Wander Girl

by Tweet Sering

  After four months of dancing around Chris’s invitations to “Come see my apartment. I decorated it myself, so I don’t know if I made a mess of it or what. I really, really need your opinion of it,” he finally came right out with: “Hilda, I really don’t know what it is. If you’re a virgin and plan to stay that way until you’re married, then I will be the sorriest man in the world because, as you know, I don’t believe in marriage but I am... I am dying… I’ve been dying to make love to you.”

  Iuwi mo na ako sa apartment mo NGAYON DIN!!!

  It was so easy to be with Chris after that. I stopped caring about what people thought. I became infinitely more relaxed, and more carefree. (I was waiting for my mom to ask me where I had been the night before, so I could tell her the truth. Apparently, since she never said a word about my conspicuous absences at home, she wasn’t ready for the truth.)

  Once, for fun, I wore my hair big, put on the reddest lipstick I could find in the Rustan’s make-up counter, slipped into a backless, thin-strapped top, wore large hoop earrings, uber-tight jeans, stilettos, toted a tiny glittery handbag and dragged Chris to Cafe Havana.

  Also, as a gag, I wore the ugliest lola panty I could find and wore them loose, so that when Chris started undressing me, he was unsure what to make of it. He stared at it, trying to find the most politically correct words to say, but I couldn’t keep a straight face long and burst out laughing.

  Finally, after being a couple for ten months, I decided I wanted to get my own apartment.

  “What for?” Chris asked, stirring the sauce of the only thing we knew to cook—pasta.

  We were in his spacious kitchen, which looked like it came straight out of a design magazine (that thing about him decorating it himself was a shameless lie). I was eating all his chips, waiting for my dinner to be ready.

  “Well, it’s just getting really weird at home,” I said. “My mom and I are locked in this strange game of who’s saying what first. Do I admit I’m sleeping with you first or does she ask me first? As long as I’m in her house, she will see me as her teenager who doesn’t know what’s good for her, who only does things that displease her out of rebellion.”

  “Then why not move in with me?” asked the pasta-sauce-stirring Brit casually.

  “Here,” I repeated, unbelieving. “With you.”

  “Uh-hmm...”

  “Well, yeah, except that we’re not—” I stopped myself. OK, so what was the coolest, un-manang way of putting this?

  Without stopping his work, Chris turned to look at me.

  “Except that we’re not married?” He guessed right. “Baby, if I believed in that whole thing, I would’ve married you a long time ago.”

  That was the absolute sweetest thing anyone had ever said to me. And I sat there, my hand frozen inside the bag of chips, unable to speak.

  “Besides, it makes sense for you to move here. You’re here most of the time. And on the days that you’re not here, I’m on the phone with you. Why spend your money on another place that will separate us when you can spend it on paying me back for my chips that you finish off in one sitting?” He stopped stirring and looked at the bag of chips in my hand. “I haven’t even tasted those.”

  At that, I tipped the whole bag of chips into my mouth and moved right in the following day.

  Naturally, my parents weren’t so wild about the move— especially my mom. She looked at me as though I had been possessed by her usual suspect: the Devil. I imagined all the novenas she must have prayed for me, for my lost, tarnished soul. I was living in sin—in mortal sin. My dad, in his less hysterical manner, told me, “Sana naman pakasalan ka. Pag ganyan kasi, pag live-in na, nakakatamad nang mag-plano pa ng kasal-kasal, eh ginagawa niyo na naman ang ginagawa ng mag-asawa. Bakit pa siya gagastos, ‘di ba?

  “Dad,” I said. “He doesn’t believe in marriage. ‘Di siya Christian, eh—agnostic.”

  “Naku,” my dad said, shaking his head. “Mahirap yan.”

  But I paid no attention to any of that. My relationship with Chris was the healthiest one I’d ever had—it made me feel good about myself. I looked into the mirror and saw a babe; a real one, with bright eyes, a ready and uncontained smile, great tanned skin, and the blackest, shiniest hair. “Ang ganda mo!” I’d tell my reflection. Which was quite unnecessary as Chris said it often enough.

  “You’re such a babe, baby,” he would say at random moments, such as when I’d be washing my underwear in the bathroom and he happened to pass by the open door.

  “Can you wash your babe baby’s panties, please?” I’d call after his retreating back.

  One time, I took out The List and found, to my utter shock, that I had gotten the man I wanted. Wait, wait... again, again. I HAD GOTTEN THE MAN I WANTED! The very person I had imagined, the very person I had asked the universe for, almost three years ago!

  I marveled at this thought through my 27th birthday party (which he threw at our apartment for our friends and my family—my mom finally agreed to come under intense pressure from my dad and sisters); through Hannah’s acceptance as junior art director at the agency Stephen worked for (I had told him to check out Hannah’s work); through Helen’s latest episode with KP; and through the actual completion, printing and launch of my guidebook (with the help of my dad’s publishing experience and his influential friends still in the business). The book, entitled Your Friendly Neighbors: The Fun, Fabulous Filipina’s Guide to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia was the first ever my very own company, Wander Girl Guidebooks, published.

  The name for my company came to me as Helen and Hannah, who were crashing for the night in the apartment I shared with Chris, were discussing Hannah’s new diversions on top of her regular job at the agency. Besides supplying dessert to The Bourbon Blues, she was now also in charge of all the bar’s creative materials—from the design of the new menu to its print ads.

  “Sweetie?” Helen asked, as she lay stretched on the couch. “How did you become this way? You were just this little baby I carried and now you’re Supergirl! Why? Why are you Supergirl?”

  Hannah had always been Supergirl, the family’s overachiever. All through grade school and high school, she had been a consistent honors student. She was her high school football team’s star striker—their most bemedalled player. She was also head cheer dancer and would probably hold her own at a dance showdown with Justin Timberlake.

  “I had to be something,” she said, teasing, as she tore open another bag of Chris’s chips. “I mean, I couldn’t be Pretty Girl because that’s Ate Helen, right?”

  “Heeey,” I said. “What about me? What am I?”

  “You are...” Helen said, thinking.

  “Sexy Girl!” Hannah supplied.

  “Yeah!” I said and we slapped hands.

  “No, no, no,” Helen said. “What do you call someone who can’t stay in one place? Someone who’s always traveling, and I mean really traveling? Someone who needs to go out there...”

  “A flight attendant?” Hannah suggested helpfully.

  A person stricken with wanderlust, I thought. Wanderlust, my favorite word in the whole world.

  “Wander Girl,” I said, surprised. “I am Wander Girl.”

  Oh my God! I am Wander Girl!

  When my guidebook debuted in the bookstores, it seemed like the whole world was raving about it. It was featured in broadsheets and in glossy women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan Philippines. It got mentions on lifestyle TV shows, and was used as reading material props in soap operas. Chris put the full weight of his marketing genius to work on the books, making sure they got the right exposure and offering his services for free to my publisher, his girlfriend and live-in partner who had secured the financial backing from one of her dad’s retired publisher friends (Chris also helped make the pitch). He even suggested a tie-up with his shampoo brand. He was just as passionate about the books as I was.

  We had decided to target the same readership of Cosmopolitan. “Upwardly-mobile women,” he called them. His s
hampoo brand advertised heavily in the magazine and he was familiar with the kind of women he was talking to.

  “They want better lives for themselves, you know,” he said. “They know they deserve it. But they’re not waiting for men to give that to them. They’re going out and getting it themselves. So they learn, they educate themselves, they open their minds, and they work hard for independence— which includes financial independence. That’s why they’re shrewd—”

  “That’s what I said, too! That’s why we can’t price the book beyond two hundred pesos.”

  “We can even go lower,” he said. “And it can get cheaper with advertising.”

  I was overwhelmed. Shit, this could really work!

  “You are a very bright, British boy,” I deadpanned.

  “Guess what,” he said in an equally serious tone. “I am also a very horny, British boy.”

  “Wanker!” I yelped in my best I’m-Gwyneth-Paltrow-I-Can-Soo-Do-Brit accent, and let him chase me around the room, screaming.

  If Lulu were there, she would have summed up the whole scene, thus: “Kauyagan!”

  Speaking of Lulu: when I told her that I was publishing a guidebook, she shrieked, “Why not of Surigao?”

  Uh-oh.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t think of Surigao!”

  I realized that being with Vince, who had become her boyfriend a few months after the Sagada trip, had not mellowed her as I had hoped it would. On the contrary, she had become even more militant, especially with all the Billy Bragg songs he was feeding into her head.

  I tried to calm her down by assuring her that the next one will be about her beloved Surigao.

  “It better be!” she warned. “I’ve been to Cambodia and their beaches suck!”

  “Whatever, Lulu,” I said. Shortly thereafter, I began work on the ultimate guidebook—to Surigao.

  I literally felt on top of the world. I was in a relationship with the man that I not only loved, but adored and admired. I was a publisher! I was living the life I had imagined for myself—traveling, writing and making money out of it!

  So why, I asked myself the year I turned 28 (and the Surigao guidebook came out to another round of glowing reviews), was I lying in bed at night, wide-awake till 4, sometimes 6 a.m? This is the life that I want, I’d remind myself. This is everything I’ve ever wanted. And I would snuggle closer against Chris’s warm body, pull his arm over me, as if to guard against something.

  Then one day I got a phone call. From Gabe.

  “I’m getting married,” he said, happiness ringing in his voice. “I just wanted you to know because, well, the truth is, before I met Kathy, there was really just you, Hilds. Man, you messed me up good.”

  “Oh, Gabe, I was a terrible girlfriend,” I said, realizing it as I spoke. “I didn’t know what I wanted. I’m so sorry.” And just as I said it, I began to cry. “I’m sooo sorry, Gabe.”

  “At least, we got that cleared up,” he joked.

  Kathy was an account executive at the new graphic design company he was working for. They’d been together for two years.

  “Gabe,” I said, as a matter of goodwill. “Just try not to do that counting thing...”

  “I know!” he exclaimed. “The first time we did it, she slapped me so hard that my head almost did this 360 degree-Linda Blair turn.”

  I liked this girl already.

  “Oh, my God! She’s the one, Gabe. She’s really the one.”

  “Hoy, pumunta ka sa kasal, ha? I’ll expect you there. Sama mo ‘yung Kano mo.”

  “He’s British,” I corrected.

  “Basta puti, pareho lang yan,” he joked. And after thanking him for the call, and promising I would be at his wedding if only to see Kathy the Slapper, I put the phone down, looked out the glass window at the city, and wept.

  The truth was, I had grown tired of people asking when Chris and I were going to get married. “Why does everything have to end up in marriage?” I’d ask defensively. “We’re perfectly happy the way we are. Why does everyone feel this great need to pin our relationship down to something they recognize?”

  “Hmm,” Helen would say and drink her coffee when we’d be hanging out at a cafe and someone I knew from college would come up and say hi, how are you now, do you have a boyfriend, oh really that’s great, you’ve been together almost three years and you’re not getting married yet? Wow, ‘day, 28 ka na, kelan pa?

  “What if I don’t even believe in marriage?” I’d say to my shocked mom when we were at home and all the titas and titos were there, asking when, when, when I was going to get married to this British boy that I was living with (in sin, I knew they’d supply in their head).

  Even my Friday drinking friends asked the same fucking question. I was so sick of it, I wanted to scream.

  Of course, I would be coming with him to Bangkok, Chris said. He was due to for a transfer—his Manila run was almost over. (“You love Bangkok, don’t you?” he asked anxiously.) He was about to leave for the airport, for Bangkok, to meet with his bosses there for the final plans, and I had chosen this moment to be the bitchy/needy girlfriend.

  “As what?” I asked, hating myself for having to press like this.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll be with you in Bangkok as... as your girlfriend or...?”

  He knew what I was getting at and he set his bag down.

  “Baby,” he said. “You know I don’t—”

  “Believe in marriage,” I finished for him. “Yeah. You don’t have to remind me.”

  “I don’t need a piece of paper to tell you I love you and that you’re the most important person in the world to me.”

  “Go,” I said. “You don’t want to miss your flight.”

  “Let’s talk when I get back, OK?” he said, walking over to me and kissing me on the cheek.

  I watched him leave, with the dreadful feeling that this was the beginning of the end.

  With Chris away, I hardly slept at all. I stared at things. I didn’t care if the third guidebook (on Davao) did well. I took out The List, taped it to the headboard and looked at it from where I lay at the foot of the bed. He had met all the requirements. Everything. Every one of the thirty things I had asked of a person. And yet here I was, lonely. I couldn’t believe how lonely I was. And so unhappy. How did it happen? Was this list betraying me?

  Three days later, when he walked into our apartment straight from the airport, Chris went down on one knee before me.

  Oh, my God! Had I really been able to change his mind? Did he soul-search in Bangkok and decide he wanted to live with me in matrimony, forever and ever, amen?

  From behind him he produced... a shoebox. Oh, I get it, I thought. The box within a box within a box—somebody give this guy 500,000 pogi points for presentation!

  “I know it’s not what you were hoping for,” he said. “But I thought this is more... us,” he added, removing the cover to reveal two tickets—to the Coldplay concert in Bangkok!

  Holy shit!

  “Hilda Gallares,” Chris said with ceremony, looking deep into my eyes. “Will you grant me the pleasure of—”

  “Yes!” I screamed and hugged him. I knew it wasn’t a ring. But this was Coldplay. Chris Martin. It was going to be the first concert my Chris and I were watching together since we promised to do so three years ago in Gweilos.

  And for a moment, that was enough for me.

  A few days later, on a Friday, Helen called.

  “Hey,” came the listless voice on the other end of the line. “You going home?”

  What did she mean? “I am home,” I said.

  She sighed. “I mean, are you visiting mom and dad this weekend?”

  “I guess,” I said. “Why, what’s up?”

  Deep sigh. “Nothing. I just... I dunno... wanted to hang out at their place for the weekend.”

  I needed a break myself. “OK, let’s go home this weekend.”

  As far as my parents were concerned, Helen and I were their
prodigal daughters. With the absence of a husband by our side and a marriage contract to flash at society’s face— the only legitimate reason for flying the coop—we had no right to be out of the house yet. Never mind that Helen was at the ripe, old age of 31 and I, 29.

  It went without saying that our family was glad to see us.

  “Wow!” My dad said happily, peering through the door of our bedroom. “My girls are here!”

  My mom chose a non-verbal way of showing her pleasure. She went grocery shopping and had Gang-Gang cook our favorite food—warm sopas.

  “Tara, let’s watch!” Hannah said, brandishing a DVD inside our room, in her version of It’s-Good-To-See-You-Guys.

  Helen and I, lounging like lazy cows on our beds, were enjoying the unparalleled pleasure of nakatanga lang. Zero brain activity, we were discovering, was actually loads of fun.

  “Come on!” Hannah urged, tickling the soles of Helen’s feet.

  A guttural sound issued from the other cow.

  “What movie’s that?” I asked, rising from my bed and letting Hannah push me out the door.

  “A Walk To Remember,” she said, marching Helen and me towards the TV room. “The guy’s my crush! Grabe, he’s sooo cute! He’s the coolest!”

  “ ‘Di ba baduy ‘yan?” Helen complained, slumping on the couch in front of the TV.” Pinoy na pinoy daw the story.”