Wander Girl

by Tweet Sering

  I took my place by the door. My dad’s band, Bourbon Street Sound, had taken over the stage. They were performing for an audience for the first time tonight. I could tell by the way my dad kept shifting in his seat, looking for the perfect position, as he balanced the upright bass between his legs, that he was nervous.

  Gabe, I began the speech in my head. We need to talk.

  Everyone settled into their own tables. My mom, I noticed, was standing by herself in a corner, arms crossed, watching my dad.

  I don’t think we have any reason to stay together anymore. I know we had a lot of fun in college, but—

  “Hey.” Gabe had come up behind me.

  I turned to look at him. He was scrubbed clean, he had obviously taken a shower before coming. I smelled the men’s cologne I had given him for our third anniversary. And he was wearing the buttoned-down brown collared shirt that I said looked good on him. And he was carrying a bouquet of carnations. Ano baahhhhh!

  “Where’s your mom?” he asked, scanning the room. “These are for her.”

  Oh.

  “Exciting, ah. Galing naman ni Tito Dindo. Pinanindigan talaga.”

  He took my hand. “What’s to eat? Di pa ako nagdi-dinner, eh.”

  The thing is, Gabe, I don’t love you anymore. There, I said it.

  Hannah was making her way to us with a small round dish of The Floatannah.

  “Gabe, you want to taste my invention?” she offered with a smile so wide it bared all her teeth.

  “Sige ba.”

  I watched him eat his dessert as I delivered the rest of the speech in my head. I had broken up with him but he didn’t know it yet.

  I sighed. What was I thinking? That I could be heartless enough to break up with someone in the middle of revelry? Later, I thought. We will park outside my house and do the deed there. Yes, that sounded like a plan.

  “Excuse me,” I called to a passing waiter, “Isang Red Horse, please.” The waiter nodded and turned to leave. “Ay, boss. Gawin mo na lang dalawa... hindi, tatlo. Hindi, sige, lima na lang.

  Helen slid out of the booth and stumbled towards me, a glass of vodka tonic in hand—her 14th for the night.

  “He’s going to Italy with his wife,” she breathed at my face.

  I took it to mean her paramour, Martin, a.k.a. KP (Kulubot Pwet).

  “Aren’t you joining them?” I asked sarcastically. I had become impatient with her mad obsession with that ugly man, that very attached, available-only-for-a-fuck Pinoy.

  She ignored my comment and faced the stage, where my dad was wrapping up the piece he had been practicing for months since he bought his upright bass. His chubby face glistened with sweat.

  “He could’ve gotten himself out of it,” she mumbled to herself. She pouted exaggeratedly and scratched her nose. “But noooo.”

  I rolled my eyes in the darkness. Some women could be real knuckleheads.

  The song ended and the crowd of relatives and friends erupted in applause and hoots. My dad was grinning like a little boy on his first recital. I looked in the direction of my mom, who had an open-mouthed smile, clapping her hands above her head. I wanted to run to the stage and hug my dad.

  Then Helen hollered, “Everyone! People!” Her voice rose above the din. Heads turned away from the stage towards the back of the room. “People, listen up! I’d like all of you to raise your glasses of... whatever it is you’re drinking and toast my dad, Dindo Gallares. For saying ‘Screw you all, I’m going to do my shit and nobody’s shitting on my game.’”

  My mom’s mouth was now hanging open, her arms frozen in mid-air. And save for the scraping sound of a chair against the floor, the room had grown deathly quiet.

  “I love you, Dad!” Helen continued, holding her glass out to him. “I’m sooo proud of you! Man, you are the shit! Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo....!!!” Then she ran out of air and fell straight backwards.

  On the ride to Helen’s apartment in Mandaluyong, Gabe kept glancing at me from the driver’s seat. I was slumped on the front passenger seat, resting my forehead on my right palm. All those beers, which I gulped down one after the other, made my head feel like it had split open right down the middle. Helen was lying face-down on the backseat, totally wasted. We had almost reached the night’s end and I still hadn’t broken up with Gabe.

  Gabe had offered we take Helen home and my mom, perhaps unable to bear the sight of her eldest daughter in such a graceless state (“Does she drink all the time?”), was only too grateful for the suggestion.

  It was almost 2 a.m. and we were cruising down an almost-deserted EDSA.

  “Tired?” Gabe asked, reaching across the seat to rub my shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I said, slumping lower in my seat.

  At her apartment, we tucked Helen in with her clothes on and tiptoed out. Outside Helen’s door, Gabe paused.

  “Oo nga pala, did you say you wanted to talk?” he asked in a low voice.

  I looked into his unsuspecting brown eyes; took a deep breath.

  “Did I say that?”

  The following weeks, the world took on an underwater quality. Everything was blurry and painful on my eyes, sounds seemed muted, and my movements, as well as those of everyone, were heavy and in slow motion. I had sunk even lower than I thought was possible for a loser like myself. For once in my life, I felt I had trailblazed something: I had gone where no other loser had gone before—to the absolute depths. I knew what I wanted to happen, knew what I had to do, but I just didn’t have the balls to do it. I began altering my perception—maybe Gabe wasn’t so bad. Maybe I was just too picky, too demanding, too feeling-great.

  I resigned myself to the idea that perhaps this was my destiny. And the more I fought it, the more miserable I’d be. Perhaps some people were born to be happy and others, like Jude the Obscure, were meant to lead lives of despair. Perhaps I should start reading the Russians—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky; I just might find comfort, not to mention soul mates, there.

  I was waiting for something to happen: Gabe finding another girl, me getting run over by a passenger jeepney as I crossed the streets of Malate, or getting swiped off the sidewalk by a tsunami from Manila Bay.

  Then one day, it didn’t come.

  “What do you mean you haven’t gotten your period?” Lulu demanded over the static-laden long distance lines.

  I had been up all night, staring at my desk calendar, trying to find a practical loophole for the obvious delay in my menstruation, like the calendar bearing a different year or something. I finally got out of bed at 5 a.m., sleep-deprived and, using the landline in the living room, punched Lulu’s cellphone number in San Francisco, where she and the airline crew were spending the week.

  “I mean, I haven’t gotten my period,” I hissed, panic-stricken. “It’s been two weeks, and I’m never late. Never.”

  “How?” queried the dimwit.

  “The Archangel Gabriel came to me last night,” I snapped. “What do you mean, how?”

  “He would’ve had to come in you, then, right?” She joked, the bitch.

  “This is not the time for that!” I wanted to strangle her, but since that wasn’t possible, I strangled the receiver instead.

  Gang-Gang walked into the room with a broom and a dustpan but stopped when she saw me. We locked eyes for a few seconds, but it was enough for me to see her judgment.

  I took a deep breath, and lifted the receiver back to my ear. “I am drowning, you freak,” I whispered through clenched teeth. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Bai, hai, relax. Don’t lose your head over this, OK? I’m sure it’s going to be fine. Later, you go the drugstore and get a pregnancy test kit, you hear me?” She gave me instructions calmly as a school nurse. “Two strips,” she was saying. “Two strips means you’re pregnant.”

  No, I wanted to say. Two strips means my life— whatever was left of it—was officially over.

  That morning at the travel agency, I surreptitiously watched the agents and clients around me. They w
ere talking about an upcoming familiarization tour sponsored by an airline to Bangkok; what to buy in Chatuchak; which restaurants served the best tom yum soup; and what they can sell when they get back.

  How can they stand there, I thought, chatting so carelessly when Armageddon was at hand? Where was Helen when I needed her? In Sydney, in the arms—I was sure—of that sonofabitch. And there was no way I was going to burden Hannah with her “Ate’s kagagahan.”

  It was an Olympian struggle to keep from thinking about my impending pregnancy, but I had to do it to prevent a complete meltdown at the office.

  At eleven o’clock, Bea Suarez, a sales representative from an airline, floated into the office, making her weekly client call to our agency.

  Bea was one of those girls my mom wished she had for a daughter. She was soft-spoken, lady-like, clean. She wore small pearls, classic, no-fuss clothes of beige, cream and camel, and ballerina flats; she parted her straight, shoulder-length hair just a little to one side; and she seemed to have been born without sweat glands. She was the kind of girl who never yelled, made faces behind people’s backs, went showerless for days, popped her pimples with her fingers, sniffed her feet or offered for people to smell them. In short, she was the anti-Helen/Lulu. Which was why I never paid her any attention when she was at the office, charming the skirt off my mom.

  “Magsama na kayo” I’d sourgrape under my breath to my computer when I heard them laughing their similar, twinkly laughs.

  “Hello, Hilda,” she greeted with a dimpled smile over my computer screen.

  I gave her what must have been a zombie-like stare, looking up at her without lifting my chin, and must have looked really awful because she visibly recoiled. In a moment, she recovered.

  “Are you OK?” she asked gently, a small frown disturbing her delicate features.

  I shook my head.

  She glanced discreetly around the room, smiled and waved at someone. “Would you like to join me for coffee?”

  I nodded.

  She motioned with her head towards the door. I gathered my things, walking briskly ahead of her as she called to my mom behind me.

  “Tita, borrow muna Hilda, ha? I need to discuss something with her.”

  We walked the short block to Starbucks along Adriatico Street. Once at the counter, Bea turned to me. “I’m actually going to order milk for you. It’s more soothing; it has a calming effect. Coffee might just agitate you.”

  I was lactose intolerant, but I nodded. With our milk and coffee cups, we sat down near a window and stared at the street. We drank in silence.

  “Is there somewhere else you’d like to go?” she asked finally.

  The facility for speech had left me, and I looked at her mutely, hoping she’d read the word “drugstore” in my eyes.

  But she read wrong. “OK, let’s go to Malate church,” she said and put down her cup.

  The walk to the church took us longer—two blocks – which made me realize that Bea didn’t have a car. How did she go around making all those client calls—in a cab?

  Navigating the streets of Malate was always, at least to me, a walk on the wild side. You encountered characters that inhabited the fringes of society: a group of tight-jeaned female call girls; a pink-cheeked overweight Caucasian man and his brown small-boned male Filipino companion; a bushy haired taong-grasa. Once, a rat longer than my forearm crossed in front of me and I had screeched like a madwoman.

  Inside Malate church, we made our way to one of the pews by the side entrance. Maya birds flitted in and out of the wide entrances (“Naku, ‘wag talaga kayo mag-tae,” I warned, eyeing them silently), sometimes soaring high up towards the ceiling. A breeze carried in the smell of salt water from Manila Bay. Just outside another entrance, a woman and her baby were sitting on the ground beside their candle business. The sounds from out on the street—of passenger jeepneys, a hand tapping the back of a car as its driver parked it into place, the honking of tri-sikads—harshly penetrated the solemnity of the church’s interior. I wanted to turn around in my pew and yell at the top of my lungs: “Hoy ang iingay niyo! Kita na’t nasa simbahan ang tao, eh.” But it seemed inappropriate with Bea there.

  I expected Bea to bring out the rosary or to whip out a pocket-sized Bible and read me a verse, as my mom usually does. But she sat down and gazed ahead serenely.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said. “I don’t need to know what’s bothering you, unless you want to share it. But I will pray for your load to be lightened. You know, Hilda, there’s nothing we cannot survive. God knew this world can be tough on anyone, and that’s why He gave us our faith. That’s what it’s for—to survive the unthinkable.”

  My head throbbed with stored tears. Was she high? Where did this girl come from? Why was she being so kind to me when she hardly knew me?

  Bea turned to look sideways at me. “Whatever it is, lift it up to God. Ask Him for the wisdom to know what needs to be done and the strength to carry it out.”

  Wisdom, I noted silently. Got it. And the strength to last nine months of pregnancy??? Why God???

  After about 30 minutes sitting side by side in a church pew and listening to the surprisingly comforting cacophony of the world around me, Bea and I made our way back to the travel agency.

  After dinner, when my dad had settled in front of the TV in the living room and my mom was on the phone with Hannah, I retreated to my room and locked the door. From my pocket I took out the rosary I had filched from the altar by the front door’s entrance, and, clutching it, sat down on my bed.

  “God,” I started. “I’m really sorry for getting myself into this mess. I know this is all my fault and that I should be punished.” I took a deep breath. “But can You please postpone that for another time? Because You see, I can’t...”

  The tears I had been holding all day broke loose and I had to purse my lips to keep silent while my face contorted into Phantom of the Opera hideousness.

  I can’t be a loser mom, I cried silently. I didn’t want to be the kind of mom that my kids didn’t listen to, or mocked, or belittled, or hated. I didn’t want to be the kind of mom who, when she advises her teenage daughter, is told, “What do you know? You got knocked up at 24, married a guy you didn’t love, stayed in a job you didn’t like. And you couldn’t even afford a cellphone.”

  OK, that’s it! Now you’ve really gone too far. I would grab the little ingrate by the collar and snarl, “How dare you judge my choices? I didn’t buy a cellphone not because I couldn’t afford it. It was a matter of priorities. You understand the word ‘priorities’? I chose other things to buy with my hard-earned money, like the CDs of The Best of Prefab Sprout, Sting at the Movies, Everything But the Girl’s Amplified Heart instead of that annoying, beeping instrument because then I’d only get calls from your daddy. All his I-miss-you’s and wish-you-were-here’s that came too late in the game! If you’re so smart, missy, let’s see you handle adulthood!”

  My kohl-eyed daughter would give me a cold stare, shake off my hand and form the letter L with her thumb and forefinger against her forehead (for Loser) and walk out of the house in her black bikini top, leather pants and jacket, and then hop on a big bike behind her tattooed boyfriend before he’d gun the motor and speed away.

  So maybe I’ve watched too many American suburban dysfunction movies. But I just wanted to be the kind of mom my children could be proud of, the kind they bragged to their friends about.

  “You know my mom,” they’d say to their playmates as they skipped rope in the playground during recess. “She’s the coolest. You know what she does? She, uh... she...”

  I couldn’t even complete the fantasy because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had no idea how my best self could look like. All I know is that I had already squandered 24 years of my life. I haven’t done anything yet. I just went along aimlessly, letting other people’s wishes supercede my own. Like allowing Gabe to get away with not using a condom because he found it “a bit stifling.” My
own cluelessness appalled me.

  “Just give me a second chance, God,” I wept. “I promise I’ll be braver. I’ll break it off with Gabe. I’ll try not to do stupid things.”

  Since I was on a roll, I also promised to keep awake during mass, to not bully the usher who stood in the aisle, and to laugh at the priest’s corny jokes (even the ones that began with, “Tingnan niyo katabi niyo. Mukha ba siyang demonyo?’)

  I made the sign of the cross, wore the rosary around my neck, curled up under the covers clutching my pillow as though it were a lifesaver. And on the darkest night of my life, I cried myself to sleep.

  “Claim it,” Bea had said to me in church. “Claim the Lord’s answer to your prayers.”

  So the next day, through my bedroom door, I claimed I was coming down with something. I croaked to my mom that I felt too weak to come to work today.

  Surprisingly, she didn’t press on. It was unlike her to leave something at that. Normally, she’d rap on our door insistently, demanding to know what was going on when all Helen and I (and sometimes Hannah) wanted was to have our privacy, to not let anyone walk in on us talking to ourselves, or practicing our smile, or posing a la Victoria’s Secret model in our underwear in front of the mirror.

  My eyes were so swollen from crying I had to pry them open. And when I did, my room, with its floral wallpaper, white bookshelves stuffed with books all the way from childhood, lime-colored closets, yellow wooden writing table and window covered by white Roman shades, appeared in cinema crop.

  My bedroom was my church. If the religious sought the high-ceilinged stillness of a cathedral for comfort and strength, it was here, among my favorite things, the artifacts of my personal history, that I derived the same.

  I pored through my stack of old journals, and depending on the tone of the entry, spent the morning chuckling (“Yikes, I had a crush on Mr. Corona?” our freshman math teacher who later turned out to be gay and hooked up with the P.E. teacher Mr. Alonzo), squealing (Enrique, the boy I had a crush on in third year high school, gave me a heart-shaped balloon on Valentine’s Day) and falling silent (Che-Pie, a sweet girl whom I exchanged girlish letters with, and one of my barkada, died of cancer).