Every Kind of Wanting: A Novel by Gina Frangello

Author:Gina Frangello [Frangello, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781619028623
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

I intend to be vigilant the rest of the time I’m here. In the picture of myself in my head, I have every manner of cathartic intention. I am going to somehow break through Isabel’s reserves, which clearly she is beginning to allow to crack anyway. Maybe she wants to know me at last—to confess. All this time, I’ve felt like the black sheep of the family, when it turns out my biological mother was more of a sex worker than I’ve ever been . . . when maybe we should have been . . . bonding?

But of course it doesn’t happen that way, Nick.

For the rest of my time on Strong’s Landing—only that night until the morning’s ferry—Isabel avoids me, is “resting.” Eddie rushes around tending to her with one tea mug after another, mainly I think to create the illusion of movement and not have to sit down and engage in small talk with me, and then finally he disappears into their bedroom and closes the door, and I wait, I have silent conversations in my head in which I write both Isabel’s dialogue and mine and they correspond perfectly, but soon it is clear no one is emerging from the no-man’s-land of their marital bedroom and my head just buzzes, bounces, aimless. You and I sext until nearly morning.

By the time I am running late for the ferry the next morning, I am preoccupied and bleary and looking at my phone as Isabel and I say good-bye. She isn’t making the drive, so I’m off alone with Eddie, in the midst of telling you about my arrival time and plotting how we can get a little privacy before we hit the road. The thing is: two years to live is not a long time, but it’s not a five-alarm fire, either, exactly. I’ve seen more of Isabel this month than I had in the past four years. It seems like a trajectory we are simply on now, and that whether I like it here or not—whether I can bear it or not, even—I will soon be back. My eyes scan again for the pink bicycle as I’m leaving, but I haven’t seen it since 2005; I don’t even know whether it still exists. My eyes evade Isabel’s face, which looks different already than the night before, being claimed by degrees. Whatever toxins she was vomiting into the toilet also seems to be trying to escape her pores, and she’s broken out like a teenager, maybe the teenager I never knew her as, though the circles under her eyes are darker. It’s like there’s a bubbling kettle of toil and trouble under her skin, and all at once I imagine her darkly: a pimply, homeless, flimsily dressed streetwalker in mythical Caracas, which I have never even seen, getting into the backseats of old-fashioned cars. In my head, the cars in Caracas circa 1978 look like those in Cuba in the 1960s, because I don’t know anything about anything.

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