Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  That’s when I find out Isabel is dead.

  MIGUEL

  Death is a battle cry. A predictable pattern of vultures fighting over remains.

  In Miguel’s family, nobody owns anything of value, so the bickering is particularly sad. Most likely in Chad’s Merry Clan, there will be actual material bones to pick over: I was promised the grandfather clock, vs. fuck the grandfather clock, I was promised the house in Scottsdale. But while Isabel’s house is kind of cool, it’s in the middle of a lake and her husband is still living in it. Miguel, Lina, and Mami are so removed as to seem distant cousins. None of this, of course, stops Mami from having opinions that differ with Eddie’s. This is always how it plays.

  On the drive up to Beaver Island, Miguel sits in the backseat of Mami and Carlos’s car with Lina, like they are children on a vacation their family never actually took. While Carlos drives, Mami rages that Isabel’s funeral should be in Chicago. “Isabel’s friends” should be able to attend, Mami insists, by which Miguel understands Mami to mean her own friends, members of the Baptist congregation to which Isabel has not belonged since the late 1990s. Eddie told Mami that Isabel didn’t care about any of those people and that “her real community” on Beaver Island deserved the chance to mourn her. Miguel imagines that Mami kept right on making her point, though Eddie is the clear owner of Isabel’s death—the proprietor of everyone else’s grief.

  “He says she asked to have her funeral at that little Catholic church in town,” Mami says for at least the fifth time, “but I know she never said that.” With this, Miguel cannot disagree. He doubts Isabel and Eddie ever talked about her impending death at all, mainly because Isabel never talked about anything real, especially to Eddie. But also because her death was not impending, exactly. She would have thought—if she was thinking this way at all—that she had months or years to plan.

  Eddie came home from putting in some fancy kitchen on Donegal Bay and found Isabel dead on the floor, lying in enough blood to be a TV crime scene. Cancer is a thrombotic disease, and although Isabel’s CA 125 levels were lowering in a steady and ideal fashion, on the fast track to “remission” (whether that meant six months or six years before things went south again, who knew?), she threw a pulmonary embolism, alone in her island home. The blood began to spurt (from her nose first? From her mouth?) while she was still in bed, and she stood, her blood trailing after her, grabbing the phone. She pressed “talk” but never, it seems, dialed—she must have realized, through her panic, that she couldn’t speak in her state, and instead rushed toward the stairs—if Miguel knows Isabel at all, thinking to get to her car and take herself to the emergency clinic. In the end, she died before reaching the bottom of the staircase. She fell forward, sliding down the remaining stairs face-first, breaking her nose and crushing the bone beneath her left eyebrow. The blood from her nose and mouth pooled at the bottom of the staircase. When Eddie found her, Isabel’s blood had leaked all the way to the front door, where it was trickling under the door and down the small step, but Eddie entered through the back door as always and didn’t see Isabel until he was inside. Her head, from lying face-first on an incline, was the size of a watermelon. She looked like something that had been dead for days.

  Eddie called Ezme. Ezme offered to take over the telephone chain, but to his credit, Eddie, still inches from Isabel’s body, then called Mami. Mami had to choose between calling Miguel first, or Lina. She chose Miguel—Miguel, the Chosen One, who according to most of his family members is on a one-way train to hell for his gaiety, and yet is something of Mami’s favorite. This has never made any sense, the way families never make any sense.

  Hence it was upon Miguel to call his sister/niece/closest friend and tell her that her biological mother was dead. It took him two tequila shots to steady himself enough to dial. When Lina answered, she sounded unnaturally happy, like someone he didn’t recognize, her voice high, devoid of gravelly cynicism. When he got the words out, she hung up on him without speaking, and for a few hours he thought maybe she wouldn’t attend the funeral, and allowed himself to concoct fantasies in which he, in solidarity with Isabel’s shunned daughter, also abstained. But now here they both are, meek in the back of Mami and Carlos’s car, Lina’s all-black garb for once suitable to the occasion.

  “I can’t believe she is being laid out in a Catholic church,” says Mami, who of course was—like every good Puerto Rican girl in Chicago—raised Catholic, and married Papi, a Cuban Catholic, and baptized all her children Catholic, but now having been married to Carlos the Baptist for nearly thirty years has forgotten about all that.

  Lina sighs long and slow. She seems reluctant to say what she is about to say and fiddles around with the rings on her fingers and the hems of her sleeves. Finally she says, “Mami, they converted back to Catholicism almost as soon as they moved to Beaver Island. That Eastern Orthodox thing was just a phase. She never really felt Baptist, she said—she’s always felt she was Catholic, really, because it’s how she was raised. By you.”

  The car sits silently. Isabel abandoned Lina thirty-one years ago—or, no, maybe it’s that Lina was stolen from Isabel thirty-one years ago; Miguel can’t be sure—and in the brief time they did live together under Mami and Carlos’s roof in Chicago, Isabel took barely an interest in Lina’s existence. Now, Mami, who bore Isabel, and Miguel, who slept in the curves of Isabel’s body as his only solace for years, are hearing about her deepest feelings from the daughter Isabel never quite acknowledged. Everything has turned upside down. At least Mami tried to go visit Isabel on this godforsaken island, only to be sent home. Miguel didn’t even try. Lina said that Eddie told her Isabel was hoping Miguel would come, but he didn’t. Why would he? Lina isn’t the only one Isabel abandoned. She left him, too, long ago.

  When he asked Isabel to be his best woman, she immediately began to cry. Miguel understood the sound: silence. She switched to English: “I have to talk to you. About the ceremony.” Previously, she always said wedding. Miguel waited. He knew what was coming. Though it had not been made official, Isabel was about to confirm that Mami and Carlos would not attend. He could already hear her platitudes, You know Mami loves you, and, She thinks Chad is such a nice boy. Oh, sure, his mother would pray for him; he was welcome for dinner anytime. She would not turn her back. Yadda yadda. He felt agitation at his sister for ruining what should be their moment, but nobody had a moment—nobody in the Guerra clan—had a moment without Mami.

  “I can’t be the matron of honor,” Isabel said, as though Miguel were the bride. “This is the hardest decision I’ve ever made. You know I love you . . .”

  Miguel was uncontrollably smiling, waiting for the punch line.

  “I just can’t support something I don’t believe God supports—not in public. I can’t act like the union is binding in the eyes of God. I’m not saying the right thing would be to marry a woman if you just can’t love her that way. I know you were born . . . I believe God made you like you are.”

  Explosions. Small fireworks going off behind his eyes.

  “But He gives people tests, Miguel, like some people are born without a leg or without sight, to see how you’ll handle adversity. You could still choose not to give in to the limitations you were born with, not to take the easy way out.”

  “What,” he stammered, “are you talking about? Wait. Did Mami put you up to this?”

  “Mami’s God is meetings and potlucks, she doesn’t know what she even believes.” Isabel paused, snuffling. “Mami doesn’t know I’m talking to you. Her religion is about finding a new man who doesn’t drink liquor, you know? I don’t go to her church anymore. I don’t want Ezme growing up like we did—I’ve been taking her to Eastern Orthodox church for a few . . . I feel it there, what I’ve been looking for.”

  Two weeks until the big night. Miguel should have asked her long before this, but hadn’t—Chad kept asking why, What are you waiting for, do you think she’s a mind reader and is just going to show up? and Miguel had reasone
d he was just being typically reticent about actually expressing to another human being that he gave a shit about them—that asking Isabel to stand up at his wedding was tantamount to saying I love you aloud, a display of emotion of which he was positively horrified. Then he thought, We’ve grown apart, as though that explained it, as though perhaps his older sister would think he must be a loser if he had no one closer to ask. Now, he saw all at once that none of that had been it, even if it were all completely possible of him—him and his backward, stilted emotional range, his crippling fears of being noticed. That it was all true but not The Truth, and that the real truth was darker, buried deep inside Isabel and her insatiable longing to betray.

  “Being Baptist wasn’t restrictive enough for you?” Miguel asked incredulously. “I mean, they wouldn’t want you to be best woman, either. You don’t have to change religions to get out of standing up at my wedding.”

  “That kind of thinking,” Isabel said quietly, “is exactly what I’m talking about. You know, the world does not revolve around individuals, Miguel. Mami married a Baptist, so bam, she became one—you feel attracted to men or whatever, so you think you can marry one like a man and a woman marry. Everyone does whatever they want—Papi did whatever he wanted and he had bastard children running around Caracas and us with bruises starving to death while he partied. The Orthodox Church and its rituals have been around a long, long time—it’s not about what you or me want. It’s about what is.”

  “Or maybe its just you wanting morality prescribed in clear, unchanging terms. Maybe traditional ethics is about cowards not having to choose. There’s a thought, too.”

  “You can’t change good and evil by changing your opinion!” Isabel flared. “Christ taught us the difference, and if you found Him, you’d know what I’m saying is true. I’m not denouncing you or Chad as people. I love you both as children of God and I’ll always stand by you and hope you find your way.”

  “You’ll always stand by me unless I ask you to stand next to me on the most important day of my life?” But why was he doing this? He heard his voice: all rhetoric, like hers.

  “This is useless.” Her tears had noise now, the sound of a common cold, his warrior sister a nasal congestion commercial. “I’ve been meaning to tell you there was no way I could attend the ceremony, but I’d been putting it off. I’m still new to the church and I was hoping to have my cake and eat it, too. I didn’t want to sacrifice. But I’ve spoken with my priest, and I can’t make exceptions just because I love you—”

  “God forbid anyone make exceptions for love.”

  Isabel’s tone was somber. “God does forbid it, Miguel.”

  He sat stunned, still holding the phone gingerly. How could this be happening? Isabel, joining the ranks of the earnest, all humor sucked from her pores by a vampire more powerful than their father ever was. Nothing left to say. At the dial tone in his ear, he wondered if a union between two men was more or less morally right when based on the kind of compromises mainstream heterosexual marriage also extolled. Would marrying Tomas for hysterical lust have been more meritorious? Or was marrying Chad, with whom he tended a litter of bulldog pups whose butts need wiping in the middle of the night; with whom watching The Simpsons at 10:00 p.m. was a far more regular ritual than sex, exactly the kind of circumstances that would, someday in the future, convince the religious right that gay love was not so different after all? If he had pleaded: I thought about killing myself for years, and only this man with his lightness and entitlement and oblivion has pulled me out of the depths of my own narcissistic despair, would Isabel consider the mortal sin of suicide greater or lesser than that of loving a man? Would she take pity if he had confessed, I’m not sure I even am in love with him—I’m not sure he’s anything more than a survival tactic?

  Next to him in the backseat, Lina so strongly resembles the Isabel he remembers that Miguel cannot stand to look at her. Soon, he will become a father—will grow old—but Isabel will remain frozen in time, still in her early thirties the last time he saw her with any regularity. Lina looks over at him, her eyes widening with motherly concern at what must be his stricken expression, and slides her hand along the seat to grasp his, but Miguel manages to choke out only, “I’m sorry,” before he recoils, turning to look out the window and pressing his pulsing temple against the coolness of the glass, not looking back until the car stops in Charlevoix.

  “My mother was a traditionalist,” Ezme says into the humid air of the sanctuary. Her voice is too soft to project well, and she is too short to reach the microphone properly, so the collective energy of the room is one of straining toward her, to hear. “These days, families often don’t have time for one another. The television is the babysitter for the kids. They go from daycare to school to the TV and the computer. Families don’t talk together or do activities together or pray together like in former times. But my mother preferred the old ways, when families were tight-knit. I wasn’t allowed to watch television until junior high. Mom homeschooled me, giving up her salary and living more simply, making many of our clothes herself, and cultivating a vegetable garden. She valued motherhood more than money or her own ambition. She gave me all of her time, and made me into who I am.”

  Miguel squirms in his Armani suit, leans down and whispers snidely into Lina’s ear, her cartilage piercing brushing his lip, “Yep, just like we grew up, a real traditionalist.”

  It’s true that his family owned no television until Carlos came into the picture. It’s true that there were long periods in Caracas when they didn’t attend any conventional school. Mami had a vegetable garden, of course. But it’s almost as though Isabel took the bare-bone details of their childhood and dragged them from a hellscape straight into Leave It to Beaver.

  “Why didn’t Chad come?” Lina mutters back, her lips unmoving, like a ventriloquist.

  “You don’t get it,” Miguel says back, also side-mouthed like a spy. “All Chad does is work. That’s why we haven’t killed each other. Why would I want to drag him here, to this? But what about Bebe? Are you guys okay?”

  “Sure,” Lina says, “we haven’t had an argument in months. We barely talk, so that makes it hard to fight.”

  These are the “marital rights” he and Chad and Lina and Bebe are emulating then? This is what it’s all about? I, the undersigned, vow to stay out of your way as much as possible, so as not to get on your nerves. I, the espoused, vow to occasionally laugh at your jokes, not gamble away our money, stay away from needles, not beat our children, and thus present you with a relentless lack of Real Problems so you can never justify leaving. I promise to make being with me simple enough that the thought of being single again will give you a headache. Till death do us part.

  The official story on Bebe is that the hybrid battery in her car has rotted from the inside—that she was planning to come, but as soon as she learned they couldn’t drive their own car and she would be stuck in a car with the other Guerras for seven hours, she bailed. This is plausible enough. There is no official story on Chad. In reality, Chad’s barely been working since Emily developed preeclampsia—he’s been spending all his time bringing her gifts and hanging around her house all day until Nick comes home to care for her—but none of that is applicable here, because Miguel didn’t want him to come to Beaver Island anyway. He can’t feel any of the things he’s supposed to feel—his reactions all feel off-kilter, inappropriate, and he didn’t want Chad as a witness, so that he would have to feign some kind of normalcy in his grief. He doesn’t have to pretend in front of Mami and Lina. They’re used to him. Besides which, they are probably both so self-involved they’re taking very little notice of the fact that he’s carrying a flask of tequila in his suit jacket, and that he’s rolling his eyes a lot rather than crying. Mostly, he’s numb and sick and bored.

  “She was my best friend,” Ezme tells the congregation. “She was the love of my life.” Clusters of women in the audience begin to weep openly, no doubt thinking of their own departed mothers, o
f their young, trusting daughters at home. The mother-daughter bond is supposed to be . . . well, Miguel is not sure what it is supposed to be exactly, but something like what Ezme is describing here: primal, proprietary, primary. What is a lover, really, or a spouse, compared to a mother? A spouse can file for divorce. A lover can change his mind. Romantic love comes with boundaries on the blueprints. Isabel threw Mami out of her house in the pre-winter chill and refused to ever talk to her again, and still, Mami is here, deferring to Eddie, standing sentry over her daughter’s bloated, unrecognizable body.

  The child Emily is carrying will not have a mother. Is what he and Chad can offer enough to transcend that loss? Is something a loss if it never existed in the first place? Isabel never even held Lina—Miguel remembers with utter, shocking clarity, the way she refused to pick the baby up, and Mami and Tía had to buy expensive premade formula for baby Angelina because Isabel could not be forced to nurse, would not even listen to the reason that it was “free,” and the family needed the money for Miguel and his food and his schoolbooks. Isabel was unmoved, held her arms fast over her too-young, too-ripe breasts, saying, Get her away from me. Miguel shivers in the chilly white sanctuary. All her years with Mami still, somehow, could not make up for Lina’s loss of Isabel. Or is that a fair assessment? Lina is . . . well, she’s sick. She has a diagnosed mental illness. Maybe she would be the way she is no matter who had mothered her. Maybe it means nothing about what Miguel and Chad are withholding from their own unborn child.

  He needs another deep pull from his flask but the fucking thing is empty.

  In the church basement, after the service, Eddie wanders around blank faced, blank voiced. The small white church is packed as though Isabel were an archbishop—the largely Irish-Catholic community of Beaver Island must have welcomed her and Eddie with open arms. Eddie looks, to Miguel, as totally over his head in Isabel’s loss as he did when she was alive. He doesn’t cry, but then again, this is a man who always seemed like he might claw his own face off with discomfort whenever Mami hugged him. He is not That Kind of Latino, as Miguel and Lina always joked. Still, every once in a while, Eddie seems to forget the mask of grief he is supposed to have plastered on his face, and his laughter dashes out like thunder in a quiet sky, talking with neighbors and island friends. At times, he looks like a man sprung from prison. What could it have been like being married to beautiful, formidable Isabel, the double agent, the emotional terrorist, the heroine and martyr? Maybe Eddie has a lover in the wings. Later, Miguel sees Eddie leaning against the wall of the sanctuary, his hands in his hair, and guilt impales him. Eddie will be remarried in less than six months, but of course Miguel doesn’t realize that at the time, and even if he did, it wouldn’t prove much. Men, all studies will tell you, prefer marriage if they’ve had it once. Men are happier married, while women are less happy and live less long inside long-term marriages. Widows often choose the single life. But who knows what that means about anything?