“Okay, Daniel,” his mother sighed at the kitchen table. “We’ll see what Santa Claus can do this year, but it’s been a hard year in the North Pole.”
He didn’t think he had anything to worry about. He had been a good boy. He had done okay in his classes. He didn’t push anyone on the monkey bars. Okay, he pushed Jimmy—but it was only once, and Jimmy had deserved it because he was mouthing off at Kyle. But that didn’t count, or if it did count, Daniel was sure that when Santa looked at the grand scheme of things, he would be forgiven.
* * *
They ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches for dinner that month, but Daniel wasn’t going to complain because he wanted to be on Santa’s good list. When Christmas came around, there were those Hot Wheels. There was the drag ’chute stunt track. And when he gave his mother these big-ass, hoochie-mama, gold-embossed bamboo hoop earrings, she laughed and said, “Oh god, Daniel, these are something else.”
He squealed and told her to put them on.
She did. And she wore them all day long. Until night, when she made a hurt face and took them off. “Mommy’s gonna have to make these her indoor earrings,” she told him. “They’re kind of heavy and Mommy needs to rest her earlobes. And, oh look—they made my piercing hole turn green, well that’s not good.”
* * *
Eight. He could tell that his mother was always in a good mood when a nice man took her out to dinner and movies. She used to say to her friend Nilda on the phone, Yes, he was such a nice man, or, No, girl, that man is nasty or cold or just downright mean and I wouldn’t fuck him with my enemy’s vagina.
Then she met Rob and she talked on the phone with Nilda for longer in the evenings. “I’m just over the moon, Nild,” Mama said, and Daniel watched her twirling the cord with her index finger as she rested the phone between her ear and her shoulder. She was painting her toenails, and her foot was plopped straight up on the kitchen table as Daniel watched his cartoons. “He’s got me believing in all kinds of magic,” Mama said. “Let–me–tell–you, shoo.”
So for the next week, whenever his mother was out of the apartment and he was doing his chores at home, he developed some rituals to help her out. The goal was for Rob to be nice to his mother, to take her out to all the dinners she could handle without getting fat, and then he would marry her and be Daniel’s father. He dug into the bathroom cabinet and pulled out some tealight candles and set them up on the dining room table next to a faded painting of La Virgen María that Nilda had bought Mama from the dollar store on Tremont. He did the sign of the cross and said, “Dear María, let all these things happen,” and then he listed his wishes.
Monday and Tuesday came and went. His mother went on two dates with Rob. But still no wedding. He was gonna have to go in with the big guns. On Wednesday, he faked sick so that he could dedicate the whole afternoon to the ritual. While his mother was working at the Duane Reade, he turned on All My Children and watched that Susan Lucci woman slap the hell out of her former best friend. He held one of the tea candles in his hand and walked around the room in circles. He chanted Jesus’s name because he was starting to worry that maybe María wasn’t enough heavenly power to assist on this mission.
When the show went to commercial and kids were singing for more Ovaltine, there was a pounding at the door. “Yo, Carmen,” a man’s voice boomed. Daniel froze and blew out the candle. The guy at the door banged again. “Carmen, I know you’re in there,” he shouted. “Let a brother in, woman.”
Daniel glided over to the door and pressed his ear to it. “Um,” he said, “she’s not here.”
“Daniel?” the man said. “Is that you?”
Daniel was stunned that this man knew his name. He didn’t recognize the voice at all. Now he was curious. He knew that he shouldn’t open the door, but maybe if it was just for a second, everything would be okay. “Maybe,” Daniel said. “How do you know my name?”
“It’s Ricky,” the man said. “Your moms ever tell you about Ricky? I need to talk to your moms. You sure she ain’t here?”
Ricky did kind of ring a bell. He had heard the name once or twice before when his mother was on the phone.
“I’m sure,” Daniel said.
“Damn yo,” Ricky said. “I’m flipping shit out here. Can you help a brother out and let me in? I used to be your mom’s boyfriend, can’t believe she didn’t say nothing about me.”
“I don’t think I can.”
But he did let Ricky in. Nothing happened. Ricky just sat on the sofa with flowers in his hand. Daniel offered him a glass of water and felt like an adult when he did, but Ricky said no, he didn’t want water.
When his mother got home, she raised hell up one level closer to Earth with her screaming.
“Bitch,” Ricky said. “All I wanted was to give you some flowers.”
“I don’t need your flowers,” his mother said. “You come here and make my son let you in this house. I should beat your ass, Ricky, so just go away.”
“Ingrateful,” Ricky said. “I should beat your ass for being a goddamned whore with that Robert.”
“Don’t talk about Robert.”
“You tell your son what you did to me?” Ricky said.
His mother sighed loudly. “I didn’t do anything to you, you fucking narcissist.”
“How long after me did you wait to fuck him?” Ricky said. “You gonna make a grown man cry in front of a child?” Ricky looked at Daniel, who was watching from the sofa like he was watching a soap opera fight.
“No one asked you to come here,” his mother said. “This isn’t about you.”
“You’re a cold bitch,” Ricky said.
When he left and she slammed the door behind him, she sat down on the couch next to Daniel and cried.
“Why’d he call you a cold bitch?” Daniel said.
“Don’t say that,” she said, and Daniel wondered if maybe his rituals had backfired and gone all wrong. Maybe he had set all of this in motion with his prayers and candles. He vowed to never light another candle and just let things happen like they were supposed to.
Cold bitch, cold bitch, he mouthed the words to himself later after he got out of the shower and had to wipe the steam off the mirror. Cold bitch, cold bitch, that man Ricky was surely gonna get a large sack of coal.
* * *
Ten. Rob left and he took her happiness with him. Daniel didn’t know what to do. He would’ve brought out all his Hot Wheels cars and sold them to the pawnshop dudes. Heck, he was double digits now and that meant he wasn’t some little kid. He needed to be a man about it now. He needed to help the woman of the house.
He decided he would start by making his mother eggs and toast for breakfast. When he brought them to her, she looked at the plate and blinked all slow. “They’re running,” she said. “The eggs are too watery, they’re running.”
Silly, silly, he thought. Eggs don’t have legs for running. “I tried my best,” he said.
She took a chunk of the scrambled eggs with the fork and laid it on top of the toast and took a bite. “Oh fuck,” she said, sticking out her tongue so that the half-chewed mess in her mouth just fell out. “What did you put in these?”
He watched as her head leaned back into the pillow and she moaned as if she were in pain. “It’s too bright in here,” she said. “When did it get so bright?”
“I put oregano and”—he had to think about what else he had put—“and there was butter on the pan. Oh, and I sprinkled Adobo on too.”
She swiped her arm across the bed so the plate could fall onto the ground. It made a crash sound but no glass broke. The eggs slid onto the floor. “Who the fuck puts Adobo on eggs?” she shouted. “What’ve you done?”
“I didn’t do nothing,” he said, on his knees, scooping eggs into his palms.
“Why don’t they ever love me?” she asked. Her voice was so still, it gave Daniel goosebumps on his arms.
“I love you though,” he said. He put the fallen eggs onto the plate and put the fork
on top so that he could bring it back to the kitchen. “Here,” he said and kissed his mother on the forehead.
He asked her why she was crying.
“You’re not my little boy anymore,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to get this old so quick, and then you’re just gonna grow up and leave me all alone and then who’s gonna be with me. They always go away from me, Daniel, why do they always go?”
He didn’t know what kind of answer to give to a question like that. Maybe some questions just didn’t have answers, he thought, so he leaned in and gave her another kiss.
“Stop,” she screamed and pushed him away. She was crying now for him to close the blinds, to make the sun go away.
And he did. He cleaned the plates and threw away the food. He closed the door and let her sleep all day, and the next. He couldn’t make the light disappear back into the sky, but he could close what needed to be closed.
* * *
Eleven. The thing about desire, he thought, was that it was unpredictable. Desire is what led him to watch his first porno. It was fairly vanilla—an overdone production where the white woman lit candles and the bed was very cushiony. The white man was tall and tan. He had gym muscles and a huge cock. Daniel looked at the woman’s titties, but he was more interested in the guy. He watched him eat her out, then fuck her, and he realized that he wasn’t interested in the woman. He wanted the man. Actually, he wanted to be the guy and fuck him. That would make him gay, but whatever. He didn’t feel any shame about it. He knew what he wanted and he didn’t give a shit if other people were gonna give him shit about it. It wasn’t like he was gonna get fucked. He wanted to do the fucking. He watched the guy’s ass squeeze as he fell into the woman, up and down, and Daniel jerked himself until he shot all over his torso.
* * *
Twelve. He could no longer recognize her. She became so thin, it looked like her body was a shrink-wrap machine and it was sucking her in. She grew pillows under her eyes, and then those pillows turned a purple-blue that made Daniel wince whenever he saw her. She lost her job. She made him go to Pathmark by himself to make the food stamps stretch, and every time, the cashiers looked at him like he was too young, but he acted like he didn’t see those stares.
He knew she was using, but he also knew that she didn’t know that he knew. He had found a needle in the bathroom, and for fuck’s sake, she wasn’t no diabetic.
“I really fucked up,” she said to him one day when he came back from school. It was May and the city days were starting to get warmer.
“Oh no,” he said. “What’d you do?”
He was expecting her to come forward with it. He imagined it would go something like this: she would sit him down at the kitchen table, present her needles and tinfoil and lighter and plastic baggie of powder stuff. The more he tried to imagine the scene, the more it slipped away from him, just like when he woke up in the middle of a bad dream.
“The bitch at the help office,” she said, “is stopping our checks until I go to court.”
She was crying now, saying she didn’t know what she was going to do, how they needed to eat and pay that rent check. But he didn’t want to hear any of that. He could find a way to figure things out. “You sure there isn’t nothing else you wanna say to me,” he said.
She wiped her nose and sighed. “I’m craving,” she said, “a goddamn cigarette.”
He looked at her thick, messy hair that was so uncombed, it was surely full of knots by now. He looked at her chicken-bone arms, thin enough for the wind to snap in two. He looked at the dotted marks in the middle of her arm, where the needles searched for veins. “You really fucked up,” he said.
“I know,” she said, “I know.” She was crying hard now, so hard that he wondered if she would hiccup when she had to gasp for air again.
What can I do to help? he should have said. But: “You’re a cold bitch, mama,” is what he actually said. “I can’t believe you did this.”
* * *
Thirteen. He gave her an ultimatum: get off the smack or that’s it and I’m walking out the door. He said please do it for me and she said she would and he believed her. He thought that when he got older, he would take her away from this place to a new city, a new building, a new life, where she could get clean and stay clean and that was it, she just needed to start now because he couldn’t take it no more.
Clean, he thought, what a strange concept. Like a person was fresh out the shower and nothing had dirtied them. Turn over a new leaf, stay clean, yada yada, they were just bullshit phrases. His mother was a junkie, but she wasn’t dirty. And it wasn’t like being clean made a person any more or less worthy of love.
Please, he thought, please let it be true this time. She gave her word. Let her get off that junk. Please.
* * *
“How old are you, anyway?” Venus asked him. They were sitting at the dining room table with another kid who was introduced to him as Juanito.
“Fourteen,” Daniel said. He was still wearing Venus’s fur coat, even though there was no air conditioner and it was stifling inside.
“Oh, look at you,” Venus said, “just like Juanito.”
“Yes, say it loud and proud,” Juanito said, taking a pause from the sewing machine that was gobbling up a web of fabric from the tips of his fingers like he was some kind of diva spider. He moved his fingers over to Daniel to pet the fur jacket. “Venus isn’t supposed to be bringing just anyone back here.” He winked at Daniel.
“Ay, cállate, Juanito,” Venus said. “Dani’s just a new friend of mine. Ain’t that right, Daniel?”
Daniel nodded yes as Juanito’s eyebrows stayed risen over his eyes.
“He’s gonna live with us now,” Venus said.
“Oh, is he now?” Juanito said. “Girl, you know you gotta pass this through Angel first before you start making decisions around here.” Then Juanito turned to Daniel but didn’t take his eyes off the gobble-gobble of the sewing machine. “You ever walk in a ball? ’Cause I’m preparing for my big debut now and I wanna know if you’re gonna debut too?”
Daniel looked at Venus and tried to communicate with a squeeze of the face that he didn’t know how to answer Juanito’s question.
Venus must’ve taken the hint because she put a hand on Daniel’s arm. “No,” Venus said. “He’s not a ball queen like you, Reina Juana, with that ugly-ass silver shit you got going on over there. What the hell is that?”
They both cackled like it was the funniest joke in the world, but Daniel had no idea where the punchline was hidden. He was pretty sure it was a straight-up insult, but why the laughter?
“You are a shady one,” Juanito said. “Pero excuse me, this is a silver lamé bodice. And it’s going to win me the Banjee Girl Realness trophy, so you better back that truck up. And since we’re reading, tell me, what the fuck happened to your face? Did you run into a police officer on the street?”
Venus touched the bruise on her cheek and now it was Daniel’s turn to chime in. “Some motherfucker tried to get real with her,” Daniel said.
“Yes,” Venus said, “And Daniel helped me out, otherwise I was going to beat the shit out of that sorry excuse for a man.”
“Didn’t he try to stab you?” Daniel asked, adjusting the fur so it wasn’t sticking to the beads of sweat forming on his neck.
“Yes, he sure did.” Venus threw her hands in the air, like can-you-believe-that-shit, what-is-a-girl-to-do.
“Ay, Dios mío,” Juanito said, shifting the fabric to a new direction. “No no no no no me lo puedo. I simply cannot.”
* * *
When Daniel knocked on Angel’s door and peeked in, Angel was placing various gold earrings up to her right ear and evaluating them in the mirror. Angel singsonged for Daniel to come in, and he sat down on the edge of her bed as Angel still considered her earrings in the mirror.
“Venus tells me you wanna live here, verdad?” Angel said, still looking at the mirror.
Daniel hesitated. The answer was yes,
he did want to live there with them, but having Angel speak to him without looking at him at the same time was throwing him for a loop.
“Yeah,” Daniel said.
“She also tells me that you saved her life,” Angel said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, even though he believed that Venus would’ve been fine if their paths hadn’t crossed at the piers. Venus was probably more than capable of kicking that guy’s ass. If anything, he had stopped Venus from killing the guy.
“Don’t,” Angel said, laying one of the gold earrings into a wooden jewelry box like she was laying down a sleeping baby. “Don’t ma’am me. I’m not some irrelevant vieja,” she said. “I’m not even a full woman yet.” She laughed at this.
Daniel apologized and Angel picked up another earring and put it up to her ear. She leaned in and squinted her eyes, as if that might hold the answers to the mysteries of selection.
“Which is better?” Angel said, holding up a gold hoop to her left ear, and an even larger gold hoop to her right ear. They were so large, they looked like towel rings for a bathroom. Daniel pointed to the one on the right because the gold looked textured.
“Good choice,” Angel said and finally turned to face Daniel. He saw her give him a one-up and her face soured. “Where’d you get that coat?”
“Oh, um,” Daniel said, “Venus gave it to me after—”
“She gave it to you?” Angel said. Her tone was acid rain, and Daniel realized that this may have been the wrong answer. Before he could backtrack, Angel was screaming Venus’s name.
It took all of five heartbeats for Venus to pop up in the door frame.
“Daniel tells me that you gave him Hector’s fur coat,” Angel said.
“Ay,” Venus said, “what he meant is that I gave it to him for the day, as a token for helping me out.”
Angel’s eyes were stone as she stared at Venus, then back at Daniel, then at the heart of the fur coat.
“Right,” Daniel said. “I didn’t know it was Hector’s coat. I can give it back to him when I meet him—”
The House of Impossible Beauties Page 14
