Mango Seasons

by Michelle Cruz Skinner

  In the hospital, the drops fell endlessly against the corrugated tin roof. The gray was a warning not to go out. So we stayed inside, sleepwalking through lunch and dinner and injections and bedpans.

  Gemma slept her first week and when she woke she seemed to be sleeping. Her eyes stayed focused on the ceiling for hours. Then she would look at the blank wall, then her feet. I moved around so she could not focus on me. I was thankful when the nurses, the doctors, Nick and the children came into the room. I could sit still and breathe easily.

  Even now that Gemma is home, she still is too white and skinny. I make her eat and she tries for me, I know. I dress her warmly, reminding her to wear socks. I tell her to sit out on the porch, in the rocking chair, so she can get some sun. I’m afraid of what people will think of her now that she’s started school again and everyone can see the sharp bones of her elbows. I’m afraid of what they will think of me.

  Nick, lying in bed, said, “We should have brought her to the doctor earlier.”

  I pretended to be asleep, but finally I replied. “We brought her soon enough.”

  “Why didn’t I notice?” Nick said it softly and in a voice like he was going to cry.

  I felt a hard emptiness in my throat. At times I have wanted to yell at him for not seeing what people are, for not knowing what is in front of him. He had never noticed enough until that moment when he realized it and almost cried.

  I rolled over and laid my arm across him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why we didn’t see it.” He seemed so small at that moment, all curled up. I ran my fingers through his hair until we both fell asleep.

  Today Gemma said to me, “Mommy, I don’t recognize some of the people in my class.”

  “Maybe they’re new students. They joined the class while you were sick.”

  “But I don’t remember a lot of them,” she insisted. She sat in the chair with her legs crossed and watched me knead the ensaymada dough on the kitchen counter. “I sometimes wonder if I imagined it.”

  “Imagined what?”

  “Everything before I got sick.”

  “Well you were sick. You just don’t remember everything very clearly.”

  “Sometimes…” Gemma’s head was bowed so I could hardly hear her. Her fingers pulled at the stitches on her skirt. “I’m not sure I’m not dreaming.”

  I stared at the white dough stuck to the tile and to my fingers. Gemma stood up and went to her room. Nick, please come home, I willed. But I knew he wouldn’t be home for two more hours.

  I took a deep breath and began again, rolling the dough into a thin sheet that covered half the counter. Then, using the small, paring knife, I cut the sheet into four strips and drizzled butter, sprinkled sugar, on each one. Gemma came sleepwalking back into the room, dressed in an old duster and socks. She sat by the window and opened a magazine. I carefully rolled a strip of dough and placed the round ball into its pan.

  “Don’t you have homework?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “You want to help me with this?” She looked at me with her sleepy eyes. “I need you to help me roll these up.”

  I’m trying to keep us moving, keep us focused on something real, like the dough rising between our fingers.

  The

  School

  of

  Fathers

  This morning, when Vince left, we rode all the way to the base in silence. When we got to the recruitment building, I said “good luck” and “write us.” We didn’t even hug.

  To be completely honest, before he came I had hoped not to see Vince again. I knew I would see him, inevitably, but I didn’t want it.

  I think of Vince as my first failure as a father although he’s not my son. When Nanay had him I was already sixteen. A year later Tatay died and I left for college. I’m afraid I’ve been too much that way with Emil and Marisa. Eat, sleep; come and go. Gemma I know better: I buy her favorite peanuts, I don’t tell her ghost stories that are too scary. With Vince, I never know.

  His arrival was at such a bad time, too. Gemma had been sick and had a cold that worried us, Emil and Marisa were fighting, the bank was reshuffling people into new positions. In the midst of this, Vince walked in the door with me, tracking mud onto our beige tile floor. Clara smiled anyway. I kissed her cheek and was glad for the smoothness and her smile.

  “You look as lovely as ever,” Vince said to her. She gave him a hug and kiss, offered him juice. She’s truly kind. I wish I could be so easy with him.

  Two months ago he wrote, the only time he had written in the last five years, and asked if he could stay with us for a short time. He wanted to join the U.S. Navy. He’d gone through a preliminary process, the letter said, and was asked to show up at the naval base for further steps in the selection procedure.

  Clara wrote back that of course he could stay with us. I didn’t want him to come because I was afraid he would be disappointed. If he didn’t pass what would he do? What could I do? But we had to let him come.

  “He can stay in Emil’s room,” Clara said.

  But I wasn’t sure I wanted him with Emil. I didn’t want them to talk.

  “We don’t have anywhere else for him,” Clara pointed out.

  Vince didn’t know the children and didn’t feel comfortable around any of us. His first morning here, I found him talking to Mila over breakfast.

  “So where are you from?” he asked.

  She was holding the empty pie pan that Naty always heated the pan de sal in. “I grew up in Kalookan, but we’re from the Visayas.”

  “O, where in the Visayas?”

  “It’s a small town. You wouldn’t know it.” She took a few sideways steps toward the kitchen. Vince was eating the second of his pan de sals.

  “I’m from a small town too,” he said. Mila stopped. “Well, smaller than Olongapo. We’re from around San Fernando, you know. Didn’t Nick ever mention that?”

  “No,” said Mila. Then, “He probably did. I may have forgotten.”

  I set my briefcase on a living room chair and the creak seemed to startle them. “Good morning,” said Vince.

  “Good morning,” I said. Mila left with the pie pan and the dining room was quiet after that until Clara and the children joined us.

  A few days later I came home from work to find Vince sitting in the living room talking to the children. Gemma was on his lap. “O, I see you’re telling stories.” I smiled and bent down for Gemma to kiss me. I was glad to see he was getting comfortable with us.

  “Tito Vince is telling us what happened today,” she said. I had dropped him off for his first appointment that morning, the first of two days of physical exams.

  Vince smiled, a little uncertainly it seemed. “Let me change and I’ll be back out,” I said and smiled again to encourage him. I’m sure now he thought me foolish. He doesn’t understand me any better than I understand him.

  Vince told the children about the hospital where he had to go for the physical, about all of them riding there on the bus from the recruiting station, and then waiting to go through one test after another. He described the hospital all white and cold because of the air conditioning, and told them about the other men who were with him, one from as far away as Cebu. I sat in the far chair and listened along with the children.

  He said they couldn’t go to lunch until all the morning’s tests were done and it was taking longer than they had been told. “And we were so hungry already.” In the hallway was a machine that sold candy and other snacks and another machine with soft drinks, but he and the others didn’t have any American money. So they all sat there, hungry and not able to do anything.

  Then Vince saw a pretty Filipina dressed in the blue uniform that some of the hospital staff wore. “So I asked her in Tagalog, ‘Excuse me, Ma’am, can you change some money for us?’ She looked at me confused.” Vince imitated her look and the children giggled. “Then she said, ‘I don’t speak Tagalog.’ Ay, the others teased me, telling me not to bother,
that she was from the States and she wouldn’t understand me. But I speak much better English than any of them, so I apologized and asked her again.” He said she was interested to hear he was joining the Navy because her father had done the same years before. She was from Pasadena and also in the Navy, a corpsman, which meant, said Vince, that she worked with the doctors, like a nurse. Then she changed enough of their money so they could buy peanuts and candy and drinks.

  “She asked where I’d be assigned and I told her I didn’t know yet. Ay, the others were all jealous. They said she probably thought I was guapo and she’d be looking for me tomorrow.”

  I sat in the far chair embarrassed. I hadn’t realized until then how easily he could exaggerate. He always was guapo, but ’Nay taught us better than to talk so shamelessly.

  “What did the lady look like?” asked Emil.

  “Emil,” I interrupted, “go get my wallet.”

  Emil reluctantly got up to fetch the wallet. “And the change from my dresser too,” I yelled. When Emil returned with the money, I gave some of it to Vince. “So you won’t have to ask pretty girls for money anymore.”

  “Then what excuse will I have to talk to them?” he said and smiled slyly at Emil. I worried about what Vince was telling him.

  I’ve never talked enough with Emil, except when we play basketball and I’m teaching him. Sometimes he gets frustrated and won’t play. I wish I could do better with him, really with all of them. I don’t want always to be teaching, but I don’t seem very good at other things. When the children were babies, I didn’t hold them much, and I think now I should have. Maybe that would have helped me to be easier around them, to really know them.

  I remember seeing Emil drink Ovaltine and being surprised because for years I’d thought he didn’t like it. And Emil told me, no, it was Milo. He didn’t like Milo in his milk. That stopped me, that I hadn’t known something so simple. I wondered what else I didn’t know or thought I knew.

  After Vince was born I tried to carry him a few times, but I was afraid I wasn’t holding him right, that I would hurt him. And he always cried to be returned to Nanay. With the children, it always seemed easier to buy them presents or tell them stories and in this way I suppose I’m not very different from Vince.

  After his second day of physicals, he brought them M & Ms from the machine at the hospital. “You’re lucky,” he said as the children sat at the dining table eating the M & Ms and doing their homework. He looked at me for a moment then away again. “This is a nice house.”

  I wondered if he was accusing me. When I started working, I always sent him and Nanay money, as much as I could. Nanay always wrote me about how they were doing, what grade Vince was in. The Vince I saw when I went home was never the same as the Vince Nanay wrote about.

  After Nanay died, I asked him to live with us, but he didn’t want to and I didn’t want it either. He was only eleven, but maybe he knew this. I didn’t know how to fit him in with the two children who seemed enough. I didn’t want my life to change. So he stayed with Nanay’s sister instead and I sent her money.

  But Vince acts around me as if I did nothing. I have tried to be responsible.

  I wanted to say this. I wanted to tell him, I kept you clothed and in school and eating. All these years. Because he acts as if it never happened and I need acknowledgment of something. I want gratitude too, I suppose. But mostly—I believe this—mostly I need him to acknowledge it happened, that I in a small way did right for him.

  I think he has convinced himself these things came about some other way. He seems to be able to change the stories of his life just like that. He said something to the children that would make them believe their lola was a maid or a labandera, washing other people’s clothes, working herself to the bone.

  “She talked about the children all the time,” said Vince. “She hoped Emil would grow up to become a doctor.”

  “Really?” said Emil.

  “Yes,” Vince replied. “She wanted me to be a doctor too, but that’s not possible.”

  “Why not?” Emil asked.

  “I don’t have enough money. She worked long hours to support us, you know. And she was always tired and her fingers hurt. She had arthritis. After she died, there wasn’t much left.”

  Clara looked at me to make sure I wasn’t going to say anything. I wanted to explain that she was a teacher, but I kept quiet. Clara and I looked at each other then back down at our plates with the bones and pieces of vegetable. I felt sick.

  As we were getting ready for bed she reminded me he wouldn’t be staying with us much longer. “The navy will have to make a decision soon.”

  “What if they say no?” I said.

  “Then he’ll go home.”

  But I wasn’t sure about that. I was afraid he would stay. As it turns out, they took him and he’s not staying. He’ll be farther from me than he’s ever been. First the States and then maybe Europe. He’s said if he can’t stay in the States, he wants to go to Europe. I hope they give him his request.

  I really don’t want him back here too soon and this makes me feel guilty. I should be more of a brother. But it’s too late now. What am I supposed to do about a brother who recreates his life as he goes along? A brother who talks as he does?

  I just wanted him to leave. I wanted the children to myself again; I wanted to be able to sleep easily with Clara. Before we were losing each other and the family and we didn’t do anything. It was as if we didn’t know what to do. Even if we had known how to fix it then, I don’t think we would have. We were willing to allow everything to fall apart. Thinking back on it scares me.

  I truly do love her and I’m not sure how I forgot that. How could I have forgotten her smile and kind ways? Her touch. The way she knows what I’m feeling and what I will do. I had forgotten how she felt held against me, so cool and smooth.

  Our lives seemed better once we moved to Olongapo, as if we had begun to slough off some parts of us. I just wanted Vince to leave.

  But somehow, I couldn’t simply let him go. Before he left, I suggested to Clara we give him a party. The way she looked at me I knew she was wondering why I had to do that. Trying to make up again, she knew. We told Vince about it and asked whom he’d like to invite.

  “Definitely the others who went through the program with me.”

  “Of course,” I encouraged him.

  “Ummm… the girl from Pasadena,” he said and laughed. “Emil’s girlfriend.”

  The table went quiet. Emil stared at Vince in shock then looked down at his plate. Vince seemed to realize he’d said something wrong. “Just kidding,” he said and smiled.

  “Who is she?” Marisa asked.

  Clara intervened. “It’s nothing, Marisa. Tito Vince was just joking. Why don’t you finish your dinner?”

  Emil keeps things to himself, so I should have known if he ever had a girlfriend, ever liked any girl, he wouldn’t tell us about it. But I wish he’d known enough not to tell Vince. I began to feel sick at the whole idea of a party.

  “Can we invite some people?” Marisa asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you invite a few friends?” I began to have a faint hope that the children could salvage the party.

  Clara organized the party and helped Naty prepare the food. Two days before, they were chopping vegetables and cooking some dishes. I gave Vince directions to give to his friends. “If they take the jeepney to the market and from there the Gordon Heights jeepney, they should be OK. And they know where to get off. How many are they again?”

  “Ten,” he said, which I already knew. I just kept hoping the answer would be less.

  The party was not bad, although it became awkward. I was relieved when it was over. Vince seemed pleased and talked mostly to the others who were leaving with him about what they would do in the States, where they would go. They joked about the women they would meet and I kept glancing at the children. I suppose really it doesn’t matter what they say. Emil and Marisa, who would under
stand, have already heard such things by now. I just didn’t like the way they talked. But Vince was a little drunk already before the party began.

  I never found out exactly how that happened. Emil just said, “We went to a nightclub.” He seemed a little hurt or disappointed and his two friends, Freddy and Efren, crowded behind him as if in some sort of pact. Freddy looked a little disappointed too.

  All I knew was Clara had sent Vince to meet Emil and his friends after school and buy some Magnolia ice cream on the way home. They were late coming home, they had no ice cream, and they smelled like cigarettes. Vince was surly with me and clearly drunk.

  “It’s always ‘where, where, where,’” he said sarcastically. “‘What, what, what.’”

  So Emil had to be the one to try and explain it. “We were thirsty so we went in for a drink.” He gestured behind him to the other two. “We only had soft drinks.”

  “OK,” I said and let it stay at that. Emil needs to keep some things for himself. I thought everything would be fine if I stayed away from Vince for the rest of the evening, and it was.

  Later, when we were eating the cake, without ice cream, Emil said to me, “He didn’t even give Nanay back her money.”

  I have to remind myself the children are smarter about these things than I realize. Emil knows Vince even if he doesn’t understand him. That’s why he didn’t want to be in the going away picture this morning—we had to coax him—and why he didn’t want to shake Vince’s hand through the car window as we prepared to leave.

  I’ve known too, longer than I realized. Before Clara and I got married, I went home to visit Vince and Nanay. I took him to a store in town to buy new dress shoes for the wedding, and afterward we ate ice cream. On the way home, he wanted candy, so we stopped at another store.

  Some classmates of his were there drinking soft drinks and playing sipa. They tried to keep the sipas in the air, kicking and kicking, the paper on each fluttering. Vince asked the woman in the store for a few of one kind of candy. Then he saw the Tootsie Rolls and asked me if he could have some of those too. I said yes, I saw him so rarely. What about the strawberry candies? he asked. OK. So he got those too and some White Rabbit candies and peanuts and two sipas to play with.