The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  When she walked in a ball, MODEL EFFECT was her category. She always looked elegant when they saw her: sometimes in a tapered silk dress, carrying a Sevillana fan as an accessory. She wasn’t about the costume posturing, nor did she want to strut her stuff looking like a hoochie. Her goal was to look like a wealthy woman with purpose. At Pathmark, on the other hand, she wore her frumpy outfit and looked like a male. She’d be damned if someone from the ball scene came in and saw her like that. The only thing worse would be if her mother came in. Oh, she wouldn’t know what to do. Surely she’d get fired if she smacked a customer in the face.

  Before going into work that day, she stood in front of the mirror and flared out her nostrils to see if there were any straggler pelos that needed to be cut. She doused a cottonball in polish remover so that she could wipe the gold off her uñas. She wiped her lipstick off with a baby wipe and tried to relax all her face muscles so that she could look more masculine. Boys don’t show emotion, she repeated to herself as she deadened her muscles. No emotion, no emotion.

  She had taken the job because, por lo menos, it was easy money, something she could do as a side hustle when she wasn’t at the piers. And it was stable. Porque she’d be damned! Damned if she ever had to stand in line at the welfare building! Not no way in hell was she going to beg. For what? So she could stand in line? She undid a string of floss and smiled at herself in the mirror to make sure nothing was stuck between her teeth. She stuck out her tongue. Her motto was this: If it can’t be done in heels, she didn’t want to do it. And could she wait in line in heels? No. Could she break out the heels for a day shift at Pathmark? Unfortunately not, though a girl could daydream about it.

  When she got to work, she wasn’t put on register. They had her ass mopping up the milk aisle. Ha! she thought. If only someone could put that on a badge: ANGEL XTRAVAGANZA—SHE’LL MOP UP ALL YOUR MILK. Oh, she was being nasty.

  She kept an eye on the entrance door, as if that could do anything to prevent her damn mother from stepping foot into that store. No, she was being irrational. Miguel hadn’t said anything to Mami. Or maybe he had, and lied about it. An old black man walked in, holding a giant book up, marching toward the chips aisle.

  “Hallelujah,” the man shouted. “Jesus, I love you. Hallelujah.”

  This man came in from time to time, enough times for her coworkers to refer to him as Hallelujah Man. He was bone thin, had tight white curls, and wore suits that had way too much fabric for his body. Angel didn’t know why he was celebrating all of creation in an overly lit aisle filled with Fritos and Funyuns and Cheetos, but there he was.

  There was nothing to mop up, so Angel just worked the motions, pretending to clean up spills that didn’t exist. It was easier than putting things on shelves for hours on end. If her mother showed up, she’d cry. No, she wouldn’t cry. She would stand tall and say, Ma, you shouldn’t have come, I don’t want to see you.

  Pero she knew that wouldn’t work. Mami was persistent like it was nobody’s business. What was she so afraid of? Angel was a grown-ass human being. It’s not like Mami would throw down and whoop her ass in the middle of the cereal aisle. She was a mess, but she wasn’t that much of a nightmare.

  Then it hit her. She didn’t want to face her mother because she was afraid she’d have to lie. Mami would want to know how Hector was doing and Angel would either have to tell the truth and own up that Mami was right all along (she’d rather eat a salad washed in Port Authority toilet water), or she’d have to lie. She could just see it now: she’s holding onto the mop and looking straight at her mother as she tells her that Hector is fine, doing fabulous actually, and that they are going to move to Long Island, to a real house, once they saved up enough money. They’d become the type of couple who’d say “burbs” instead of “suburbs.” Then what?

  The man was in front of her now and he threw the Bible on the floor, in front of Angel’s mop. “I love you,” the man sang to the sky and Angel was crying in front of the applesauce shelf. “Hallelujah.”

  * * *

  When she got home that night, the house was empty. Juanito had probably taken Daniel out. Venus was—wherever that girl felt like going that day, hopefully keeping herself out of trouble. A mother could only worry so much. Angel went to the back of her closet and pulled out the box where she kept the envelopes.

  There were two envelopes that kept everything in her life in some kind of order. She had taken a black Sharpie and labeled them, months ago, when she knew that Hector was gone and that the entire weight of the house was gonna be on her arms. Needs: envelope one. Dreams: envelope two.

  She took out the stack of bills in each envelope and counted them. All the ones and fives and tens, sometimes a twenty here and there, pero never a fifty or hundred. All those white men on the bills, but it was whatever. At least Mr. Hamilton had nice bone structure. Now that was a face she could carry in her pocket and think, Damn, papi.

  She licked the tips of her fingers as she counted each bill and added it up in her head. Always the small change, but small change was small change until it could be added up to big change. There was no forgetting that.

  Needs meant food—huevos for breakfast and boxes of Cheerios, milk by the gallon, bread for toasting and grilling cheese, and lots of deli meats sliced real thin. Then dinner meant cans of Goya beans and white rice by the pound, sometimes chicken breasts if they were on sale.

  Then there were the dreams. This was where she saved up money to buy that darling Chanel suit at Saks that she was lusting over. And the newspaper cutout for the Model Search at Bloomingdale’s, where she would go in a few months to show the panel of judges—and Wilhelmina her damn self—that she, Angel Xtravaganza, mother of the House of Xtravaganza, known on the streets as La Nena del Bronx, could be a supermodel.

  Angel slipped out the two pictures of Hector that she kept in that very envelope. She kept him there because she couldn’t bear to put him in a frame and stare at him every day. She couldn’t see his face as a constant reminder of what she had once upon a time, and at least when he was stored away in the envelope, she could go searching for him whenever she could handle it.

  While she waited for her children to come back home to her, she lingered a little longer than usual on Hector’s fotos. One was just him, wearing a chunky sweater and tight jeans, hand on his hip and a sonrisa so big, the camera flash bounced off his pearly whites. The other foto was of the both of them: a day at Coney Island ending in a foto-booth session of four fotos in quick succession: a side hug; a goofy one, where they leaned in and stuck their tongues out; and the last two, where they took turns pecking kisses on the other’s cheek. The film was proof that what they had was real. They had made the mistake of sitting too close to the camera, so their faces were up close and personal, and some of their hair got chopped off by the top margin of the foto. Angel stuck out her index finger, where the golden nail polish had split in half before she had completely removed it before work. She rubbed Hector’s face.

  “Ay, Hector,” she whispered to the strip of paper. “We’ve got ourselves a new Xtravaganza.”

  JUANITO

  It wasn’t any kind of sorpresa that Angel had given Daniel the green light, but Juanito was a little taken by the fact that Venus was the one who picked Daniel up in the first place at the piers. Juanito had trouble imagining how that even went down. Did Venus think he was a potential client, por fa-vor, could anyone imagine! Especially since Venus could be so cold sometimes—so closed off to the world. Always hard to tell with Vee’s moods, because one minute she’d be an ice queen, then homegirl would bounce back, as warm and abierta as a flamenco dancer in a hachi-mama red dress, ready to stomp all up on a plank of wood.

  As soon as Angel said yes, that Daniel could become an Xtravaganza, Juanito put a pause on his sewing machine, set the red silk fabric down with a gentle glide of his fingers, and said, “I’ll take him down to the piers.” He tried not to sound as excitable as the locas on The Price Is Right—the ones w
ho launch up out of their seats when their name is called like their ass is gonna zoom all the way to Mars, screaming like Jesus was making a second coming back to Earth. Juanito tried to sound like it was no bother, like if he had to give a tour, he would. But on the inside, his heart was singing a tune—something fast and wild.

  When Daniel woke up on his third day in the house, Juanito made two extra eggs in the frying pan. “You like eggs with butter?” he asked Daniel, who walked into the cocina in Venus’s sweatpants, which were too tight and short on him. Daniel must’ve had half a foot on Venus’s height, and Daniel’s muscular quads and ass were wrapped tight in the gray cotton.

  Daniel said yes and rubbed his eyes with closed fists. “Like, how much butter are we talking though?”

  “Like, just enough to make it not stick to the pan,” Juanito said.

  “Then yeah. You gonna share some with me?”

  “If you want,” Juanito said, trying not to rush his manos to the cabinet door to get a plate for the eggs. Once the plate was on the counter, he took the wooden spoon and cut the omelet in half.

  “You can take the bigger half,” Juanito said and handed Daniel his plate.

  “You sure? You made it.”

  Juanito nodded and moved his sewing machine from the dining room table to the sofa so that they had enough room to eat. They ate in silence because Juanito was too nervous to say a thing. He thought about things he could bring up for chitchat, but just when he was going to say a word, a garbage truck passed on the street below. Four stories down and the sound was still thunderous enough to make words impossible to hear.

  Juanito wondered if Daniel were the type of gay who would want to talk about fabric with him, or sewing machines. How the needle could gobble up the swatches, connect whatever was fed into it with the quick needle motions, up and down and up and down. So he picked something easier. “When’d you get your ear pierced?” Juanito finally asked. He resisted the urge to take the gold hoop into his fingers, and by default, play with Daniel’s earlobe.

  Daniel smirked and finished chewing his eggs. “Uh,” he said. “Like a year ago? Two?” He shrugged.

  “Well, I only ask,” Juanito said, forking his next bite, “because I think it looks nice.”

  Juanito knew that his eyes could hold no secrets, so he looked back down at his eggs. He didn’t want Daniel to read his eyes like a palm reader reads a palm. Juanito was convinced that if his eyes had lines that people could read, the heart line would be the strongest.

  “Gracias, guapo,” Daniel said, and Juanito had to hold himself from melting like a tub of butter over a nice blue flame. “You’re too sweet.”

  Juanito smiled and play-punched Daniel on the shoulder. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

  * * *

  They waited two days to go down to the piers because two days meant Friday, and Friday was always a good day for cash. Juanito’s job was supposed to be easy. He would teach Daniel how to hustle for some cash—how to spot the white men who cruised the piers for their little Latin lovers, how to exaggerate the vowels of their Nuyorican accent to give the johns the exotic flavor that they wanted, how to go behind a bush or deep into a dark alley, how to kneel down on cement so that his knees wouldn’t get cut up, how to always negotiate higher because the price they give is always gonna be so, so low. And, most important, how to get into a car, if they had a car, but cars were complicated because cars meant rules. Cars meant that at any moment, the client had the power to lock the doors and drive away without letting anyone out for fresh air.

  “But if you find a dude with a car,” Juanito told him, “then you gotta take this.”

  This was one of those Swiss Army knives, hooked up with a corkscrew that he could use between his fingers to land a fierce punch. Or if he had a bottle of wine and some free time, he could always take a break to sip on some vino. Then there were little scissors and a tiny, but sharp, blade.

  “This blade is all you gotta flash,” Juanito said. When Daniel’s eyes looked wide like deer, Juanito said, “No, don’t worry. No tengas miedo—you probably won’t have to use it. Like ever. It’s mostly just to feel safe. And maybe you gotta flash it once or twice to let them know that you are not to be fucked with, sabes?”

  Daniel was quiet. His hands were in his jeans pockets, shoulders so tense that they were jutting to near his ears. He was kicking the curb with the toes of his shoes.

  “¿Qué pasa? You cold, papi?” Juanito said. “The March air got you needing a fleece blanket still?”

  “Nah,” Daniel said. “I’m just surprised that you’re the one telling me to take a blade and knife a john, you know?”

  “¿Y qué? Why does that surprise you?”

  “Porque you’re so little, Juanito. So innocent looking,” Daniel said. “With your sewing machine and your fabrics and shit. Now, here you’re telling me to keep a knife just in case I gotta flash it.”

  “Mira, some of these guys are gonna fuck with you,” Juanito said. “And you gotta be ready.”

  “I mean, I figured that. I just wasn’t expecting you to be the one to be giving me a blade. I ain’t never cut anyone before.”

  “And you think I have?”

  “No, well I don’t know, I didn’t say that. I’m just surprised, that’s all,” Daniel said. “I didn’t think you was capable of cutting anything other than a piece of silk.”

  Daniel put his arm on Juanito’s shoulder and looked both ways to see if there was anyone around them.

  “If it makes you feel better,” Juanito said, “I never had to cut anyone before, and I hope I don’t ever have to. Pero hold up un momento—you like my fabrics?”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said. He kicked against the curb again, gently. “No sé—I think it’s pretty adorable.”

  It was too dark to see if Daniel was blushing, but Juanito was pretty sure that his own face was going red. “Well maybe I’ll make you a pair of pants some time. Or a shirt! Yes, I think a shirt, maybe.”

  Daniel smiled and held out his hand. “You gonna give me that knife or what?” His arm was reaching like he wanted to take it and hold it.

  “No,” Juanito said. He held the army knife, then put it into his pocket. “Not yet. I don’t think we’re gonna hustle tonight. I think we should do something else.”

  * * *

  They bought two bottles of orange soda instead, then found a little patch of grass to claim their own. Only a block from the water, the Friday night pier crowd was making all kinds of noise—stereos with freestyle on blast; laughter and kikis; hands clapping and shoes clacking; the occasional, Girrrl, no you did not. Daniel and Juanito sat on the grass, opened their soda bottles, and leaned against each other for support. A young black queen walked past them with her right arm raised to balance a boom box on her shoulder. It wasn’t playing any music yet. Homegirl’s nails were vampire-red and thick gold nameplate hoops hung from her earlobes. Juanito’s eyes weren’t sharp enough to read her name.

  Juanito turned to Daniel and whispered, “What do you think her name is?”

  “Umm,” Daniel said. “I’m thinking she is giving vibes that she is—Mildred? No, now I’m seeing Leonora? No—”

  “Ay, Dios mío.” Juanito laughed. “You’re the silliest. She is definitely not a Mildred or a Leo-whatever and you know that.”

  “Yeah, I’m just playing with you.”

  They watched the queen sashay her way to the pier. “Shawna,” she shouted out toward the river with her free hand up to her mouth like her fingers were some kind of megaphone. “Don’t choo even think about that bitch from the DMV—”

  “Sounds like Shawna’s having trouble getting her car papers done,” Daniel whispered to Juanito as the queen glided away too far to hear the rest. “I hope she takes her friend’s advice and doesn’t think about it for a single-little-hot-second.”

  Juanito giggled and smacked the side of Daniel’s arm. “You’re too much,” he said, and dipped the straw into his bottle. Daniel leane
d his head back and took a big gulp out of his own drink.

  “You know what I love about orange soda?” Juanito asked.

  Daniel raised his eyebrows and shrugged. A smile lingered on his lips.

  “It’s so much sweeter than all the other sodas,” he said. “So much sweeter that it’s like tangy-tangy and it makes it feel like the top layer of your tongue is pinching together.”

  “Like a soda-sugar tongue burn?”

  “Sí sí,” he said. “Azúúúúcar.”

  Juanito lay back on the grass so that he was looking up at the night sky. He could see Daniel out the side of his eye, could see the barba-stubble growing on the side of his face and the tip of his chin. He could see how that one thick vein bulged out of his left arm—the arm that he leaned on as he held the soda with his right hand. He wanted to kiss Daniel, but he didn’t want to go in for it. It was like he just wanted it to happen, like bam! He wiggled a little closer to Daniel and traced the vein on Daniel’s arm with his forefinger.

  Daniel sighed and tilted his head back. “That feels good,” he said. “My arms are sensitive like you got no idea.”

  And Juanito, in that moment more than others, wished that he could sing. He wished that he could sing a slow jam about kisses and night skies and sensitive brazos. He wished that he could open his mouth and something beautiful would come out of it, so that Daniel would turn his head to face him and say, That song, those words, are so, so beautiful—please don’t stop singing to me.

  But he knew he couldn’t carry no tune. Not even a note. And it seemed like just when Daniel turned to look at Juanito, some queens started wailing.

  Juanito and Daniel both sat up straight and turned around to face the epicenter of the throwdown. It looked like, as best as Juanito could tell, two Latina queens were going at it. He could tell that it wasn’t going to end well. They both had studded clutch purses, which meant that someone was probably going to end up bleeding by the time that fight fizzled.