by Nicki Chen
This time, though, when she paused, it looked like something was wrong.
It was the beautiful goldfish with the white tail. The others were chasing her, biting at her underside. Trying to get away, she twisted and turned and hid behind plants. But they wouldn’t leave her alone. Diana leaned close and waved her hands. Stop! Please, please stop! she mouthed. What were they doing to her beautiful goldfish?
“Ma’am.” Clarita came up behind her. “Ma’am, can we go up to the roof?”
“What?”
“The roof, ma’am. Everybody is up there.”
“Why?”
“To see American planes and tora toras. Can we go up, ma’am?”
Diana turned away from the aquarium. “Why not.” Surely it was more humane to watch a dogfight in the sky than to stay here and witness this mob execution in her own aquarium.
They took the stairs the two flights up to the roof. Pulling open the heavy door, they stepped out onto the grubby top of the building and looked around, blinking at their total exposure to the hot, white sky. It was as though a party had formed on the roof, a casual, impromptu party attended by neighbors, most of whom Diana had never met. They were gathered in clumps, laughing and talking and looking up. The big attractions were the comical little tora toras circling high like hawks and two sleek Phantom jet fighters shouting their deadly force to the entire city, leaving their roar echoing across the sky long after they were gone.
“American jets,” people shouted, craning their necks. “F-5 Phantoms.” In normal times these jets didn’t fly over Manila. They stayed up north near Clark Air Base. Diana gazed at the sky until her neck cramped. Cory must have asked for help, she thought, rolling her neck to one side and then the other.
The rooftop “party” dragged on, but no one wanted to leave. People would disappear for a while and then return with folding chairs and beer and snacks. There was always something to watch: helicopters flying low over Manila Bay, jets zooming past too high to be seen through the cloud cover.
People here lived on political drama. They knew the actors and followed their opinions and their rise and fall from power. Expats who’d lived in the Philippines longer than Jay and Diana said that everyone had been starved for news, gossip, and drama during the fourteen-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. When he was chased out of the country and democracy restored, they couldn’t get enough.
Diana and Jay had missed the country’s most dramatic events by months. If they’d moved to the Philippines earlier that year, they might have arrived smack in the middle of the unrest caused by a rigged election or during the People Power Revolution with millions of people in the streets demanding Marcos step down.
But they hadn’t.
People who’d lived through that upheaval always seemed to be expecting something almost as big to happen again. Revolutions, demonstrations, and coups were entertainment, all the more stimulating and fun because they were real and just a little bit dangerous. She had to admit, she understood the attraction.
Looking up now at the white sky and rubbing her neck, she noticed that the city had become quiet, not totally silent but quieter than usual. A car here, a jeepney there, a few people walking along the boulevard, a kid on a bicycle, an ice-cream cart ringing its bell, a rooster, a dog. Shadows from the boulevard’s palm trees stretched across four lanes, leaving bouquets of shade on parked cars in front of their building. She glanced at her watch. Four o’clock.
“We should go down,” she said, suddenly worried. She’d forgotten about Jay. If he’d called while she and Clarita were on the roof and no one answered, she wouldn’t know how to explain their absence.
She didn’t hear from him until the next morning, day two of the coup. She was sitting on the bed watching television, barefoot and bare-legged in her short shorts. A senator in an expensive barong Tagalog was pounding his fist on the desk in outrage that government planes had strafed and killed their own troops. “They nearly cut one soldier in half at the waist,” he sputtered as the station switched to a video of the scene. Without warning, the camera moved in close to show bloody internal organs spilling grotesquely from the soldier’s body.
Diana gagged and clicked it off, tossing the remote across the bed. The phone rang just as she was beginning to remember the gruesome images from the Vietnam War that had invaded their living room every night when she was a teenager.
“Diana.”
It was Jay, his voice, rich and low and familiar. “Honey,” she whispered, suddenly feeling a great load of tension and loneliness slip away.
“Thank goodness! I’ve been trying all night to get through. Are you all right?”
“All night?” Her eyes stung to think how much he loved her. “I’m fine, honey. Fine. You shouldn’t have stayed up. You need your sleep.”
“Don’t worry, I napped. Listen, sweetheart, I’m trying to wrap things up here early. As soon as the Manila airport opens, I’ll fly back.”
She didn’t ask how he could complete a mission that was supposed to take ten days in three or four. This time, when he insisted she stay inside and be careful, she didn’t roll her eyes. Today it felt good to be loved and cared for and worried about.
“I’ll call you again tonight. Gotta go.”
And just like that, he was gone. The ceiling fan whirred over her head, going nowhere, stirring the stale air of their bedroom.
She turned off the TV and called Abby. She could always depend on Abby to add a note of levity. And she did. She made jokes about the coup and complained only briefly about Saudur’s plan to move them to Vanuatu.
When they finished talking, she called Madeline Dinh. As she might have expected, Madeline wasn’t impressed with the little coup playing out a couple of miles from her house. It must have seemed like nothing compared to what she’d experienced in Saigon during the early days of the Vietnam War.
“It does not affect us here in Urdaneta Village,” she told Diana. “Only problem, some people worry too much. Elise’s ballet teacher cancelled class. Now Elise has nothing to do. I have to give her a math assignment.”
They talked for a while. And then, even though it wasn’t quite noon, Madeline said she had to think about what to have for dinner. “I haven’t been to the market for three days,” she said. “I don’t know what I can make without fresh basil and cilantro. Even my lemongrass is wilted.”
“Quan is a lucky man, Madeline. You’re such a good cook.”
“Cooking is an important duty for Vietnamese wives.”
“What if you didn’t like to cook?”
Madeline laughed. “I can’t imagine such a thing.”
Diana felt a twinge of guilt. She did like to cook . . . more or less. Lately, though, she’d been spending less and less time preparing menus, teaching Clarita new recipes, or doing the cooking herself. The Asian women she knew never lost interest in cooking. They spoiled their families with delicious dinners every night of the week.
With Jay on mission, Diana realized, she was even less likely to cook. She should be paying more attention to food—the four servings of fruit, five servings of veggies, six of whole grains, and two or three of protein Dr. Feliciano recommended. And she would, starting today. But first she had to check on her goldfish. She’d been putting it off, afraid of finding the beautiful white-tailed goldfish floating belly up.
On first glance she was relieved. The goldfish were all swimming peacefully, turning and waving their long tails.
Then she looked more closely.
“Clarita,” she shouted, running into the kitchen. “Where is she? The white-tailed goldfish.”
Clarita looked up from the kitchen table where she was eating fish and rice. “She died, ma’am. I throw her away.”
Diana pictured a bloated little fish floating in the toilet bowl, a flush sending it swirling down and away.
“Shall I fix your lunch now, ma’am?”
“What?” Diana blinked. “No. No. Just coffee and toast today. Thank you.”<
br />
9
Clicking off the TV, Diana watched the tangle of images and sounds shrink with an electronic whoosh to a single white dot and then disappear. What a total waste of time! She’d spent the better part of the morning sitting in a darkened room, glued to the TV. And the Philippines wasn’t even her country.
She straightened the sheet, walked around the bed, and smoothed out the thin seashell beige cover. What now? She placed her hands on her hips and stared through the glass door at the brownish haze hanging over Manila Bay. Being cooped up in this barren wasteland of an apartment made her feel dry as sand.
As she turned away from the door, an image came to her unbidden of a woman, a foreigner, wandering across the sands of an Arabian desert.
Oh, lordy, she told herself. Snap out of it.
Lately she’d been having these little spells of expatriate ennui. They attacked her like a tickle in the throat that could easily go from bad to worse if she didn’t hurry and take a sip of honey-and-lemon common sense and remind herself that no one had much control over the course of events, even in their own country. Besides, the coup was winding down. It wouldn’t be long before it fizzled out like all the others.
After a shower, her wet hair smelling like an evergreen forest, she sat down at the desk in the guest room and took out a pen and some stationery. Every week since she and Jay moved to the Philippines, she’d written to Mom and made sketches for Andrew. It was a habit she’d begun out of a sense of responsibility but one she’d come to appreciate. Pulling together the events of the week gave her a chance to construct the story of her life—one version of it anyway—and to find some meaning and humor in it. That first year, her letters gushed with all the new and exciting and, yes, difficult experiences of living in a foreign country. Now, after three years, it was harder to find fascinating topics—though she always found something.
She clearly had to start that day’s letter with the coup. It wouldn’t be front-page news in the United States. In fact, her mother might not even have heard about it. By the time Diana’s letter arrived, it would be old news. But she couldn’t leave it out. She summarized the basic facts and assured her mother she’d been perfectly safe. It wasn’t hard to come up with comical sketches and doodles for Andrew. The coup lent itself to humor—if you wanted to think of it that way. She was smiling and finishing up a sketch of a man in a singlet hanging over his balcony and looking at the sky, shaking his bottle of San Miguel beer at a pair of tora tora planes, when Eddie Wu called.
“Diana, have you heard?” His voice had the breathless tone of someone dashing up a steep Hong Kong hill.
“Heard what?” She stretched the phone cord to get as close to the window as possible. What now?
“This whole thing has blown up. The government troops had the rebels on the run, but they didn’t bother to contain them. They allowed the insurgent troops who occupied Fort Bonifacio to retreat down McKinley Road and EDSA right into Makati, six or seven hundred of them. They’re holed up in the hotels now.”
As he ticked off the names of the luxury hotels in the financial district, the Mandarin, Intercontinental, Peninsula, Manila Nikko Garden, Diana’s heart jumped to her throat. Eddie was right, this coup had suddenly become serious. Most of her friends lived in the residential areas surrounding those hotels.
But why, she wondered, was he calling her? Their apartment on Roxas Boulevard was a thirty-minute drive from Makati, longer than that for rebels on foot. She was safe here, wasn’t she?
“Now they have hundreds, maybe thousands, of potential hostages,” he said, “snipers on the roofs and leaning out the windows. They shot up the big supermarkets and department stores. They’re crawling all over the villages—Bel Air, San Lorenzo, Urdaneta.” His voice cracked. “You need to stay where you are, Diana.”
“Your wife, Eddie, is she okay?”
“She’s fine. So far they haven’t invaded Dasmariñas. We’re going to stay in a hotel here on Roxas tonight. She’s packing a bag as we speak. I sent a car to pick her up.”
“Good.” Good for Eddie and his wife. Good for Diana. But what about Abby and Saudur in San Lorenzo Village, the Chatterjees, Browns and Yamamotos in Bel Air, and the Olsons and Dinhs in Urdaneta?
The Philippines’ raucous politics, not to mention violent goings on all across Asia, were familiar topics at dinner parties. But Diana and Jay and their friends were usually observers, not participants. The D-TAP officers provided aid and assistance. Their wives played tennis and mahjong and took care of their children. They didn’t get shot at the supermarket.
As soon as Eddie hung up, she dialed Abby’s number. “Abby, are you all right?”
“Fine,” Abby said, not sounding totally convincing. “I’m fine.”
“But Eddie Wu said the rebels are in Makati now.”
“So I hear.”
“You’ve been hearing gunfire?”
“No.” Abby’s laugh sounded strained. “I mean I’ve heard the news. Don’t worry about us, Diana. We’ll be fine.”
“Why don’t you and Saudur and the boys move in with us. It’s safer here on Roxas Boulevard.”
Abby laughed again. “I don’t think you want that. The twins would drive you and Jay up the walls.”
Diana objected, but Abby held firm. “Listen,” she said, “we’ll be quite safe here in San Lorenzo Village.”
They talked for a while, and then Diana spent most of the rest of the afternoon on the phone calling other friends and answering their calls. Each person had one more bit of information or piece of advice—or one more joke to ease the tension.
The sun was still up when she stepped out on her balcony. Two hundred feet away, in the building across the garden, a man was gazing at the bay from another balcony. Despite the clouds, his bare back looked golden as sunlight on a September afternoon. He ran his fingers through his dark hair, igniting red highlights. Then he turned toward Diana’s building, and she became part of his view as he was of hers, anonymous people in buildings across the space of a large garden.
Neither of them looked away, but Diana was thinking about Eddie now. He’d called earlier to remind her that the US Marines were guarding the American Embassy, so she didn’t need to worry about the rebels coming this way.
When the phone rang, she was expecting more breathless news from Eddie. Instead her brother’s distinctive, always serious baritone cut through the long-distance crackle.
“Diana, are you and Jay all right?” Andrew was never one to waste time on small talk.
“Jay’s in Korea. And, yes, I’m fine. I wrote you a letter this morning. Haven’t had a chance to mail it yet.” Was it only this morning? She flashed back to the light tone of the letters she’d written to Andrew and Mom, the funny cartoons she’d sketched. How quickly the situation had intensified! She’d need to add more up-to-date information to those letters. “Does Mom know?”
“She’s probably just getting out of bed. But it’s all over the news this morning—snipers on rooftops, tourists and expats getting shot.”
“Will she call you?”
“You can bet on it. As soon as she hears.”
“Just calm her down, Andrew. Tell her how safe I am. Remember, we don’t live in Makati anymore. That’s where it’s all happening—the snipers, people getting shot. Just tell her I promise not to leave my very safe apartment. Tell her not to call. It’s too expensive.”
“I’m worried about you, Sis. Urban warfare is the most dangerous. With the rebels dug in, it could go on for weeks.”
“Don’t worry, Clarita and I have a big bag of rice, and meat and fish in the freezing compartment.” She didn’t tell him how little they kept in their tiny fridge. Like most people in the Philippines, they made frequent trips to the market. They liked their produce fresh.
Before hanging up, Andrew gave her his priestly blessing. He’d been a seminarian the first time he gave her his blessing, and it had been all she could do to keep from laughing. Her big brother playing p
riest? The closer he came to his ordination, the more annoyed she became. His new identity seemed to distance him from her and Mom. By now, though, he’d grown into his priesthood. It suited him. And she’d long since come to expect their conversations to end with him asking God to bless her.
She put the phone down. Andrew’s mention of urban warfare was sobering. He was a historian. He knew what could happen and what had happened in other times and places. But he wasn’t here. So far the government wasn’t fighting the rebels; they were negotiating with them.
Diana walked across the room. Now what? She’d already talked to Abby and everyone else she could think of. She stood in front of the aquarium, watching the rhythmic opening and closing of the gills on the largest goldfish, the sheen of his body, the perfect design of his scales.
“Ma’am.” Clarita stood in the kitchen doorway. “Was that sir?”
“No. It was my brother.”
“Ma’am, when will sir come home?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“I’m afraid, ma’am. They say many terrible things on the radio. Sir should be here.”
Diana put her arm around Clarita’s shoulders. “I know. He’s trying. As soon as the airport opens, he will come. He promised. Now let’s go make something tasty for dinner.”
The two women worked together shelling shrimp, distracted from their worry by a friendly shrimp-shelling competition. Suddenly Clarita shook the shells off her hands. “I can make ginataan for dessert,” she said. “My friend downstairs has jackfruit. And we have kamote and sago, two saba bananas, a coconut . . . Oh!” Her buoyancy suddenly collapsed. “No ube.”
Ube was just another yam, and they had yams already, but it was purple, and ginataan didn’t have enough color without a few chunks of purple ube.
“Maybe my friend has some,” Clarita said, regaining her good humor. She untied her apron and hurried out the door.