In the Country

by Mia Alvar

Not wanting judgment from someone like the BAA receptionist, the old girl spies on what the other customers—all of them men—are buying and grabs the same for her man: knit cap, gloves, muffler, tracksuit with stripes down the legs and across the chest—and then a second pair of gloves, to replace the ones her husband will surely lose.

  “Women’s is this way,” says the salesclerk, at her shoulder, startling her.

  I’m here for my husband, she’s said, in other contexts. He’s the politician. But he’s not “the runner” yet; in fact he’s only slightly more a runner than the old girl is. So she lets the clerk show her a corner table, with a few leggings and sweatshirts, braided headbands and neon wristbands, fanned across its surface. A sports bra stretched across a headless mannequin like taupe armor. “Know what size you are?” The old girl looks around before whispering, “Medium,” but no one in the store cares. “And are you satisfied with your current pair of running shoes?” The old girl’s not sure if this clerk really believes she is a runner, or pretends to believe that to sell more. But she doesn’t correct her. There are no women’s sneakers, only a pair of gray New Balances she buys in both her husband’s size and hers (men’s minus two, the clerk suggests). And then she buys the children some.

  Ringing her up, the clerk asks, “Have you read the Bible yet?” Out from under the register comes a book entitled—rather hippie-dippily, the old girl thinks—Running & Being. “It’ll change your whole way of training.”

  On her way back to the station, she sees runners everywhere. Have there always been so many? She notes what they’re wearing, wondering how soon she might have to go back to buy him a hooded sweatshirt, a pair of sweatpants, a lanyard for his keys. She starts to read Running & Being on the T. Scanning the chapter titles—a few she would expect, like “Training” and “Racing,” and airy-fairier ones like “Living,” “Discovering”—she flips to the one, ironically four chapters in—called “Beginning.” Can tomorrow be the first day of the rest of our life? What if the other passengers think, between this book and the bags at her feet, that she is the runner; that she’ll shed this trench coat and these rain boots when she gets home, baring her neon spandex like some secret fitness superhero? Let them, she finds herself thinking. She doesn’t mind.

  Parlor Talk

  It is not exactly true that—as the old girl has written the family back home—she has no servants in Newton. There’s a maid. One maid, Tweety, shared by five different Manilachusetts families. The old girl has her Tuesdays. On Sundays, Tweety goes to Chinatown to fulfill all five families’ requests for patis and mung bean noodles in one trip.

  It took some getting used to, having no one but the old girl and Bitbit to cook and clean in Tweety’s absence. There were years on Times Street when she had one yaya per child. They slept in the old girl’s house, knew the old girl’s rules and preferences. Right hand doesn’t begin to cover it. With them the old girl felt multiarmed like an Indian deity, invincible.

  One thing no maid ever did—in Chestnut Hill, or Concepcion, or Manila—was serve the old girl’s husband and his guests in the parlor. That, everyone knows, is a job for the wife. High-born and well-schooled though she may be, only the old girl can pass through, a ghost carrying a tray. Rice cakes, if it’s Manila; pan de sal or buttery pastries and pitsi-pitsi. Or something savory, like squid balls on bamboo sticks. In Boston, pretzels or club crackers, nuts, crudités, and cheese. The old girl knows which congressman and which professor has a taste for what.

  She never expects more of him than how her own father behaved around her mother, reaching for the biscuit or the cup without a glance in her direction. And most men follow his lead.

  But some have been jumpy, suspicious of her. The Huk captains her husband had over in Tarlac were tense and wary, never out of their fatigues. They held their coffee cups in their laps without sipping. Didn’t touch the food, eternally afraid of betrayal.

  And in America, some men feel guilty enough to take her presence on themselves. Not in some weighty way, just long enough to log that she’s been seen. Something along the lines of You’d better figure out your stance on that, buddy, or She won’t vote for you. They cock their heads at the old girl, lightening the mood, some cupping hands beside their mouths to feign a secret from her. It seemed gallant, at first—the old girl’s husband is a lot of things, but rarely that—until she understood the joke. That a woman, a wife, could have serious political opinions at all. As if the old girl would ever not vote for her own husband, they seem to be implying. One of the Akitas could walk into the parlor, sniffing for crumbs, and they’d make the same joke. Better figure it out, buddy, or Yoshi here will never vote for you.

  Fuel

  Over the years, the old girl and her husband’s dialogue about food has (as he gently puts it himself, when his political opinion—or even, once, his party—changes) “evolved.”

  In the late fifties and sixties she was still the bride who raised an eyebrow, shook her head when he reached for the fifth beer or the second dessert. Peking duck and rich white chocolate were his weaknesses. A young and pretty wife who kept those in check for you was, back then, no less a status symbol than the armored car or bulletproof vest.

  The old girl did not think, in 1975, almost three years into his prison term, that that same beer- and Peking-duck- and white-chocolate-loving man could be serious about a hunger strike. When he floated it—his protest against a military trial for civilian crimes he didn’t commit, or weren’t even crimes when he supposedly committed them, before martial law—the old girl said, “Whatever you think is best, Dad.” That’s how little she believed he would go through with it. Even when he did begin, she waited for him to grow bored, plan his next dramatic gesture. Until she saw him on the twelfth day, looking positively Caravaggian. His breath—cold, sepulchral—sent a shudder through her. The hunger strike inflicted, in one month, all the aging the former cub reporter, baby mayor, Wonder Boy had previously skipped over. When it came to food, after that, all the old girl cared about was that he regain some of his lost weight and color in his cheeks. He could eat Peking duck for breakfast as far as she was concerned.

  Then she saw him clutch his chest and search for breath after Christmas 1979. Indigestion, she thought at first. The shock of pork stew and pineapple ham after so much bland prison cuisine. But seeing his face grow gray and damp, like uncooked clay, she called in the guard. Angina pectoris: a dirty, vaguely genital-sounding diagnosis. She begged him to get triple-bypassed in the States. Not Manila—who would put it past the President and First Lady to arrange “mysterious causes” on her husband’s operating table? “Cabbage surgery,” the Dallas surgeon called it—for coronary artery bypass graft, “and also for the kind of diet you’ll be on afterwards, the rest of your life.” His voice, so reassuring; that word cabbage—the old girl had visions of a sweetly ordinary life ahead, slapping his hand away from the butter or the gravy. But the cabbage diet lasted about as long as his vow not to bad-mouth the regime abroad. About as long as the daily breathing exercises he abandoned, saying he’d rather suffocate than watch that spirometer ball go up and down its plastic piston, over and over. Before his stitches healed he started booking speeches in New York, Columbus, Ithaca. A pact with the devil is no pact at all.

  Now with the marathon approaching, in a decade when everyone’s counting calories and cholesterol, the old girl serves up skinless chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, brown rice.

  “What’s with the prison food, Mommy?” says her husband.

  “If you want to be a marathoner, start eating like one,” she says.

  “All of us?” says Toyang, their second to youngest. “We’re not running the marathon.”

  “Yes, all of us,” the old girl says. “Dad could use our support. Unless you want to do your own cooking—in that case, by all means, eat what you like.”

  Miki

  Something’s wrong. The old girl knows it after she drops Kit off one Tuesday: “Kung Liligaya Ka” (If You’ll
Be Happy) is blaring from the master bedroom. She follows a trail of gray puddles through the hallway and up the stairs, to Imelda Papin’s melancholy voice:

  If you’ll be happy in the arms of someone else,

  and if her love is paradise to you,

  who am I to argue with what you desire?

  It’s enough that you loved me once.

  He lies on their bed, still in his sweaty workout clothes, his sneakers muddying the down comforter. He’s locked in an embrace with Yoshi, whose nose is resting on his shoulder. Humming gloomily with Imelda Papin, he now and then chimes in on a word—forever, tears, apart. He could hear something a million times and not have memorized it.

  “We lost her, Mommy,” says the old girl’s husband. He buries his face into Yoshi’s fur, and the pillow. Miki has disappeared, distracted by a squirrel on the Common. After bathing them last night, the old girl’s husband didn’t bother to put their collars back on. “I was in a rush this morning. Knew I had an early meeting before class. Now, I can’t go anywhere.”

  The old girl doesn’t ask whether he’s done anything about Miki besides mope. Instead, she unties his shoelaces. I’ll take care of it. She convinces him to get into the shower, sets out a sweater and trousers for him. No need to miss your meeting. She finds a photo of Miki and makes a MISSING poster. $200 REWARD. Her husband drops her at the copy shop in Back Bay before heading off to Cambridge.

  She tells him she’ll catch the T home after posting copies all around the Common. But the sun’s out, glinting off what’s left of the snow. It’s not too cold. In the sneakers she bought in Cambridge, bouncier and gentler on the feet than the flattest loafers she owns, she walks herself home.

  Popsy

  The old girl can imagine one of them, out of the seven, as a marathoner outright: Popsy, her second oldest.

  Popsy moves fast. Popsy commutes each day to East Cambridge in what the old girl’s husband still calls rubber shoes, on top of scrunched tube socks and panty hose. Two pairs of leather pumps—one black, one brown—wait in a steel file cabinet in Popsy’s office.

  She’s their only breadwinner these days. How competent Popsy looks, with her briefcase and pencil skirts and pearls! Her personality—pamparampam, they call it, like the trumpet fanfare that feels like it should announce her arrival in any room—seems built for shoulder pads.

  They call her Popsy for the sweet ice Popsicles she loved as a child. But she’s grown into the fatherly sound of it, too. More than her dad—the visiting professor in jeans and polo shirts and sneakers, a suit only for speeches, off on Mondays and Fridays, nothing scheduled before eleven—Popsy wears provider clothes and keeps provider hours. Home by six-thirty or seven in her suit, her insteps aching. She devours what the old girl makes for dinner, while Bitbit, “little Mommy,” pulls out Popsy’s chair and clears her plate; the old girl’s first- and second-born reenacting some domestic dinner scene from a 1950s TV show. Whatever Dad earns on a speech goes right back into the Movement for a Free Philippines, but Popsy has the family-man instinct toward “blowouts” and pasalubong on payday. Those Fenway seats for Ben’s twenty-second. The IBM in her father’s study, installed in secret and festooned with a big red gift bow while her father was in Singapore. They can hear him, from downstairs, typing on it with two fingers—slowly, torturously, until Bitbit or the old girl would rather seize his yellow notepads and type for him than hear more. (All old girls had to pass stenography in high school. An insurance policy in case they—God forbid—never married.)

  Ben

  Like any other race—even Kit, at seven, stumped for him during the sham 1978 campaign—it’s a family affair. The old girl splits the course map up six ways, assigns each child a station. Her husband will need the water and, more than that, the company. Bitbit at the Dairy Queen in Framingham (he’ll beg for a fudge caramel sundae; she’ll cave). Popsy in West Natick. Ben at the Wellesley gate, easy to spot amid the wall of screaming girls. Effervescent Kit will boost him up right at the drop into Newton Lower Falls, after the mile-fifteen mark. The old girl will stand at the same spot where he’ll see the Citgo sign. And Toyang, if she can be convinced to come at all, can simply meet them at the finish.

  As for the after-party, a politician’s wife can plan one in her sleep. With Bitbit she’s drafted a rich and heavy Patriots’ Day menu. One afternoon of Sam Adams, baked beans and johnnycakes, Boston cream pie, and shooters of New England clam chowder, after a marathon, won’t kill him. They’ve invited everyone they know in Manilachusetts. To the kids’ (except for Kit’s) dismay, there’ll be a “program”: the young standing to perform for their elders’ amusement. The old girl asks her son, Ben, to memorize Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and recite it to his father, who’ll have just commemorated it on foot.

  It’s easy to forget that, besides Kit, who’s in sixth grade, her children are adults in their twenties. Something about Dad’s prison term froze their little family in 1972. They live together on Comm Ave to make up for lost time. She sometimes imagines coming to Boston years ago, if they’d had the savvy to skip town before Proclamation 1081. The kids would have been seventeen, fourteen, twelve, ten, and one. Make Way for Ducklings might have been Kit’s favorite book. Their childhood memories would include baseball at Fenway, swan boat rides in the Public Garden, school trips to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  As it happened, Ben was twelve—the balbas just beginning to darken his chin, the pimples, the voice breaking before it deepened—when his father was taken away. The one time she feared not being up to mothering. Her only son, losing his father just as he was becoming a man: a cruel joke. Even as practical and ready for the worst as she was.

  Ben’s turned out fine—upstanding, trustworthy. Some might even say boring. Sons of friends have acted out with smoother upbringings. Now he studies part-time at BC, classes called Operational Leadership or Managerial Perspectives, though her son seems more accountant than CEO. Even the way he smokes (out on the front stoop, at the old girl’s request) appears as quiet and methodical as watering the plants. In his free time he’s been combing the rare and antiquarian bookstores on Beacon Street and Harrison Avenue for crumbling editions of Tales of a Wayside Inn, Browning’s Dramatic Idylls, Herodotus. Learning the Longfellow will be a piece of cake for him. He’s reading up on where historians disagree with “Paul Revere’s Ride,” facts he’ll share with the guests while his father, full on chowder and exhausted from the race, tries not to fall asleep. Ben’s a fact hoarder, as the old girl was. She hears him practicing upstairs.

  That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,

  The fate of a nation was riding that night;

  And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,

  Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

  “Come on,” his younger sister Kit, a ham and gifted mimic, says. “Put some feeling into it. And say Reveah and spahk, like the locals do. Listen, my children, and you shall heah.”

  Trouble

  The old girl never saw the talk show air. She only knew he had to get a haircut for TV, because she’d scheduled it. That day, another Senate wife, during dismissal at Ateneo, said, “Your husband—what a troublemaker, eh?” By then the old girl hardly even heard that shiver in their throats when people talked about her troublemaker husband.

  A busy week: the old girl had Ben’s Confirmation party to plan. Even if she asked her husband what he’d done, he’d been pulling moves like that for months. By this time people in their circle had discussed martial law long enough to channel their anxiety into domestic jokes. To bratty children: Daddy’s going to lay the martial law on you. About philandering husbands: What will he do once there’s a curfew? She knew not to expect him for dinner; he’d be at some caucus meeting at the Hilton. When the phone rang early the next morning, she teased: “Really, Dad? Tariffs and customs codes took all night? All Friday night?” But the operator cut in, to announce a call from Camp Crame detention center, monitor
ed and recorded.

  When his voice came through, it did sound slurred, hungover. Mommy?

  What on earth had he said on TV?

  Forget it. I’ve done worse. Or else, they think I have.

  Ticking

  Was he behind those Plaza bombings, one year earlier? She’s never asked, not to this day. There are degrees of being “behind” something, anyway. He didn’t throw the hand grenades onto the podium, where all the major candidates in his party were standing. He couldn’t have killed those people. He was with the old girl, celebrating his goddaughter’s despedida de soltera.

  His party fingered the President; the President fingered him. But her husband’s appetite for theater ended where someone—on his side, no less—might actually get hurt. Didn’t it?

  Now and then one memory floats back to the old girl: the way her husband checked his watch during the despedida party. The old girl’s husband never checks his watch, a wedding gift. He wears it out of respect to the grandfather who gave it to him. But when he wants to know the time, he asks her. She, who only sometimes wears a watch, then has to search the room for a clock, all because her husband can’t be bothered to look at his own wrist. An annoying tic, but so consistent she has wondered, sometimes, if perhaps he never properly learned to tell time in school. But that night, he raised his wrist to read it for a good few seconds, before going back to his conversation. Five or so minutes later, someone interrupted the toasts to say there’d been a bombing at the rally. She remembers the commotion. People at the party who had planned to join the rally later, or had come from it. People at the rally who’d sent regrets to this same despedida. The old girl’s husband acted as the others did: alarm, confusion, anger. She has no reason to connect the watch to the grenades in any way. Why should she?

  Runaway

  “My heart is broken,” says the old girl’s husband, about Miki. “I can’t trust myself outside with Yoshi. If we lose him, too, I’ll be destroyed.”