The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  “He was a good man,” Angel said, digging deeper. She was searching for the right string of words that would burn Mami so hard. “And it’s amazing that he’d ever marry a woman like you.”

  Mami slammed the glass against the floor and reached her hands out to grab hold. Before Angel knew it, Mami’s fingers were around her throat, squeezing mad hard. Angel only had a couple of seconds to think about her options—grab the pan of oil and clock Mami over the head? No, she could never burn her own mother. Kick her with a knee? Tampoco.

  Miguel swooped in and carried Mami down the hall. She was screaming sounds that weren’t words, as if pain had no vocabulary comprehensible to the human ear. He pushed her into her bedroom, slammed the door shut, and locked the door from the outside.

  “Go to bed,” Miguel shouted at her door as Mami banged on the other end. “You’re drunk, Ma. Bo-rra-cha and you don’t wear it good.”

  Angel turned off the stove and poured the hot oil down the sink. When Miguel walked back into the kitchen, she handed him two tostones that were plopped on a bed of paper towels.

  “¿En serio?” Miguel whispered to Angel. “You’re gonna bring up Papi when she’s fuckin’ wasted like that?”

  Angel didn’t say nothing.

  Miguel grabbed her arm and pulled her into the sala. “Okay, listen to me,” he said. “Punch me.” He puffed up his chest and swagged back and forth on both feet.

  “What?” Angel said. “Are you buggin’?”

  “Just punch me.”

  “¿Por que?”

  “Mira, Angel,” Miguel said. “You gotta learn how to protect yourself. If you wanna be a chica, whatever. I still love you. But I’m not always gonna be there to throw shit down. You gotta learn how to throw a punch. So punch me.”

  She punched him and her knuckles hit his chest muscles, which were harder than she expected. How was it, she thought, that two brothers could be born so different? That night, he taught her how to spray a guy straight in the eyes with a can of PAM. He told her to aim her knees at a dude’s balls and to really dig in as hard as possible. Because, he said, if she went after a man’s junk, they won’t fuck with her no more. She readied her second punch, then a third. “You think Papi would love me?” she asked.

  “Damn, Angel,” he said. “That’s quite the fuckin’ question.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m just wondering.”

  She watched as Miguel thought about it, one second, two seconds, three. “Sure,” Miguel said, but Angel could hear it in his voice—he wasn’t sure at all. Miguel had lingered too long before answering. But she smiled anyway, because she knew that Miguel was lying just to make her feel better about what they both would never—could never—actually know. She readied her fist and punched again, but this time, it landed like a gentle tap over her brother’s heart.

  THOMAS

  1976

  He feared that with that name, he would become the type of man who wore plaid button-downs and tucked them into chinos. With a belt.

  She would never.

  * * *

  He lived in the Puerto Rican and Italian area of Jersey City. From his classroom windows and the roof of his building, he could see the Manhattan skyline. He liked to imagine that he was Dorothy and New York was his Oz—a place where he could go to become his true self. He’d only have to get across the water that held him back, and all that would take was one PATH train under the river. Then he’d be in Times Square with the businessmen, the hookers, the twenty-five-cent sex shops that promised a good show. He stood looking out at the buildings and thought, One day.

  When he was eight, nine, ten, he used to stay in the apartment with Nonna while his mother was out with her boyfriend, Antonio. Nonna liked to open the closet door and take out all her wild outfits and drape Thomas in them. He stood against the plain white wall—the only wall without any picture frames—and posed for Nonna’s camera. The goal was always to fill up an entire roll of film on the Instamatic with pictures of a certain theme. Nonna’s favorite theme was Elizabeth Taylor, which wasn’t as much a theme as it was a person. But it worked.

  Tonight, he wore Nonna’s rabbit-fur coat—the one with the hole in the left armpit that he liked to worm his finger through. He had on a long, red, chunky block-shaped costume necklace, and rings on every finger. “Hand me a cigarette, darling,” Thomas said, and even though Nonna didn’t smoke and there were no cigarettes in the apartment, besides the fact that no one was giving a ten-year-old a smoke, Nonna laughed until she had to readjust her dentures.

  Thomas loved those nights, not just because it was Nonna-Thomas time, but because he didn’t have to see his mother and Antonio. He didn’t hate his mother. That would be extreme to say. He simply didn’t love her the way that he loved Nonna. And sometimes before bed, he would pray that when he woke up, the world would be as it should be—no pain, plenty of food, and Nonna would actually be his real mother.

  Then there was Antonio, with his thick Brooklyn accent and the gold ring on his pinky shaped like a lion’s head with two small diamonds for eyes. What a waste of diamonds, Thomas thought, amazed that it was even possible for diamonds to be wasted.

  After dinner, still in the rabbit fur, he and Nonna watched The Gong Show because Nonna had the hots for Chuck Barris. “That hair,” Nonna said when the camera went to his face and he held the needle microphone to his lips. “I want to run my fingers through that hair.”

  They sat on the couch and cuddled while they watched, and Thomas laughed at Nonna’s running commentary. “Ma-donna,” she loved to say, “what is this singing?”

  He sat there, still in his Instamatic photoshoot outfit—swimming in the clothes like a miniature Liz Taylor—clapping so hard whenever Gene Gene the Dancing Machine or The Worms appeared. “Get up!” he screamed at Nonna whenever Gene Gene came out. “We gotta dance-dance-dance!”

  They danced, shook it out, moved their hips as if they were doing a never-ending Hula-Hoop race.

  Thomas loved to be overdramatic about it, so when the show went to commercial, he put the back of his right hand up to his forehead, looked up, and shrieked as he fainted to the floor. Nonna laughed and bent down to kiss him on the forehead. “Ah, bello, bello. You are so delicate,” she said. “You have a delicate soul and it’s beautiful and you no let nobody tell you wrong.”

  * * *

  His mother decorated the entire apartment with magazine cutouts and postcards of Hawaii. Palm trees, rainbows, water that glittered so hard under the never-ending rays of sunshine, all taped to the walls with flimsy bits of Scotch tape. In the summer months, the air was so humid, the tape would unstick itself from the walls and Thomas would hear, plop, plop, plop, as the pictures and postcards fell to the floor. His mother would just tape them back up again. Didn’t matter how many yards of tape she had to get through, there would always be more in the drawer.

  These pictures were filled with smiling faces and couples that had no relation to Thomas and his family. Most of the people were blond and the wind blew through their hair like mad. Some of them were surfing or suntanning. One couple held hands and walked on the sand. Then there were the ones with no people at all, and those were Thomas’s favorite. The volcanoes and fog and trees with roots that looked like they were ballerina feet balancing on top of the mud.

  “Antonio is going to take me to Hawaii,” his mother said one day as she was taping another magazine page to the wall, “for our honeymoon.”

  Thomas gave his mother one of the smiles he gave her so often—the kind where his mouth curled up but he showed no teeth. He knew that he would never get to go along on that trip. The world of Hawaii would only be seen through the pictures on the wall. But that was okay, because it meant that he could stay home with Nonna and watch The Gong Show and eat tomato salads with slices of mozzarella and tiny bits of oregano.

  “What is it with this Hawaii?” Nonna asked. “Hawaii everything. Take these off the walls.”

  “Antonio and I are going to Haw
aii,” his mother said.

  Thomas watched from the kitchen table and focused on his scrambled eggs.

  Nonna laughed. “Antonio said this to you?”

  “Yes, we’re going to get married,” his mother said. “You should know.”

  “You’re getting married?” Nonna said. “He’s already married!”

  Thomas continued looking down at his eggs and watched out of the corner of his eyes. He had only met Antonio a couple of times, but he knew that his mother had been seeing him for much longer than that. He tried to imagine if Antonio were married, but he didn’t know what the signs could be, other than meeting his wife. He had the feeling that he was hearing things that he wasn’t supposed to hear, like the nights when Nonna cried in the bathroom alone with the sink water flowing, or when his mother’s bed shook and shook until Antonio moaned and it stopped.

  “He’s going to leave her,” his mother said.

  “Oh, Isabella,” Nonna said, “I no teach you to be so blind.”

  “Ma che dici?” his mother said. “These things take time.”

  “Eh, what is time?” Nonna said. “You no tell a woman like me about time.”

  He was almost done with the eggs, and he swirled the last clumps with his fork. He spread butter on a piece of toast and bit into it.

  Earlier that morning, when Thomas woke up, he’d cracked open Nonna’s bedroom door. The room was empty but the bed was made. He didn’t know it at the time, but she had gotten up early to get eggs at the corner store. So Thomas knocked on his mother’s door and walked in. She was lying on her side, running her fingers through her big hair. Even though it was so early, she already had her perfect Sophia Loren Persian Eyes penciled on.

  “Really, Bella?” Antonio sighed as he unheld her and plopped back down on his side of the bed.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked Thomas.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “He’s hungry,” Antonio echoed.

  His mother put her hand on Antonio’s chest and told him to shush. “Nonna’s getting eggs,” she said. “Ant and I will come when the breakfast is ready.” Antonio laughed and Thomas walked back out the door.

  Now he bit into the last piece of eggs and they felt mushy in his mouth. “And where’s your ring, eh?” Nonna asked his mother.

  “Love is more than a ring,” his mother said, adding more tape to the wall to hold the pictures up.

  “Days like this,” Nonna said, “I wish your father were still alive to tell you to have sense.”

  “Well Daddy ain’t here.”

  “Why you no understand,” Nonna said, “he will not marry you?”

  “Ma che cazzo!” his mother shouted.

  “Ma che cazzo is right,” Nonna said. “No ring—ha!—ma che cazzo.”

  “Fuck you,” his mother said.

  The Maui postcard with the orange letters HANA and rich green trees had come untaped on one end. It was lopsided now, dangling off the only remaining piece of tape.

  “You have no place to criticize,” his mother said. “You work for him too, so I don’t want to hear it anymore from you.”

  Nonna was silent. Thomas walked over to the sink to place his empty plate in as gently as he could. He didn’t want to make a sound. He didn’t want them to remember that he was standing so close by. He tiptoed down the hallway to his bedroom, lay on his bed, and hugged his pillow.

  “Can’t you think of your son?” he could hear Nonna saying. “You bring that man into this house,” Nonna said, “and what if the police come and find?”

  “That won’t happen,” his mother said. He squeezed the pillow harder, closer to his chest. “You shouldn’t bite the—what’s the phrase?—you shouldn’t bite the finger? The hand?”

  “Ha—” Nonna said, “I bite whatever I want to bite. I bite, chew, and spit right out if that man brings the trouble into the house.”

  * * *

  When spring came to New York City, the world felt like a daydream. The trees budded out into cotton candy, people lunched outside, and the ring-a-ding tune of Mister Softee trucks whirled on every other block. And then there was the lake. Nonna’s favorite place in the entire world was the lake in the middle of Central Park. When she was in a good mood and the weather was right—no spot of April showers to be seen in the sky—she paid for two round-trip bus tickets from JC to Port Authority.

  Nonna rented a boat for them, which meant that he had to strain his tiny arm muscles to row them both.

  “Aspetta,” she said. “Look there.” She pointed her thick fingers—hands that could knead dough, fingers that could pinch cheeks—toward the East Side. Just above the trees, there was a trace of building tops.

  Thomas stopped rowing and they stared at the buildings together. Thomas loved how, on a beautiful and clear day, there was a crisp line where the building edges met the sky. Those building tops were the only hint that they were still in the city at all.

  Nonna told him that she loved Manhattan more than the other boroughs, and much more than Palermo, because of the buildings. Manhattan buildings, she said, had expectation and desire. They were aware of their own beauty and power. They wanted to compete with the sky. But not in Palermo. Those buildings, she said, were brown like caca and old and sprayed with bullet holes. She said that holes were sad reminders of the past.

  Thomas didn’t understand how a hole could be a reminder of anything. Nonna took out two butterscotch candies for them, and after Thomas popped one in his mouth, he continued rowing. They passed a couple that had stopped to kiss. Thomas was worried that the couple’s boat would fall over if they didn’t pay attention.

  When they returned the boat to the dock, his arm muscles were on fire. They walked past the pretty fountain with the angel on top of it, then up to Central Park West. On Seventy-Second Street, Nonna pointed up to a large building. “This is the Dakota,” she told Thomas. It looked like a square castle.

  One of Nonna’s favorite hobbies, that she said made her feel like a real American, was to learn the names of monuments and buildings. The Statue of Liberty was just okay, she said, because everybody knew what that one was. Her face, she said, looked too much like a man.

  She was interested in the other places. The Dakota, Thomas guessed, was one of them. There were men at the entry gates dressed in fancy suits. They stood under goblets of fire. “This is where the rich people live,” she said. “Like Jonathan Lennon and Yoko Uno.”

  “Who are they?”

  “He sings for the Beatle,” she said. “The girls used to love him. Use to throw their panties at him and I say, Ma-donna, what is it with these girls?”

  * * *

  It was a little past four o’clock when there was a pounding at the door. Thomas was sitting at the dining room table working on his science homework—a worksheet that asked him, for the fourth time that year, to place the planets in their correct order. The exercise angered him—it was bullshit, he thought—because the nuns had already taught this to his class last year, and unless there was some kind of cosmic game of musical chairs going on that he was unaware of, the planets were still where they always were.

  Nonna popped a saltine into her mouth, gummed it, put in her dentures, and got up from the table to answer the door. The man on the other side sighed when the door opened, and when Thomas glanced up, he saw that it was Vanessa’s father, Henry.

  Vanessa was in his grade at Our Lady of the Flowers. Not in the same class, because the nuns separated the girls and the boys, but they were in the same year. Vanessa was a nice girl, a bit quiet. She wore her uniform like all the other kids did—braided pigtails, plaid skirt, white collared shirt under a green sweater-vest. The other boys were mad for her. Thomas was mad for her plaid skirt. He liked to imagine he could be better friends with her so they could play dress-up and he could try on the skirt himself.

  “Oh, thank god,” Henry said. “You’re here, Rosaria. I gotta talk with you.” Henry’s eyes darted around the room and he rubbed his hand
s together quickly, like he had just washed them and the water wasn’t coming off fast enough.

  “Henry, Henry,” Nonna sang. “You’ve got yourself caught in a situation, eh?”

  “You’ve got no fucking clue, Rosaria. It’s bad.” Nonna led him to the table and offered him some saltines and tea. He said he was too nervous to eat a crumb.

  Henry was a nice man, from what Thomas could tell. They lived in a small house that was painted sky blue and had a porch with a swing. One day, in the second grade, Thomas had cut himself bad on the playground and Vanessa sat with him and soothed him while the nuns ran to fetch some bandages. “Don’t worry, Thomas,” Vanessa had said. “My mom is a nurse and whenever I get a cut, she says not to worry because everything will be okay.”

  “I don’t got the money for Tonio,” Henry told Nonna. He glanced at Thomas, then at the table, and he slid his fingers through his uncombed hair. When Henry looked at Thomas again, Thomas looked back down at his worksheet like he had been caught. He scribbled the word Jupiter next to the largest circle drawing.

  “This is no good,” Nonna said. She stopped spreading margarine on the cracker and let it sit on the plate. She sighed, “Henry, this is no the first time.”

  “I know, Rosaria,” he said. “I’m so sorry, but we just had to get Vee a new uniform after that Menendez kid vomited all over the place last Friday. Cost me fifty bucks, can you believe that?”

  Nonna hummed.

  Thomas had learned what the word cunt meant because of Vanessa. Not that Vanessa had said the word. She was far too sweet for that. But it was the boys who had started calling Vanessa a good-for-nothing-little-cunt in the fourth grade.

  “What does that mean?” Thomas had asked one of them, Sal, who was the ringleader of the group of self-appointed bad boys.