“It’s…quite interesting.”
He didn’t seem convinced.
“I’d better get to school.”
“Yes.”
They both stood up, and before Rosa could say anything else, Lito had lifted his net and was walking toward the shallows.
Rosa watched him for a few moments. He wasn’t short, but he certainly wasn’t tall either, and he was as black as the other boys who worked in the sea. But he was more handsome and less scarred than many of them, and he cut his hair much shorter. Disco hair was prized by all whose parents permitted it, following the local tradition of diligently matching Manila fashions of the previous year.
Maybe Lito had strict parents. Anyway, avoiding disco hair was no bad thing. Disco hair, Rosa commented to herself as she set off again toward Infanta, looked pretty ridiculous. She hadn’t really noticed before, but it wasn’t manly at all.
3.
At lunch break, when Leesha had suggested they leave the school grounds to talk in the burned-out WW II army truck, Rosa had known that something important had happened. So had Ella, who’d spotted them as they left the playground and caught up before they vanished into the privacy of the jungle.
Arranging themselves in the cabin, laying palm leaves beneath them to protect their dresses from the rusty seats, there was a sense of anticipation. A few minutes later, it was difficult to imagine how the sense of anticipation could have been better rewarded.
“What?” Ella gasped. “You did what?” She fluttered a hand weakly in front of her face and nearly knocked her glasses off her nose. “Quick, I’m dizzy. I may faint.”
“It’s the truth,” said Leesha, glowing with happy defiance.
“You realize—” Ella began, but she had to break off to fan herself more vigorously. A series of deep breaths gave her the strength to compose herself. Then, after a pointless glance into the thick foliage that surrounded the truck, she whispered, “You realize that there’s absolutely no going back from this point.”
“Of course. But I don’t want to go back. I want to marry him, and he wants to marry me.”
“So he says!”
“I told him. I told him I wasn’t an inland girl.”
“And?”
“He told me he wasn’t even interested in inland girls.”
“Oh?” said Ella, arching her eyebrows. “For someone not interested, he’s made enough trips over the boondocks.”
“Only to keep Doublon and Simeon company.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Mmm-hmm nothing, Ella.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Mmm-hmm nothing! If I didn’t trust him, I wouldn’t be marrying him.”
“Marriage!” Ella echoed, abruptly changing her tone. “It’s too wonderful for words.”
“I’m telling my parents this evening.”
“This evening! What do you think they’ll say?”
“I hope they’ll agree to it.”
“But of course they will! Turing is so…well! His father virtually runs the sawmill.”
“Everyone says he’ll be the general manager when Tata Rudy retires.”
Ella widened her eyes. “And one can only expect that Turing will run the sawmill after his father.”
“Yes,” sighed Leesha. “But I’m not interested in that. If I could only tell you, Ella, when you’re in love, things like sawmills seem so unimportant.”
“It’s too wonderful!”
A silence began to grow. Rosa waited until it had reached a suitable length before she cleared her throat and asked, “What exactly is a blow job?”
The nature of the act was both predictable (Rosa had heard rumors along similar lines) and unexpected (she hadn’t thought the rumors were true). Straightforwardly unexpected, however, was that halfway through Leesha’s graphic explanation, Lito popped into Rosa’s mind. Dismayed, forcing him out, Rosa told herself it was because she happened to have seen him that morning. He had been registered as something beyond a familiar local face, so his arrival in her mind was without any great meaning. Inevitably, she had fleshed out the image, and he was the first boy at hand.
It was an argument that carried no weight, and after the briefest of absences, Lito popped back again. This time, Rosa’s dismay was at the rush of jealousy she felt toward Leesha. Then it was at the odd elation that followed, and finally at her own hot cheeks.
Leesha noticed the blush immediately. She read it as innocence. Rosa, twirling the small silver-plated crucifix that hung around her neck, was content to let the mistake go uncorrected.
Chismis, gossip like a soft wind that raises heads from field work, strong enough to chill sweat. Chismis ladies, the ones who excelled in the collection and distribution of gossip. Nobody trusted them, but everybody gave them their confidence and secrets, because taking these things was their art. Ella’s art. Since she had been as young as five or six, people had identified Ella as a chismis lady-in-waiting. They said she made up for Coke-bottle glasses and thin lips by having second sight and a big mouth.
When the end-of-school bell rang that afternoon, Leesha’s news had already spread beyond the boundaries of Infanta and was making its way cross-country to her barrio and her house. Rosa followed lazily behind, daydreaming, keeping half an eye out for any pretty flowers growing by the side of the road.
4.
Rosa’s father, Doming, wasn’t talking over dinner that evening. Nothing unusual—a whole week could go by without his uttering a word. Ever since the dynamite fishing accident that had deafened him, his communication had become more and more limited, these days restricted mainly to nods, smiles, shrugs, and similar gestures. Not that the underwater pulse had damaged anything beyond his hearing—Doming had never been a big talker. Rosa sometimes felt he was closer to his natural self after the accident than before.
Corazon’s not talking, however, was unusual. Normally, Corazon was chatty to the same degree her husband was not, but she hadn’t opened her mouth since the three of them had sat down.
Eventually, Rosa became troubled. The quiet was not angry or resentful, but it was certainly loaded, so she decided to find out what it was loaded with. “Is there something the matter, Mother?” she asked, ladling a cube of chicken neck onto her plate.
Corazon raised her eyebrows. “Should something be the matter?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No,” said Rosa, genuinely. “I don’t. Tell me.”
Corazon’s eyebrows rose again. Then she pursed her lips. “How is your schoolwork?”
“Schoolwork?”
“Yes, your schoolwork. How is it?”
“It’s fine.”
“Really,” said Corazon. “Interesting…I’d have expected it would be one of the first things to suffer…”
Rosa looked over at her father to see if he was registering any part of this mysterious conversation, but he wasn’t. “Suffer from what?”
“I notice you have a flower in your hair,” Corazon replied, apparently ignoring the question.
Rosa paused. “I saw it growing near the…”
“Naturally. Do I know him?”
“Know him?”
“Do I know the boy? Or am I going to be surprised like Leesha’s mother this evening?” Corazon leaned forward across the table, and the curl to her mouth became an open smile. “Am I going to be cleaning rice tomorrow afternoon and find a little gossip breeze in my ear, telling me that my daughter has become intimate with her future husband!”
Rosa pulled the flower from her hair with one hand and covered her mouth with the other.
“Is it Mario?”
“No!”
“Gregorio?”
“There’s no boy!”
“Fine, fine. Suddenly you’re wearing a flower, but there’s no boy.” Corazon burst out laughing. “Let me tell you something. As soon as the first one marries, the others all will follow. Within a few months you’ll all be lined up in your best dresses to
talk to the padre. It’s always been that way. Of course…” She sniffed delicately. “…I was the first in my bakada.”
“There’s no boy.”
“I’ll be waiting for the little breeze…”
“I think you’ll be waiting a long time.”
“I think it’s Mario.”
“If you’re finished eating, I’ll take the plates outside.”
“Soon it will be someone else’s plates!”
Lying awake, Rosa became aware of her bed. She’d been sleeping on the same wooden boards for the last six years, and boards of similar dimensions for the years before that—but now she was aware of them. They felt small and hard, and they creaked whenever she shifted her position.
Plates, Rosa thought, watching a lizard flicker across the ceiling. Plates, bed…
One wouldn’t change without the other.
“Angel!” Doming had shouted earlier as Rosa had slipped behind the curtain partition that separated her room from the rest of the house. Rosa had stuck her head back around the curtain, wondering what had made him break his customary silence.
“What?” she mouthed.
“Why did you take that flower out your hair!” he yelled, making Corazon cup her hands over her ears. “It looked very pretty! You put in another one tomorrow!”
“Maybe.”
“Did you say something, angel?”
Rosa held the oil lamp up to her face so Doming could see her lips. “Maybe,” she repeated. “If I see a nice one on the way to school.”
“Keep a look out on the way to school! You might see a nice one!”
“Okay.”
“Good night then, angel!”
“Yes. Good night.”
5.
At a certain point, for a limited time, dead things turn black and pink. People and animals, black where the skin is exposed, and where the black skin flakes or splits, bright pink shines beneath. This is when dead things smell the worst. The stench has an impact and constricts the throat muscles to stop the lungs from taking in any more bad air while also preventing the lungs from letting the bad air out.
Trapped inside Rosa, a sense of death spread from her chest with the speed at which an oil droplet spreads on water. In a second, it had infected her whole body. She took quick steps and held off taking a breath until she was sure that the breath would be fresh. But she misjudged the zone of the stench, and her quick steps only brought her closer to the source. A pig, bloated by the sea, a quarter submerged in the sand, left by the three A.M. tide.
“It must have washed up during the night,” said Lito. “I saw you walking down the beach. I should have warned you.” One of his hands hovered an inch above her back, ready to reassure Rosa if she was sick again, too shy for the meantime to go the extra mile. The other held the flower she’d picked and dropped as she stumbled away from the shore, aiming blindly for the tree line. “Look, the flower’s okay. You can put it back.”
Rosa gazed at the patch of ground and splashes of breakfast between her hands. “Keep it,” she said, too disoriented and humiliated to think about what she was saying. “It was for you anyway.”
“The flower was for me?”
“I wore it for you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Rosa, and spat.
Lito hesitated, not sure what to say.
“I need to wipe my mouth.” Rosa looked up. Lito was wearing his T-shirt draped over his left shoulder like a towel—the same way he’d worn it yesterday when she’d walked over to inspect his mutant milkfish. “Can I use your shirt? I have to wipe my mouth. I can’t go to school like this.”
Lito frowned. “Um,” he said, still hesitating.
“Is it clean?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll rinse it in the sea afterward.”
“No, I’ll rinse it.”
“So?…”
He handed it to her and at the same time moved a pace to the side so that her back was to him. He was either putting himself out of view or politely letting Rosa dab away the vomit in relative privacy.
She murmured her thanks.
The T-shirt smelled strongly of soap. He must have washed it the night before, which seemed curious, given that this was the shirt he worked in. And the T-shirt was old, frayed on the collar stitching, but as bright and white as it would have been when new.
Rosa finished wiping, then flipped the T-shirt over to take one last deep breath through the clean folds, ridding herself of the pig’s final traces. Then she held it up for Lito to take, and when she’d stood and turned to face him, it was back over his shoulder.
Rosa thought for a moment. “Actually, I want to rinse it for you.”
“I can do it. Won’t you be late for school?”
“No.”
“Well, anyway…”
“Well, anyway, I’m going to rinse it,” said Rosa, making up her mind. “It’s the least I can do.”
He flinched as she reached out. She had known he would.
Lito’s right pectoral muscle existed; his left one did not. It was absent. With only a thin covering of skin, his rib cage was visible all the way up his chest, until it dipped beneath his collarbone. The absence of the muscle was compounded by an overdeveloped right pectoral and left shoulder. Bluntly concave where it should have been convex, Lito’s torso was deformed.
“It’s a good job you did all your throwing up already,” said Lito with a hopelessly nervous laugh.
Rosa waited before replying. “You look like a bar of chocolate,” she said eventually. “A bar someone took a bite out of. Your ribs are the teeth marks.”
His eyes flicked downward, then at the T-shirt, then downward again.
“You’re embarrassed.”
He nodded.
“You shouldn’t be.” Rosa lifted her hand and gave him a soft nudge on the arm. “It isn’t so bad to be a bar of chocolate.”
Sandmen
1.
It isn’t so bad. Rosa had said the same thing to Raphael, when he was old enough for them to explain what had happened to him and why. It isn’t so bad to be a bar of chocolate.
What she should have added, if she was being truthful, was that it might not be bad but it was hard. Being deformed would make his life harder than it would otherwise have been. And then she should have added that bad, and even good, were irrelevant anyway. Hard was what really mattered.
“ER!”
“Yes,” Rosa called back, although it was difficult to think of anything she wanted to do less than watch ER, let alone watch it with her mother. “I’m coming.”
“You missed the beginning section! Already I’m confused about what’s going on!”
“At the beginning they only show what happened the week before. The announcer says, ‘previously on ER.’ Something like that.”
“No.” Corazon waved a finger. “Previously on ER comes first,” she said, also using the English. “But then they have an introduction to the new story. Look, the credits have passed now. So you have missed previously, and also the introduction.”
“I’m sure we’ll be able to pick it up.”
Drugs and dosages, procedures, relationships between doctors and nurses, short-tempered surgeons—Rosa was impressed every time she watched the hospital program. The writers did their research. The only thing it lacked was a certain kind of detail. Background people. Not much interested in the plot lines, Rosa studied the background people, looking for familiar expressions and postures, and always found them missing. Not the injured—the ghost faces. The almost translucent figures, drifting, hovering, slumped in chairs. Unfocused eyes, lips pulled back in a strangely vague rictus of horror. She couldn’t believe an accident-and-emergency ward existed without them.
And there weren’t many gunshot wounds, but maybe Chicago didn’t have a problem with gangsters.
“Is the little Negro boy going to die?” asked Corazon, ten minutes in.
Rosa made a quick diagnosis, partly based on m
edical knowledge and partly based on the boy’s role in this week’s story. Broken rib, possible punctured lung, angelic face, abusive father, addict mother in a rehab program. The boy was being cared for by the guapo doctor. Or rather, the most guapo doctor. “He shouldn’t. Not unless there’s some kind of complication.”
“You never know with ER! Often there’s a complication! Even in rich American hospitals, with all the latest facilities, the children often die! There are no guarantees with ER.” Corazon shivered. “I remember once there was another child, a girl, and she had AIDS. Imagine that.”
Rosa was spared her imagination, to the extent that imagination was required, by the phone ringing. “I’ll get it,” she said, jumping up. “I’ll take it in the kitchen.”
“Let it ring! How can you drag yourself away?”
“It might be work. Maybe an…emergency.”
“Nonsense. You know who it is as well as I do.”
“I’ll check anyway.”
“If you insist. Actually, you’re lucky. I think there’s a commercial break coming up soon, but it won’t last long.”
“Commercial break,” said Rosa, over her shoulder, already out the door. “Right.”
2.
“Hi,” said her husband. “I only called to say I’m in the car. Coming home.”
“Are you over United Nations Avenue yet?”
“Just about to reach it.”
“Well…don’t hang up yet.”
Rosa pictured him. He would have one arm out the driver’s-side window, keeping away the street beggars and vendors with a wave of his cigarette. His other hand would be holding his mobile phone. In the early evening traffic, there would be no need for him to keep a grip on the wheel. He would be creeping the car forward with little pushes of the accelerator.
“Do you have either of your hands on the wheel?”
“Nope…Why do you ask?”
“Wondered. That’s all.”