America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  I got this, you said when you finally got your shit together, meaning, wanting to mean, wanting it to be true so much there was no way you could ever fucking say it aloud: I got you. You pressed your middle finger down on Hero’s clit—slick, saliva-warm, too wet if that was even possible, fuck, you’d been sloppy as hell, no wonder—enough. No time to lose it. Time to work. You pressed your middle finger down onto Hero’s clit, gentle at first, the way you liked it, and started in on the familiar slow circle, not trying anything fancy, aiming straight for the heart.

  Hero had known for a long time about your crush; that was pretty clear. It was also pretty clear that Hero was dead set on telling herself that it was just a crush: nothing to get worked up over, easy enough to work around. Hero was probably gonna keep on fucking around with other people; you’d never asked her not to, and even if you’d wanted to, you had the feeling your skills in bed were, to say the least, nothing that suddenly would get Hero hyped about monogamy.

  That was fine. You were patient, or could be. What you didn’t want was for Hero to take one look at you, and know. Just know. And then—run like hell. Leave you for dead.

  Bíba, Babaero

  The problem with having somewhat good sex with someone reasonably available—well, reasonably; immoderately and extravagantly available, more like—was that, once had, it was difficult not to want it all the time. It was difficult for Hero to remember that she’d spent months and months filling up her days with something that wasn’t fucking around with Rosalyn, that in fact she’d gone most of her life doing things that weren’t fucking around with Rosalyn, that she had an entire lifetime’s worth of evidence showing that it was possible to think about things that weren’t fucking around with Rosalyn—and yet. Hero found herself ignoring all the evidence in favor of spending her days thrumming, like a machine that had been left turned on and then forgotten about, leaking electricity, draining itself dry, until Rosalyn got within hand’s reach again.

  It didn’t help that Rosalyn kept finding absurd reasons to call Hero into the kitchen and then to shove her against the sink and crane up for Hero’s mouth, needy, hip to hip, acting like she’d gone deaf to any attempts at reason, while Boy and Adela were out in the restaurant talking to customers about what everyone had been talking about that week, which was the impending eruption in Pinatubo.

  Hero heard about the tens of thousands of American soldiers who’d been airlifted out of Clark Air Base, had been trying to keep up on the news while she was in the car, but found she was too exhausted from work to watch the evening news, as Pol did before he left for work. Most of the people in the restaurant were concerned, but not particularly scared; volcanic eruptions happened all the time, like with Mount Taal. Pinatubo was bigger, of course, but still.

  Rosalyn put her thigh between Hero’s, giving Hero something to rub up against, and then, in her haste, Hero knocked over a container of barbecue sauce, the entire day’s worth.

  Hero broke away like she’d been shot, looked down at the mess she’d made. Rosalyn started laughing, her hand over her mouth. Punyeta, Hero hissed, then grabbed for paper towels, her hand smarting from moving too quickly. She waved at Rosalyn without looking at her. Just—stop laughing—

  Rosalyn’s shoulders were still shaking with laughter when Adela came back into the restaurant and demanded, Anong ginagawa ninyo dito? What the hell are you guys doing in here?

  Butterfingers over here spilled all the sauce, Rosalyn said. Adela tsk-ed. Get the extra in the fridge. I’ll make more.

  Hero tried to get up, her hands sticky and red, barbecue sauce on her jeans, her shoes, the bottom of her shirt. I’m sorry—it was my fault. I’ll clean it up.

  Adela shook her head, waved Hero to the sink. Just wash your hands. Do you need to change your clothes? Rosalyn can lend you some, just go back to the house—

  No, Hero interrupted, much too fast and much too loud, refusing to acknowledge the look of what she could tell was wolfish excitement rising on Rosalyn’s face. No. It’s fine. I’ll just wash my hands.

  Despite the fact that they were all over each other the minute they were alone, Hero was surprised at how little Rosalyn let on when she was around her friends and family. Hero had always assumed that no one, barring perhaps Lola Adela, knew about Rosalyn’s preferences, and so she’d already known that she and Rosalyn would have to hide whatever they got up to. But she hadn’t expected Rosalyn to be so good at it. They could have been fucking in her bed half an hour before going to one of Maricris’s rehearsals, but once Rosalyn was in the presence of other people, she would look at Hero the way she’d looked at her when they first met, interested but separate, even as Hero would stare at Rosalyn’s fingers and know that if she lifted them to her face, she’d smell herself there, find herself under the fingernails.

  It discomfited Hero, at first, how good Rosalyn was at hiding—at lying, really—but then Hero took her coolheadedness for a good sign: Rosalyn, having now slept with the object of her attention, was probably now in the swan song of her crush, faced now with the real face of the fantasy she’d nursed her minor infatuation on; dimmer, rucked-up and used, human-sized. It was a good sign, Hero told herself, and told herself, until she half believed it.

  All in all, it was a problem. It was a problem how much she liked it, it was a problem how little she was thinking of other people, it was a problem. Which was why, less than two weeks after Lola Adela had found them in the kitchen, Hero asked Jaime if he wanted to go up to the city.

  They hadn’t gone up together in a while, not since the Calaveras Hills were still green and not straw-beige and dried out like they had been over the summer. Instead of going up to the city, Jaime invited her to a house party in Hayward, a going-away party for one of his old friends from his time in Elmwood. Jaime mourned in the car on the way.

  Fucking everybody’s moving away, man. Down south, or to Vegas. The Bay’s getting too steep.

  They separated not long after arriving, and later she glimpsed Jaime being kissed into a couch by a girl much shorter than him, dressed in tiny shorts and what looked like a cropped Warriors jersey. It was hot that night; Hero was wearing a tank top, too, and so was Jaime, the tattoo high on his arm that she’d seen through his T-shirt the first day they’d met finally visible again. It was too far away to be sure, but it looked like Baybayin characters. Hero didn’t know how to read Baybayin, but there was a poster in Rosalyn’s bedroom that looked like it had been hung there for years, and the letters in that poster matched the letters on Jaime’s arm. Hero turned away from Jaime, and let her gaze lock on to the lanky moreno who’d been eyeing her since she’d walked in, who didn’t have tattoos, didn’t resemble anything like Rosalyn’s bedroom.

  When she got home, her mouth chalky-dry and bleachy with traces of semen, Paz and Pol were both in the kitchen. Paz was on the phone, shouting in rapid-fire Pangasinan, and Pol was watching her, occasionally interjecting in Tagalog or English when he understood something Paz or her sister Rufina had said.

  If the highway between Manila and Pangasinan is full of ash, of course they shouldn’t travel, he said.

  Paz, confused by Pol’s Tagalog, started speaking in a broken Tagalog to her own sister, jumbling it up with her Pangasinan, then sometimes breaking into English, so Hero could eventually make out that Paz was ordering Rufina not to breathe the ash in, to cover her face with a panyo, to stay inside, that they didn’t know if the volcano would erupt again, why didn’t she stock up on water like Paz had told her to weeks ago, how much food did they have. The tone of her voice was stuck on a peevish, high-pitched yawp, like she was angry that she even had to be saying what she was saying, like she had to be angry, because the anger was her last fortification against the fear.

  Quietly, Pol said, You’re shouting, and Paz turned to him, hand over the receiver, and shouted back in English, I’m not shouting! This is just how I talk!

  On the phone, Ru
fina was saying, switching to Tagalog once she understood that Pol was also listening, that there wasn’t much ash to breathe in, the typhoon was hardening most of the ash into mud.

  Pol saw Hero standing there. While Paz spoke to her sister, he and Hero stared at each other. The wall of Pangasinan cut them off, gave them a shroud of privacy. When he finally spoke, he spoke in Ilocano, confirming what Hero had understood, but giving her the brutal mercy of receiving the news in her own language. Bimtak ti Pinatubo.

  * * *

  At the restaurant all through the week and into the weekend, when the worst of the eruptions and evacuations took place, people watched the news in silence, tapes of anime movies forgotten to the side of the VCR. Hero came to the restaurant on the weekend just to have something to do, was surprised to see that so many people did the same. Hero knew Paz was doing the same thing at work, with the rest of the nurses. Pol, likely with the other security guards. Paz came alive in scenes of emergency, relieved to push aside superfluous detail and make do with basic commands. She would call Rufina regularly, briskly gathering information, trying to find out who else needed money, if anyone’s home had been destroyed, trying to remember if she knew people who could give them a place to stay, if she knew coworkers who had family in the area and might have a free bed or five. Pol’s expression was grave, but composed. It was the expression of someone who knew without having to find out for himself that all of his family members were safe.

  Hero asked him, just once, if he’d called anyone, if he’d talked to Soly. She didn’t mention her father’s name. He shook his head. Paz, who was in the room when Hero had asked, interrupted to say she’d called one of Soly’s children. Everyone was fine.

  Hero knew from Amihan’s lectures that it was mostly Aetas living near Pinatubo, just as in Isabela many of the people they met and lived among were Aeta. Back then, Hero was still sometimes calling them negritos, a holdover from her parents, and the berating from Amihan was. Thorough. Beyond that, Hero knew only that Philippine National Oil had been working on a geothermal exploration program in Pinatubo for years. The building of the Magat Dam in neighboring Cagayan had made everyone in Isabela aware of the patterns that led to land theft. They joined up with NPA Cagayan and with Aetas from Cagayan to protest against the drilling, often risking retaliation from the soldiers who protected the building sites. By the time Hero got out of the camp in ’88, drilling had begun. The news in California didn’t mention the Aetas.

  Rosalyn sensed that the eruption had left Hero more withdrawn than usual. Did you, uh, know anybody—she started, tentatively. Hero shook her head, curt; annoyed that she didn’t know if she knew anybody, annoyed at her own safety, annoyed that after ten years in Isabela, she could still react to disaster like—a donya from Vigan, safe in her interior courtyard, paved with damili tile.

  Rosalyn reached out to touch her, but Hero’s limbs locked up in defense. Rosalyn pulled her hand away. Sorry, she said.

  After that, she gave Hero space, anxious and hangdog, waiting for the slightest hint of invitation. The shock of the disaster hadn’t endured in her, not really; for her, the horror of it all felt too far away, Hero could see that. Something that happened thankfully to someone else, somewhere else, a place that Rosalyn was now only distantly related to; not home, not anymore. That was true for Jaime and the rest of Rosalyn’s friends. It was truer for Hero than she cared to admit.

  Paz said both Clark and Subic Bay bases had been destroyed by Pinatubo. That would please Amihan, Hero thought. If Tarlac was within the radius of the eruption, Amihan in all likelihood knew people who were affected. Would the ash have fallen all the way to Cagayan, all the way to Isabela? Would Teresa have gathered the cadres in a rescue mission, evacuating villagers, meting out tarpaulin for makeshift shelters, accepting aid from white missionaries with her eyes smiling and her mouth flat? The clinic would be full of the injured: people who’d slipped and broken an ankle on a mountain incline that the typhoon had made as soupy as monggo, people who’d protected someone else’s body with their own when a part of a roof had caved in under the weight of the ash and rain, people who’d desperately need treating and Hero—wouldn’t be the one to treat them. There were other cadres with medical experience in Isabela; Hero had reluctantly trained most of them after failing to convince Teresa that the idea of her teaching anybody anything was absurd. They would be the ones to step up, the ones to bark out orders to the men with strong upper bodies, tell them who to carry and where, the ones to ration out the rubbing alcohol and then, when the rubbing alcohol ran out, to ration out the Ginebra, the ones to stay up until morning watching over the sleeping wounded, silently chewing betel quid to keep themselves awake. It was failing to remember the taste of betel nut in her mouth that made Hero get up from her stool behind the register, turn around, walk to the kitchen, and throw up quietly into the sink.

  Boy was at the stove, frying atsuete seeds in oil to store for the week. Hero didn’t look at him. If he said anything, she didn’t hear it, ears ringing.

  When she was done, she rinsed the vomit away, sprayed the sink with the disinfectant that Boy and Adela usually used for the countertops, splashed water on her face, and dried it with the front of her shirt. Then she went back out again into the restaurant, where a customer was waiting.

  * * *

  Hero knew that lust was one of the time-honored antidotes to sorrow, but that had never been her relationship to sex. Whatever sorrows lived in her heart were either too superficial to need such soothing, or too burrowed-in and settled to be eased out by something as mundane as coming for the fourth or fifth time against Rosalyn’s fingers in the kitchen late at night when the restaurant was long closed; Rosalyn multitasking by leaving eggs and longanisa frying in an oily pan while grinding into Hero’s lap, hand down her unzipped jeans, until Hero unclenched her teeth from Rosalyn’s ear and said, Something’s, uh, burning, and Rosalyn cursed and hopped off.

  Hero waited for her body to just get bored with it already, the chasmal gorge of her desire, many-chambered and spacious, a sunken caldera so deep she kept feeling and feeling for the floor of it—but every day she still came up wet, groundless. Rosalyn would get bored with it, then. She just had to wait.

  While she waited, Hero learned small, stupid things, like the wounded sounds Rosalyn made when she was about to come, or when she was moved by the death of a cartoon character. Like the fact that while Hero had a habit of falling into a sleep like the dead after sex, Rosalyn turned even chattier, energetic and restless, usually leading them on a hunt for snacks like Yan Yan or shrimp chips. She learned that Rosalyn hid things under her bed: old school notebooks with things like fLiP prYde and aZn LoVe scribbled onto the covers, or videotapes and manga she didn’t show anybody, which Hero found when she was on her knees in front of Rosalyn and saw them sticking out from underneath the mattress. Drawings of half-naked men wrapped up in each other, sometimes chained up, sometimes wreathed in flowers. Zetsuai Bronze, Ai no Kusabi, Hero read, climbing up from the bed, her knees cracking. Rosalyn made a dying-dog sound of embarrassment and covered her face, to which Hero said, Is this—is this pornography? And Rosalyn said SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

  Hero learned that in spite of the naked men in chains and flowers, Rosalyn could be prudish and uneasy about her own body and especially its odor, diligently shaving her underarms and mustache every other day, catching Hero’s bemused eye in the bathroom mirror as she smoothed a men’s razor across her upper lip. That Nair stuff burns my skin off, so. Hero said: You said you liked my mustache. Rosalyn huffed out: Yeah. Yours.

  And despite the fact that Rosalyn had gotten into the inconvenient habit of leaving hickeys all across Hero’s inner thighs and breasts, which were the first hickeys Hero had received since she’d been in high school—she thought once of teasing Rosalyn with that fact, only to pull back when she remembered that Rosalyn genuinely hadn’t fucked that many people since high school and thus had pro
bably never unlearned that age’s overeager fantasies of what ardor looked like, hadn’t had enough lovers to tell her that suck marks and bruises were, were, annoying or, or, but Hero couldn’t finish the thought, thumbing unthinking at the marks throughout the day, the twisted-up pulse in her pussy a damning rebuttal—Rosalyn was also sometimes prudish about sex. If Hero went to eat her out and Rosalyn hadn’t showered or was on her period or felt in any way that she stank, she’d cover her crotch with a hand, and no amount of teasing or tickling or assurance would get her to move that hand away. It’s not dirty, Hero would say, to which Rosalyn would reply, I didn’t even kaw-kaw this morning. Once afterward, Rosalyn asked hesitantly, What, what does it smell like, and Hero replied, You know those shrimp chips you get at Magat, and Rosalyn slammed a pillow into her face so hard Hero nearly choked on her own saliva, laughing.

  She learned that Rosalyn sometimes, haltingly, spoke of Jaime, about the person he was, and more rarely about the people they’d been together. She talked about Jaime’s beauty, the fact that he’d been that beautiful even as a kid, all lashes and lips, and people, boys, never stopped giving him shit about it—This dude in the eighth grade called them cocksucker’s lips, I got suspended for throwing a Coke bottle at his head—and that even though Rosalyn had been the new kid in school, she was the one who first swept him up into her care, bossed him around, made sure older boys left him alone. She and Cely, that was what they did, she said: looked out for Jaime. One afternoon in Rosalyn’s bed, Hero asked about the tattoo on Jaime’s arm.

  Rosalyn’s face went blank. Oh—you saw that?