“Sort of. He’s only here a week or so a month.”
“Well, do you know what he’s doing those other three weeks?”
“You mean, do I think he has a wife and kids in Japan?” Rising on her tiptoes, Coral pulled down the cow pitcher that Keisha liked to use as a glass for milk. “No, I don’t. But he might date someone there. He said he wasn’t dating anyone in particular. I haven’t told him I wouldn’t go on other dates.”
“And do you?”
Coral shook her head. “Now you sound like Mama. No, I’m not dating anyone else. I like Koji.”
“Okay. Just be careful. This is Vegas. A lot of guys come here once a month.”
“I don’t think it’s like that.”
“And a lot of time can go by.”
“Now you really sound like Mama.”
Althea laughed and wrapped her arm around Coral’s shoulders. Keisha was there, so they didn’t talk about it anymore. Coral knew why her sister was concerned. You didn’t grow up in Vegas without knowing the possibilities. Still, Koji was important to her.
The day after Keisha had gone out to play with Malaya, there was a knock at the door.
It was Honorata.
“Hi. Do you want to come in?”
“I was wondering if you could help me?”
“Sure. Is something wrong? Is your daughter okay?”
“Oh yes. Thank you. She’s with my mother.”
Honorata didn’t seem to want to come in, so Coral stepped outside and sat on one of the chairs at the front door. Honorata took the other. She was nervous.
“Would you like a cup of coffee? I have some ready.”
“No. I just have a question. I want to change my daughter’s name. And I want to get a trust. I thought you could help.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“I think you have to go to a lawyer.”
“Yes. You grew up here. Do you know a lawyer?”
“Umm. Well, sure. A friend of mine’s a lawyer. He grew up here too. He probably does this sort of thing.”
“What’s his name?”
“He might be expensive. He works for a pretty big firm.”
“That’s good.”
Coral assumed that she meant the big firm.
“His name’s Darryl Marietti. And he works at Lionel Sawyer. I can contact him and tell him you’ll be calling.”
“Thank you.”
“Sure. I’ll do it today.” After a bit, Coral asked, “What are you naming your daughter?”
“Naming her? Oh. No, I keep her name. I’m changing her last name to Begtang. Mine’s Navarro.”
It didn’t seem right to pry, but Coral wondered if her neighbor would say why she was changing her daughter’s name. She didn’t.
“Keisha was thrilled to play with Malaya yesterday. She’s getting so big.”
Honorata smiled. “Yes. She’s almost walking. Eleven months.”
“That sounds early.”
“The doctor says she’s very bright.”
“Well, that’s great. It’s so nice that your mother’s here too.”
“Yes, now she’s here, I’m going to get a job. At the church over there. In the office. Four mornings a week.”
“That’ll be convenient.”
“Do you know I own three houses? On this street? I bought that one too.” Honorata pointed to the house next to her own.
“Wow. I noticed the sign was only up one day. Will your mother live in one?”
“My mother?” Honorata looked confused. “No. She live with me.” Then she thought for a moment. “Your mother? Does she want to rent house?”
“Mama? Uh, no. She has her own house.”
“Okay. Very convenient. To have your mother on the same street.”
Coral laughed. Ada would love this conversation.
“Yes. Very convenient. Listen, I’ll call Darryl. Let me know if it works out.”
Honorata never said anything about the name change, but Darryl mentioned it once.
“That woman you sent me? Your neighbor?”
“She’s a character, right?”
“She’s loaded.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Was she married? I’ve seen her mother. I don’t think she has any money.”
“She didn’t tell me where the money came from. Said she was never married. Just wanted to change her kid’s name. Freaked out when I told her we had to publish it in the paper. We had to put it in the LA Times too, because the baby was born there.”
“So, bad-dad story.”
“I guess. Or maybe she’s a sex worker.”
Coral choked. “She really doesn’t strike me as a sex worker.”
“Well, she got that money somewhere. And that kid. You never know, Coral. It’s not as if there’s a sex-worker type. She’s very good-looking.”
“Honorata?”
“Drop-dead. Did you even look at her?”
“Yeah, I mean, I guess she’s pretty. She’s so nervous when I talk with her, I didn’t really notice.”
“I’m a man. We notice.”
“Ohhh-kay. Well, so did she do it? Change her daughter’s name?”
“Yeah. She was pretty upset about the advertisement, but I showed her how someone would have to be looking pretty closely, and she made a big deal about it not being anywhere but here and LA. After that, it was just a verified petition in family court.”
“Did it go through?”
“Well, no dad showed up. The judge could have refused it, but that’s rare. Hers was fine. Kid is Malaya Begtang.”
Coral raised her glass.
“Daughter of a sex worker.”
“Or a drug smuggler.”
“Card cheat?”
“Romance novelist?”
Coral laughed out loud. Whenever she saw Honorata after that, hurrying in and out of the neighborhood, wearing her lace veil on Sunday mornings, she smiled.
22
Virginia asked Honorata what she thought of the priest’s sermon.
This was something of a ritual. Molly said they were like Monday morning quarterbacks, calling the shots after the game had already been played. This made no sense to Honorata, but Virginia tried to explain it.
“A lot of games are played on Sunday, and then everyone whose team loses tries to figure out what the coach should have done to win. It’s called Monday morning quarterbacking.”
This was not helpful to Honorata.
“It means that after the fact, people try to call the game differently.”
Honorata didn’t particularly care if she understood Molly’s reference or not, but she wanted to seem interested. Molly had been working there only a few months.
“Is the quarterback the one who guards the goal?”
“What?”
“I think that’s a very hard position. Because if he keeps the ball from going in, the game just goes on. And if he misses, everyone is upset. I wouldn’t like to be the quarterback.”
“I think that’s a goalie. Like soccer.”
“Oh.”
Honorata looked down. She didn’t know why she had started talking about soccer. It was on her mind lately because there was a player in the news named Wohlmann, and the name made her jump. He wasn’t even American, though. It had nothing to do with James Wohlmann. Still.
“Anyway, what did you think of what he said? About joy?”
At Mass, the priest had said that Catholics should be joyful. He said that joy was the natural expression of faith, and that the parishioner who followed all the rules but didn’t feel joy was missing the point of a faithful life.
What Honorata thought was that the priest didn’t know that much about life. He’d never lived in another country, he’d never been with a woman. He didn’t have children, he didn’t even pay his own bills. She didn’t think she would say this to Virginia.
“I thought . . . I thought he wrote it very carefully.”
Virginia
laughed. “Carefully!”
“What did you think?”
Virginia might think anything. She was very surprising. She’d worked in the office for years, and she was devout, but she could be irreverent. Honorata didn’t quite know what to think of her.
“I think he’s got his head up his ass. Telling people to be joyful. Like that’s something on tap.”
Honorata wasn’t sure what to say. It was very unusual, someone who worked in a church office and said “head up his ass.”
“Doesn’t it make sense, though?” she said. “That God would want us to be joyful?”
“Oh, what’s God got to do with it? We’re talking the Catholic church. Sex is joyful, but only if you’re married and ready to have eight more babies. If you’re one of God’s chosen ones, which means you’re also a man, then you can’t have sex at all. Where’s the joy in that?”
Honorata didn’t answer. She didn’t want to tell Virginia that when the priest was talking, she’d been thinking about how little he could know about her life. He looked at her and saw a little Filipina lady, something like her nanay, which was fine with Honorata—which was the way she preferred that he see her—but still, how could somebody who couldn’t tell the difference between Honorata and her nanay tell her how to feel?
“It’s very American,” she said at last.
“It’s American? That’s interesting. What do you mean?” Virginia leaned forward and waited for Honorata’s reply.
“I mean, telling someone what to feel. A feeling is . . . A feeling isn’t . . . I don’t think you can tell someone what to feel.”
“Exactly! Feelings aren’t on tap. Only a priest could come up with something like that.”
Honorata didn’t know what “on tap” meant, but she did know that Virginia was big on what priests didn’t know. She said it had something to do with her parents naming her Virginia, for the Virgin. Also, she believed the problems in the church came from ignoring women.
Molly asked why Virginia worked at the church if she thought it was such a mess. Honorata knew what Virginia would say. She’d heard it before. Virginia said that she was a true believer, and that she was quite sure God was happy to have her in the church, encouraging it from the inside.
Honorata thought about the other things the priest did not know about her.
He didn’t know about her village. He didn’t know what it was like to grow up as if one were part of the earth, the way that she and the other children were part of the green leaves and the rain and the sky. He didn’t know about the ladder she climbed into her home, or the way that home was dark and close and smelled of the rice stored under its thatched roof. What could the priest know about what it had meant for such a child, one who ran naked in rain or sun, and made the other children laugh by bobbing her head sideways like a tamsi, to move to Manila, with more people than even a teacher could count, with its tin-sided shanties, and human waste running down mud roads?
More than this, how could the priest know what Honorata felt about what had happened to her: about the men who had made the video, about the one who had violated her, about the way her uncle had watched that tape? What could he know about the months in Chicago and the fat American man in her bed every night? How she still felt about all of this, how the feelings came to her at night, how they made her want to scream, how she would never be sure of herself again, of who she was, of what she might do. Could the priest imagine that the little girl who had lived in that village—who was herself—seemed almost otherworldly to her? Even with a daughter of her own to help her remember, a sturdy American child, Honorata could not quite summon up what it was like to have once been that little girl in a green world.
Still, with everything the priest could not know, she didn’t like the way Virginia talked about him. He was a kind man, the priest. He had been kind to her, and he was kind to the people who came to the door, looking for help, and to the people in the parish, so many of whom were old and had no one to look out for them. That was one thing about America. A lot of old people were left all alone.
Americans went bonkers if a child was left alone, but if you worked at the church, then you knew that all sorts of old people—just as helpless as a child, some of them—were alone. And nobody seemed to care too much about that. But the priest did. And actually, Virginia did too. She was as kind as the priest.
Last week, Honorata and Nanay had attended a program at Malaya’s preschool. It was the first program of the year. And since it was Malaya’s first year of preschool, Honorata had not known what to expect. She dressed her daughter in a gold satin dress with a white lace neck, which Malaya kept pulling at; before the night was out, the lace was torn, and Malaya was saying “That feels better, that feels way better!” to anyone who looked at her. Nanay said she could fix the lace.
The room where Malaya had preschool was filled with so many toys and so many bits of colored paper hanging from the ceiling and plastered to the walls and piled on the teacher’s desk that it had made Honorata feel dizzy. She wouldn’t be able to think calmly in such a room. When they arrived, Malaya wanted to play with her friends on the jungle gym. Honorata made her stay and greet the teacher, but Miss Julie said, “Oh, let her play. That’s what all the kids are doing.” So Malaya had run outside, and Honorata had seen her sliding and trying to hang from a bar and turning a somersault in the dirt with her underwear right in the air.
In her remarks—that’s what they were called in the program, “Miss Julie, Remarks”—the teacher stressed the importance of being independent. She said that at Sunny Days Preschool, four-year-olds hung up their own backpacks, four-year-olds took themselves to the restroom, four-years-olds solved sharing problems on their own. These seemed like very unusual remarks to Honorata. What else would a four-year-old do?
Miss Julie also said that she encouraged children to think their own thoughts and to stick up for their own ideas. While she was saying this, one of Malaya’s classmates, a boy, was yelling “Bang! Pow! Shazam!” Honorata looked around to see if his mother was coming to get him, but everybody sat smiling on the very small chairs. Nanay was one of the ones sitting and smiling. She couldn’t understand a word. Honorata thought about asking what Miss Julie would do if the child’s idea was not a good one, but she decided against it. She didn’t feel comfortable speaking.
After the teacher’s remarks, the parents were free to wander around the room. A man wearing a blue T-shirt said hello.
“My name’s Mark. Father of Adam. You’re Malaya’s mom?”
Honorata was not sure how he knew this. She nodded.
“I’m a single dad. I feel sort of awkward at these things. You?”
Honorata wondered if he was insulting her. How did he know she was a single mom?
A ring. She didn’t have a ring. She wondered if it would be lying to wear one, for Malaya’s sake. She gave the man a discouraging look and turned away.
Later, he tapped her on the shoulder.
She didn’t want to talk to him.
“Hey, listen, I’m sorry. That came out wrong earlier. Miss Julie’s my sister, so that’s how I know you’re Malaya’s mom. She told me Malaya didn’t have a dad, so I was just trying to be friendly. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m really sorry.”
He did look like Miss Julie.
“I’m sorry that Malaya doesn’t have a dad. I know that’s bad.” Her voice didn’t come out strong, as she intended.
“What? No. That’s not what I meant. Hey, no big deal. Like I said, I’m a single dad.”
He hadn’t seemed mean, more like a puppy, but Honorata had walked away, and when she could persuade Malaya to leave the sandbox, she and Nanay had gone home.
Virginia was still talking about joy, and Molly had apparently stuck up for the priest.
“Molly,” Virginia said, “the problem is not with the idea, it’s with the command. Of course, we should feel joy. Of course, we are meant to enjoy this world.”
Was that true? Were we m
eant to enjoy this world?
Did Honorata feel joy?
When it was the morning of Malaya’s birthday, when Honorata had impulsively pulled over at the pet shop, a dirty little place, not at all reassuring; when she had gone in and seen the gray kitten, fluffy and blue-eyed, and known that it might not be healthy, that getting a pet from one of these stores was not a good idea, that in any case Malaya couldn’t be relied on to care for a pet yet, that a cat would shed hair and snag its claws on the silk fabric of the dining room banquette; when she had thought all these things and brought the kitten home anyway; when Malaya had stood there, shocked to absolute stillness, with tears pouring down her cheeks, so surprised and so happy, and yes, so utterly joyful; hadn’t Honorata felt joy then? Hadn’t she laughed and sat down on the floor, and set the kitten near her daughter’s feet, and watched while Malaya bent her knees and squatted in her Swiss dot dress and gently, oh so gently, stroked the kitten with one small finger?
Surely that was joy.
And was it not joy when she walked the three short blocks from her home to the church office, and let herself in with the key, and poured the honey over the pandesal she had baked that morning, and brewed the coffee, and opened the blinds, so that when Virginia and Molly and the priest walked in, they would know the day was starting right?
Wasn’t it joy when she spent the afternoon in her garden, wiping the bugs off the rose petals with her fingers and wrapping the sweet pea vines on the trellis? Wasn’t it joy when she and Malaya stopped at the Blockbuster to choose a movie, and then walked to the Dairy Queen for an ice cream dipped in red candy, and then sat in a heap on the couch with Nanay while Malaya shrieked in delight as an enormous dog shook mud all over his owner’s bed or stood on his hind legs to eat the Thanksgiving turkey? Malaya used her whole body to watch a movie—jumping to her feet to bounce up and down when something funny was about to happen, or throwing her arms out wide to sing “roll over baked oven” whenever the music started up again.
That was joy.
Honorata wanted to say something about joy to Virginia and Molly. She wanted them to know that she felt joy, that her daughter did, that joy was possible even if there was also a great deal of pain, but she couldn’t find the right words. She wasn’t quick enough, and Virginia always spoke so fast.
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