by Nicki Chen
Dulcinea’s churros were legendary. The Spanish bakery also had the best mango pies Diana had ever tasted, not to mention mouth-watering cream puffs, leche flan, brazos de Mercedes, and, of course, their fantastic sans rival. But now it was almost three o’clock in the afternoon, the hour when Dulcinea served fresh churros con chocolate. Every table was occupied with expat women and Filipino men and women, all of them waiting for the same thing. The baker would be in the back, squeezing loops of fresh dough into hot oil while his assistant prepared the thick Spanish-style cups of hot chocolate that went along with it.
Jangling her bracelets again, Abby waved at a passing waiter. “Tatlong churros con chocolate,” she told him, throwing a little Tagalog in with the Spanish.
“Ah,” Diana sighed. “This is great. We haven’t been to Dulcinea in such a long time.”
Abby and Madeline exchanged knowing grins.
“You haven’t, luv,” Abby said. “Since you moved to Roxas Boulevard, we hardly see you.”
“And we miss you,” Madeline added.
“I know. I miss you, too. It’s just that I hate fighting the traffic.” There I go, she thought, complaining about the traffic.
“For the life of me, I can’t comprehend why you moved there,” Abby said. “No one lives on Roxas. Nothing happens there.”
“Except our husbands’ work.” With Jay’s office walking distance from their new apartment, it had made a lot of sense to move. What hadn’t been reasonable was to keep paying the higher rent for a large house with a yard in Makati when there were only two of them. Sometimes Diana regretted being so susceptible to arguments of reason.
“Please!” Abby raised her palms to fend off the thought. “Please don’t mention our husbands’ jobs. I’m sick of hearing about the Development Trust for Asia and the Pacific. It’s all Saudur talks about these days. D-TAP, D-TAP, D-TAP.”
Madeline grinned. “Don’t they all?”
“Not like this. Every evening Saudur goes round and round grumbling about his boss. He’s fed up to here.” She grazed the top of her auburn curls. “Banerjee keeps giving the fisheries projects to some guy who knows nothing about fisheries and assigning Saudur projects that don’t match his expertise. He’s bloody furious.”
“Saudur?” Diana said. “You’re kidding. I’ve never seen him get even mildly angry, let alone furious.” Abby’s husband was a brilliant Bangladeshi with a Cambridge accent and a ready smile. He could get overly serious. But angry?
“That’s just it. He’s usually so mellow. This thing has been simmering for a while, though. Some blokes simmer.”
The waiter was already back. Balancing his tray in one hand, he served them small cups of thick hot chocolate and plates of churros sparkling with hot oil. Before leaving, he placed a fresh sugar bowl and three spoons in the center of the table.
“I have a bad feeling.” Abby sprinkled sugar on her churros. Then she broke off a piece and dipped it in the hot chocolate. “I’m afraid Saudur’s going to do something stupid.”
Madeline tilted her head to the side. “What stupid thing would he do?”
“I have no idea.”
“You see,” Diana said. “You can’t even imagine Saudur doing something stupid.”
Abby shrugged. “Listen, I’m sorry. I talk too much. How’ve you two been?”
“Fine. Always the same.” Madeline blew on her hot chocolate and took a sip. “Cooking, shopping, accompanying the children to the park or swimming pool, playing mahjong.”
On another expat woman’s lips, Diana thought, the list might have been a complaint, a description of the boring insignificance of her life. Coming from Madeline, it sounded more like an accounting of her blessings.
“How about you, Diana?” Abby asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Doesn’t sound like it. What’s the matter? Have you heard from your obstetrician about those tests you were taking?”
Diana pressed her finger into some stray grains of sugar and lifted them to her tongue. Then she cleared her throat and leaned across the table. “Tell me something. Do I seem stressed to you? Nervous?”
Abby chuckled. “Aren’t we all?”
“I’m serious. I mean more than most people.”
Abby took a bite of chocolate-dipped churro and licked her lips. “I don’t know if you’re stressed out, but you are bloody persistent.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. You don’t let things go. You’re kind of obsessive that way.”
“Oh, my god!” Diana said under her breath. Why didn’t people understand? What was she supposed to do, stop caring? Stop trying?
“Persistence is also a virtue.” Madeline nodded as she spoke, as though to confirm her own words. “We all need it at some time in our lives. But, Diana, what is this all about? What did the doctor say?”
“Nothing. After all those lab tests and X-rays, she couldn’t find a single reason why I’m not getting pregnant. Not unless you count being stressed as a reason.”
“So . . .” Abby raised her eyebrows. “If she couldn’t find anything wrong, that’s good, isn’t it? Just keep on trying. And if you don’t get pregnant, that’s all right, too.”
What? How could Abby say that? It wasn’t all right. It absolutely was not. Diana clenched her fists and tried to keep her voice steady. “Of course we’ll keep on trying. But . . .” She pressed her lips together and turned away. “We’ve been trying for such a long time. Ever since the day we arrived in Manila.”
“Oh,” Abby said.
“I didn’t tell you at first because . . .” She bit her lip. “It’s such a personal thing. Besides, I thought it would only take a few months, and then once I was pregnant, I could tell you. You probably got pregnant right away.”
They both nodded.
“Too fast,” Abby said with a crooked half-smile.
“That’s the way it should be, isn’t it?” Diana said. “A woman should be able to get pregnant.”
Madeline stirred her hot chocolate, watching intently as the thick dark liquid swirled around her spoon. And Abby—Abby who wasn’t afraid of anything—seemed to have trouble meeting Diana’s eyes.
Diana looked away and then back at her friends. She felt on the verge of tears, but she continued anyway. “After a couple years of trying, I decided there must be something wrong with me. Or with Jay. Wouldn’t you think so, too?”
“I guess,” Madeline said.
“And then I found this doctor, supposedly the best fertility doctor in Metro Manila, and I thought she’d be able to find a solution for us. This morning when I saw her scrawling something on her prescription pad, I was so hopeful.” Diana sighed. “Until I saw it. ‘Relax.’ That was what she wrote. Just ‘relax.’ Some prescription, huh?”
There was a moment of silence between them. Suddenly Abby lifted her half-eaten churro in the air like a scepter. “Well, then,” she said, “let us relax and eat and drink.”
Diana picked up her churro and studied it—the crispy ridges all along the bow-shaped pastry, the shiny sprinkles of sugar. Well . . . if this was what she had to do, so be it. “Okay,” she said, dipping her churro into the cup of hot chocolate. “I pledge to become the most relaxed person you know.”
She bit into the chocolate-dipped churro. And it was delicious. She took another bite and another. Mmm! Crisp on the outside, soft and moist on the inside. Lifting her cup, she let the thick chocolate linger on her tongue and slide slowly down her throat. “Soo good!”
Abby raised her cup. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, waving her cup in the air.
“To chocolate,” Madeline said, tapping Abby’s cup and then Diana’s. “It makes everything better.”
Diana put her cup down and licked her lips. “Jay and I have been talking about a beach trip over Christmas for our three families.”
“Brilliant idea!” Abby said.
“I told Jay you knew someone with a cottage at Hundred Islands.”
“Well,” Abby said, “to be more precise, I know someone who knows someone whose aunt has a cottage there. I’ll get right on it.”
“Before we met you and Quan,” Diana said, touching Madeline’s hand, “Abby and Saudur introduced us to the beaches here. We were still looking for a house when they dragged us off to Matabunkay.”
Madeline laughed. “Quan and I would not have conceived of doing anything so frivolous until all our affairs were in order—house, maids, car, school . . . everything. We are such serious people.”
“Or so you believed until you met us,” Abby said.
“Coffee?” the waiter asked.
The women nodded, and the waiter, a slender young man in a crisp white shirt, bent smartly at the waist and served their coffee.
“Salamat,” they murmured. He raised his eyebrows in subtle acknowledgement and backed away.
“I got such a sunburn on that trip.” Diana winced to think of it.
“Don’t remind me.” Abby poured cream up to the rim of her cup and stirred, sloshing it into her saucer. “We dodged the sun most of the next day, remember?”
On that trip, the men stayed outside under the trees, napping, talking, and drinking chilled sodas and beers while Abby and Diana remained inside under a fan blowing hot air across their even hotter skin. They snacked on salty potato chips and drank Coke and Sarsi. And they talked, starting with their lives since they arrived in the Philippines and moving onto the lives they’d left behind, a subject that, as if by mutual agreement, was seldom discussed among expatriate wives. You didn’t need to know Abby long, though, to realize she paid scant attention to convention.
“All these colas are gonna rot our stomachs,” she said, pulling a bottle of Chardonnay out of the little fridge.
They were on their second glasses when Abby draped her legs across the arm of a battered rattan chair and turned their conversation on its head. “Bloody Philippines!” She drained her glass and lay back, waiting for the last drop of Chardonnay to fall on her tongue. “I’ll never get used to this heat. Oh lordy! What I wouldn’t give for a foggy London morning, the buildings and trees soft and gray and fuzzy edged, and me hurrying to court in my high-heeled boots and leather gloves, a woolen muffler tucked around my neck.”
Diana hoped she wouldn’t go on. She wanted to like this life that she and Jay had stepped into. And so far she did. Her first inclination was to argue the other side with Abby: We’ll get used to the heat. By next year we’ll be old hands. But Abby was a lawyer—a solicitor, she called it—and anything Diana said would just elicit a stronger counterargument from her. So Diana sat back and listened.
Abby had wanted to stay in London. Her family lived nearby. She had been an immigration lawyer with her own practice.
“I adored the law,” she said, swinging her bare feet down to the floor. “Justice. Advocating for the downtrodden. All that glorious rot.” She ran her big toe back and forth on a bamboo slat. When she looked up, her eyes were sparkling with tears. “All those years of study, all that struggle getting established, finding clients—all of it wasted.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I knew that if we left the UK, we’d be gone for years. And if we ever went back, by then I’d be too old and out of touch.”
Diana squeezed Abby’s hand. She wanted to hug her new friend, but neither of them needed another degree of heat on their painful sunburns. “Did you tell Saudur how you felt?”
“Not straight out. How could I? He’d tried for months to get a job in his field. But no one in London wanted a Bangladeshi fisheries expert. When he got the offer from D-TAP, he was giddy. I argued with him a bit, pleaded my case. But I was just finishing up maternity leave, and a baby in each arm certainly complicated my argument.” She coughed out a mirthless laugh. “London loved me,” she said, pushing her hair away from her face, “but it bloody well failed Saudur. In the end, it was his future or mine. I stepped back, and we chose his career.” She sighed. “So,” she said. “How did Jay talk you into coming here?”
“Um . . .” Diana shrugged. “We both agreed.”
“Oh?” Abby said, raising her eyebrows.
“Okay,” Diana conceded. “Not at first. You know . . .” She bit her lip. “We had a nice life in Seattle—two jobs, a house, my mother nearby.” She looked away, trying to remember how it happened. “I guess . . . well . . .” She shrugged. “Jay was so enthusiastic about working at D-TAP. He called it his ‘dream job.’”
Abby nodded knowingly.
“And then, I started thinking I should be more adventurous. Try something new.” She looked down, her eyes falling out of focus. “I wanted a baby, but I think I also wanted something more out of life. I didn’t know what . . . something.”
“That elusive something,” Abby said. She stood up, and for a moment there was an awkward silence between them. Then, she tottered to the sink and turned on the cold water. “Damn, it’s hot in here,” she said, sticking her head under the stream of water. She stayed there until her red hair was good and wet. Then she straightened up and shook her curls like a dog after a swim.
That day, Diana had sympathized with Abby. At the same time, though, she’d wanted to think of her own situation as quite different. True, she too had left her job behind, and she’d also worked all her life to build a successful career. But an accountant’s job wasn’t about justice or serving the downtrodden. All that mattered for an accountant was getting the numbers right. You couldn’t cry over a job like that, could you? Back then, Diana believed she’d be able to return to her career later and that soon she would have a baby to care for.
It had seemed so easy in those early days. So certain. She lifted her cup and stared at the black, bitter coffee. Leaning closer, a partially formed reflection of her face took shape on its wavering surface—an under-the-nostril view of half her face. Ugly and incomplete. She quickly blew it away and took a sip.
“We’ll have to bring large floppy hats and plenty of sunscreen on this trip,” Abby said. “The twins will want to be in the water all day long.”
That first beach trip had been Diana’s introduction to snorkeling. Before then, none of them except Saudur had snorkeled. He had taught them all. “The snorkeling should be good at Hundred Islands,” Diana said, imagining herself floating facedown in the warm sea, gazing at the fish and coral. Relaxed. Totally relaxed.
She wondered: Would a stress-free getaway really make any difference? Could Dr. Feliciano actually be right?
4
The parking lot at Cartimar was quiet. The housewives and maids who shopped early looking for the freshest fish and seafood, the choice cuts of meat, and the best selection of fruit and vegetables were long gone. Only the late and the lazy remained, and those shoppers like Diana who’d come for something else. Even the carry-your-bags boys seemed to be finished for the day.
The other regular at the Cartimar parking lot was a boy—a teenager really. He kept apart from the others, hiding in the shadows, waiting for the right moment. Then he’d sidle up to a lone shopper and pull aside his rags and expose his fingers and nose, eaten away by leprosy. Whenever he approached Diana, she gave him money. She wanted to help the poor boy. But it was hard to look at his sores. She was ashamed to admit that she was always relieved when he didn’t show up.
Today she had just one errand to accomplish: pick up some orchid food at a little shop across from the wet market. The shops, which sold handicrafts, potted plants, birds, fish, and the occasional dog or cat, were separated from the main market by a road and a single strip of parking places. The little shop that sold orchid food was at the far end of them.
The nervousness didn’t take hold of her until she’d finished buying the orchid food and was on her way back to the car. She felt it first as tightness in her shoulders and neck and the back of her head, then as a racing heart and an overwhelming hunger for air. It was that poor boy with leprosy. Every time he’d approached her, she’d been returning to her car. She tried to look normal and relax
ed as she surreptitiously searched for him in the shadows between cars. Last time, though, she hadn’t seen him until he was right there, at her shoulder. She fished in her purse so she’d have money ready in case he stopped her.
This was the leper’s tragedy: the disgust people felt. The shunning. The fear. Knowing that leprosy wasn’t as contagious as people used to think didn’t help. She still felt sick to her stomach when she saw the boy’s open sores.
Her car was waiting for her, baking in the sunshine. As she unlocked the door, she couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder. She turned and waited a moment, half-hoping the boy would show up so she could give him something and half-hoping he wouldn’t.
Once inside, her breathing returned to normal, but her muscles still felt tight. Was this what Dr. Feliciano meant about her showing signs of stress? She leaned back against the seat, letting its searing heat soak into her back and relieve the tension. Maybe she was an uptight person.
She closed her eyes, enjoying the warm, moist sauna-like air. Dr. Feliciano probably practiced yoga and believed in meditation and essential oils and the healing power of precious crystals. What Diana wanted from her, though, was science. Instead the doctor had given her a diet and some exercises and told her to keep track of her menstrual cycle and fertile periods. And now all the doctor had for them was her exhortation to relax. Where’s the scientific precision in that?
She slid the key into the ignition and stopped.
What the heck?! As long as she was here, she might as well give the doctor’s advice a try. What could be more relaxing to watch than the languid to and fro of her own fish?
A nasty smell drove her from the first pet shop, only to find herself at another dingy storefront. Gritting her teeth, she walked in the door and hurried past the snake cages and an obnoxious mynah bird with no table manners. The parakeets were lovely, though—dozens of them tweeting and fluffing their feathers in huge cages. She stopped to admire a parrot while nearby an elegant white cockatoo fanned his yellow crest.