Gutom ka ba, Roni? You want something to eat? We have cookies—
Roni brightened. Cookies?
Melba laughed and led the way to the kitchen. Hero hesitated, then followed them. In the kitchen, there was a large portrait of the Last Supper hung above the dining table, which was covered with a plastic tablecloth patterned with grapevines and bunches of grapes.
Anong gusto mo? You like chocolate chip? Or peanut butter?
Both!
Hero turned to her, fast, embarrassed. Roni—
Melba opened two packages without blinking an eye; a blue Chips Ahoy! package, and a transparent package of peanut butter sandwich cookies, off-brand. There you go, Melba said.
Thank you, Roni chirped, stuffing her face with a sandwich cookie.
Melba turned to Hero and began speaking to her in Pangasinan, a long sentence that sounded inviting, conspiratorial.
Hero held up a hand and said, Sorry po, sorry, I don’t understand.
Melba stopped and held up her hands in apology. Oh, sorry! Were you born here, too?
Hero shook her head. No, I—I’m Roni’s cousin on her dad’s side.
Oh! It’s because you said you were Paz’s niece, kasi. Sorry. Then Melba pushed the package of Chips Ahoy! across the table to Hero. Ikaw mo, have some.
Hero had never really liked sweets, and had especially never liked American sweets. But Melba was smiling encouragingly, so Hero dutifully took one of the cookies from the package, along with the paper towel Melba handed her, to put it on. Salamat po, she forced herself to say, and ate.
* * *
Hero wasn’t sure how the whole process worked, and she had been too self-conscious to ask Paz for details beforehand. She had the feeling her ignorance would come off as superiority to Paz, and she wanted to avoid the obvious: that she had no exposure to these types of things because she was from a different class, that she remembered friends of hers in college making jokes about probinsyanas and their hexes. Hero’s own childhood eczema had gone away when she was in college; she never knew why, and she’d never questioned it. Most people she knew outgrew it. Her father had had severe eczema in the webbing of his hands and feet. Pol gave him various creams, which sometimes worked. None of them worked as well as mashed coconut flesh and petroleum jelly, used as a kind of poultice, which Hero’s yaya Lulay had prescribed, until Concepcion put a stop to it; the smell of fatty coconut on her husband’s hands nauseated her.
The people Hero grew up around generally ridiculed faith healing, loathed the camphoraceous smell of Efficascent oil, used by all the worst quacks, that would remain on a yaya’s hands whenever she came back from a visit to her country family. Hero remembered even Pol speaking as a physician, frustrated at the prospect of the people, mostly poor, being preyed on and deluded. But even Americans and Europeans came in droves to visit faith healers. The ones with the most international fame tended to be the men who called themselves psychic surgeons, who claimed to remove imaginary toxins and parasites from the bodies of their patients. White people always thought they were full of toxins, so you could make a lot of money just by claiming to be able to remove them.
There were stories Teresa told the cadres, about the early days of American health in the Philippines. Paul Freer, the first dean of the Philippine Medical School, met with W. Cameron Forbes, the governor-general of the Philippines in 1913, to show Forbes one of the newer medical schools in the colony. Freer showed Forbes what the governor-general later described in his journals as a rather gruesome dissection, then declared to Forbes that the first hundred autopsies on Filipino bodies—oh, just the first hundred! Eddie always interrupted—had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the natives were inherently unhealthy, prone to all manner of plagues, cankers, and skin disorders. This frailty meant they were constitutionally underequipped for physical labor. Worse, there was a danger they would spread their infirmity to whites. Emily Bronson Conger, a nurse from Ohio who’d spent time in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Japan, wrote woefully that she wanted to dip them into some cleaning cauldron. Edith Moses, the wife of Bernard Moses, then-secretary of public instruction and member of President Taft’s Second Philippine Commission, used to hose off her servants with disinfectants, during the cholera wave of 1902. The trained baboons and monkeylike coolies needed to be house-trained, she said of the young boys who polished with burlap the narra wood floors of her home on the shores of Manila Bay, facing Corregidor.
American guards told Moses to be wary, too, of the fiestas the natives loved to throw, especially in the streets: the contact with the crowd, the distracting lights, the pungent smells—and most of all, the risk that such parties carried within them the potential for revolt. I think our guard was rather disappointed that the fiesta went off without any trouble; one of the boys told me he was “aching for a scrap,” but another said he didn’t want “to kill no niggers, they hadn’t done nothing to him.” It is a miserable life—that of a soldier in peace—and I don’t wonder these boys would like to see a little active service, Moses wrote in a letter, which Teresa read aloud to the cadres from a tattered hardback book, the cover of which was missing.
One thing was clear: the locals had to be cleansed before anything could be done with them. Inspections, experiments, education, regulation; medical schools and rigorous training. Perhaps that obsession with cleanliness was part of why Americans invented the water cure in the Philippines, Teresa suggested. She used to point out Tanauan on maps of Luzon, her finger encircling the whole province of Batangas. She would tell the cadres:
They put the men on their backs. There would be one American soldier to stand on each limb, to keep the man down. They put a stick in his mouth to keep it open, and poured a pail of water directly into the mouth and nostrils. If the men didn’t start talking by then, then another pail, then another. Then another.
Victor G. Heiser, a Pennsylvania doctor who’d survived the Johnstown Flood of 1889 and became the Philippine Director of Health in 1902, declared that his project was to wash up the Orient. It was Heiser who came up with the condition called philippinitis. According to him, symptoms included mental and physical torpor, forgetfulness, irritability, lack of ambition, aversion to any form of exercise. Heiser had a mental and physical breakdown in 1908, and placed the blame on his dealings with Filipinos, the Herculean effort of converting them into people.
After Teresa finished those lectures, cadres who didn’t want to do their share of clean-up duty or night patrol would joke: Kumander, may philippinitis ako kasi eh—
Teresa would grin. Mabuti walang gamot. Good thing there’s no cure.
* * *
From what Hero observed, Roni was smeared generously with something that smelled minty-sweet and burnt, like plastic; a mixture of holy water, Efficascent oil, and Vaseline. Melba didn’t ask Roni any questions but kept her eyes closed, listening for a voice that Roni gave no sign of being able to hear. Sometimes Roni opened one greasy eye and caught Hero’s gaze. She stuck her tongue out. Hero tried to school her face into a scold and failed. Melba didn’t notice.
Afterward, Melba said it was difficult to tell what was wrong with the girl, but she would find some creams and waters they could take home, if they would just wait in the living room. When they were alone, Roni got up from the love seat she’d been sharing with Melba, and joined Hero on the bigger couch, the plastic cover squeaking beneath them.
Hero nudged her. Oi. Kumusta?
Roni shrugged, looking down.
Hero tilted her head in mock-appraisal, bent down to take a closer look. So what, all-healed ka na?
Roni burst into laughter, relaxing for the first time since Hero had picked her up from school.
Yeah, it’s aaaaalllll better now, she replied, the greased scars around her mouth stretching wide.
It turned out Melba couldn’t really heal Roni, or even begin to try; she wasn’t strong enough of a bruha. W
hat Roni needed someone whose powers had wider radius, someone who could speak and listen and hurt across distances. The source of Roni’s illness was too distant, too clever. If it was a curse you were dealing with, the radius was necessary. Melba was pretty sure it was a curse; her theory was that someone had been jealous of Paz, perhaps someone who had known her growing up, someone still in the Philippines, reaching out to take revenge through Roni’s body. That meant it was trickier than dealing with a kapre or even an engkanto. Human cause was always more dangerous. Engkantos, at least, could be negotiated with. They had ethics.
Melba gave them the number of a woman in San Jose who might be able to help. I don’t know how much she still does this; matanda siya kasi, she’s old now. She might be retired already. But call her. If you can’t see her within a month, come back to me. We’ll try again. Ingat kayo, ha? Roni, take some cookies with you, here, here.
In the car on the way home, Hero noticed Roni staring at her. What, Hero said, trying to keep her eyes on the wide California roads, having already learned that most of them were potholed, uneven, not all that different from roads in the Philippines.
Roni asked, How come you always forget to put on your seat belt?
They were on 880 North, going seventy miles an hour. Hero looked down at herself quickly, even though she knew what she would see. I forgot, she said.
Papa’s the same, Roni said, already leaning over.
No, no, stay there, I’ll do it, Hero said. She held on to the steering wheel with one hand, then shrugged on the seat belt so it hung loosely over her left arm, like a suspender or gun holster. She tried to pull it across her body, but the car jerked, and began to drift toward the lane divider. So she left it, lodged in her armpit.
Roni didn’t look amused. Papa leaves it like that, too, she said.
She leaned forward again, stretching her own belt taut. She grabbed onto Hero’s seat belt, yanked it down hard, so that the stiff, smooth belt cut uncomfortably into Hero’s neck. She tilted her head back, put her hands back on the wheel to steady the car’s path. Then a click; fastened.
Thank you, Hero said, craning her neck to get away from the tight fit.
Roni leaned up, tugged on the belt to give it some slack. Hero relaxed.
Thank you, she said again, meaning it this time.
They teach you this kinda stuff in school, Roni said, leaning back into the seat, her cursed face smug.
* * *
It’s good that you eat a lot, Hero said to Roni one day, after she’d cooked her own corned beef properly, sitting down to join the girl, who was eating her own corned beef straight out of the can so it was still viscera-red and cold. When I wasn’t much older than you, I knew girls who dieted.
’Cause you diet, huh, Roni said.
Hero blinked. No, she said.
Yeah-huh. Roni was eating with her hands again, her left leg tucked under her, her right leg propped up so her right arm rested on her right knee. She scooped a mound of rice and pink beef into her mouth. Chewed, then swallowed and said, I used to not eat.
Hero paused, her fingers curled around a ready mouthful of food. What do you mean?
Roni replied while eating, so Hero could see the pinkish-brown meat being chewed by her back teeth. A year ago, I only ate Nestlé baby milk.
Formula, she meant. For the first four or five years of her life, not all that long before Hero arrived in California, Roni had been given nothing to eat but canned baby formula, usually Nestlé brand. At the time, she was being raised by Paz alone; Pol hadn’t come over to live with them in California permanently but shuttled between the Philippines and Milpitas, six months here, six months there, still in denial about the new chapter of his life. Paz and Roni were living in the apartment on San Petra Court where Gloria, Carmen, and Paz’s mother now lived, just off Junipero Drive. It was on the side of the town closest to the county penitentiary and the run-down shopping plaza, Serra Center, with its movie theater, dollar store, and Vietnamese restaurant. Paz’s petition for Grandma Sisang had come through, and she had only recently arrived. Her father Vicente’s long years of service as a clerk for the American army in Guam were about to come to fruition: he was finally going to get citizenship, and most of her younger siblings would arrive shortly after. Paz had been naturalized a few years before Roni’s birth.
But in those early, early California years, it was just the four of them—Paz, Carmen, Grandma Sisang, and Roni—living in the small apartment for half of the year. When Pol was around for the other half, they gave the bedroom to him and Paz, with Roni sleeping sometimes in the bed with them, and, later, in a secondhand crib. When Pol left for the Philippines again, Grandma Sisang and Carmen took back the bedroom, and Paz and Roni slept in the living room; Roni on the couch, Paz on the floor. The floor was carpeted with shag, at least. When Vicente’s citizenship came through, Gloria and Boyet were the next to arrive in California, taking up residence on the living-room floor. Lerma was just waiting to finish nursing school, and then she’d be on her way, too. They were running out of space on the floor. Carmen joked that Lerma could sleep on the kitchen table, like a rack of lechon.
When Paz and Pol heard about the house lottery in the new neighborhood being built in Milpitas, just off of the 680 interstate, the whole thing sounded like a dream. By that time, Pol was inching closer and closer to staying permanently in California. Paz knew a real house would help matters along.
The night before the lottery, Paz and Pol slept in the car outside the plot of land where the new neighborhood was going up, just so they would be there first thing in the morning for the draw. They were parked in a line with other cars, full of young Mexican and Filipino families doing the exact same thing. They left Roni, then just a toddler, with Carmen, who dropped her; just once, lightly. She never told anyone. Grandma Sisang saw it happen, but didn’t tell anyone, either. By the time Paz and Pol came home, they had a down payment on a house and Roni had a fading bruise on her hip, indistinct against the eczema that was already there. Her parents, in their euphoria, never noticed. By the time they moved into the new house, Roni had been living on Nestlé formula for four years.
Hero remembered the Nestlé campaign. She’d never intended to become an ob-gyn, so perhaps she’d avoided the worst of the push, but she distinctly remembered fellow students being encouraged to discredit breast-feeding. They were taught the science of Nestlé formula, and interns and residents were used to the spiel, how to get new mothers hooked on the formula with a decent amount of intimidation and a free trial. Just mix with water. Easy enough. Easy enough, despite the fact that many of the poorer women they’d recommended the formula to lacked access to clean water. The campaign must have been in full swing during the last of Paz’s years in the Philippines, so she would have missed the boycotts organized much later: the poor directions, the contaminated water, the children who died. All Paz would have known when she got pregnant in California was that she had to make sure she could get her hands on some Nestlé.
It was a miracle Roni’s teeth were growing in normally, if somewhat crooked and slow. In an attempt to wean her daughter off the formula—busy as she was, it took her awhile to realize that she was going to have to start feeding the child solid foods—Paz started to hide the formula cans, replacing them with other kinds of food, the kinds of food Roni should have been eating for years. Mashed peas, mashed carrots, mashed apples.
Roni stopped eating entirely. One day, after days of only feigning to eat, the girl fainted, gaunt as a cricket and ice-cold to the touch. Paz and Pol—the collapse must have occurred during the Californian part of his year—rushed her to the hospital, where she was fed intravenously. It was the first non-formula meal of her life.
Hero said, What do you mean, you only ate baby milk?
Roni just shrugged.
It tasted pretty good, she just said, which wasn’t an explanation. But she didn’t mean to give on
e, and Hero didn’t know how to ask for one.
* * *
During the day, when Roni was at school, Paz was at work, and Pol was asleep, Hero cleaned the house.
Paz had never asked her to, though Hero had seen her lose her temper a few times about the state of the house, especially when Roni ran through it without her tsinelas, the bottoms of her bare feet nearly black with greasy dust.
Paz’s temper was at its worst in the evenings, and especially on her rare days off. She didn’t know what to do with herself on days off, and spent them looking around the house, being alternately shamed and irritated by the mess, starting to clean, and then stopping halfway through, usually by starting a fight with Roni, or Pol, or sometimes her sister Gloria if she was dropping off food or asking to borrow some money for her husband. The bones of the house, pretty enough but built hastily for the town’s rapidly expanding population, didn’t hold up well to neglect. It wasn’t like the De Vera mansion, the antique bones of which meant that even a mess came off as eclectic—not that the De Veras’ servants ever let the house get messy. The house in Milpitas needed constant tidying in order to look decent. Hero offered to clean. Paz refused, at first, but Pol talked her into it.
You’ll be less stressed, he said. Gloria doesn’t live here anymore, and she works now. Nimang has the time.
Paz’s mouth firmed at that. It looked like another thing she didn’t want Hero to know; that Gloria cleaned the house for Paz, that Gloria had lived in the house. But Hero knew that she wasn’t the first relative—the first relative of Paz’s, at least—to stay with them; sometimes, when they mentioned a sister or cousin of Paz’s, they said things like, When they were here, or She left it in that room, or She used to. Chronically messy though it might be, the house had enough space to house any relative who needed a refuge, temporary or permanent.
America Is Not the Heart Page 8