America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  Jaime said that a year after they moved to Milpitas, Rosalyn moved in four houses down with her mom and grandparents, from San Francisco. A few Mondays later she showed up in his second-grade class. The rest was—and Jaime didn’t have to finish his sentence, waving his cigarette with his right hand to indicate what the rest was. History.

  One time, Hero and Jaime were at a bar in the Tenderloin and Hero had gone into the bathroom, not to fuck, just to piss after having drunk too many beers in too short a time. She’d ended up having to take an unexpected and difficult shit, and when she finally came out, Jaime was nowhere to be found, even though the chat he’d been having with another Mexipina—that word he’d taught Hero—looked like it’d been promising. She went outside, woozy and cheerful, just to check if they were smoking or making out, since usually Jaime didn’t leave without telling her, and found him being charged into a wall by a man much shorter than him but no less discouraged for that fact.

  Before she could even register what she was seeing, or shout for help, another, older man grabbed Jaime’s left arm and wrenched it backward. Even if she hadn’t been a doctor, she would have known the wet pop of a dislocated shoulder. She shouted, Police! and the two men looked up, breathless. By some miracle, they ran away, leaving Jaime on the ground. Hero went to Jaime, feeling herself sober up with every step. Then she said,

  This is gonna hurt, and with his eyes squeezed shut Jaime breathed out a confused, Wha—and she promptly yanked his shoulder back into place before his tongue could touch his teeth and finish the word. There were things she’d forgotten; there were things she hadn’t forgotten.

  Fu-uck, he throated out, eyes still shut, the base of the lashes wet.

  Hero saw the thank-you that was going to come out of Jaime’s mouth next. In order to prevent it, she said: I’ll be sure to tell everyone you cried. Jaime laughed, a choked-off sound. That was another way to make history.

  Of course, there were things Jaime and Hero didn’t talk about. He didn’t talk about the years he and Rosalyn had spent as a couple; when he talked about Rosalyn, it was about their childhood or about their more recent adult friendship. Nothing about whether or not he still had it bad for her, the way Janelle described it, whether or not she was the reason he’d left Milpitas for San Francisco, whether or not she was the reason he’d come back.

  For her part, Hero didn’t talk about the NPA, didn’t talk about dropping out of medical school, didn’t talk about having become a field doctor, didn’t mention Teresa. She wanted to know if Rosalyn had mentioned something to Jaime about what she’d said in Rosalyn’s backyard, but she couldn’t read any sign on his face that said he already understood why sometimes her story would trail off, why sometimes she’d backtrack and start talking about biguenyo generalities, food specialties, types of music she’d listened to when she was in college.

  Often these were things she’d already told to Rosalyn, sometimes even when Jaime was around, but he never called her on repeating her stories. There was a difference between telling someone something when there were other people around, and telling someone something when it was just the two of you. There was a difference between having friends, and having a friend.

  * * *

  Paz’s plan to throw Roni a lucky double birthday—double the luck, Hero heard her tell Pol, verging on shrill—came into fruition fast, after the holidays. She had put down a credit card deposit on the main hall in Milpitas Community Center for the twenty-third of February, the Saturday after Roni’s birthday, which was technically the eighteenth. Bad luck to celebrate a birthday before the actual date itself, everyone knew that.

  Rosalyn’s family got the catering job. The same old banquet foods, with some extra afritada, Roni’s favorite, Paz said—Hero still wasn’t sure if it was really Roni’s favorite—and a lechon. They didn’t have to do desserts, Paz would go to Gold Ribbon for the cake.

  There wasn’t actually much coordinating to be done, Hero would have thought, yet Rosalyn was always coming into the restaurant while Hero was supposed to be working, sitting her down and asking if Roni liked pancit bihon, if Roni ate diniguan. And then, after work, Rosalyn would want to go with Hero to the community center to see the layout of the place, even though later Hero thought to herself that Rosalyn must have been to the community center dozens of times. Still, there Hero was, asking an older white lady at the entrance if she could possibly unlock the doors to the main hall so they could take a look at the space, just to know how to configure the tables. Paz had invited well over two hundred people. The capacity for the hall was 214.

  Hero stood in the doorway while Rosalyn flicked on the massive overhead lights, illuminating the space, as big as a basketball court with a laminated dance floor in the center, just in front of the stage. Rosalyn lifted her chin to the stage, said, That’s where Ruben’ll set up his decks.

  Rosalyn stepped onto the dance floor. Her voice echoed, When Jaime and I were kids, the church had a party to celebrate our First Communion here.

  Hero thought of the picture she’d seen in Rosalyn’s house, Rosalyn and Jaime as children, dancing together. She didn’t say anything.

  Rosalyn looked at her, then looked away. She pointed toward the outer walls of the room, some of which were lined with big windows. We usually set up the food here. There’s gonna be like two hundred people at this thing, so we’ll have just a long buffet line along both walls.

  Rosalyn was doing a lot of that, recently. Looking at Hero, then looking away. They hadn’t talked about what Hero had told Rosalyn on Christmas, in her backyard; they hadn’t talked about Hero taking off with a stranger, on New Year’s. When Hero saw Rosalyn two days later, the morning of her first day back at work, Hero had waited for Rosalyn to make a comment, to throw it in her face. But Rosalyn just said,

  Do you want the next chapter of Vampire Princess Miyu? I just got it in from Ruby.

  Hero didn’t really care about the next chapter of Vampire Princess Miyu. Sure, she’d said, the relief so thick in her throat she thought she might choke on it.

  * * *

  Pol accepted, more than participated in, the preparations for Roni’s birthday. His attitude wasn’t altogether that different from the one he took with respect to Roni’s faith healing; it was something Paz needed, for her peace of mind, and it would have exhausted more energy to fight it, or even question it, than to simply let it happen. If there was anything he spoke up about, it was his mild disapproval of how much of the party was being paid for by Paz’s credit card, when she was already so much in debt. Paz brushed the fears off, said that she’d worked overtime over the holidays and would have more than enough to pay the credit card off. By which she meant pay the minimum off, as always.

  Sometimes Hero came home late in the evening and the preparations would still be going on, Paz and Pol at the kitchen table, Paz making up diagrams of where people would sit, scratching out names and then rewriting them. At least half of the people were distant relatives, some of whom neither Paz nor Pol had seen in over a decade. The rest of the people were friends, coworkers, friends of friends, family of friends, friends of coworkers, family of coworkers.

  We don’t know half these people, Pol said.

  I see them at church, Paz replied. They’re Belen’s friends.

  Belen was Charmaine’s mother, and Charmaine was the girl who’d been involved with the fight that had gotten Roni suspended, the one who’d lied to their teacher about being involved and failed to recruit Roni to her ruse. Hero had seen her in the parking lot after school, talking to Roni: a much taller girl, with her hair in a precise braid. She was picked up in a BMW sedan by her mother, who was usually dressed in black slacks and a tweed jacket. Both Belen and her daughter were mestiza, either naturally, in Charmaine’s case, or with the help of a foundation two shades lighter, in Belen’s. Hero wouldn’t have registered the makeup before, but watching Rosalyn’s work had made her more attuned.


  Paz sometimes brought supplies home from the hospital, syringes or insulin or stronger fluocinocide and hydrocortisone creams, and instead of putting them in the drawer where the extras usually went, she put them in a paper bag, labeled FOR BELEN. Hero was used to that kind of thing, knew that Pol, too, sometimes took things from the hospital to give to friends in need, but there was something about the ceremony of how Paz did it, the way she found a clean bag, the way she wrote the label painstakingly, the letters big, like the words and names were important.

  On the guest list, Hero saw that Paz had written Belen Yaptangco Navarrete. But she was more distracted by what she saw above the name, the header of the particular stationery Paz was writing on.

  It said, in slightly unevenly printed letters, APOLONIO CHUA DE VERA, M.D., PH.D. FELLOW, INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS. At the footer of the stationery page was their address in Milpitas and the house number, written as CLINIC NUMBER.

  Hero frowned at the page. She remembered Pol’s old stationery, back in the Philippines, with the jagged surgeon’s cursive script of his name written at the top. Then below his name, his adornments: Fellow of the Philippine Orthopedic Association, Fellow of the Western Pacific Orthopedic Association.

  This stationery didn’t mention those associations. Was he a fellow of the International College of Surgeons in the Philippines, too? Had Pol applied for and passed the board, here in California? As far as she knew, he hadn’t practiced medicine since he’d left the Philippines. He certainly wasn’t using the house as a home clinic.

  Paz noticed Hero looking down at the paper and misinterpreted her look. She nodded to confirm a question Hero hadn’t even been thinking of asking. Yes, her mother is one of those Yaptangcos.

  The Yaptangco family she knew by reputation, if they were the ones Paz was hinting at. They’d founded one of the largest paper manufacturing businesses in the Philippines, owning and operating pulp and paper mills from Bataan to Cebu. Their name had been bandied out on Amihan’s long list of oligarchic families whose chokehold on the country’s resources was cannibalizing its future, before Eddie would hold up a hand and say, Does being an insufferable bore again count as cadre abuse? Why Belen was living in Milpitas if she’d come from such an illustrious family was a mystery to Hero. Although someone might say the same thing of her.

  Who cares what their name is, Pol said. Paz flattened her mouth.

  Pol had never been impressed by illustrious families, not in Vigan, not in Manila, not anywhere. Perhaps it was something as simple as a sense of pride; why should he be impressed by a family that was no better than the one he himself had issued from? But that wasn’t it, Hero knew. He’d been detached, not just from the De Vera name itself, but from the social obligations it demanded. Hamin and Concepcion cultivated friendships with the other landowning families of Ilocos Sur and Ilocos Norte, made regular trips to Manila to visit strategic friends: businessmen who were becoming politicians, politicians who wanted to do business. Pol had never done any strategic cultivation. He’d become a man far from the society of his peers, having lived and worked for so long in Indonesia, and the fact that he was a surgeon and not a budding mayor or industrialist only further distanced him from the daily politics of being a De Vera. Not entirely, of course; in the end, strategically or not, he’d cultivated and been cultivated. Tito Melchior had been the one to introduce him to Josefina Edralin in the first place, saying: Marcos has a very pretty cousin.

  When Hero first left for Isabela, she thought that would be the last she’d hear of people like the Yaptangcos, the Marcoses, the De Veras. But they were everywhere. And now they were even here, in California. They were the mothers of Roni’s classmates, they were in the restaurant asking for a rush order of lechon for an upcoming banquet.

  There were things Hero had hoped to cast off forever, but it turned out there were things that she couldn’t dislodge or forget, like the sound of Pol’s voice on the phone when she’d called him to ask for a place to stay, the night before she officially left for the mountains with Teresa and Eddie. Weeks before, uniformed soldiers had burst into the UST dorms looking for the students who’d been suspected of corroborating with the Communists, asking questions, making threats. By that time she was already living in Cubao, at an apartment belonging to one of Teresa’s journalist friends, waiting to be taken up to Isabela. She couldn’t stay and risk endangering Teresa’s friend for much longer, so she needed a place to sleep for the night. Eddie could drop her off somewhere quickly but not linger too long himself, just to be safe. The next morning he and Teresa would pick her up and they would leave for the mountains for good.

  The only phone number of Pol’s that Hero remembered wasn’t his home phone number in Dagupan, but the number of Nazareth General Hospital. She had to endure ten minutes of changing her mind, then hardening her resolve, after a chirpy nurse told her that Doctor De Vera would be right with her. When he finally picked up and Hero said Hello, Pol mistook her for Soly at first. She had to say, No, Tito Pol. It’s me.

  Hero told him everything, then and there: that she’d dropped out of school, that she’d joined the NPA, that she was going into hiding and could she stay overnight at his house in Dagupan before she and her comrades left for the mountains. She said it all without letting him interject. Afraid he would talk her out of it, afraid she would listen.

  At the time she hadn’t thought of what Pol must have felt; how he must have felt, someone who’d supposedly been at Malacañang that evening on the twenty-sixth of January, just hours before the palace turned the lights off and soldiers turned Armalite rifles on students and protestors. He must have seen just how cruelly his own comrades, so to speak, would deal with hers. She never thought about the possibility of Pol one day being called in the middle of the night and being invited to some far-flung regional morgue. Being asked to identify a dredged-up body: packed tight with river and earth, gouged of its soul. Having to say, Yes, I know her. She’s my family.

  If Pol said no, she thought, this would likely be the last time she ever heard his voice. Before that thought could sink deeply enough into her heart to change it, Pol spoke. He asked her when.

  * * *

  Paz made Roni try on two different birthday dresses, one from a department store in Palo Alto near Paz’s work, the other one made by the relative of a coworker. Both of them were pink. The first one, which Paz had bought really as a backup option, was simpler, the pink duskier, a better match for Roni’s skin tone; it had a full skirt, capped sleeves off the shoulder, and a bodice covered in lace the same color as the rest of the dress. There was something old-fashioned about it—or, not quite old-fashioned, but mature. The second one was a loose interpretation of a terno; puffy butterfly sleeves made of iridescent taffeta, sequins all across the bodice in what looked to be rose shapes, and instead of the traditional straight skirt, multiple layers of transparent fabric, alternating between white and the kind of bright pink that made the undertones in Roni’s skin look greenish.

  Hero tried not to laugh at Roni’s face when she came out of the downstairs bathroom in the second one, scratching at her arms, shoving the bottom of the butterfly sleeve up over her shoulder so the taffeta wouldn’t irritate the oozing plaques that were climbing up her inner elbows toward her armpits.

  That’s—nice, Paz said unconvincingly.

  No way, no way, Roni said, giving up on scratching and crossing her arms.

  It’s your first terno, Paz reasoned. Auntie Ariel’s sister made that specially for you. Even your Ate Hero wore a terno when she was a kid.

  Roni whipped her head around to stare at Hero, betrayed. You? You wore this?

  I had a terno when I was your age. Ternos, Hero amended. She noted that Paz had used her as an example, not herself. Paz had almost certainly never owned or worn a terno.

  And you liked it?

  Hero didn’t look over at Paz. I hated it. Mine was very itchy a
nd tight.

  In the end, they went with the department store dress. When Paz was out of earshot, saying there was another bag she’d left upstairs, Roni said to Hero, grinning slyly, that the skirt was big enough she might even wear shorts underneath.

  Paz came back with another bag that said Nordstrom on it, handed it to Hero. Dread rose up in Hero’s throat, just at the look of mounting glee on Roni’s face.

  I also bought you slacks and a blouse, Nimang. You don’t have to wear it. You can borrow something of mine. A dress or something.

  Paz’s voice forged through, confident, dismissive, and it was only the way the fabric twitched in her hands that told Hero that she was self-conscious.

  Hero looked inside the bag. It wasn’t anything remotely like Roni’s, to her relief and to the girl’s visible disappointment. It was just a pair of loose black pants with suspenders and a white rayon blouse, soft to the touch.

  Kasi you don’t like dresses, ’di ba? Paz asked, her voice now rising, openly anxious, seeing the look of surprise come over Hero’s face and interpreting it, not entirely mistakenly, as discomfort. That’s what Pol said.

  When Hero went to her room to try the clothes on, the trousers and blouse fit well, loosely, enough for her to feel comfortable. They felt like the clothes of someone more stylish, more graceful, more—more. They felt expensive, more expensive than the clothes Paz wore on her days off, more expensive than anything Hero wore. But the feeling of being in them, the feeling of being that woman, or looking like her at the very least, wasn’t. It wasn’t bad.