Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  10. ________ FACTS IN SUPPORT of orders requested and change of circumstances for any modification are (specify):

  X Contained in the attached declaration. (You may use Attached Declaration (form MC-031) for this purpose. The attached declaration must not exceed 10 pages in length unless permission to file a longer declaration has been obtained from the court.)

  I will be succinct here because this is really a cut-and-dry situation, as you will see. My estranged wife, Gretchen Merry, just up and decided one day that she would sabotage our whole entire lives as we had set them up. She was disruptive to our son Gray’s therapists at his very prestigious school, which we had gone to great lengths to get him accepted at, and where Ms. Merry’s own family all attended. She withdrew Gray from the middle of a therapy session and announced to everyone there that we were getting a divorce, which is not something I had ever heard her even mention until that day. I had no wish for this divorce, but before I even knew it was happening, she had kidnapped my son and taken him to her parents’ house and on a dangerous excursion to Chicago with her family members, when I know that they were all drinking. They were driving drunk with him in the car. Gretchen and her parents, Charles and Elaine Merry, all drink alot and I think it is clear that Gretchen is an alcoholic and she is also taking prescribed psychiatric medication for her “stress.” She pops Xanax like candy, which no one should eat, which Gretchen eats regularly!

  As you will see from looking at her, Gretchen does not take care of her body. When I married her, she was an athlete. We both were in top physical condition and treated our bodies like temples. Now she will not even go to the gym, and she is always giving Gray Pop Tarts in his lunch, as though it is the 1970s and we live in the projects. Who, in Winnetka, gives their only child processed sugar crammed in to a weird fake-frosted square and calls that “lunch?” Obviously she not only doesn’t care about Gray’s well-being, she also doesn’t care how she is being perceived by her social contemporaries and what impact that might have on Gray socially. She does not buy organic and makes fun of me when I suggest it.

  She is a cold mother and you can ask anyone about this. She very rarely pays attention to Gray and is always working. She works maybe seventy hours per week, which is clearly unacceptable for someone with a young child with special needs. Her pattern of behavior just over and over again shows a flagrant disregard for her own offspring and for our role as a family in our community. Gray has pervasive developmental disorders NOS. It is hard for him to fit into our community, which is very high achieving, yet Ms. Merry sabotages all my efforts to get him to fit in and have a smooth, happy life. I did not even want to bring this up but as an example of what I mean, she has recently given her eggs (yes, her reproductive eggs!!!) to her gay brother in the city. This is apparently how meaningful motherhood is to our Ms. Merry, that she is just giving eggs away on the street corners to people who are not even qualified to be parents, who live an hour away from her where she would not see the child regularly. This would be my son’s brother or sister, but does she consider that this might be an issue for Gray?! No, she does not. She is too busy drinking vodka in her sweat pants and stocking up on the fruit rollups that everyone knows cause cavities and harassing the school therapists who are only trying to help Gray. I implore an immediate shift to sole legal and primary physical custody in my care, so that Gray can have a reasonable upbringing befitting to his station in life and be a respectable human being in his community.

  I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of Illinois that the foregoing is true and correct.

  Date: 1/19/09

  Gretchen walks in to Juko Nail + Skin Rescue, on uber-hip Division Street, with the same self-consciousness with which she enters clothing boutiques and hair salons. She does not belong in places of this nature, full of lithe sales girls or tattooed, terminally edgy aestheticians. She looks, in such environs, like she is in an improv group and is performing a skit about an uptight, middle-aged suburban mom: all khakis and button-down, crisp shirts topped by V-necked pastel sweaters, and sensible shoes that cost deceptively obscene amounts of money. She is always the tallest woman in the place, unless, God forbid, one of the staff “models” in her spare time. Instead of being all Asian, like most nail salons Gretchen sees, this one is a virtual United Nations of aestheticians: Black, Asian, Latino, Polish. This both complicates and alleviates Gretchen’s discomfort. On the one hand, she is more comfortable than she would like to acknowledge with the dynamic of people (well, women, if she’s honest) of other ethnicities serving her in some manner in exchange for money, and the implicit way in which this makes it seem that Gretchen is the important one in the situation, the one somehow more fully nuanced, like the lead in a movie rather than an extra. On the other hand, since the Cabrini-Green/Capital Grille incident, it has become abundantly clear to her that she and her entire family are racists . . . which sucks, and about which she is completely unsure what to do. Is there some sort of Political Correctness for Dummies book she is supposed to buy to rectify herself? Gretchen hovers near the sofas up front, staring self-consciously out the window and wishing she could disappear into the floor.

  Chad is late, of course. When is Chad ever not late for anything?

  He invites her here, after things have been kind of strained between them—he invites her here to a place she would never ever go on her own, despite that he grew up in a house with her and when did he ever know her to get pedicures?—he invites her here like a stranger of whose preferred recreational pastimes he has no prior knowledge, and now he is late.

  Under her agitation, however, Gretchen is aching to see him. Her entire body strains with the hope of being around someone who loves her, even if he is a clueless dolt. She has told no one about Troy’s petition for custody of Gray—has been afraid to speak the words aloud and make them real—and yet she knows she needs everybody in her corner she can accumulate. She needs her parents and all the force of their respectability; she needs her brother and his dimples and charisma, of which she herself is in short supply. She needs someone to tell her that this is going to be okay and she is not going to lose her baby boy to a jackass who will structure Gray’s life like an endless series of adults volleying balls in his direction until he falls over his own feet, and then blaming him for it. Gray! Gretchen’s eyes well up. If Troy tries to take Gray from her, she will murder him with the goddamn blue light and then use it to hide the evidence. Except then, what would become of Gray, visiting his mother in prison? Would her parents even take him in, or send him off to some “home” for children who don’t perfectly live inside the lines of an affluent, suburban grid? Gretchen sits in the horrifying nail salon, silently weeping.

  “Lady, you like some wine?”

  A woman who may be Filipina—she is not, thank God, luminously gorgeous, but in fact rather chunky and no younger than Gretchen’s age—stands in front of her smiling. “We give you wine, you wait for Chad.”

  Chad? This woman knows she is waiting for Chad?

  “You like red or white?”

  “Red,” Gretchen says numbly. It’s like she’s fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole and people are speaking a language she doesn’t understand, but it is the dead of winter in Chicago and anyone who is drinking white wine is clearly insane.

  Gretchen accepts her plastic cup of red wine. The shock of it has stopped her piteous weeping, thank God. She looks up, and there is Chad at last, through the giant storefront window of the salon, striding happily toward the door, his scarf flapping in the wind.

  Emily is with him.

  Gretchen rises to her feet. The reaction in her is that strong, though she has no idea why precisely. Her impulse is to dash before they can see her—to get the fuck out of there.

  Their cheeks are flushed from cold as they throw back the front door. Both the woman who gave Gretchen the wine and another woman immediately rush over to them, clucking, “What month now?” and, “Oh, pretty pretty!” at Emily, even though
Emily is, at most, mildly pretty. Still, it is enough to make the inexplicable, Wonderland-meets-Kafka nature of things clear: Chad and Emily obviously come here often, and together. Only today has Gretchen been included for some reason, on this excursion that is normally theirs. She has not been invited to spend the afternoon with her brother, as she believed, but to join in Chad and Emily’s preexisting plans: an afterthought, just like the day she arrived at her parents’ home to find them all celebrating with cake. Well, no, of course she wasn’t any kind of thought then—she just showed up on her own.

  Chad and Emily both, hugging her, perhaps taking note of her stiffness, thinking Gray’s apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  “Look!” the wine woman says to Gretchen, as the woman pours half red and half white wine into a glass together, like Gretchen is in on the joke, “we make her wine pink!” She hands the disgusting, pale-red concoction to Emily, who smiles affirmingly and takes a delighted sip.

  Why is that stupid bitch drinking cheap mixed-up wine with Gretchen’s fetus inside her?

  Chad, however, is nonplussed, hooks his arm in Gretchen’s. “I’m so excited you could finally come here!” he exclaims, as though invitations have been volleyed her way weekly and she keeps batting them away.

  “I’ve never had a pedicure before,” Gretchen says, for lack of absolutely anything else to say that wouldn’t involve smacking Emily or her brother upside the head.

  “Never?” Emily trills. “That’s amazing!”

  Coming from someone whose personal aesthetic would not have been out of home with the fucking Manson family, Gretchen finds it hard to swallow Emily’s amazement.

  They are all three led to oversized massage chairs, handed the remote controls to adjust their settings, and Gretchen mindlessly pushes “knead.” Knead, need. Three women come back toward them with decorative bowls full of soapy water, help them to remove their boots and socks, usher their damp, linty feet into the warm water. The sensation is beautiful and uncomfortable simultaneously. Gretchen notes that her feet are larger than Chad’s. Across her brother’s body, in the massage chair flanking his left side, she sees Emily’s dainty feet in the bowl, skinny like a girl’s, at odds with the rest of her milk-fed figure. Manson-family snark aside, Gretchen also realizes that Emily is not dressed today as she has been the other times Gretchen has seen her, in what seemed to be tied-dyed rags. By contrast, she is wearing perfectly creased wool trousers and a black turtleneck that might actually be cashmere. The effect is . . . uncanny. Emily looks like she could be Chad and Gretchen’s sibling, on her way to meet the Merrys at the country club. While Gretchen is no expert (despite Elaine Merry’s consternation) in judging the expensiveness of fabric, these clothes were at the very least purchased at, say, a respectable mainstream chain like Banana Republic, and not at some hemp specialty shop that sells soap, patchouli, and earth mother clothing along with organic scones. Gretchen has met Emily only a handful of times, but the fact that Emily is dressed this way is even more inexplicable than “pink” wine.

  “You look nice,” she makes herself say to Emily, across Chad’s body. “Pregnancy apparently suits you. Are those new maternity clothes, or ones you had from your sons?”

  “Oh these?” Emily gestures her body carelessly. “They’re new. After Jay, I gave all my old ones away.”

  “Don’t you love your gloves?” Chad croons, as though Emily’s hands are also in need of a maternity wardrobe. “Show Gretchen your gloves. They’re delicious, Gret, you’ll want to eat them.”

  Their coats are all hanging at the front of the salon, but to Gretchen’s surprise she sees that Emily has a pair of gloves on her lap. She holds them up for Gretchen to see, though with far more hesitation than she accepted and downed her wine.

  “We were walking down Damen and she didn’t even have gloves on!” Chad cries. “Hello? It’s almost February, in Chicago! We saw these in a window and they were so exquisite we couldn’t resist.”

  Gretchen looks from the gloves to her brother, her brother to the gloves. It’s as though there is a CNN ticker running commentary underneath her brother’s moving lips. The commentary reads: I bought this woman’s new maternity clothes, and then, because she was too stupid to leave the house wearing her pair of cheap, fake-wool Target gloves, I also bought her a pair of $800 gloves from the kind of store she’s never been in before in her life.

  The woman on her knees in front of Gretchen is scraping her feet with some kind of loofah stick, and it tickles so badly Gretchen’s entire leg keeps twitching like she’s having her reflexes checked. The woman beams at her and says, conspiratorially, “Tickles, eh?” but then continues her sadistic endeavor. Gretchen sits like a simmering cauldron. She cannot pinpoint her emotions. It is not like she wanted Chad to buy her a new wardrobe or expensive calfskin gloves. Gretchen has no shortage of nice things, and she could have more of them if she were that kind of woman, and does not require any man, much less her baby brother, to buy them for her. What, then, is the toxic brew boiling in her gut? Why does she want to scream?

  “I told Chad they were too expensive,” Emily says demurely, tucking the gloves back on her lap. The fact that she has kept them with her, instead of in her coat pockets, indicates clearly that she has never owned such an exorbitant item in her entire life and is afraid of losing them—Gretchen should feel touched. Here is this relative stranger, doing their family an almost unspeakable favor: why shouldn’t the poor girl have a nice pair of gloves, for God’s sake? But then she watches Emily’s fingers caressing the leather, and something in her churns again.

  The clothing. The gloves. The cake with the Merrys. Capital Grille. This salon at which Emily and Chad are apparently “regulars.” There is something Single White Female about the way Emily is insinuating herself into Chad’s life, on Chad’s dime. Is she wrong? For perhaps the first time in Gretchen’s life, she wishes Miguel were next to her, even if his own CNN ticker read things like, See, Chad’s secretly lesbian sister has never had a pedicure! Miguel is no naïf. If something creepy is going on here, he would perceive it, too. She wants to ask him, though she isn’t sure, really, whether she wants to be wrong or secretly hopes she is right.

  While they sit with their toes under drying jets, Chad reaches over and takes Gretchen’s hand. It’s an odd gesture, even though Chad is an affectionate boy, but Gretchen feels something on the far-enough side of desperate that she doesn’t pull away. She’s said not one word about Troy or Gray, because it is none of Emily’s business—Emily, who has Gretchen’s egg inside her body, but that has nothing to do with familiarity, whether or not the others can see that clearly. Chad clutches her hand, his eyes wide and shiny and so happy Gretchen almost has to turn away.

  “We should go have a celebratory lunch after this,” he tells Gretchen. “Emily just had the amnio, and they told us the baby is a girl.”

  And then it is like being underwater. She sees Chad’s lips moving, but all sound has left the room.

  Muffled noise. Her entire head feels clogged with waves. He is speaking, but nothing he’s saying matters anymore.

  Emily has had an amniocentesis.

  No one invited Gretchen to said procedure.

  No one invited Gretchen shopping or bought her gloves.

  No one invited her to her own fucking parents’ house for cake.

  Gretchen’s egg is a girl.

  Gretchen has a daughter, but she lives inside of Emily.

  Emily had a fifteen-week amnio, to which Gretchen was not invited, at which they found out the sex of the baby, and Gretchen has spent approximately seventy minutes now inside of this idiotic pink-wined salon, but only now is anyone mentioning to her that her baby is a girl.

  We’re all the heroes of our own narratives. Gretchen knows this. There are no “villains” in real life sitting on a throne in a lair like a Disney movie, rubbing their hands together and cackling with glee over their own divine wickedness. In regular life, everyone thinks what they’re doing is j
ustified. Genocides, witch hunts, murders: all committed by people who were convinced they were in the right—so clearly, on the small, ordinary human scale of Gretchen’s own First World, upper-middle-class, white-privileged reality, it is not so farfetched to understand that, among her cast of players, Troy believes his actions are justifiable, that Gretchen is “wronging” him, that he alone deserves Gray. It is not so hard to understand that Chad believes himself a good brother, taking his sister out for a pedicure, offering a celebratory lunch in exchange for Gretchen’s egg—for Gretchen’s daughter.

  And Emily?

  What does Emily believe? In this story where Gretchen’s daughter has somehow ended up the prize and the pawn, to what does Emily feel entitled? Gretchen stares at them both, their joyful faces watching her expectantly, and feels herself smiling, even emitting a small, very un-Gretchen-like squeal that Chad, were he a brother who paid attention to who she is instead of one who thinks pedicures are an appropriate celebratory outing for her, would realize was wildly fake. Her heart throbs all the way up to her ears, and she is glad she is sitting down. Be careful, she thinks slowly to herself, like she might if encountering a rabid animal. No sudden moves.

  “A girl!” she squeals again, half expecting the floor at her feet to open and swallow her whole, because otherwise how can it possibly be that she will live through this impending lunch?

  LINA

  My brother’s fetus, like most Guerra fetuses, is female, so I am going to Enemy Camp to celebrate. This makes me laugh, because I don’t really feel that way about Emily, about your home. At this point, I think such infidelity stereotypes are hilarious because I don’t believe they apply to me. This is during the Era of Our Spectacular Rationalizations. I have no problem with your wife, I tell myself. Your wife is a lovely person, doing a great favor for my brother. Your wife bore you two sons you adore. Your wife is someone who means something to you, I reason, and therefore she means something to me, too. I don’t want to be her intimate friend, but I think of her as a kind of in-law about whose well-being it is incumbent upon me to care.