by Mia Alvar
Annelise didn’t argue, but didn’t seem ashamed either, as she placed her hands at her sides and stood straight in her place. There was more giggling and murmuring. The pleats of her pinafore were perfectly ironed, but a single crease slanted down the back of her blouse. One fallen strand of her frizzled hair hung on to the wrinkle, stubbornly. I didn’t realize, till Annelise’s replacement began to read in a calm, dull voice, that Annelise’s had set my heart racing. I’d never heard a child speak to adults with such boldness, or stand almost with pride while being disciplined.
At the end of our lesson, after Sister Carol allowed Annelise to sit again, Father O’Connor brought out an offertory basket full of paper slips, which he shook gently. “It’s time to partner up for the fiesta,” he said. “Gentlemen, when I call you, please step forward and draw your lady’s name out of the hat.”
Students shifted in their seats. I believe it was fate that brought Annelise and me together, for Father O’Connor announced, as if on a whim, “Let’s start at the end of the alphabet today, and go backward from there.” He glanced at the roll. I had inherited my surname, like my handicap, from my grandfather, and—ever since Joel Zamora’s family had moved to Manila—always came last on the list. “Danny Wilson, Jr.,” said Father O’Connor.
Faces turned as Sister Carol helped widen an aisle for me. I rolled awkwardly to the front of the room. At each spin my wheels struck the legs of another girl’s desk, a sound that seemed to ring into the hallways. “Watch your step, Manny,” Ruben whispered. “You wouldn’t want to stub your toe.” The girls—each praying silently, I knew, for anyone but the class cripple—turned away as I passed, and fiddled with their girlish things: a gilt-edged Bible, mechanical pencils, a blue heart-shaped eraser whose left lobe was blackened and rubbed flat with use.
But I had a silent prayer of my own. I glanced at Annelise’s curls, and imagined their powdery scent, just before Father O’Connor lowered the basket before me. Was it Father O’Connor, or another priest, who had taught us to pray with pure and total trust that our prayers would be answered? I closed my eyes and reached for her name.
—
We took recess outside. Annelise and I stayed close to the hedges separating the high school from the little girls’ playground.
“How is your mother?” I asked.
“She’ll be ready to work again next week.”
“I didn’t mean—”
Annelise laughed. “She’s doing better,” she said. “My little brother kept refusing her nipple, at first. Like a spoiled little prince! But good old Dr. Delacruz brought us some formula.”
Annelise glided easily from Dr. Delacruz to her next subject and then the next, treating them all as casually as she had her mother’s nipple. You would presume from her tone that we had known each other for years.
“You seem different from the girls here,” I admitted. Then, fearing I’d insulted her: “Sorry.”
“I am,” she said. “I’m the ‘scholarship girl.’ The nuns took me on as their charity case.” She smiled and looked at me expectantly. “And you? Which ‘boy’ are you?”
It was not so easy to name my status. How should I explain the fine house, and the servants who were sometimes paid in bowls or jewels to maintain it? What title bridged the space between light skin and no legs, between a white hero for a grandfather and a half-white mother whose doings were whispered of in town? Which “boy” did all these things, combined, make me?
“I’m not the Delacruz boy,” I finally said.
Annelise nodded. As if their ears had pricked at the sound of Ruben’s name, some of her classmates approached, and made a show of holding their noses. “You stink, Negrita,” they said. “Stinks to be poor, eh?” Annelise turned away. She faced me and held the handles of my chair, her knees touching my trousers, so that we made a nearly self-enclosed unit on the grass. Her movement made a rustling sound like plastic bags.
“What’s in your diaper?” they asked. “We think Negrita needs a diaper change.”
My mother once fired a maid who, she said, filled the house with a wretched odor. “The poor live in a Dark Age of superstition,” said my mother at the time. “I won’t have her trailing her animal smells into my house.”
“In one ear and out the other,” said Annelise, looking down at me. “You don’t let the things they say affect you, do you?”
“No,” I lied.
—
Later that week Sister Grace and Father Johnson excused us from a joint Physical Education class, where the other pairs would learn a folk dance called the kuratsa. Annelise and I watched from the sidelines of the Doug Prep gymnasium. “It isn’t fair that you won’t dance in the fiesta, because of me,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You say this word a lot,” she said.
“Sorry?”
“There you go again.” Annelise grinned. “I used to be like that too. Shy, and ‘sorry’ about everything. Anyway, does that seem like a good time to you?” She turned to where our classmates were shuffling along, two by two, some looking like they wanted the gym floor to swallow them. “I wish we had our own radio, though.”
“I listened to Pusong Sinugatan last night,” I offered. I didn’t mention that I’d missed Annelise’s company just as soon as my class left Safety’s campus, that I’d wished almost immediately to go back to the Catechism lesson and the recess, or that I’d tuned in to the radio as a way, alone in my room, to conjure her. I didn’t talk about searching my Bible at home to reread Luke’s story of the bleeding woman. Daughter, faith has cured you. Go in peace.
“Well?” said Annelise. “Catch me up, then.”
I told her how, after the program had been following their separate paths for days, Joe finally laid eyes on Reyna at a dance. It wasn’t love at first sight—not for Reyna, anyway. Joe had to fight through a thicket of other suitors to say hello. Those suitors had only one thing in mind—so said the narrator—but Reyna was too blind to see it, or to notice Joe. It surprised me how easily I fell to talking about these people, like an old village gossip. As if they were neighbors and lived on our same hill in Monte Ramon.
Annelise sighed. “She’ll come around.”
I was sorry that she couldn’t listen at home. Before I knew what I was doing, I said, “You’re welcome to borrow it, Annelise. The radio. Next time you or your mother come…”
“That’s kind of you,” she said, “but we’d need electricity for that.”
I felt sorry again, but now I knew not to say so.
“Thanks anyway.” Annelise reached over as if to touch me, but gripped the armrest of my chair instead, helping herself up and excusing herself to the lavatory. As she crossed in front of me she smelled different, this time, from the laundry powder she had used to do our wash. She tossed her hair behind her, sending a damp and loamy scent in my direction. It reminded me of our garden after a very heavy rain, the grass and hibiscus buds gone slick and overripe under the weather.
—
Because we couldn’t do the kuratsa, Annelise and I were in charge of serving punch and cake at a dance—a kind of rehearsal for the March performance. The Safety girls wore fancy dresses to this event, with flowers on their shoulders and waists and hems. The boys arrived in white barong Tagalog—sheer dress shirts of banana silk thread or pineapple fiber, embroidered at the placket and worn loose over the undershirts we’d tucked into the waistbands of our trousers. I wore the same barong I’d worn at my Confirmation the year before, a plain linen one left behind by one of my mother’s visitors, still large on me. My classmates raised their eyebrows at the frayed sleeves, buttoning nearly at my fingertips. Ruben, whose barong seemed to have gold thread in it, called me Lolo as I filled his punch cup. I watched the clock and waited for Annelise.
An hour passed, and then another. She did not come. Three hours into the dance, there was still no one at the refreshments table but me.
A few girls from Annelise’s class approached. “Your Negrita girlfriend�
�s on the rag,” said a petite, snub-nosed one, taking a cup of punch from my hand. “She’s a freak of nature. Her rags go on for weeks and weeks and she can barely stand for pain. She’s bleeding her guts out right now.”
Sharp words, turning this girl’s tiny voice and delicate face ugly. I looked away. I knew so little of what female bodies did in secret. Women’s privacy, I’d been taught, was sacred. The second story of our house, my mother’s zone, was forbidden to me and difficult, in any case, for me to access. Sometimes, when I passed the foot of the stairs, I’d catch a gust of perfumed air or a flash of eastern sunlight as a guest opened my mother’s door and then closed it behind him. Ruben once smuggled a medical textbook of his father’s to school and showed his friends a page headed “Female Reproductive System.” Excluded from their circle, I glimpsed only something like a symbol of Aries, that ram’s head with great curlicued horns. These subjects felt as far from me as my mother’s quarters, closed and quiet at the top of the stairs that I could never climb.
“Maybe Danny’s mother can get Annelise some medical help,” Jacinto Cortez said. “Doesn’t Danny’s mother know Dr. Delacruz?”
Ruben Delacruz balled his fists. “Did you say something?” he said, staring Jacinto down and away from the table. When the gymnasium began to empty and Annelise still had not appeared, I wheeled my way home.
—
In Annelise’s absence, boys and girls alike went back to teasing me. After dismissal that Monday, Pedro Katigbak clutched his heart and forehead like a girl. “Help!” he falsettoed. “I’m bleeding to death! Oh, how can I stop this bleeding?” He placed a hand between his legs and made as if to faint.
Rizal Rojas lumbered over on his knees. “I am Manny-manananggal,” he said. “I can save you, Negrita.” He knelt at Pedro’s standing legs and looked up. “Negrita, let me drink your blood! I’m a womb-eating vampire, after all—and look! I’m the perfect height! Somebody get me a straw!”
The girls howled in squeamish, scandalized delight. Ruben Delacruz clapped his hands. “Well done,” he said. I tried to picture myself as an actual manananggal, flying my half-body high above the school-yard laughter. This little piece of vaudeville wasn’t the worst they’d inflicted on me, in my school career, but I felt new and unaccustomed to it. In the short time I’d spent with Annelise, I had forgotten what it was to be lonely.
After school, a group of students followed me home on their knees. They went as far as the gate and then abandoned me, knowing that our gardener would shoo them off with a giant pair of pruning shears. Once they had gone, I started to wheel myself past the front yard to the house, then stopped. Annelise lived down the other side of the hill, on the banks of the ravine dotted with squatters’ shacks. Without pausing to consider why, I turned my wheelchair and pumped past the houses on our street, then coursed down the yellow grass to the ravine.
It took some doing: each rut in the hill’s soil bumped me forward. I pressed my weight back to gain some balance. The slope seemed to grow steeper the further I rolled. I hooked an arm behind me, the wooden backrest in the bend of my elbow, while steering forward with the other hand. The grass gave way to rocks and mud, which clung to my wheels at every turn. Every few years, during the wet season, mudslides swept some houses clean off this bank into the creek. I feared toppling forward and landing in the water with my chair overturned, its dirt-caked wheels spinning.
By the time I reached the first shack, the air had thickened, with an overwhelming stench of smoke and urine and spoiled milk. The shacks were patched together from cardboard and plywood and other scraps, raised by stilts, and roofed with corrugated tin. Clotheslines joined one shack to the next like crude telephone wires. An old woman, her lips puckered inward where the teeth had fallen out, stood in front of the first shack. Some children kicked around a metal can beside her. When they saw me, they stopped and gathered to stare.
I recognized Annelise in their large bottomless eyes. Perhaps all the ravine’s children learned to look at people this way. Suddenly I remembered what was said about the squatters: that their kind would dive into canals and landfills, scavenging scraps to sell or use or eat. What would they do with me, an outsider in a school uniform, with a steel chair and books hanging from his mouth? I resolved to give them anything they wanted, so long as I could see Annelise and make it back up the hill, using my bare hands if I had to. Like a dog who’d just fetched for its master, I released my books into my lap.
“I am looking for Annelise Moreno,” I told the children. “Do you know where she lives?” One boy, wearing a shirt but no pants, pointed down the row of houses. A small girl said she’d show the way if I let her push me. I agreed, blinking away another vision of my chair upended in the ravine. My wheels sank slightly into the earth and caught every so often on rocks within it. But my young guide pushed with surprising force. She left me beside a woman yanking clothes off a line. “Over there,” said the woman, jerking her head to the next shack. “Girl kept us up all night with her moaning and crying!”
I tapped lightly on the side of the house. Instead of a door, a faded green tarp covered a gap between the tin walls. Because of the stilts, I could not go inside even if I were someone who entered other people’s houses uninvited.
When the tarp lifted, none other than the famous Dr. Delacruz emerged from the doorway, with his kind eyes and waves of gray hair. “Anak,” he said, surprised to see me there.
“Doctor?” I said, then explained: “Annelise and I are partners. For the fiesta. And her mother…works for mine.”
“But how on earth did you…?” The doctor looked from my wheelchair to the hilltop, in the direction of my house.
Annelise’s mother, our laundress, lifted one side of the tarp and looked out, her arms cradling an infant. I could hear groans from behind the tarp.
“Anak,” the laundress said, looking frightened, as if I’d come to scold her.
“Who’s out there?” I heard Annelise call from inside. “Danny?” I was not prepared for the smell that came from beyond the tarp, magnified since the gymnasium to something like raw meat and burning sugar. But I was even less prepared for the wail that Annelise let out just then, a sound of pain so mighty that it seemed the walls and tin roof might not hold it.
“Let’s go, anak,” said Dr. Delacruz. “The medicine might take some time to work. Right now your friend’s not in a state for visitors.” He wheeled me around and pushed me through the dirt, where Annelise’s smells gave way to the surrounding air of mud and smoke.
The doctor brought me up the hill and home. “And here I thought I was the only one from town who visits the ravine,” he said, kneeling to clean the mud off my wheelchair before we entered the sala.
“I’d never visited before,” I said. “I haven’t known Annelise long.”
Inside, he sat down on the sofa next to me. “How are the fiesta preparations coming?”
He was so kind I didn’t feel the need to lie. “Annelise can’t learn the dance everyone’s learning, thanks to me.” I told him how my day had gone, the new manananggal insult, the children hobbling home beside me on their knees. I didn’t mention Ruben, but the doctor winced anyway, as if my suffering were his fault. He stayed and listened until my mother came down from the bedroom with the electrician, who nodded quickly at the doctor as he hurried out.
When Dr. Delacruz greeted my mother, she barely nodded in return. On other days the doctor would bring food to us—leche flan, a macaroni salad—or send his cook to deliver them, but when my mother saw he had nothing like that on offer this time, she went back upstairs. We heard water running. Of all the men who visited our house, only Dr. Delacruz never followed my mother up the stairs. And for all his kindness and attention, my mother was as cold and distant with the doctor as she was warm and inviting with almost all other men. Sometimes she refused to greet or come down to see him at all. Instead, he’d sit with me, flipping through comic books Ruben had already read and thrown away, or asking how my day had g
one, how I was feeling.
“What will you and your mother eat tonight?” the doctor asked, after she’d gone.
“Whatever Marivic prepares.” My mother had taught me always to present to the world that we had plenty, in the way of food and help.
“Are you sure?” asked Dr. Delacruz. “I can send Celia over with something after I get home.”
“No need,” I said, repeating words I’d heard my mother say to him before. “We have enough to feed a village. Thank you, Dr. Delacruz.”
We said good night.
—
With the doctor’s help, I got better at navigating the slope between my house and the squatters’ colony. On my third visit, I saw we weren’t Annelise’s only guests. Squatters had gathered at the steps of her shack, holding buckets of water. I recognized the old woman with the sunken mouth, as well as the young girl who’d pushed my wheelchair, among the others forming a passageway from the ladder and the tarp.
“This is good news,” said Dr. Delacruz. He rested his palm on the back of my chair. “It means your friend is doing better.”
Annelise was descending the bamboo steps and walking across the dirt. The squatters dipped their fingers into buckets and sprinkled her with water. Young children splashed her with glee. She trained her gaze a few paces before her, as if balancing a basket on her head. She stopped at my chair. “It’s a tradition,” she said, with a flicker of embarrassment upon her face, slight as the mist of water on her arms and cheeks, and evaporating as quickly. “They don’t let girls bathe in the creek during our time of month. So when it’s over, they do this. I hate it, but that’s life in the ravine.”
I thought of the maid that my mother had let go because of her smell. Once again I was at the foot of those stairs, catching perfumed air and sunlight from a momentary crack in the doorway. “You can use our house, Annelise,” I said, without thinking. As soon as I’d offered it, I knew it wouldn’t be easy. My mother wouldn’t abide it. She would have to be upstairs with a guest, or think that Annelise had come to do the wash again in her mother’s place. But I wanted to give Annelise something, since I had nothing for her pain.