Angel stood up from the sofa without using her arms for support. She just rose with her hands still stretched out on either side of her body, fingers out like she was walking a tightrope in some fucked-up circus act and she needed her arms out to keep her from falling over. She walked over to the intercom and pressed the talk button.
“Juanito,” she said. “You down there, nene?” She held down the button with two nails instead of one, just to be sure. “If you’re really there with my mother, it’s all good. You can bring her up here.” Then she turned around and said to no one in particular, “I’ll believe it when I see it with my own damn eyes.”
* * *
Nothing could fool the eyes. Whenever she needed proof, she just needed to see in order to believe. Like when she wanted to remind herself that humans were, at their root, good and loving beings, all she needed to see was a giggling baby. When she needed to see the wonders of creation, she went to the public library, like Hector did, and watched fast-forward videos of trees and flowers in bloom. When she needed to accept that Hector was gone, she just needed to see his body there, on the hospital bed, when the nurse said she was so sorry and Angel screamed out that she didn’t want her sorry.
So now there was her mother, standing before Angel’s eyes, looking like the hot mess that Daniel had pegged her to be. Everyone stood up because no one knew what to do. Angel looked at Venus, at that wig that was consuming her face, then at Daniel and Juanito, who had their arms resting on each other’s shoulder. Angel imagined what this scene must look like from her mother’s eyes. For a hot second, she wanted to close her eyes and imagine that none of this faggotry was happening. She imagined that no one was in the room, that she wasn’t wearing a hot pink jumpsuit with silver stilettos like it was just another night at the Roxy, or the Garage, or Studio 54, or the Saint, or the Pyramid, or god forbid, the Mineshaft.
She took a deep breath and pushed back her shoulders. “Venus,” Angel said, “could you close the door. Juanito, could you pour a glass of water for my mother.”
Venus and Juanito moved quick without saying a word.
“You look shell-shocked, Ma,” Angel said. “It’s okay. None of us are gonna bite you.”
Mami stood there looking like all the color had been drained from her face. The woman had hardly aged. Well, if she was going to be shady, she would point out that maybe Mami looked a little dehydrated and tired (but who wasn’t, really?). And it wasn’t like Angel was going to dish some ingenuine compliment for her. Angel had figured out years ago that Mami was not the type of woman who knew how to take a compliment—she never said thank you.
When Juanito came back with the glass of water, Mami refused it. Angel offered her some pineapple soda, but that was all she could offer, she said, porque they didn’t have anything else in the fridge at the moment.
“I didn’t come to drink,” Mami said. “Why don’t you answer your phone?”
“I’m sorry that we don’t keep rum stocked in my house,” Angel said.
“Damn, Angel,” Daniel said under his breath, but it was loud enough that Angel and everyone else could hear it.
“I was calling all morning, but there was nothing.” Mami’s slow words were like lashes. “Y entonces I come to ring the bell, and it ringsringsrings, cada hora, pero you don’t let me in.”
Juanito was still holding the glass of water out for Mami to take hold. It looked like he didn’t know what to do with it, or with himself, standing in the middle of them, so Angel took the glass and downed the water in what felt like one gulp. “I thought you were a crackhead going to town on my buzzer,” Angel said. “The phone company must’ve stopped service for a little blip, you know how it can get sometimes—”
“Miguel is dead,” Mami said.
Time checked itself, like someone was mixing a house record and put their hand on the vinyl to slow down the spin. “That’s not even funny,” Angel said. “You’re just being malicious now.”
“It’s true,” Mami said, “my son is dead. They killed him.”
What kind of cruel trick was she trying to pull now? Angel always knew that her mother was something cruel, but she didn’t think that she had the cojones to march up into Angel’s own house and mess with her like this. She had to have known that Angel loved Miguel like something fierce. She knew that Miguel and Angel kept in contact, and now Mami was manipulating strings just to make her feel bad.
“I just talked to him—” Angel said. She tried to think of exactly when it had been. Before the last ball, on the pay phone, like always, but she had gotten lunch with him a week ago. Now she wasn’t sure. Maybe it was two weeks ago? Three? It was odd how remembering worked, how tricky it could be when trying to pin something down exactly. The mind was like a trapeze artist playing tricks in the air.
“Who killed him?” Daniel asked. Angel shot her head toward Daniel and Juanito. She had forgotten they were standing there.
“She said they,” Venus said, and Angel shot her head to the other side to look at her nena. “I think we’re all just wondering who did it, verdad?”
Angel looked back at her mother who seemed more concerned with Angel’s outfit than the question. Maybe the jumpsuit and stilettos weren’t right for this situation, but did her mother need to glare at her? How dare she throw shade on her outfit at a time like this?
“They,” Mami said. “Nobody know shit. Nobody tell me what happen. Pero esto es lo que pasó: they shoot him in his car. Esos-hijos-de-puta.”
“He had a car?” Angel said. The fact that she didn’t know this detail about her brother’s life was what stung her first. How was it that she could live with her brother for nineteen years, get lunch with him and listen to his life, but then at the end of things, realize that she had not known him at all?
Venus took off the wig and started to fan her face with the copy of Cosmo that was on the coffee table. Mami glared at the wig. “Creo que I made a mistake,” Mami said. “I come here at a bad time.”
Angel felt light-headed and the room was spinny. When it came to all these things about Miguel’s life, she wondered if he withheld from her because of all the shit she gave him about the weed. Motherfucking guilt was a bitter feeling. She held out the glass and told Venus to get her the pineapple soda this time. Maybe the sugar would help make the dots in her vision settle down. The last thing she needed to do was collapse in front of her mother, who already thought she was weak.
“Mira con esa peluca,” Mami said, pointing at Venus’s head. “Y tú, Angel, con that tackiness you’re wearing. I come to tell you that my son is shot and dead and you’re over here playing dress-up.”
The way that Mami referred to Miguel as her son pissed Angel off like she had no idea. It was a complicated emotion for her to feel. She felt like Mami was completely erasing Angel from the picture by making it seem like she had only one son. Angel knew that Mami had one son and one daughter (Angel, clearly), but she knew that Mami didn’t think this way. Not once had Mami ever referred to Angel as her daughter. Not once had she acknowledged Angel’s womanhood, and that hurt her beyond comprehension.
Angel took a step toward her mother. Angel was full of rage, and she knew that in order to be the better woman, she would have to take the high road. But she didn’t have the map to the high road. How like Mami to be a critical mess. Angel took another step closer, not because she wanted to be near Mami, but because she wanted to be near the door so that when she swung it open and told her to get the fuck out, it could all happen in one swoop.
“Mira,” Angel said. “You know what kind of life I live, and I’m proud of that life, so I don’t know what you were expecting to see when you marched your critical ass up into my house.”
“Eh, eh, eh—”
“Don’t you interrupt me,” Angel said. “I won’t stand your ignorant ass coming into my own damn house, telling me I’m playing dress-up. I bought this dress at Bloomingdale’s, do you have any idea what it means to me that I selected and paid for this
dress all by my damn self? No, you don’t because good, high-quality fashion wouldn’t bite you in the ass. I don’t have to—and I don’t want to—legitimize my own damn clothes, or the wigs that I own, or my own damn body to you. Even if you are my mother.”
Venus came back with the pineapple soda. Juanito and Daniel stood on both sides of Angel now, like her army of children ready to protect her. Or if they couldn’t protect, por lo menos, they would be right by her side. Mira, Angel wanted to say, look at my family now. Look at all this love we got for each other.
“You can walk out any time you want,” Angel said. “The door is right behind you.”
Now Mami cried. Angel couldn’t tell if they were crocodile tears or real ones. She could feel the muscles in her back tense up at the immediate feeling of distrust. Qué horrible—to think that someone could cry for the sole purpose of making her feel bad about herself.
Mami wiped the mocos from her nose, gave Angel a one-up, and said, “It should have you been you.”
“Bitch,” Venus said, “what’re you saying about my mother?”
Angel held out her arm to block Venus from attacking Mami. Angel told Daniel to hold Venus back. Angel looked at Juanito’s eyes and saw that he was searching her for something. It was a look that Angel hadn’t ever seen, but she must have been aware of that gaze all along. He was looking up to Angel to see how she would handle the situation. It made her feel nervous and safe at the same time.
“How can you be a mother,” Angel said, as dignified as she could muster, “when you act so cruel to your daughter? How can you say someone should’ve died over another? You think my life got no value. Well, look around you and see that it does.”
Angel shot out her hands and spun around slowly. This, Angel could say, is my house and even though it may not look like much to you, I’ve built this thing from the ground up and filled it with people who love me. Mami kept crying.
“Maybe if you weren’t such a horrible mother,” Angel said, “you wouldn’t have driven Papi to jump off that building and the drug dealers on the streets wouldn’t have gone to shoot up your son.” It was harsh, she knew that, very harsh. And maybe if she had more time to think about what she wanted to say, she wouldn’t have used those words. But she did, she said them and there was no taking them back. “Maybe you should,” she continued, “call the santera lady you got on the hookup at the botánica and she can kill a chicken so nothing bad happens again.”
Mami was sobbing mad hard now. Angel had gone in for the jugular and it worked. Por supuesto, Angel didn’t believe anything about the santera lady’s voodoo powers, but she knew that words were like a knife and the most artful kind of shade could lacerate.
Mami walked up to Angel so close that Angel could count the nose hairs sprouting out of Mami’s nostrils. She stared at her mother’s puffy eyes, the blue-purple crow’s-feet, the red tree-branched vessels in her eyeballs. “Angel,” Mami said, bringing her hand up to touch Angel’s cheek. “I’m sorry, I said it all out of anger. I came here, no? Porque even if you abandoned me and refused to come back home when we asked, I knew that you two were getting lunch and speaking all the time. I know that you had love for him.”
Before she heard the words again, stated so matter-of-factly, this had all been another in a long series of power struggles with Mami. As if Angel didn’t even know what they were fighting for. Pero now it hit her like a brick—Miguel was dead. He wasn’t coming back. Somebody, or somebodies, had shot him. And they, whoever they were, would probably never be found, because that’s just how that bad episode of crime TV went in their neighborhood.
Now Angel cried. She cried so hard that she grabbed onto her mother with both arms. They held onto each other and sobbed so hard, they had to get their knees onto the ground so they didn’t fall over. They stayed there, together, having a moment to themselves as all the others watched in silence.
DANIEL
There were preparations that needed to be made. There were clothes that needed to be ironed, ties that needed to be transformed into Windsor knots, shoes that needed polish, teeth that needed flossing, pimples that needed something because cover-up would be a no-no, hair that needed to be uncurled, flat-ironed, held back into clips that looked masculine. That was the key, masculinity. It was, essentially, the problem. Not for Daniel, but for the others. Angel’s mother made it clear: if anyone came to Miguel’s wake dressed in drag, she would drag them out by the hairs on their chinny-chin-chin.
“Ugh,” Venus said, “how’m I gonna pass as straight?”
Juanito laughed and clapped his hands over his mouth.
“It’s not funny,” Venus said. She was tying the laces on her black shoes. “God, I haven’t worn flats in ages.”
“Your arches will love you,” Juanito said.
“Today is a serious day,” Venus said. “Don’t make light of it.”
“I think what he means,” Daniel said to Venus, “is that the idea of you—you—passing as straight is kind of funny.”
“The ironic thing is this,” Venus said. “She says she doesn’t want anyone dressed in drag. But if she asks me to dress like a man, it’s basically like she is asking me to show up in drag. I don’t even know how to act like a man anymore.”
“Well, for starters,” Juanito said, slapping Venus’s limp wrist. “You’ll need to work on body language. Wrists, hips, neck.”
“Ugh,” Venus said. “What a burden. What if someone talks to me? What do straight guys even talk about?”
“Baseball, booze, and pussy,” Daniel said.
“Oh, well then forget it,” Venus said, throwing her hands up and walking into the bathroom. “I’m just gonna chain-smoke outside and when someone talks to me, I’ll pretend that I don’t speak English.” She closed the bathroom door and Daniel could hear the hairspray can going off.
When they all had their thrift-store funeral suits on, Angel came out of her bedroom and walked up to Daniel with her hands on the untied tie around her neck. She whispered his name. “I need your help,” she said, holding the two silk ends.
“Come here,” Daniel said. It was a blood-red tie with a repeated white rose pattern. He grabbed hold of the ends and lifted the longer side over, then under, then near the neck and through the hole he had formed. When the knot was done, he told Angel to straighten her neck so he could make it snug around her, fitted and fine.
* * *
When they arrived, a group of people around the casket were talking about how much of a marvel it was that the funeral home could do an open casket, how auténtico the body looked, especially considering Miguel had been shot in the neck, twice, pero nobody could see the hole on the side or nothing. One woman, whom the others referred to as Titi Adalita, said the body looked very fresh. Had anyone ever seen a body so fresh? She told the group that when she dies, she could only hope to look that fresh.
Fresh, yes so fresh, everyone hummed in agreement. Qué fresco está este cuerpo, an old woman with no teeth said. Daniel looked down at the body in the casket, surrounded by flowers and crucifix palmas. Fresh? Daniel didn’t know if he agreed about that, but what did he know?
He shrugged and turned to face Angel. “You doing alright, Mami?” he whispered.
“Hush,” Angel said. She didn’t take her eyes off her brother. “Don’t call me that here.”
Daniel blushed.
“Ugh,” Venus whispered. “Rip this tie off my throat, por favor.”
Angel gently slapped the side of Venus’s arm. “Would you behave yourself, please?” Angel said.
Venus stopped fidgeting and stood still. When they kneeled down to pray around Miguel’s body, Daniel peeked out of the corners of his eyes and saw Venus wrap her pinky finger around Angel’s pinky finger, and it made Daniel want to cry.
* * *
Juanito wanted a cigarette, so they both went outside to light up. “This is horrible,” Juanito said. “If I hear one more person say the word fresh, I’m going to scream.”
“I know, right?” Daniel said. “As if he was a plate of berries in the nevera or something.”
“Please, promise me,” Juanito said, “that when I die, you’re just gonna cremate my body. I don’t ever want people crowding around my body and saying shit.”
“Oh god, don’t say that.”
“What?” Juanito said, flicking one butt to the ground so he could chain up the next one. “I just want to spread out into the wind,” he said, after lighting the next cig. “Just pick somewhere nice.”
What took Daniel back was not the assumption that Juanito was making about them being together until the day they died, but that Juanito was jumping to the conclusion that he would die first. “Can we not do this right now?” Daniel said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Juanito said. “I’m sorry.”
Daniel closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the cement building. There were few things he loved more than savoring the calmness in his brain when the nicotine was settling in. He exhaled and Juanito gasped.
“What?” Daniel said, eyes still closed.
“Oh, you are not going to believe this,” Juanito said. “This is real bad.”
Daniel opened his eyes and Juanito put his hand on Daniel’s arm, as if the image would go away—just a mirage!—if they held on to each other.
She was approaching, dressed in full drag—black elegant dress, a wig big enough to cover her large head, and a diamond necklace that Daniel was pretty sure was nothing more than cubic zirconia. She was smoking her cig through an Audrey Hepburn cig holder, like she was about to get breakfast at Tiffany’s instead of going to a funeral. Daniel took a final drag of his cig and dropped it on the ground so he could step it out.
“Dorian,” Daniel said, as Dorian gave them both double air-kisses. “Didn’t Angel tell you about the dress code?”
“Darlings,” Dorian said. “There’s no such thing as a dress code—only dress suggestions.”
“Ay, Dios mío,” Juanito said. “You’re certainly going to push some buttons when you walk in there.”
The House of Impossible Beauties Page 30
