Skinnier than you remember, darker than you remember, more heartstopping than you remember, and he hasn’t even said a word yet. He doesn’t comment on your beauty, he doesn’t comment on your clothes, he doesn’t say anything like, It’s good to see you again, Pacita, as plenty of the older male doctors who remembered you from your nursing days have said in the ten minutes since you’ve been in Nazareth, with the good directed somewhere around your ass.
The babaero asks how you are. You don’t answer. After a long pause, he says, quietly, that he hopes you’ve been well. He congratulates you on living in California, says he’s heard it’s beautiful there and he’d like to visit one day. You feel yourself softening, which, of course, is where it all goes wrong. A lesson you should already know: the minute you let yourself go soft, it’s over. In the next breath, he asks you to marry him.
You don’t remember how you react in that moment. You only remember walking out. You don’t stop when you think he might follow you and he doesn’t. You don’t stop when the nurses at reception ask you what’s wrong. You ask the doktora’s waiting driver, a tall moreno with puffy eyelids who looks like he could be your brother, to take you back home to Mangaldan, and to apologize to the doktora on your behalf, for leaving so abruptly and not even saying good-bye. During the journey back home, the driver tries to make conversation with you, but you barely respond.
When you get home, your mother’s giving you that look. She saw the nurses, she saw the car take you away. You almost remind her that your petition to immigrate her over to the States should be finished soon, that you’re working hard on moving her to California with you, putting her in a home with running hot water and a roof that won’t threaten to cave in any minute, so maybe for once she could cut you some slack—but you shut that thought up immediately.
You get on the next plane to California; you don’t care how many hours you’ll have to work overtime to pay for the flight change fee. You should have known that you weren’t ready for whatever was waiting for you, in this place that people keep telling you is home. All you want now is the cramped apartment in San Petra Court, Milpitas. Eating canned sardines and rice, safe and far away. Safe because you’re far away.
But the babaero starts writing and calling. He says he got your details from the direktora. In all of his letters and calls, he asks you to marry him. Now he says he misses you: he misses you, he misses you, he’s always missed you. He says he loves you, he loves you, he’s always loved you. He never calls collect. He never says Marcos’s name.
In your deepest of hearts, you know he needs to get out of the Philippines; that Marcos’s cronies and allies are scurrying from the country as the regime falls apart. Later you’ll learn that many of the babaero’s friends and relatives took their wealth and moved: to Sydney, to Singapore, to Glendale, California. The doktora knew about your naturalization; she must have told him. You know what you really are—before being loved, before being missed. You’re a pathway.
You might be a pathway, but so is he. You think of his first wife, her family. You think of the look his sister Ticay gave you when she first met you, like she wouldn’t come close enough to buy a mango from you. You think of the parties in Malacañang the babaero must have gone to regularly, the women waiting in line to snap up a De Vera. Then, a smothered, fathom-deep part of you thinks of the look on his face when you said your favorite dessert was tupig.
Choosing to marry him will mean having to prove yourself to invisible judges, all the time, for the rest of your life. You think you know what it’s going to be like, but you don’t know the half of it. You don’t know that the sting of amused disapproval when his siblings gaze at you will never subside, not even when the financial situation turns around and it’s your nursing salary that starts making up the bulk of the money that the babaero occasionally sends back. You don’t know that you’ll never be able to shake the sweat-streaked terror of scarcity, or those dreams about being back in Pangasinan still clawing around in the ground for a crab. You don’t know that marrying someone who’s always slept with a full belly will be like being married to someone from another planet; you don’t know that even just the velvety confidence of his English will sometimes send you into paroxysms of shame that you counteract with buying things you can’t afford, just to prove you aren’t the girl you’ll always be. You don’t know that you’ll end up going hungry some months to buy Estée Lauder creams, Chanel perfumes, things you remember the De Vera women using freely. The person you are now won’t even recognize the smell of the person you’ll be in twenty years.
You tell yourself: People get married for all sorts of reasons. You say yes to him on the phone, and the warbly, frizzled echo on the long-distance call means you hear your own yes back to yourself. It isn’t the voice of a woman just being practical. You say yes again, in English, and again it rings back to you, overlapping the babaero laughing and saying yes, too, yes, mahal, so you can hear for the first time what you sound like together.
* * *
When a few years later you finally, finally give birth to your dream girl, an American morena—she wasn’t quite so morenang-morena in your dream—both of you nearly die during the labor. The dose of Pitocin they give you in the hospital to hasten the birth and vacate the bed ends up inducing contractions so strong that you start hemorrhaging.
The babaero, who’s no longer rich, no longer a surgeon, no longer really a babaero, but now a badly paid security guard at a computer chip company just outside of Milpitas and your lawfully wedded husband, tries to make you laugh by telling you that the entire floor of the hospital room was covered in your blood, just like in The Shining, a film you’ve never seen. His green card hasn’t been processed yet so doesn’t live with you in Milpitas full time, spending six months in the Philippines, six months in California. And though his forlorn look of love when he leaves you at the airport seems genuine, it’s not hard to see that he grows at least half an inch taller the minute he’s through security, once his back is to you and he’s facing the direction of home. You’re the future mother of his children, but you’re not home for him; not yet, maybe not ever.
But right now he’s at your side, and you’re still trying to give birth to the dream girl, gushing blood, moaning in Pangasinan, and to top it all off, she starts suffocating inside you, the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. The doctors move fast; you’re knocked unconscious, and she’s cut out of you in minutes. Alive. You’re both alive.
Throughout her childhood, you won’t be able to stop yourself from constantly telling your daughter: If you were born in the Philippines, we would both be dead. She’ll grow up knowing that the only reason she’s alive is because she was born in America—though she doesn’t seem to love America any more or less for that reason. Then again, she doesn’t have to love it. She’s of it.
Looking down at her in those first few moments, what you see most of all is what she doesn’t have. A fate. You know what it’s like to have a fate; you also know what it’s like to escape one. This one won’t sell chico on National Road. This one won’t brush her teeth in her hand every night. As for loving America or not loving America, those aren’t your problems, either. Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.
Ate Hero
Pol didn't ask his older bother where his niece had been. He asked only how her injury was healing; if the surgery had been successful; if Hamin thought his daughter would need to continue physical therapy in California, and if so, could Hamin drive to their sister Ticay’s house in Vigan, where Pol had left some of the old equipment from his old clinics in Dagupan. Most of the drugs would be expired or obsolete, but Pol would make do. By the time of the phone call, Pol had had been retired in California for over five years, but everyone knew doctors and nurses rarely retired; the vocation was eternal. Hamin had no answers to Pol’s questions. He replied only, with some composure, that according to their younger sister, So
ly, Hero was physically intact.
That was the phrasing Hamin used, in English, even though they were speaking in Ilocano. Non compos mentis? Pol asked, more to himself than to his brother. Aniá? Hamin asked, irritated. Pol reverted back to Ilocano, said he hadn’t said anything, that the line was bad. Hamin didn’t reply for a long time.
Finally, Pol said the same things he’d already said in his letter: Have Soly send her on the tourist visa. She’ll stay in the extra room. She can help take care of Roni. Or Paz will try to find her a job in one of the hospitals.
On the phone, neither Pol nor Hamin called her Hero. Nobody did. Everyone still called her Nimang.
It was a few months later, in the summer of 1990, when Hero walked through the garage door of that house in Milpitas and was met by a young girl with raw leatherlike scars covering half of her face, her entire neck, and down both of her forearms, that she learned you could make more than one nickname out of the name Geronima, a name that the De Vera family had been recycling for at least three generations.
It was this young girl who declared, rashy hand on her hip: So we have the same name, but I go by Roni. Spelled R-O-N-I. I’ll call you Auntie Hero.
* * *
That was perhaps only the second or third time Hero had ever heard an American voice in real life; the first time she’d ever heard an American voice coming out of the face of someone who looked not unlike her own father. Behind Hero, Paz came through the door, carrying Hero’s green suitcase, hefting its weight against her substantial hip until she could settle it on the ground next to the pile of worn-out tsinelas. She was several inches shorter than Hero, not over five feet tall, but Hero felt immediately shadowed, rebuked somehow by that tense, proud stance.
A woman Hero would later come to know as Paz’s sister Gloria emerged from the living room, followed by two young men Hero would later come to know as Paz’s nephews, Jejomar and Freddie. They spoke to Paz in Pangasinan; Hero didn’t understand anything they said. Mangan kila, Paz was saying, pointing to plates of food covered with paper towels on the kitchen table. They were shaking their heads, smiling shyly at Hero, and heading for the garage door. Hero realized they must have been watching the girl while Paz and Pol went to the airport to meet her. Paz was picking up the suitcase again, getting ready to take it up the stairs, to show Hero her new room.
There were many things Hero should have done then. She should have said, Sorry, Tita Paz, let me take that, even though she wouldn’t have been able to carry the suitcase herself. Even before that, driving through the town, she shouldn’t have minutely wrinkled her nose at the smell, which she would come to know later as the famed shit smell of Milpitas, the reason why house prices were lower there. She should have made casual conversation on the drive from San Francisco International Airport to Milpitas, instead of remaining mute and clammy in the backseat. She should have mustered up the strength at least to stay awake as Pol drove in silence down the highway that Hero would later know as intimately as the vein down the inside of her own wrist, instead of creakily turning her head to its side and treading lead-limbed between buoys of sleep, only fully lucid for the last fifteen minutes of the drive. Hero saw the sign for CALAVERAS BOULEVARD MILPITAS above them, saw a large, lone Holiday Inn on her right side. Pol steered the car up the overpass, and on the way down, there waiting was the town: sun-weathered and stout, garlanded on every side by strip malls, the tarmac so uneven and rough that Hero saw Paz reach up for the grab-handle on the roof above her; not gripping it, just touching the tips of her fingers there by instinct, the reminder of the handle’s presence steadying her more than the handle itself. The road remained patchy all the way to the house, down the long boulevard that cut through the town.
Upon arriving, Hero should have looked up at the house and enthused, stretching out the creaking bones of her Tagalog: Ang ganda naman ang bahay ninyo, Tita, wow; the house was obviously newly bought and waiting for praise. Or she should have lowered her head and said Salamat, kept her head there. First impressions didn’t have to be everything, but she didn’t know yet that Paz was the kind of person who made judgments about people based on whether or not they treated her like she was beneath them, that she was a sensitive scanner of gaze-overs and under-words, that those judgments helped move Paz through the world, told her whom she could laugh with her mouth wide open in front of, and whom she had to wear perfume next to. There were a thousand ways Hero could have walked into the house in Milpitas that day to begin things, but Paz lifted the suitcase again, straightened her back, and closed off her heart.
Then she looked at her daughter and said: Manang Nimang is your cousin, not your auntie.
To which Roni said, scratching at a purplish-red plaque on her neck: Fine. Ate Hero then.
Pol came through the door and saw his wife on her way up the staircase. He shook his head, gestured for her to put it down, saying he would carry it up. Paz put the suitcase back down, giving no impression that she was glad to be relieved of its weight. Then she crossed the kitchen to the rice cooker on the counter and asked, Gutom ka, Nimang? Gloria made pinakbet. Pol said it was your favorite.
By then it was too late to make a second first impression, so Hero just came farther into the house that was now her home and lied that yes, yes—she was hungry.
* * *
Pol brought the suitcase up to the small, tidy room next to the bathroom; the sheets were clean and mismatched, freshly laid. Hero followed him, and then watched as he put the suitcase down, then unzipped it for her without saying a word. She opened her mouth to tell him he didn’t have to unpack everything, that much she could do herself—even if she couldn’t, she would—but he was already standing up and turning around, saying,
Just tell us if you want us to help.
After more than ten years of not seeing each other, he still knew the perimeters of her dignity. You look the same, she said in Ilocano.
He laughed. This isn’t the same, he said, rubbing the belly that hadn’t been there when she’d last seen him.
Hero looked down at her open suitcases, the things that Soly had helped put in there, even though by then she’d had enough movement in her thumbs to handle something like packing. There was a bottle of Tabac cologne that she should have wrapped up more securely, but when she knelt down to pick it up, it was still intact and dry. She heard the warmth of Pol’s laughter again, a sound she knew better and had heard more often than the sound of her own parents’ laughter. She looked up and Pol said, You still wear that?
It’s not the same bottle as the one you gave me, she’d said, smiling back, the feeling so foreign on her face she nearly reached up to touch her mouth.
I hope not, Pol replied. He leaned down and picked the bottle up, twisting open the brown cap and sniffing. How are they, he said, looking at her hands. If anyone else had asked, Hero wouldn’t have replied. Pol seemed to know that.
She said, On a scale of one to ten?
No pain scale. You’re not my patient.
It’s okay. Much better since the surgery.
Pol screwed the cap back onto the bottle. We have painkillers at home. And Paz can get you codeine, whatever you need from the hospital.
Just ibuprofen or acetominaphen, Hero said. I don’t want anything stronger.
Pol nodded, and put the bottle of Tabac on the nightstand next to the bed. Okay. You let us know if there’s anything else you need. He turned to leave.
Hero pointed with her chin to the cologne bottle. You can have it, she said. I don’t really wear it anymore.
Pol shook his head. I don’t wear it anymore, either. It’s hard to find here, so I stopped.
He smiled again. But it still smells the same.
* * *
She doesn’t even have a driver’s license, Paz argued, on Hero’s second evening in California.
Hero, Paz, and Pol were sitting around the kitchen table, emptied plates in fro
nt of them. At the center of the table there was a bowl of cold white rice, a hardened crust of yellowing grains forming over the top. When she saw Hero looking, Paz tore off a square of paper towel and covered the bowl, shooing away a fly that wasn’t there.
Pol was smacking the bottom of a still-sealed pack of Benson and Hedges menthol cigarettes. He said, If she can pick Roni up from school, then Roni doesn’t have to be at day care or Auntie Gloria’s until nighttime anymore. He pulled the cellophane off the pack, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it.
Paz frowned. And if she gets caught?
She won’t get caught.
Hero felt a presence behind her and nearly jumped out of her chair, only to see that Roni had come into the kitchen, barefoot, silent as a cat. Where’s your tsinelas, Paz called, rote, used to having to ask the question.
Roni shrugged and opened the cupboard, poking her head in.
Baka you’ll get sick again, Paz said. The floor is dirty. And cold.
Roni pulled a can of Vienna sausages out of the cupboard and took it to the sink to open and drain. She didn’t look as though she were listening.
Pol turned his head to face her, parting the cloud of smoke in front of him. What if Manang Nimang is the one to pick you up from school tomorrow?
Roni was using a paper towel to dab the excess congealed jelly from the Vienna sausages, arranging them on a plate. There’s rice here, anak, Paz said, pulling the paper towel off the bowl at the center of the table. You want me to heat it up?
Nope, Roni said, bringing her plate to the table. She sat at the head of the table, bizarrely—Hero had been wondering whose seat it was, since both Pol and Paz had avoided occupying it.
Hm? Pol prompted his daughter again, using his left hand to wave the smoke away from her. It still floated over her head.
America Is Not the Heart Page 4