Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

—

We took recess outside. Annelise and I stayed close to the hedges separating the high school from the little girls’ playground.

“How is your mother?” I asked.

“She’ll be ready to work again next week.”

“I didn’t mean—”

Annelise laughed. “She’s doing better,” she said. “My little brother kept refusing her nipple, at first. Like a spoiled little prince! But good old Dr. Delacruz brought us some formula.”

Annelise glided easily from Dr. Delacruz to her next subject and then the next, treating them all as casually as she had her mother’s nipple. You would presume from her tone that we had known each other for years.

“You seem different from the girls here,” I admitted. Then, fearing I’d insulted her: “Sorry.”

“I am,” she said. “I’m the ‘scholarship girl.’ The nuns took me on as their charity case.” She smiled and looked at me expectantly. “And you? Which ‘boy’ are you?”

It was not so easy to name my status. How should I explain the fine house, and the servants who were sometimes paid in bowls or jewels to maintain it? What title bridged the space between light skin and no legs, between a white hero for a grandfather and a half-white mother whose doings were whispered of in town? Which “boy” did all these things, combined, make me?

“I’m not the Delacruz boy,” I finally said.

Annelise nodded. As if their ears had pricked at the sound of Ruben’s name, some of her classmates approached, and made a show of holding their noses. “You stink, Negrita,” they said. “Stinks to be poor, eh?” Annelise turned away. She faced me and held the handles of my chair, her knees touching my trousers, so that we made a nearly self-enclosed unit on the grass. Her movement made a rustling sound like plastic bags.

“What’s in your diaper?” they asked. “We think Negrita needs a diaper change.”

My mother once fired a maid who, she said, filled the house with a wretched odor. “The poor live in a Dark Age of superstition,” said my mother at the time. “I won’t have her trailing her animal smells into my house.”

“In one ear and out the other,” said Annelise, looking down at me. “You don’t let the things they say affect you, do you?”

“No,” I lied.

—

Later that week Sister Grace and Father Johnson excused us from a joint Physical Education class, where the other pairs would learn a folk dance called the kuratsa. Annelise and I watched from the sidelines of the Doug Prep gymnasium. “It isn’t fair that you won’t dance in the fiesta, because of me,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You say this word a lot,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“There you go again.” Annelise grinned. “I used to be like that too. Shy, and ‘sorry’ about everything. Anyway, does that seem like a good time to you?” She turned to where our classmates were shuffling along, two by two, some looking like they wanted the gym floor to swallow them. “I wish we had our own radio, though.”

“I listened to Pusong Sinugatan last night,” I offered. I didn’t mention that I’d missed Annelise’s company just as soon as my class left Safety’s campus, that I’d wished almost immediately to go back to the Catechism lesson and the recess, or that I’d tuned in to the radio as a way, alone in my room, to conjure her. I didn’t talk about searching my Bible at home to reread Luke’s story of the bleeding woman. Daughter, faith has cured you. Go in peace.

“Well?” said Annelise. “Catch me up, then.”

I told her how, after the program had been following their separate paths for days, Joe finally laid eyes on Reyna at a dance. It wasn’t love at first sight — not for Reyna, anyway. Joe had to fight through a thicket of other suitors to say hello. Those suitors had only one thing in mind — so said the narrator — but Reyna was too blind to see it, or to notice Joe. It surprised me how easily I fell to talking about these people, like an old village gossip. As if they were neighbors and lived on our same hill in Monte Ramon.

Annelise sighed. “She’ll come around.”

I was sorry that she couldn’t listen at home. Before I knew what I was doing, I said, “You’re welcome to borrow it, Annelise. The radio. Next time you or your mother come…”

“That’s kind of you,” she said, “but we’d need electricity for that.”

I felt sorry again, but now I knew not to say so.

“Thanks anyway.” Annelise reached over as if to touch me, but gripped the armrest of my chair instead, helping herself up and excusing herself to the lavatory. As she crossed in front of me she smelled different, this time, from the laundry powder she had used to do our wash. She tossed her hair behind her, sending a damp and loamy scent in my direction. It reminded me of our garden after a very heavy rain, the grass and hibiscus buds gone slick and overripe under the weather.

—

Because we couldn’t do the kuratsa, Annelise and I were in charge of serving punch and cake at a dance — a kind of rehearsal for the March performance. The Safety girls wore fancy dresses to this event, with flowers on their shoulders and waists and hems. The boys arrived in white barong Tagalog —sheer dress shirts of banana silk thread or pineapple fiber, embroidered at the placket and worn loose over the undershirts we’d tucked into the waistbands of our trousers. I wore the same barong I’d worn at my Confirmation the year before, a plain linen one left behind by one of my mother’s visitors, still large on me. My classmates raised their eyebrows at the frayed sleeves, buttoning nearly at my fingertips. Ruben, whose barong seemed to have gold thread in it, called me Lolo as I filled his punch cup. I watched the clock and waited for Annelise.

An hour passed, and then another. She did not come. Three hours into the dance, there was still no one at the refreshments table but me.

A few girls from Annelise’s class approached. “Your Negrita girlfriend’s on the rag,” said a petite, snub-nosed one, taking a cup of punch from my hand. “She’s a freak of nature. Her rags go on for weeks and weeks and she can barely stand for pain. She’s bleeding her guts out right now.”

Sharp words, turning this girl’s tiny voice and delicate face ugly. I looked away. I knew so little of what female bodies did in secret. Women’s privacy, I’d been taught, was sacred. The second story of our house, my mother’s zone, was forbidden to me and difficult, in any case, for me to access. Sometimes, when I passed the foot of the stairs, I’d catch a gust of perfumed air or a flash of eastern sunlight as a guest opened my mother’s door and then closed it behind him. Ruben once smuggled a medical textbook of his father’s to school and showed his friends a page headed “Female Reproductive System.” Excluded from their circle, I glimpsed only something like a symbol of Aries, that ram’s head with great curlicued horns. These subjects felt as far from me as my mother’s quarters, closed and quiet at the top of the stairs that I could never climb.

“Maybe Danny’s mother can get Annelise some medical help,” Jacinto Cortez said. “Doesn’t Danny’s mother know Dr. Delacruz?”

Ruben Delacruz balled his fists. “Did you say something?” he said, staring Jacinto down and away from the table. When the gymnasium began to empty and Annelise still had not appeared, I wheeled my way home.

—

In Annelise’s absence, boys and girls alike went back to teasing me. After dismissal that Monday, Pedro Katigbak clutched his heart and forehead like a girl. “Help!” he falsettoed. “I’m bleeding to death! Oh, how can I stop this bleeding?” He placed a hand between his legs and made as if to faint.