“Why is this the first time I am watching this?” Max asked, as we shared my large bucket of caramel popcorn.
“Because you and I haven’t been friends long enough for my awesome to rub off on you,” I joked, and we laughed again. My mind started to wander, and I vaguely looked around the theatre. I wondered where Enzo was sitting, who he was sitting with, when I realized that the movie was over and…
Was that Tita Merry coming to the front of the theatre? When did she get that microphone?
“Hello, hello everyone!” she said happily, and I could see most of my relatives waving back at her like they were greeting each other at the mall. She looked glorious, dressed in her own interpretation of Missus White, my favorite character in the movie. Tita Merry wore a wig and the same black dress as Madeline Kahn, complete with a string of pearls around her neck. “Did you enjoy the movie?”
The crowd cheered, clapping their hands.
“Well as you know, this was all to raise funds for a very important place to me and my husband Gerund…” she said, her voice trailing off slightly. Sometimes Tita Merry did that when she talked about Regina’s dad, who I remembered as someone who was quite aloof and strict. “We used to go to the Metropolitan Theatre every night we could to watch a show. So I dedicate my life to only two things now. The restoration of the theatre—“
More cheers from the crowd. Max and I even whooped to encourage her.
“And to make sure that my beautiful daughter Regina Marie is happy,” she said, looking down at the spot where I assumed Regina was sitting. I hadn’t seen her all night since I was busy with the event.
She looked just like she did when we were kids—tall, thin, demure and delicately beautiful. Though we were related, we looked nothing alike.
“With that said, I think you have something to say to her, Lorenzo?” Tita Merry asked, bringing me back into the room as I saw Enzo stand up from his seat next to Regina and smile nervously before he stepped up to the center of the room.
Behind him, a photo presentation started to flash of Regina walking past a London phone booth, laughing at someone behind the camera, mouthing words that we couldn’t hear. Then there was Regina pouting at the cameraman offering her an egg tart before she bit it off his fingers. Regina toasting him, looking beautiful in the dim lighting of a bar.
“Hello,” Enzo said into the microphone, and I felt my heart shattering into a thousand tiny pieces. It all made sense suddenly. His nerves, Regina’s insistence that I be there tonight, Tita Merry’s disappearance…Enzo wasn’t just here for the Met. “My name is Enzo, and I met Regina for the first time in London…”
His words melted away as the evidence of what I had missed nearly blinded me. I wasn’t even conscious that I was stuffing my face with caramel popcorn until Max stopped my hand midway to my mouth and gave me an odd look.
“What?” I asked him with my cheeks full of sweet, painful bitterness. I wanted to leave, and I knew that I should. But you know when you’re on the road and you see an accident, and you just can’t look away? That’s what that moment felt like. There was nothing else for me to do but fill my mouth with sugar and popcorn.
“Regina, will you marry me?”
The roar of the crowd’s cheering drowned out her answer, but the kiss they shared was unmistakable. Tita Merry was wiping her eyes with the handkerchief Dad passed to her as they watched Regina and her new fiancé Enzo smile at the crowd of well-wishers.
“I think I need to throw up,” I said, pushing Max aside to go to the bathroom.
Five
“This isn’t healthy, you know,” Max said, standing outside the closed stall while I stood inside, held my breath, and swallowed air to throw up or pass out. Either one would be preferable at the moment. I glared at the toilet, picturing the sheer amount of food that I’d consumed in the last twelve hours. Popcorn, fast food, a burrito, cookies…come on, come on! I need to get this awful, sickening feeling out of my stomach.
I gagged on air. I could feel something starting to rise up from my stomach. Here it comes, here it comes…
“Can you please get out of there?” Max asked, so close to the door that I saw his shoes peeping inside. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Martha.”
Suddenly the desire to gag vanished as quickly as it had come, and I took a step back from the toilet. Max was uncomfortable, and I was making him uncomfortable with what I was doing. I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. This wasn’t me at all! I don’t do this, and I certainly wasn’t going to start now.
Willpower, Martha. That’s all you need.
I emerged from the stall to find Max leaning against the frame, his glare severe. He had apparently locked the door to the women’s bathroom, and I could hear people trying to get in. We were alone.
“Mind explaining what that was?” he asked, nudging his head towards the stall. He sounded like Dad when I did something wrong, and I hated it immediately.
“None of your business, that’s what,” I said, walking to the sinks. I couldn’t bear to look at myself, so I glared at my hands as I needlessly washed them, letting the water just run over my fingers. Max sauntered over to the sink next to me.
“That wasn’t nothing,” he said sternly. “Martha, you were about to make yourself throw up! And why, because someone you liked got engaged to your cousin?”
Something inside me twisted, reminding me that the awful feeling I had was still inside, and looking for a way to get out. I grabbed the soap and put some into my hands. Then I started talking before I could stop myself.
“You don’t get it,” I snapped at him, so suddenly and so fast that I didn’t even realize that I was doing it. I kept my eyes down and my hands under the water. “Enzo wasn’t just this boy that I liked in college, Max! I was in love with him! Enzo is, was the first…the first real boy I’ve ever fallen in love with.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to spend four years watching someone from a distance, never feeling that you were good enough for him because you wear pants that could fit around him twice! You don’t know how strange, and, and wonderful and new it felt to me when he knew my name, when he called me or laughed at something that I said.”
“You will never, ever understand how much it hurts that in the end, he still chose someone as beautiful and perfect as Regina. Because of course the fat girl doesn’t get the boy. That’s not nothing, Max! That is everything, everything…”
He reached over and turned off the faucet. I looked down at my ugly, wrinkled hands and clenched them. If I was crying, big, ugly, fat tears, I didn’t notice or care right now.
He was so close I could pick out the individual threads on the buttons of his shirt. So close that I could see his chest rising and falling.
“Don’t cry, okay?” he said, and I couldn’t. My heart was hammering in my ears and my lungs were screaming for breath. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Martha…”
“I don’t want your pity, Max.” I said, pushing him away. There was a pause, and I didn’t have the heart to see the way he looked at me. This was the first time I’d broken down in front of him, and it reminded both of us how new and fragile this friendship of ours was. I wiped the tears from my eyes, rubbing it hard.
“Okay,” he said, stepping back. “Okay.” Suddenly my friend was back, and acting like nothing had ever happened. I watched him adjust his sleeves in the mirror, ruffle his hair slightly, slightly confused. Was this how Max dealt with things? Just pushed them aside and act like they didn’t happen?
He took a piece of tissue from the counter and passed it to me. My breathing started to even out, and running the tissue under cold water helped lower the swelling of my eyes.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked me. “Get a sexy, revenge body before the wedding?”
“Yeah right, I like I could give up chocolate that easily,” I snorted.
“I have no doubt that you can,” he shrugged. “Do it for the right reasons, though.”
Then we were quiet for a few moments. Me, finally finding the courage to look at myself straight in the mirror again, and Max making stupid faces and posing in front of the mirror. I know he was trying to distract me from my feelings. He was trying to make me laugh.
“Max Angeles,” he said in a fake American accent. “You are a sexy man. Smokin’ even. All the girls drop their trousers—“
“What the heck…”
“Just to grab your attention. Tell us! What did you do to be blessed with such a handsome face?” he said to the mirror.
“Oh just the proper diet, exercise and the love of a good woman is all a hunk needs,” He said as I finally smiled and rolled my eyes. He grinned at me. “Now there’s the Martha I know. Are we going back out there or are we bailing?”
I quickly checked my phone. Three missed calls from Regina, one from Tita Merry and one from Mom. I sighed and showed them to him quickly.
“Duty calls,” I said, tossing the tissues into the trash bin. Max shrugged and walked to the door when I realized where we were. He’d just locked the door to the women’s bathroom. Anyone who would see us walk out would think we were…
“Dude!”
“What?” He asked, his hand already halfway to the door handle. He looked genuinely surprised. Then I remembered that this wasn’t the first time we were in a bathroom together.
Then I looked down at myself, at my large arms, blotchy face and slightly matted hair. Right. Like anyone would think we had sex in the bathroom! I smiled and shook my head.
“Nothing,” I said, walking over to him to open the door myself. “Thank you. For this.”
“Anytime, Martha,” he said. "Oh, and one last thing. Indulge me."
"Okay?"
"You're much stronger than you think," he said, "Believe in that."
He gave me a wink and a quick kiss on the cheek before walking back out to the party with me. I stopped in shock, my hand immediately flying to the spot where his lips had been. My face felt hot, and if I was worried that we looked like we had sex in a public bathroom, this wasn't helping any.
Not that this meant anything, of course. Max was just being nice. But I couldn't deny it was just what I needed. Some of the women waiting outside the door gasped at the sight of us and looked me up from head to toe. I could see a couple of them focusing on my flabby arms. I shrugged and smiled at them before following Max back to the mansion set-up.
The bi-monthly Aguas Family Sunday brunch was always, always held at my grandmother, Lola May’s house in Antipolo. It was a small but elegant house with three bedrooms and a den that she maintained with a small staff of four—a driver, a house girl, a full-time nurse, and a part-time cook. Dad, Tita Merry, and their other sisters always asked Lola May to live with them, with her being ninety and all, but she always insisted on living on her own. There was no reason for her not to, she said.
I loved Lola May. At seventy six, her mind was incredibly sharp, she loved playing sudoku and beating her cook, driver, and nurse in mahjong every week. Her house was tucked away in the wilder parts of Antipolo and had a fantastic view of the entire city below. We usually ate in the dining room, had merienda in the garden of wildflowers in her backyard, which was surrounded by calamansi trees. Regina used to climb up those trees and put my dolls there, knowing I would be too scared to go up.
There was no Wi-Fi, and very rarely did we have phone signal (Lola still used her landline to call her children). It was a place out of time, and I loved it.
I found Regina in the garden that afternoon, sitting under the biggest calamansi tree with her eyes closed and her hands over her lap. Her engagement ring sparkled in the noontime sun, and she looked like she was soaking every bit of sunshine that bathed her. She inherited the signature Aguas wavy hair and thin lips, but her aquiline nose and slightly darker skin was a Benitez trait. Lola May used to call her the ‘little beauty queen' of the family.
We didn’t exactly get along, and I couldn’t help that little stab of jealousy I always felt when I saw her in her favorite little shift dresses with her long legs splayed out in front of her. The engagement ring only made the jealousy worse.
“Psst!” I called out to her, interrupting her downtime under the tree. “Didn’t Lola May tell you the trees were infested with fire ants?”
That made her eyes pop open before she jumped up and checked her bright yellow sundress, her back, her arms and the tree. I was clutching my sides by the time she caught on and gave me a little glare.
“I can't believe I fell for that!” she exclaimed.
I shrugged, ready to turn back to the house. To my utter surprise, Regina came over and hugged me so tightly that I thought she was trying to lift me off the ground. What on earth? Regina and I never hugged. We weren’t friends! We just happened to share a middle and last name.
“Uh…” I said awkwardly. “Okay.” “Sorry, I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I missed you!”
Oh did she? Missed someone to torture, more like.
“So, er, how long are you going to grace us with your presence this time?" I asked, pulling away from the hug.
"How about...forever?" Regina asked. "I took an indefinite leave of absence from school."
"Huh?" I asked. "Why?"
Her answer fell on deaf ears when Mags came running up to Regina to give her a hug. Regina just turned into the sweetest person in the world when it came to Maggie, like she was actually her baby sister. She and Maggie were now squealing at each other, exclaiming how thin Maggie was, how fantastic Regina looked.
"I'm down to a large now, can you believe it?" Maggie asked, and I saw a twinkle of excitement in her eyes. I felt a twinge of pride with the little green monster of jealousy taking over my throat. I was happy that Maggie was losing weight. She worked hard for it, and she seemed to like the process. But was I jealous?
Only very little, in a way that you felt jealous when a classmate had that Backstreet Boys cassette tape you've been saving up for.
Maggie and Regina’s talking started from the garden and went on all the way to the actual merienda. For some reason, Regina knew most of the friends of Maggie’s friends (or something) and they were lost in gossip for most of the afternoon.
We hadn’t even gotten around to really talking about the engagement until merienda in the garden. Mid-afternoon meals were all about gossip with a cup of hot chocolate and tea, especially in my grandmother’s house.
We were served a wide array of treats. Lola enjoyed feeding her family with homemade purple yam jam (her secret recipe), delicate rolls of sweet milk treats, called pastillas from Lukban, small round discs of bibingka rice cake and cheesy, translucent pichi-pichi snacks from one of her friends. Drinks were always the same, barako coffee for the adults (extra strong for Papa) and tablea hot chocolate for the grandchildren. If there was anything Lola loved to do more than play a round of Chinese mahjong, it was feeding her family.
The engagement was understandably buried under Regina's stories from London and our exclamations over the food. Maggie announced she had decided to go into Fine Arts for college, which sparked a discussion about an old friend of Tita Merry's that was the friend of the former dean, who happened to also know someone who knew someone...
We were in the middle of talking about a second cousin of ours who migrated to the US with her boyfriend who was ten years older than her when Enzo walked into the garden. He treated every room like a stage, his role perfectly clear to him. He dutifully smiled and lightly placed his forehead under the adults' extended fingers for mano, he politely called my dad 'Tito' and my grandmother Lola. He kissed Maggie on the cheek like they'd known each other forever. He looked at Regina like she was his entire world, and me like an afterthought.
"I had no idea Reg was your cousin," he said to me, bussing my cheek. I felt it burn and smolder, curls of smoke disappearing against my cheek as I forced the feeling away. "You have no idea how nice it is to have a friendly face around."
"I'm not ex
actly a friendly face," I wanted to say, but stopped myself as Enzo settled in on a seat beside Regina. She smiled and pat his leg.
“You’ve met Martha?” Regina asked.
“You could say that,” I said, raising a skeptical eyebrow at Enzo. Did he not tell her about us?
They looked good together, and fit together. Seeing them made sense, and the engagement ring on Regina's finger was icing on the cake. How could I go against that?
It was only until Tita Merry put down her cup of coffee that the discussion began. I was in the middle of refusing another round of pichi-pichi, which made Regina widen her eyes.
"What do you mean, you don't want Tita Chi's pichi-pichi?" she asked suspiciously. "They're your favorite! Are you on a diet or something?"
I hated major assumption number one, that just because I didn't want to eat, I was automatically on a diet. It was a Filipino thing I guess. Any young lady of a certain age was always eating too much (‘hija, you really should go on a diet!’) or eating too little (‘ay hija, are you on a diet? Eat more!’). I know Regina didn't mean anything by her comment, but it still stung.
“Oh please, me? On a diet?” I scoffed. "I really..."
Tita Merry called everyone inside by ringing a small silver bell Lola May purchased from Florence once. We all went inside as she stood at the head of the table like a CEO.
“As you all know,” she said like she was leading a power brunch instead of a family affair. “And I’ve already given Mama the full story, Regina recently got engaged to Lorenzo.” I snorted while sipping my tsokolate, as did Maggie. Of course Tita Merry used Enzo’s full name to address him. I shouldn’t be surprised. According to the play-by-play she mentioned over lunch, Enzo had approached her to help coordinate his proposal at the screening, which explained why she was forever absent during the event itself. Apparently this engagement was a year in the making too.
But to everyone else outside the Aguas-Benitez circle, this whole thing was nothing short of a surprise. Maggie usually talked to Regina over Facebook, and there was no mention of Enzo then. When they Skyped once, there was a mention of a boyfriend, but nothing too serious. Mom simply reminded us that Tita Merry had her own life, and Regina did too. Our job was to just be happy for them and help them when they asked for it.
If the Dress Fits Page 5