In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  And yet, what better name for them was there than old girls? As they jumped rope, memorized irregular French verbes, spiked and served at warball, drew shapes with compasses and protractors, sewed scenes of cottages and shepherdesses in little hoops, the one constant theme they were meant to meditate on was their future as wives and mothers. Old girls, like the Virgin Queen herself, were as pure and openhearted as children, but ready at the same time to shoulder children of their own, and households, when the time (not far off) came.

  And they learned all this, of course, from nuns. Old girls themselves: aging maidens, ancient yet suspended forever at a specific point in childhood. Those sisters, who taught the old girl everything from home ec to geometry, loved her. Modest, humble, soft-spoken, they wrote on her report cards. Pious, simple. A girl who saw the point in outlines and index cards.

  The woman answering the Boston Athletic Association phone scolds the old girl as if she were the opposite. “You’re much too late, sweetheart. What did you think? A marathon’s not something we just take up.” The old girl hangs up, thanking her.

  Doing her husband’s homework for him—it’s a habit, at this point. The old girl didn’t even mean to start. In school he was the kind of C student—gifted but needs to focus, waste of great potential—whose alleged inborn genius was never put to the test by trying. Relax, Mommy, he teases, whenever he sees her gathering data, making a nest of what she knows. There won’t be a test on this. Won’t there? There always is. Life is a test, she wants to tell him, and those who study well can lick it.

  “Registration’s closed, Dad,” the old girl tells him at dinner. “Even if you made the deadline, you’d have had to run what they call a sub-three by September.” Hard, fast rules: how can he argue? He was four years too young to run for President, in 1969—finding his youth (people had called him Wonder Boy) a liability, for once. He’d had to wait, another skill he didn’t have in spades. And by the time the wait was over, the Philippines was under martial law—a welcome reprieve, thought the old girl at first, from campaigns altogether.

  “We’ll find a way,” the old girl’s husband tells her cheerfully. He thinks like a Manila politician, still. As if they can bribe someone at the BAA. “We’ll grease the wheel somehow.”

  Town

  For all her husband’s sudden interest in Boston, the old girl is the one, between the two of them, who loves it here. This town’s the high point, to her mind, of a beloved northeastern triangle—from Philadelphia, where she rode out Manila’s war years at the school that produced Grace Kelly; to New York, where she studied college French and math.

  Not that America didn’t shock her, at first. At Ravenhill, students talked back. Mount Saint Vincent daughters disobeyed their fathers. But much about America agreed with her. When a ’kano says lunch at one o’clock, it’s one o’clock, she wrote the man who would become her husband; by high school they were exchanging letters. I’m learning, when I speak, to—as they say in New York—“cut to the chase.” In the summers, when she went back to Manila, he’d tease her. What an egghead, he would tell her, for consenting to attend school all year round.

  Some weekends, now, the old girl takes one of her children on the Amtrak down the Northeast Corridor. She loves even that phrase, imagining the country as a big house and its best cities as rooms along the main hallway. They’ve visited the Empire State Building and the Liberty Bell; had dinner with the nuns who taught her linear algebra and Stendhal; met her former classmates’ kids in Rye or Greenwich.

  But Boston and its suburbs, she loves most of all. Especially—the old girl doesn’t care how corny or obvious it is—in fall, when the hills start to blush along the Charles River like a McIntosh apple. Winter, too, comes close: the Frog Pond frozen for skaters, the snow sugaring the red-brick houses just so. When he got his fellowships to teach at Harvard and MIT, they linked into a four-mile cluster of Filipino expat households stretching from the Jesuit priests at Boston College to the nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Manilachusetts, some have called it. They’re the ones who found the old girl and her husband their own red-brick colonial on Commonwealth, piped with white shutters and white columns and a white banister around the second-floor balcony, as if designed to hold a memory of snow even in August, when they came, in 1980. And—no use denying it—his name means something different in Manilachusetts than it does in Manila. Hero. Freedom fighter. Prisoner of conscience. Some still even call her husband Senator in greeting, as if no time has passed since 1972, unlike the fair-weather friends who started taking the long way around their house on Times Street, in Quezon City, and kept their children from her children, as if bad political luck were a communicable disease, which of course it is.

  The old girl’s husband, on the other hand, is restless here. She’s known this for a while.

  Whenever they’re enjoying Boston—the best of Boston—home comes up, for him. The worst of home. At Fenway Park, for their son’s birthday: “It’s so damn civilized here,” he complained. “In Manila, they’d have oversold the seats. Some gago would yell ‘Fire!’ to clear the stadium, and there’d be a huge stampede.” He laughed, as if stampedes were charming, something that deserved his nostalgia. On Brattle Street, the rare nights they met to watch a film together, leaving the kids at home: “Remember how you wore your raincoat at the one movie theater in Concepcion? Because of all the fleas?”

  Training

  The two Akitas—Yoshi and Miki, gifts from a Tokyo congressman—accompany the old girl’s husband on his first jog. He doesn’t like to be alone. Yoshi and Miki aren’t running dogs, any more than his canvas slip-ons are running shoes. The most pampered and, at the same time, most neglected dogs she’s ever known, they’ve been raised as her husband might have raised their children, if she weren’t around. Reward biscuits have made them flabby. They’re jumpy, flesh trembling beneath the white and fox-red fur, because they never know when their next walk will come. The old girl’s husband bathes them with too much of their eldest daughter’s Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo. But he doesn’t plan for who might feed them when he flies to speak in Managua or Los Angeles or Kuala Lumpur.

  He hasn’t thought, either, about who’ll drop off Kit, their youngest, at school, now that he’s out jogging in the mornings. That’s been his one job, in the mushroom-colored Chevrolet Caprice he has all to himself. (She and the children share a blue Dodge Diplomat.) “I can’t train earlier,” he tells her (he doesn’t like the dark); and later’s not an option: once he’s on campus, he wants to stay till evening. (The same reason he’s exempt from picking Kit up in the afternoon.) If you had to find parking in Harvard Square, Mommy, you’d understand.

  The old girl makes the best of it. For twenty-eight years she’s been adjusting to his ideas. No fair to violate a silent but long-standing contract now. Didn’t she upend her life, at twenty-two, based on a line—a single line—from one of his letters? I’ll see you when we’re both home. He’d gone to Korea during the war. She’d planned, all senior year, to move to New York, get her JD, live with her college roommate. But he’d never, in their years of growing up in close proximity, of running into one another at baptisms and weddings and wakes, mentioned the next time. And the moment he did, didn’t the old girl cancel her job, and Fordham Law, and the Upper West Side studio she was supposed to share with Mary Ann; and return to Manila?

  After the wedding, didn’t she agree to skip the Pangasinan beach honeymoon they’d booked? Didn’t she follow him instead to Washington, D.C., and spend most of four months alone in a rented Arlington apartment while he did research in Langley?

  And when he ran for mayor and won, didn’t she—Manila-born, Manhattan-bred—pick up and move to that country town that always made her feel half-drugged and half-asleep? Into a house that creaked and tilted like a ghost ship all the time, under the feet of villagers who entered as they pleased, roaming the halls, demanding rice or milk, the bathroom or the telephone? He wouldn’t let her strip the wall
s or fix the floor, which was always giving Bitbit—just learning how to crawl—splinters. It’s all some of our constituents can do to keep a roof over their heads. Can’t show them up in their own town. He didn’t want curtains at the dining room window, where townsfolk liked to watch them eat. Even seeing us fight is good. Lets them know we’re just like them. And fight they did. About the time the old girl washed her hands after shaking a peasant’s: You think Bitbit will remember a cold she had as an infant? That man’s grandchildren will never forget how you insulted him. Never. About the old girl driving to Manila for Bitbit’s checkups: There are plenty of good doctors here. About her visits to Clark Air Base at sunset—when the village electricity shut off, every single day, till sunrise—to dine with American friends. He won that one. She tried cracking Flaubert and Proust at home by candlelight, but country heat and boredom made her a stupid reader. For the first time in her life the old girl needed soap operas: the bold strokes, plot twists spectacular enough to pierce through her haze. Running out of radio batteries became the great crisis of her young wife- and motherhood. When the voice of the Pusong Sinugatan narrator warbled, as if he too were half-drugged, half-asleep, she thought she might go mad.

  The old girl’s husband is in luck. He knows someone. A colleague at the K School, who’s run the marathon the past five years, has to travel to Berlin this April. “He says his number’s mine on the condition that I run a seven-minute mile.” The old girl’s husband laughs. “Better start calling me Tim Brown, just in case.” As if that’s all the training it takes.

  Drive

  In Chestnut Hill, the old girl’s husband has a recurring nightmare. He shoots upright, glazed with sweat. I dreamed I’d been hit. He grabs his chest, panting.

  He never dreamed this in Manila, or in Concepcion, or anywhere they’ve lived—just here, in their master bedroom in the house on Commonwealth.

  The first time, the old girl worried that it was his heart. A real-life chest pain, manifesting in his dreams as a bullet. Assassination, for the old girl’s husband, was once a sort of pet obsession. He’d bring it up even as a small-town mayor. Girls who never grew up around congressmen and senators might find this morbid and death-wishy, but the old girl remembers how her father, uncles, and grandfathers all had the same casual bravado about the topic. As if everyone who was anyone had to be ready for that. Back then, she did not really think it possible for her husband to die that way. He seemed too full of himself, not serious enough. His bulletproof vest, the armored car in which he rode through the sleepy streets of Concepcion, struck her as excess, like an alarm system on a toy house.

  But in Boston, it’s a drunk driver he dreams of. “Some college frat boy, coming from a party,” he says, looking terrified.

  “Since when do frat boys scare you?” The old girl brings him a face towel and a glass of water. At Ateneo, he was an Upsilon Sigma Phi brother himself.

  But the old girl understands. The banality of dying in a car, because of someone’s carelessness, is what terrifies her husband. Oblivion. Obscurity. That he should meet his end because somebody failed to think of him, rather than thinking too much of him. “Did they ask after me?” he wanted to know, throughout his years in prison. “Does anyone remember my name?”

  “You’ve read too much Filipino history,” the old girl tells him now. A steady diet of priests on garrotes, of patriots falling to Spanish Guardia Civil rifles, has warped him. Between the two times he cheated death—sentenced to a firing squad in Manila; then furloughed to Dallas for emergency heart surgery—there’s no question which one he’d pick. “You’ve got to mix it up a bit,” she tells him. “Go look at Kit’s U.S. history book. Those heroes died of old age. Some weren’t even heroes till old age, if I remember right.”

  Newlyweds

  Speaking of omens, in Manila, at the wedding, they released a dove from its gold cage. It thought better of flying away, alighting on the old girl’s head instead. “Loko mo, that’s a good sign,” said her father, as the old girl tried to shoo it off, grateful to have a veil and gloves on. “It means power, victory.”

  “Just like we thought,” her mother said. “The groom’s going to be President one day.”

  “It landed on the bride’s head,” a niece said. “Doesn’t that mean she’ll be President?”

  Everyone laughed, and no one harder than the old girl herself—the quiet, simple bride who’d just dropped out of law school for her MRS degree.

  “So it did,” said the priest. “But she and he are one now.”

  He was the old girl’s first, and only.

  Something about their wedding night recalled their first meeting, at nine years old. He kept exclaiming, “Wowowie!” or “Yehey!” in bed, as if her body was the county fair, and he a child delighted to find so many wonders in one place. Thank God. What would the old girl have done with a suave or more serious lover?

  She has never worried about other women. If she had to guess, she thinks there may have been flings, enough to keep up with his Congress buddies, the way men smoke cigars at baptisms or drink Johnnie Black because men do. But never a real love affair. He seems too restless, too easily distracted, to maintain a mistress. Pity the half-dressed nymph who tries to stroke his shoulders, coax him back to bed while he’s glued to Ted Koppel’s Nightline.

  Campaigning

  Wives she has known exact all kinds of things from their politician husbands in exchange for another year, another term, one more campaign. Cars, swimming pools, a house. A vacation, another baby, no more babies. And the holy grail of Congressbride or Senate-wife concessions: the promise that this campaign will be the last. Where is the mountaintop, and why does it keep moving? they wonder. When can we rest a little, pitch a tent, enjoy the view? Those questions, thinks the old girl, only give a brand-new Congressbride “high blood.” The sooner she can learn that, for her husband, the climb is the mountaintop, the campaign nearly as sweet as the office itself, the easier her life will be. By idea he means decision, she told a young, naïve Congressbride once. He’s not asking for your opinion but your help.

  Follow-through is not these men’s problem. Their problem is forethought.

  But not, it should be said, foretalk. While the other marathoners eat, sleep, and breathe the marathon, the old girl’s husband is busy talking the marathon. “The men’s field is deep this year,” he tells the kids at dinner, as if he’s followed a shallower men’s field for years. “You’ve got Greg, for instance, wanting to redeem himself from the disaster of ’eighty-one…” Greg and Bill and Budd and Tom and Benji—as if he’s known these guys for years, as if they’re friends. And who knows? If he meets them, someday, they might be.

  He can talk, the old girl’s husband—susmariosep, how he can talk! Give him an audience—of one or one million, passive or ill-tempered or smitten or skeptical, it doesn’t matter—he’ll go all day. The old girl sometimes tunes out during his daily speechifying—runs through grocery lists, the children’s schedules, a convent-school memory here, a question for her weekly phone call with her mother there—and when she tunes back in, contrite over what seems a longer-than-respectful span of time for a wife not to listen to her husband, he won’t have even noticed; the old girl’s husband will still be talking.

  After she turns off the TV and sends Kit to bed, the old girl smells McDonald’s grease from the study. He must have convinced Bitbit or Ben to take him to the drive-thru after dinner. Through the rustle of wax paper she can hear her husband on the phone.

  “I’ll wear the flag,” he says. “Either Bitbit will sew a cape out of it for me, or else I’ll find blue shoes, red socks, a yellow headband. What I’m asking is, beyond the photo, isn’t there a number twenty-six somewhere in our history that I can use? Some patriot that Spain locked up for twenty-six years? Twenty-six POWs tortured by the Japanese? Twenty-six international human-rights protocols violated since 1972? A symbol would be nice, beyond He ran the marathon. The more recent the better. Find that for me, would you?
”

  Bitbit

  Bitbit, her eldest daughter, is twenty-seven. Bitbit’s beau proposed to her before the family left Manila. Now, in Boston, more than eight thousand miles from him, she’s wearing her mother’s engagement ring. Her sisters have thrown Brides magazine and Emily Post’s Etiquette and the Tiffany Blue Book at her. They’ve dragged Bitbit to Newbury Street to try on gowns. But Bitbit doesn’t care for all that. She only wants to stay home, flipping through her parents’ wedding album.

  She shadows her mother everywhere, as she has from the beginning. Little Mommy, her father calls her sometimes. Everyone else has called her this Tagalog word for “hand-carried belongings” since she was small, always at the old girl’s side and in her image. Privately, the old girl also named her for the way their hearts seemed to sync up (she could swear she felt it), toward the end of that D.C. honeymoon, a comforting call-and-response between her full-grown throb and her daughter’s tiny, growing pulse: Beat-beat. Beat-beat. Beat-beat.

  Gear

  He didn’t pick an easy season to start running. March in New England: blizzards one day, sun-starved coeds airing out their eyelet dresses and sandals in the slush the next. The old girl passes them along Massachusetts Avenue on her way to buy her husband the proper clothes. She doesn’t know what’s proper, but she knows it can’t be Ateneo Blue Eagles shorts over long underwear. It never occurs to the old girl’s husband that people might laugh at him, which must be the secret of people who are never laughed at for long.