“Raphael doesn’t need to either,” Rosa muttered to herself, and he looked up.
“I don’t need to what?”
“Nothing,” replied Rosa, through a yawn she engineered unconsciously. “You want this T-shirt?”
Raphael unflipped a twist in the elastic waistband of his shorts. “No.”
“You sure?” said Rosa, and immediately answered herself. “No. Okay. Fine.”
“We’ll go and say good night to Grandma,” said Lita.
“Yes,” said Raphael.
“Yes,” said Rosa. And that was the whole point. Rosa couldn’t have cared less what Raphael wore to bed, once he was in bed. But every evening, last thing before being tucked in, the kids would go and say good night to Corazon.
Rosa sighed. Then she folded the T-shirt and laid it back in the cupboard, where, in any normal family with any normal grandmother, it would have belonged.
Corazon sat on the sofa with her interrupted book by her side. Lita sat on her lap, and Raphael stood on tiptoe, clinging with his arms to her knee. Rosa stood in the living room doorway, leaning against the frame, feeling blank and hoping to stay that way.
“Do you know what I was thinking today?” asked Corazon.
“Unh-uh,” said Lita. Raphael didn’t bother to answer, because he knew where the question was directed. But still, he stood a little farther up on tiptoe, and tried to pull himself higher up his grandmother’s knee.
Corazon brushed her fingers through Lita’s still-damp hair. “I was thinking what we will be able to do with this in a few years’ time. Really, so many options we’ll have. And so much fun, deciding the different ways you will wear it. We’ll look at magazines together, and choose only the best styles.”
“Hmm,” said Lita. “Actually, it isn’t long enough for many different styles.” She pulled her bangs to the side. “You see, I can put it to the side like this, or to the other side, but…”
“Ah well.” Corazon lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “Perhaps in a few years’ time, your mother will stop cutting it so short.” Then she laughed. “Such beautiful hair. I can imagine it long and silky, hanging to your waist. Or we could tie it back with a band, and maybe put a flower in there. Of course…” back to the stage whisper “…only the prettiest girls can get away with wearing a flower.”
Lita looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure I’d want to wear a flower.”
“We’ll see! We’ll see if you want to wear a flower, when you want to start catching boys! But listen to me. I can tell you, my angel, you will be catching boys even with no flower at all. You will be the flower!”
“Flower…”
“Yes,” said Corazon. “Flower. In the sweetest way, you will break hearts.”
“And what about me?” Raphael chipped in, frustrated, unable to contain himself any longer. “Am I going to break hearts, Lola?”
Rosa closed her eyes. It was the only way she would be able to avoid seeing Corazon’s expression. If her eyes were open, she would have to look.
A thin smile, the measure of Corazon’s genuine affection for the boy as it tried to break through the suddenly dead mask of her face. A perfunctory stroke of Raphael’s cheek. A helpless glance at his bare torso.
“Of course you will break hearts, darling. Many. You will be a playboy.”
“I’ll be a playboy, and Lita will break hearts.”
“Yes.”
“And we’ll both be rich.”
“I hope so.”
“Good. We’ll both be rich, with fantastically big houses. And I’ll be a playboy basketball player.”
Corazon coughed. “A basketball player, darling?”
“Yes, a basketball player. I’m fairly sure. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I’d be good.”
“Well, well. That certainly is a very nice idea. But darling, what about being something grander, like a lawyer? After all, basketball players need to be…”
“Right!” interrupted Rosa, opening her eyes with a snap. “Bedtime.”
Refusing to meet Corazon’s gaze, Rosa clapped her hands and preempted the inevitable protest.
“Daddy’s going to be late home from work tonight, so you can’t wait up for him. So come on. No complaints.”
There were none. The brother and sister kissed their grandmother and padded out of the room. Good kids.
3.
It wasn’t going to be too long before the kids would outgrow their small bedroom. Come to that, it wasn’t going to be too long before they would need separate bedrooms. Which was a problem, because there were only three bedrooms to divide up—two adjoining, and one at the far end of the house.
Corazon’s was at the far end, and it was the largest. When she’d moved in, she had asked to swap with one of the smaller rooms, but Rosa had insisted she stay put, despite her husband’s grumbles. At the time, there had been an unformed thought in the back of Rosa’s mind—that perhaps by the time the kids needed their own space, Corazon would have passed on. In more recent years, particularly since the troubles with Raphael, the thought was still buried but had become a little more clarified.
“Open,” said Lita.
“Closed,” said Raphael.
“Open!”
“Closed!”
Rosa frowned. “It can’t be both open and closed. Raphael, why can’t it be open? You’ll boil like a couple of eggs if I leave it closed.”
“It can’t be open. There’s a hole in the mosquito netting. The mosquitoes fly in and get me.”
“Well…your sister doesn’t seem to mind.”
“I know she doesn’t! The mosquitoes don’t get her. They leave her alone.”
“That’s a mosquito’s compliment. They bite you because you taste so sweet.”
“No. They bite me because I sleep beside the window, but mainly because I don’t drink beer.”
“Beer?” said Lita, and sat up in bed.
“Lie back down, honey.”
“If I drank beer,” Raphael continued airily, and also sat up, “they’d leave me alone too.”
“I do not drink beer!”
“Of course you do. You sneak it from the fridge. It’s completely obvious.”
“I do not!”
“Then why don’t the mosquitoes bite you? Everybody knows that if you drink beer, you don’t get bitten by…”
“They bite you,” interrupted Lita, “because of the smell when you wet the bed.”
“Wet the bed?” Raphael threw his arms up into the air. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard! I haven’t wet the bed for months!”
“You wet the bed last week.”
“What!”
“Every night, actually.”
“How would you know? With all that San Miguel, you’re too drunk to remember!”
“I do not drink beer!”
“Enough!” said Rosa. “Raffy, Lita does not drink beer. Lita, Raffy has stopped wetting the bed. Now, lie back down and show me this hole in the netting.”
Raphael sank back on his pillow. “It’s up there.”
“Here?”
“Higher.”
“Oh. Yes, I see it…So how did this happen?” Rosa winced. “No, on second thought, I don’t want to know.”
“It was Raffy.”
“Lita did it with a knife.”
Lita’s eyes bulged. “A knife?”
“When she was reeling around one night.”
“Irrelevant. I said I didn’t want to know. Okay, how about I cover the hole up with a bit of newspaper, and then you can sleep with the window open.”
“Hmm,” said Raffy. “Yes, that’s a good idea. As long as the newspaper doesn’t blow away.”
“Well, sweetheart…” Rosa rubbed a hand on the back of her sweat-slick neck. “I don’t think there’s much chance of that tonight. There hasn’t been a breeze through Manila for days.”
4.
Rosa snuck down the stairs. In the hallway, by the living room, she nodded gratefully at t
he sound of the television, and walked briskly past the open doorway, eyes forward. Then she continued down the hallway, giving a thumbs-up to the slightly frayed Christ on their Last Supper wall hanging, and went into the kitchen. She planned to read the Manila Times over a cup of black coffee, maybe complemented by some Magnolia ice cream.
Corazon was standing by the sink, busily rearranging the clean dishes that Rosa had stacked half an hour before.
“Dearest,” said Corazon. “I’ve been telling you since you were Lita’s age. If you don’t pile the dishes in order of size, they’ll get chipped.”
“Because he doesn’t want to be a fucking lawyer! He wants to be a basketball player!”
Corazon chose to ignore the bad language. “Rosa, he is never going to be a basketball player. You know it, his father knows it, and I know it. Why let him dream of something he can never have? It’s nothing but cruelty.”
“He’s six years old! Two weeks ago he wanted to be an astronaut, until you managed to talk him out of it!”
“An astronaut was unrealistic. Astronauts need to be in peak physical condition. A lawyer is realistic.”
“But right now he doesn’t want to be a lawyer, he wants to be a basketball player! And who knows, by the time he’s seven he might have completely changed his mind!”
Corazon sniffed. “I don’t believe I brought you up to use that tone of voice with me.”
“You didn’t bring me up to be a doctor either,” snapped Rosa.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I distinctly heard you say something about the way I brought you up.”
Rosa exhaled. “I said you didn’t bring me up to be a doctor.”
“Well, what a thing to say! May I ask you, who paid for you to go through college?”
“Uncle Rey.”
“Yes! And who had to go to Uncle Rey, four times a year, asking for yet more money?”
“Yes! And why did it suddenly become so important to put me through college? Why was it suddenly so important to get me out of Barrio Sarap?”
“So, you would rather have stayed in Sarap.”
“I would rather have had a choice.”
Corazon let out a short, vicious laugh. “A choice in Barrio Sarap! That’s a fine thing to say. A choice between being the wife of a sawmill laborer or the wife of a fisherman. Oh, the choices I had!”
“Right! The choices you had!”
“They weren’t choices!”
“You had choices between men!”
“My God,” said Corazon, and crossed herself. “You understand so little. You are a trained doctor in a Manilan hospital, and you understand nothing.”
“Jesus,” said Rosa, and didn’t cross herself. “Can we stick to the point? Can we agree that if a six-year-old wants to be a…”
What was it with the streetside blossom? The sun was gone now, burned away during the kids’ bathtime, but Rosa was sure she could still make out the greens and yellows and blues. What was it about the colors that made them so durable?
“I’m going to watch TV,” said Corazon. “The hospital program, it’s on tonight.” Her voice was stiff and hurt, but somewhere in it was a softness. The same softness that lay in her expression when she’d talked to Raffy earlier, smile struggling with her dead face.
“ER,” said Rosa, without turning from the window. “I’ll…”
Corazon’s footsteps hesitated.
“…come in later.”
“Don’t be too long. The hospital program starts in half an hour. You know I can’t watch it without you, or I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Half an hour…”
Rosa’s mother left the room.
It came as a surprise. The headlights flaring on the road, everything etched in a sudden bright monochrome, with quick sliding shadows. A Mercedes with blacked-out windows, fast moving.
A few seconds, and it had passed.
Flower Power
1.
Barrio Sarap was as unlike Manila as a shark was a milkfish. Separated from the capital city by one hundred miles and the Sierra Madre mountains, the barrio sat on the eastern coastline of Luzon, gazing over the Pacific rather than the South China Sea. The only stone building was the church. Outside of the lumberyard, which had its own private generator, there was no electricity. There were no phone lines. There was no tarmac. There was only one tapped freshwater source, not counting the granite-filtered streams that ran down from the boondocks.
A hard rural life, but a resolutely siesta atmosphere—even the thud of a fisherman’s homemade dynamite or a metal screech from the sawmill seemed distant and unobtrusive. The only real disturbances in the barrio were occasional alcohol-fueled brawls and the late-summer typhoons, which would rip though the nipa huts, turn coconuts into cannonballs, and bring high tides that could suck palm trees down in their wake.
Unless, as a disturbance, one counted the kind of dramas that unfolded around adolescence, and adolescent preoccupations.
Premarital sex meant: Have sex, and you get married. Sex without marriage didn’t happen. Frustrated Sarap boys were forced to collect themselves into groups of threes or fours and make a trip into the mainland, where the girls were less stubbornly virginal. There they would head for the larger towns, prowl, and hope that their long and exhausting journey would be rewarded. That failing, they’d pool their money and hire a prostitute.
As for the boys from the mainland, they stayed where they were. No need to make the trip across the mountains. They knew that the coastline girls were provincial and conservative, and didn’t put out without a cast-iron commitment.
This was the power of the Sarap girls. In their own way, Sarap boys shared the same provincial values and were damned if they were going to end up marrying someone who’d already been laid. So, where a future was concerned, Sarap girls were the only option. Their power: A smile was a good reason for a boy to wait on a hot dusty road, hoping the smile might walk that way again; an indifferent turn of the head was an agony of rejection—and both could cause sleepless nights.
Sixteen years old, knee-length cotton dress with a sun-bleached floral pattern, schoolbooks under her arm. Rosa had silken hair that dropped to her shoulderblades and skin that was as deep in color as the sky. One day, a suitor would tell her that her beauty was as rare as her fingerprint, just before she rejected him.
2.
Her house was about two miles down the coastline from her school in Infanta, the nearest town. Making the journey home on cloudless afternoons, she’d walk along the road. It was longer than walking along the beach—the road meandered inland at some points, through hamlets and rice paddies—but most of the route was shaded by roadside palm trees. In the mornings, however, Rosa always followed the beach. At seven A.M., the sun was too low in the sky to be any bother.
A boy said, “Look,” as she passed him. He was kneeling down a short distance away, with his back to her, beside six feet of fine netting to trap the milkfish fry that swam in the shallows. In front of him was the white plastic container in which he kept his catch.
Rosa stopped, a little surprised.
It wasn’t until he had glanced over his shoulder, to check if she had heard him, that she recognized the boy as Lito. They were the same age and lived in neighboring barangays, so Rosa was vaguely aware of his existence, but they had never exchanged words. He didn’t go to school, and they had no friends in common. The closest they had come to a conversation was at a fiesta, when Lito’s older cousin had asked Rosa for a dance. Lito had been his shadow, backup in the background. When she had politely declined, Lito had stepped forward to stand beside his cousin and opened his mouth as if he meant to say something. But instead he’d nodded, which had felt to Rosa like a tacit agreement that dancing with his cousin was not such a great idea. A second later the two boys disappeared.
“Aren’t you going to loo
k?” said Lito with an impatience in his voice that Rosa found even more surprising. Since she had turned sixteen, no boy had spoken to her with anything less than the utmost courtesy.
“I’m on my way to school,” Rosa replied.
“I know. I see you walk to school most mornings. Sometimes I’m on my boat, far out at sea. You’re just a dot on the beach. But most mornings I’m right here, so I see you.”
“Oh…”
“It’s okay. I don’t expect you to have noticed me. I just thought you’d find this interesting.”
“Find what interesting?”
“Well.” Lito shrugged. “Either you look or you don’t.”
Rosa hesitated, then walked over the sand toward him. As she approached, he picked up a T-shirt and slung it across his left shoulder so that it hung over the side of his chest. Only then did he turn to face her.
“So,” said Rosa.
Lito pointed at the water in the plastic container. “You have to see up close. You have to get closer.”
Rosa squatted.
“There. Now follow my finger. You see this very small fry?”
“Yes.”
“You see anything strange about it?”
“No.”
“What do you see?”
“Actually, I can see two fry.”
“No, you think you can see two fry, swimming next to each other. But it isn’t two. It’s one fry, and he has two tails…” Lito frowned. “I’ve been catching these fry since I was a fry, and I’ve never seen anything like it. I thought maybe something happened to his mother. She might have been hit or bitten by a larger fish when she was pregnant. Some kind of shock…”
“Since you were a fry?” said Rosa, and laughed. Then she frowned, puzzled rather than annoyed. “Is that what was interesting?”
“Yes.” Lito’s expression became suddenly alarmed, and he tugged at a fold on his draped T-shirt. “You don’t think it’s interesting,” he said.