Wander Girl

by Tweet Sering

  “Yeah, it was a hit here,” I said, recalling how Lee, Bunny, Felice, and Virnice—and about every other girl I knew, had watched it more than once. “It beat out Notting Hill.”

  I remember wanting to watch, out of curiosity, this movie that was playing in practically all theaters in Metro Manila for months and made a big star, and a favorite among Pinoys, of Mandy Moore. But I knew Chris would look at me funny. Mandy Moore? I could see him raising his eyebrows. Really baby.

  Hannah fed the DVD into the player.

  “Doesn’t the girl die or something?” Helen continued her protestations. “And the guy is like, the bad boy? Can this movie be any more predictable?”

  “Hollywood, eh,” I sniffed in my best I-only-watch-movies-at-Art-Film voice.

  “Shhh!” Hannah said impatiently as the movie started. “Ang ingay niyo!”

  “O, di ba bad boy,” Helen whispered to me minutes into the movie. “Manood na lang ako ng Robin Padilla.”

  I snickered as Hannah shushed us again.

  “My God, the outfit,” Helen commented when Mandy Moore, the movie’s Plain Jane heroine, first appeared onscreen. She turned to me. “Would you go out with her?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So that I can take her shopping for new clothes.”

  But somewhere in the middle of the movie the snide remarks died down. I sneaked a glance at Helen. She was chewing at the corners of her thumbnail, her eyes glued to the screen.

  I reached over to pick up the DVD case on the floor, and turned to the back. Who wrote this movie? Who directed? I didn’t know people still made teen movies like this. It had none of the usual tricks of brainless American teen flicks—the plain girl permanently transforming into a vavavavoom woman, and stealing the jock Romeo from the blonde cheerleader who used to oppress her. The ingredients were familiar—guy and girl from different worlds, girl more studious/brainy than guy, guy’s friends the wild/popular set. But somehow I got the feeling that more thought was put into this one. “The Hollywood execs weren’t too lazy with this.”

  We had come to the wedding scene.

  “Shet, gusto ko ng ganyan,” Helen said glumly.

  “Ako din,” I said. “Buti pa si Jamie, pinakasalan.”

  “Namatay naman siya,” was Helen’s sorry attempt at reassurance.

  “So? Mamamatay naman tayong lahat, eh,” I philosophized. “At least, the man she loved married her.”

  Helen looked at me. I looked back at her. And right there, on the couch in our parents’ living room, in front of Mandy Moore and an alarmed Hannah, my sister and I came undone.

  Our mom found us in our bedroom that afternoon, multi-tasking—singing, crying, and laughing in front of our full-length mirror; playing old favorite songs whose volume couldn’t be loud enough. Singing first mine then Helen’s song, which was as though it had been written for her—“Each and Every One” by Everything But The Girl:

  Tell me I can go this far, but no more/ Try to show me heaven and then slam the door/ You offer shelter at a price much too dear/And your kind of love’s the kind that soon disappears...

  Our mom stood open-mouthed at our doorway, Hannah right behind her, staring, bemused, at the sight of us.

  “Mrs. Gallares,” Hannah intoned gravely. “Your daughters have officially lost it.”

  The following day, after the Sunday morning mass, Helen unearthed our old copy of Say Anything. She stood under the archway between the living and dining rooms and, holding the tape over her head, cried out to no one in particular, “What kind of home doesn’t have a Betamax player?!”

  My unhappiness had become a permanent weight in the pit of my stomach. And I suffered a loneliness that no amount of cuddling or kissing could erase. The more I clung to Chris, the more the loneliness intensified. In the back of my head, I knew what I had to do. But I kept the thought there. There must be another way, I’d counter desperately.

  Also, there was the Coldplay concert in Bangkok in three weeks. Sayang naman.

  Ang mahal pa ng ticket.

  But as the days wore on, I felt I was being slowly choked to death. A week before we were to leave for Bangkok, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I greeted him at the door of our apartment with, “We need to talk.”

  I really didn’t have to say anything. My set, somber expression said it all.

  With slow, deliberate movements, Chris leaned against the glass window and crossed his arms. He looked at me.

  “Why?” he asked softly.

  I had practiced this, of course. “I think that we just believe in different things. Maybe you should be with someone who believes in what you believe, and I should be someone who believes in what I believe.”

  “Which is?”

  “I believe in marriage, Chris,” I said calmly, before bursting into sobs. There, I had said it. And then through my tears I managed to say, “I wish I didn’t, so I could be happy with you. For a long time I told myself it didn’t matter; that all that matters is you and me. But I can’t pretend anymore. I’m sorry, but for me, it’s not just a piece of paper. I tried to see it your way, I really did, but I can’t unbelieve in anything. I have always believed in marriage.”

  I was out of control now. I felt like my insides were being hollowed out. I was crying like there was no more tomorrow.

  “And...” I sobbed. “I believe in God...”

  I should’ve stopped there.

  “... The Father Almighty... Creator of Heaven and earth...”

  Hello, what was happening to me?

  But I went on, crying and reciting the entire Apostles’ Creed to my poor, stricken, agnostic, British ex-boyfriend.

  Nervous breakdowns are such a drag.

  The following day, after a sleepless night holding each other, Chris left baggy-eyed for work. He had shed his own tears, but they were, of course, nothing compared to mine. There’s nothing like a drama queen.

  We decided he was going to sleep on the living room couch until I moved out, which I intended to do very soon. My plan was to move back with my parents while I looked for an apartment. Chris offered to help with the hunt, but I said, thank you, it was better if we tried to get unused to each other first.

  I switched off my cellphone, unplugged the landline and dragged a chair in front of the large glass window, overlooking Makati and the Manila Bay. I sat there all morning, hugging my knees, staring out at the sky and the city, and ignoring the growling of my stomach.

  I let my eyes wander over the apartment, taking in the evidence of our shared life: our photos stuck on the ref with magnets, our shared CD and DVD collection (hmm, who’s going to keep what?), the books we gave each other as surprise non-occasion presents, his couch which I fitted with a white slipcover, a black and white photo Hannah had taken of our feet on top of each other as if holding hands...

  When my legs had grown numb, I stumbled off the chair and took out The List.

  I added the following:

  **31. Believes in marriage

  **32. Believes in God

  And, painful though it was for me, I scrapped out the second list altogether.

  “Sorry, John,” I said, mentally addressing an image of John Cusack. “It was fun while it lasted. But, you know, things change. You’ll just have to fall in line with the rest of them now.”

  Birth of an Independent State

  Helen has this theory: “John Cusack is Lloyd Dobler.”

  Cameron Crowe, she argues, couldn’t have come up with a character like that from out of the blue—it was too nuanced, too real. He had based his character on John. She was so sure he and John were already friends when he wrote Say Anything.

  “That’s the kind of guy I want,” Helen said of Lloyd Dobler. “He’s not a slacker, he just marches to his own drum. He’s passionate about things, but most of all, about me.”

  Ergo: “John’s going to be my next boyfriend.”

  Talk about going through your trash.

  She had just quit her job after quitting the seven-
year nightmare with the pilot. Now she was applying to an American airline in the hopes of lowering the odds against meeting John.

  “Which airline?” I asked.

  “Any one that flies from LA to Chicago. He still lives in Chicago, doesn’t he? Don’t we have relatives in Chicago?”

  Setting her standards waaay high was a sure sign she was on her way to recovery.

  While Helen was recovering from a broken heart, I was recovering from a slightly different heart-related ailment— my own unfamiliarity with it. I was reeling from the fact that I did not know my heart fully, and that it had things in it, inhabitants that I didn’t know I had all this time until they rebelled in a major way and demanded to be recognized (that business with the Apostle’s Creed was classic—I know I will never be able to live that down, especially now that Chris and I try not to laugh about it).

  Hannah was right, absence is presence. Just because I kept the idea of God absent in my life didn’t mean He (or She or It) was. It had always been there. It had always been a part of me.

  I knew I would have to go back, retrace my steps. Find out where I had decided to unbelieve. Recall where the presence was when I chose its absence.

  So if I believed in God, what did that mean?

  That I would, like my mom, hear mass everyday? That I would keep my mind from drifting off—and my eyes uncrossed—during the 35th Hail Mary of the Holy Rosary? That I would know my saints and their respective feast days?

  The moment I asked myself what it all meant, the answers seemed to supply themselves in unexpected ways, as though they had been awaiting that question from me all this time.

  Lulu and I had to pick up Vince at his office late one night. I had looked through the clutter on his desk, and picked up a poetry book by his favorite poet, the American hippie Joe Pintauro. I scanned its pages. “To believe in God,” he wrote, “is to build a bridge between yourself and everything worth being one with.”

  I look at the members of my family who had built bridges. I look at my dad, with his upright bass and his jazz club, simply doing what he loves. If that’s faith, then I want that. I see Hannah, fearlessly rushing into things, knowing in turn, that they were rushing towards her. If that’s faith, I’m there.

  And I realized it wasn’t my mom’s church-going, not her novena-praying that I had resisted: it was her fear. Her fear of failure, her fear of the unknown, her fear that her children weren’t strong enough to fend for themselves or to do the right thing by themselves. And I did not wish to live in fear.

  In one Sunday mass that I not only sat through but actually listened to with an open mind, the priest read the following passage from a book called God Calling: “Do not expect a perfect Church, but find in a Church the means of coming very near to God. That alone matters, then the much, that is husk, falls away. Hold it of no account. Grasp the truth and find God—the true Bread of Life. The lesson of the grain is the lesson of the Church and God. The real life is all that matters, the outward Church is the husk; but the husk was necessary to present the life-grain to man.”

  I leaned sideways towards Helen, by whose blank look I knew hadn’t been listening. “That was good,” I whispered, referring to the priest’s sermon. “Is he a Jesuit?”

  She shrugged and blinked as if to focus on the sermon.

  Hello, tapos na, ‘day.

  I am now in a place I never thought I’d be comfortable in. My entire adult life so far has been about looking for the right man, and so I was never alone, never without a man’s arms around me. Singlehood was a place I avoided like the plague, even if it meant being in the arms of not-so-right-for-me guys.

  I have moved into my own apartment in a quiet section of Makati. Though the place is small, it has large windows that look out onto Manila Bay, like the view Chris and I had shared from his apartment. I am surrounded by my books, my music, my journals, my own memories—I feel totally at home.

  I have also begun a real friendship with a guy I wasn’t kissing or sleeping with. I suppose it helps that he lives in London—at least, for another year while making his short film on Filipino grad students in the UK. He has just finished his two-year term at the London Film School, on a Chevening scholarship. He’s coming back to the Philippines, when he’s ready, with every intention of setting up his own film production company because he wants to “change the world.”

  “If you want to change the world,” he said during one of our marathon long-distance phone conversations. “Be a producer. Because to change the world, you have to change mindsets, and nothing more effectively does that than powerful stories.”

  His name is JC—a Filipino, a Pinoy, as you may have already guessed (duh!)—and he is knocking down all the negative notions I’ve had about his kind. So that for the first time since declaring a boycott on Pinoys, I am seriously toying with the idea of lifting that ban. The fact that we met at the Coldplay concert in Bangkok (which Chris and I decided to watch, anyway, as a sort of “farewell concert” except that in this case it wasn’t the band that was breaking up) is a good sign.

  I have decided to be single for a while. Mindfully single, that is. Instead of getting to know guys in the million and one blind dates my friends have already been trying to set up for me, I have decided get to know myself better. So far, between hanging out at my new apartment, arranging things, decorating, fixing stuff, I have found, to my surprise, that I am good company to myself. No, I am a blast.

  I know that Chris won’t be the last great love of my life. That someone will come along and meet all the requirements of The New List, with its important addendum, and maybe even bring some virtues of his own that I hadn’t thought to ask for. And I know that I would fall madly in love again, as though for the first time.

  If this is faith, then, wow, I have it. Finally.

  Special Bonus Section: Bangkok

  The lyrics of “Yellow” (‘Look at the stars/look how they shine for you/ and all the things you do/ they were all yellow...”) was still playing in my head as Chris and I made our way outside the Muong Thong Thani Arena, through the crowds of people milling about—many foreigners, which I had expected, but also a lot of Thais, which I hadn’t.

  Then Chris tapped my arm—someone was calling my name. I turned and saw a familiar-looking guy—but whom I couldn’t place—striding towards us. He had pulled away from his group of friends, a United Colors of Benetton sort of racial mix.

  “Hi, Hilda,” he said, a look of genuine surprise and pleasure on his face. “Remember me?”

  The dark eyes, the strong chin, the broad shoulders, the lanky frame.

  “Oh, my God!” I said as the realization dawned on me. “You look so different,” I sputtered, “but the same!”

  Even Chris laughed at that.

  “No, I know what she means,” he chuckled, nodding.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, remembering my GMRC (Good Manners and Right Conduct, as drilled into our heads in grade school). “Chris, this is...” I stopped. The Spawn of Satan. Oh, my God! Lulu and I had been calling him that since I knew him, I forgot he was a person with a real name.

  Seeing this realization in my appalled expression, The Spawn grinned and extended his hand to Chris. “JC,” he said.

  JC, right! Juanito Carlos, from his parents, Tita Juanita and Tito Carlos.

  “Nice to meet you,” Chris said, shaking his hand.

  Turning to me, JC said, “I have something of yours that I’ve been meaning to return for the longest time. How long are you guys staying in Bangkok?”

  Not long, I said. Chris and I were really just in town for the concert, he had to get back to work and so did I. Day after tomorrow, we were flying back to Manila.

  He and his United Colors of Benetton friends, former classmates at the London Film School, were staying a few more weeks. They had all just graduated from the two-year film program and were taking a break before heading back to London to make their respective movies. Some were going home to their own countries, like
India, Brazil, and New Zealand.

  “Do you mind if we meet somewhere tomorrow?” JC asked, glancing back at his friends. “Or you can tell me where you guys are staying and I can just go there and drop it off.”

  He wouldn’t tell me what the thing was, and I had become really intrigued.

  “I can meet you tomorrow morning at the MBK KFC,” I said, referring to the ground floor Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in one of Bangkok’s popular malls.

  JC narrowed his eyes and shook a knowing finger at me. “Spicy Thai chicken...” he said, guessing correctly my reason for choosing the place.

  “Yes!” I laughed. “That’s all I’ve been eating since I got here.”

  “She’s shameless,” Chris said, shaking his head. “Coming to Bangkok to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  The following day, I set out to meet JC on my own. Chris was back at Oakwood hanging out with our regular Bangkok hosts, his Filipino expat friend from the same company and his wife.

  “Here,” JC said, sliding a small rectangular thing wrapped in a piece of white envelope across one of the tables at KFC. Then, with a cryptic smile: “I figure you’ve suffered enough.”

  I picked it up, reached inside the envelope and pulled out—my old tape compilation of the best new wave love songs. Oh. My. God. “Thinking Of You” by The Color Field. “Love Moves in a Strange Way” by Bluezoo. “Stay” by the Blue Nile. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by The Joy Division. “Tears” by Chameleon. “Somewhere in My Heart” by Aztec Camera. “Soft as Your Face” by The Soup Dragons. “Whatever Possessed You” by The Care... the tape I had been missing for years!

  What the—? I looked up at him.

  “I found it on the road in General Luna,” he said in explanation. “But since nobody asked me for it...” he shrugged.

  “Asar!”

  He laughed. “Good choices, by the way,” he said, nodding at the tape.

  “So what does this mean?” I asked, referring to his magnanimous gesture. “That you’re finally turning your back on your evil ways?”