Miguel sat in his parked car, completely flummoxed as to what to do next. It was a Wednesday night, September of 1999, and he had to be up at five to get ready for work, but his baby sister Angelina, to whom he had almost never spoken outside of the confines of Mami and Carlos’s home, had called him and asked him to come to this . . . place . . . and meet her. “I have to talk to you,” she’d said urgently on the phone. She must have had to call Mami for his number, because they had never before, to his recollection, spoken on the phone. Still aching from Isabel’s spurning of his commitment ceremony, it wasn’t in him to reject Angelina in turn, so he’d gone out to his car and driven to some obscure west-side intersection at which she’d said he’d find the bar where she was “working.” He had expected to find his underage sister tending bar, expected it so without shock that he had not even considered she might be a hostess or waiting tables. Now he sat parked outside looking at the signs that proclaimed “All Nude Revue” on the chintzy marquee, his heart seeming jammed and throbbing inside his esophagus.
He called Chad on his cell. “My sister is working at a strip club,” he said. “The place is called Aphrodite’s, but it’s spelled A-p-h-r-o-d-i-t-y-s, with no apostrophe, even.”
“Um,” Chad said.
“I can’t go in there. I’m coming home.”
“Honey. If you were really leaving and not going in, you would be driving home right now, not calling me.”
“What if I go in there and it’s, like, the wrong place?” Miguel persisted. “What if Angelina isn’t even there?”
He heard Chad take a breath. “Okay,” Chad said slowly. “So are you more afraid of seeing your sister shimmering in pasties on the stage, or are you more afraid of being in a strip club alone and being mistaken for, you know, a heterosexual man who likes to look at tits?”
Miguel was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted finally. “I think I’m humiliated in either scenario. Can you just drive out here and come with me?”
“Right,” Chad said. “That is not going to happen.”
Miguel hung up the phone.
Inside the club, the woman onstage was not Angelina, thank god. Miguel had no idea what to do with his body. The room was dimly lit and generally in the sort of disrepair of a typical corner bar that catered to old men who had been boozing together for thirty years. It seemed safe to assume that the smallish stage had once been for bands, and that only the pole was a new addition. There weren’t that many customers—maybe twenty, all male except one middle-aged blonde smoking at a table with a bald man; she looked a little old to be one of the dancers, but if she found the venue a shitty choice for a date, she didn’t show it, laughing and throwing back her head in a horsey way. Miguel stood there, thrashingly embarrassed to be so visible just loitering alone, but hesitant to commit to sitting down in a corner if maybe—please, please—he was in the wrong place and would have cause to make a speedy exit.
Then he saw her. She wasn’t at one of the tables, but rather at the bar, alone. Her feet dangled from the barstool like a child’s; she was wearing Chuck Taylors, which seemed so out of place with anything Miguel had ever imagined of a strip club that it was as though her shoes glowed conspicuously. Onstage, the dancer, also Hispanic, as were most people in the bar other than the blonde and her date, hung upside down on the pole, but her breasts, large enough that Miguel half-expected them to smack her in the chin, didn’t seem to respond to gravity. He scurried desperately to the barstool next to Angelina, slid onto it.
Acne still littered the sides of Angelina’s chiseled, Guerra jaw. She had Isabel’s features, but larger, and her skin seemed thicker, less delicate. She was so tiny she could pass for a high school freshman—he did a mental math check and was pretty sure she was now twenty and had been married for two years—but despite her girlish appearance, there was something worn about her. She looked to Miguel, with her ravaged little nut of a face, like a member of a girl gang in a 1980s made-for-TV movie. Tough but somehow already ridden too hard, and achingly vulnerable.
She blew smoke from a Marlboro Red into his face. “I know we haven’t talked in a while. I just want you to know two things. One, nobody is coming to your wedding ’cause Isabel’s gone crazy and shamed Mami as a bad Christian if she shows up, but fuck them, I’ll be there. I won’t have a date, so maybe you can tell some of your cute flamer friends to take pity and dance with me.”
Miguel said, “Thanks . . . but I already knew all that. Isabel called me. I guess she wanted to do me the courtesy of telling me I was an abomination in the eyes of god to my face. Well, not my face exactly, but . . . I never expected Mami and Carlos to come. Yeah, I’ll make sure you have people to talk to, I didn’t imagine Javier would want to go to a gay wedding, it doesn’t exactly seem his style.”
“Two,” Angelina said, as though he hadn’t spoken, “I’m getting a divorce.”
“Did he hit you?” Miguel demanded, his voice too loud.
Angelina pushed his arm. “Are you on crack? Javier knows better than to be raising a hand to me. He’s just, you know, set in his ways. He doesn’t want me going to school, which I’m gonna do. He wants to, like, have a gazillion babies hanging off my boobs and shit, but I’m gonna be a nurse. Or a teacher. I don’t know. Something.”
He wanted to say, Be something that pays better. Instead he said, “So this place is giving out teaching degrees on the side then?”
She was drinking a whiskey or scotch, neat. A strange drink for a young girl, but she gulped it with the kind of desperation that transcended age. Under the too-long arms of her shirt cuffs, he saw that her nails were bitten down so low the fingertips were scabbed: picked over, re-scabbed again, mutilated and made sport of, just as he had done at her age. He guessed that she tended to torment the skin, forbidding a quick healing, perversely fascinated with damage. He wanted to put his arms around her, but he had never known how to do that, not with anybody—which was why he needed Chad.
“Uh, are you still working at Dominick’s Deli counter?” he asked lamely.
Her eyes met his. Mocking, the eyes of a mother, except his mother had never teased, always wore a sheepish expression, embarrassed for her mistakes, for what her children had seen. Angelina lit another cigarette, rubbed up and down on his leg like a lover—no, like a sister, except in his family, nobody ever touched anyone anymore, love too close to violence.
“Does this look like the Dominick’s Deli counter?” Then simply, “This is where I work now. I’m better than that puta up there. I make more money than anyone else here. This is just temporary.”
“Temporary? For tuition, you mean, to pay for school?”
“Temporary,” she said, “until I can get a job at a better club. This place is a dump. I’ll earn four or five times as much if I can get in somewhere like The Dollhouse.”
They looked at each other through the wispy smoke. Broke, undereducated, on the verge of divorce, and working in this almost unimaginably sad shithole, she gave off waves of nervy confidence that baffled and eluded Miguel—that felt utterly inaccessible to him despite the armor of his math degree, his job at the Board of Trade, his “marrying up.” She seemed to be sizing him up.
“Look,” she said, “can I be your best man or what?”
So many people are milling around downstairs, eating handfuls of oil-slick peanuts and drinking cups of Sprite, that Miguel and Lina have taken refuge in Isabel and Eddie’s bedroom, which has a window seat where they can sit, window cracked, smoking. Miguel vigilantly blows smoke out through the window, his lips almost making out with the screen, then passes the cigarette to Lina every few drags, and watches her flagrantly exhale her smoke straight toward Isabel and Eddie’s bed. Her black stockings are torn in a way either purposefully punk or accidental, and Miguel, with his utter lack of fashion sense, can’t discern which. Still, it makes her look even more delicately ruined than usual, her knees drawn up sideways on the seat next to her: she’s all hair and bones and kohl-smudged
eyes and snags. Miguel feels an urge to protect her, when of course he can’t even protect himself—he can’t even protect his unborn child, inside Emily’s preeclamptic body. It strikes Miguel hard that he should have been telling people that Chad wasn’t in Beaver Island because they didn’t want to abandon Emily and the baby, with the pregnancy so high-risk, but of course it never occurred to him to say such a thing.
Two days ago, everyone was still wearing light jackets, but now the world feels like a hot, dry bone. There’s no wind, and with the greenhouse effect of afternoon sun bearing down on the window, Lina’s face looks shiny with sweat so that she resembles Isabel—who always seemed glossy in a way that was somehow hot—even more. Lina prods him with her foot, gestures with the cigarette so that smoke waves around their proximity. “Look at that.”
Boxes are piled up near the closet. It would have been impossible not to notice them, but Miguel humors her and nods.
“No, dickwad,” she says, “That.”
Miguel snatches the cigarette from her fingers as she approaches the boxes. There are seven of them in all, full of Isabel’s clothes, neatly folded, Miguel suspects by Ezme. No doubt they will be donated to the church. Lina starts shoving one box out of the way with her leg, revealing another box behind it on which the word is written in black sharpie: Guerras.
“This one’s for us,” she says. “I saw the G-U in the gap. All these boxes, and we get a whopping one, to split between us and Mami.”
Miguel thinks to say that maybe there will be more boxes for them by the time Eddie and Ezme finish going through the house, but in reality he’s stunned that anything’s been set aside for them at all.
Lina lifts their box, which is so conspicuously smaller than the others that it was only even elevated and visible because it was sitting on a bigger, not-for-them box. She carries it over to Eddie and Isabel’s bed. Mami and Carlos are downstairs, abandoned, but no doubt they expected nothing more from either Miguel or Lina, both of whom have made familial careers out of being useless. Back when he and Isabel were still talking regularly, when she lived in Chicago, the few times she visited his various apartments she would always suggest that he should “bleach his walls” to mask the discoloration his smoking caused. Bleach his walls. Miguel is not even sure how such a thing would be accomplished. His guilt at smoking in her bedroom is both nauseating and triumphant, but both feelings leave him desperate to get out of this room.
Lina has a bunch of papers and relics, not a single one of which Miguel recognizes, spread out on the bed. She’s shaking her head, and then she begins to cry outright. He cannot remember ever having seen her cry in their entire adult lives, and despite the stifling heat of the room, his sweat breaks out cold.
“These aren’t even for us,” she says thickly.
“What are you talking about?” Miguel says. “Who else would they be for?”
Lina thrusts an envelope at him, so hard its corner knocks him in the cheek as he bends to retrieve it. The outside of the envelope bears Isabel’s own name and address, but the sender is “Pilar Guerra,” with a return address in Miami.
“This shit,” Lina says, “it all belonged to your father, I think. Look at it! It’s this old, creepy, pointless, male, Cuban shit.”
Miguel blinks, trying to take in the plethora of stimuli. He’s on the verge of being offended by Lina’s words, but . . . well . . . she’s right. On the bed is a smattering of utterly pointless male, Cuban shit. A Zippo lighter. A few photographs of what seems to be pre-Castro Cuba, boasting American casinos, with no actual humans in the photos. A cigar box. Some cufflinks that are actually pretty cool and that Miguel would pocket, had his father been even marginally less of a scumbag. A very old copy of Cortázar’s Hopscotch, in the original Spanish, which Miguel read—also in the original Spanish—while living in Barcelona with Tomas, and the sight of his vicious father’s copy on the bed taints his romantic memory so much that bile rises in his throat. What is this shit, and why did Isabel have it?
“Listen to this,” Lina says, opening another of the letters. “She calls her, Mi hija.”
“Who?” Miguel stammers. He tries to focus his eyes on Lina, looking like the Ghost of Isabel Past. “Who’s calling Isabel that? I have no idea who Pilar Guerra is.”
“She’s related to your father, obviously,” Lina snaps back. “His first wife? His sister? His mother? Why don’t you people know anything about anything?”
“You people?” Miguel mutters.
“You and Mami,” she snaps. “Why is, like, the very existence of this—” she waves the letter around—“Pilar Guerra like an Illuminatiguarded mystery? Why are you all like this?”
“I’m not like anything,” Miguel says back, his own voice rising. “I was ten years old when we left Caracas. You think anyone told me anything, either?”
“Why was this woman writing Isabel?” Lina demands.
“Lina.” Miguel exhales slow, though stars are popping in front of his eyes and he has to sit down on the bed. “You’re asking me things I don’t know. One day we were all in Caracas and Isabel and you and Mami and I lived with some old woman called Tía, whose real name I never even knew, and then suddenly—Christ—we were all in Chicago, except for Isabel, and Mami was your mother, too, and our only relative was Mami’s mother—you knew Abuela as well as I did. I have no idea on earth how Isabel ended up corresponding with some Guerra in Miami or owning stuff that looks like it was Papi’s. Maybe it isn’t even Papi’s. Maybe it’s just stuff.”
Lina is scanning the letter furiously. “This just talks about a bunch of artists, like Isabel’s taking some art correspondence course. Then she’s asking about Ezme and gushing how much she loves Isabel and thinks of her all the time and how she should bring her precious daughter to visit.”
Miguel scans the outside of one envelope she’s thrown his way. It’s dated 1998, when Ezme would have been . . . what . . . maybe eleven years old? It’s right around his wedding, but he doesn’t imagine Isabel mentioned that in in the letter.”
“Look,” Miguel says, “the box is probably for Mami, not us. Clearly Mami will know who this woman is. Mami will know if this stuff belonged to Papi. There’s no big mystery here, just because we’re too young to remember things.”
“Why does this woman love Isabel?” Lina counters. “Why does she even know Isabel, and doesn’t know us? Why is she thanking Isabel for her ‘wonderful letters’—did you ever get a wonderful letter, or any kind of letter, from Isabel? She lived in Caracas for the first six years of my life, and then she lived here for the last eight or nine years of hers, and did she ever once send you a goddamn letter? Because she sure didn’t send one to me.”
Miguel says nothing.
“I’m going to Miami,” Lina says. “I’m going to knock on this bitch’s door and find out what’s going on.”
“Lina.” Miguel’s flask ran out too long ago; he is not nearly drunk enough to be having this conversation. “Look.” He flicks through the envelopes, roughly, and Lina jerks to grasp a few back. “Some of these letters are nearly twenty years old. The latest ones are over a decade ago. They probably stopped because this woman died—she could have been Papi’s mother. No matter who she is, she probably doesn’t live at the same address. I know we’re all upset. I know Isabel was . . . an upsetting person. But you’re talking crazy.”
Lina puts all the envelopes but one back into the box, but empty—the letters themselves, plus the most recent envelope containing Pilar Guerra’s address, she shoves into her handbag. She arranges the remaining pointless, male, Cuban shit back on top of the envelopes, carries the box back to where it sat atop the others, in the back: unimportant.
“Fine,” she says to Miguel, folding her arms across her chest. “You don’t have to come with me. You don’t have to get involved.”
Miguel thinks of Emily, one last time, with her high blood pressure, her anticonvulsive medications, her bed rest. If they induce delivery right now, the baby will d
ie. But Emily, despite doing everything right, seems to be getting worse instead of better, and Chad is living in a dream world, in which bringing her copies of People magazine and fancy cupcakes can somehow make everything all right. “Okay, okay,” he says to Lina. “I didn’t say I wasn’t coming.”
LINA
Miguel and I barely speak on the plane. Inside my carry-on, a bundle of letters wrapped in a rubber band. They are effusive, full of love, assurances of the good things life holds in store for Isabel, but they say very little of any use to us, and I keep thinking, again, of how you would tell me that people who both know how they know each other, who both know what the other already knows about of their shared history, don’t rehash all these details for the benefit of some outside reader of whom they’re unaware. Aunt Pilar’s letters are both tender and innocuous, with sparse concrete information or nostalgic recollections, and I might as well have thrown them out, but I couldn’t. Miguel and I both seem to be holding our breath until we can get to Papi’s sister’s house—like we have a finite number of words and don’t want to waste them on each other anymore. What I mean is: there is a sense already, in the air hurtling toward Miami, that we are all running out of time.
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