Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Take me.

You’ll walk into this river, wash away your sins. And if he lives, you’ll see to it yourself that he lives right. You’ll walk into this river and you won’t come out.

You know that bargains aren’t prayers. This kind of pagan trade isn’t what Jesus meant by sacrifice. Today, though, you’ll try anything.

And when you hear the second rumbling, you don’t run. When smoke, the second night in one bright hour, again snuffs out the morning, you kneel and wait, elbows on the slats, hands clasped at your brow, stubborn as a statue while the glass and dust and paper coat the town.

You’ve come this far. Why wouldn’t you go back for him? You came into this world with few advantages, but faith is wealth, and you, Esmeralda, are rich with it.

—

For one whole year you both avoided the word love.

For one whole year you never talked about the future.

What you discussed, what kept you listening to each other all those hours in his office, was the past.

“I almost didn’t stay here in this city,” you told John.

“Get out of here,” he said. By then you knew what this expression meant.

You were playing the game that lovers play, when lovers can’t believe their luck. What if John had worked for that firm and not this one? What if the cleaning company had sent you to a midtown building? You never would have met. And farther back in time, and farther: what if John became a fireman or cop, like his brothers? What if you never left the Philippines?

“It’s true,” you said. “Mrs. Guzman, the one who brought me, couldn’t keep me. She said she didn’t know that living in this city was so hard. She bought me a plane ticket and called up a family she knew in Manila.”

You told John about shopping for souvenirs at the airport. The T-shirts: so expensive. Snow globes you shook to watch the salt-shaped crumbs fall on the mini-skyline. People on the farm would ask about the snow — what would you tell them? That you hadn’t stayed long enough to see it? You looked at yellow-taxi postcards, bright red apple magnets. People would ask about the skyscrapers. Had you ever climbed to the top of one? What would you say?

“I kept thinking of this rhyme that day,” you said to John. “The Guzman kids liked it.”

Because John’s head was in your lap, your hand combing his white hair, you sang it.

If I were a spoon as high as the sky,

I’d scoop up the clouds that go slip-sliding by.

I’d take them inside and give them to Cook

to see if they taste just as good as they look.

“I never learned that one.” John smiled. “How would the sky taste, do you think? If we got close enough?”

“Soft but crunchy,” you said. (You had wondered too.) “And good for breakfast; just a little makes you full.”

You told him somehow you weren’t finished with the city. Something kept you here. The city wasn’t done with you.

“It’s brave, what you decided,” John said. “When you think about it.”

“But I wasn’t thinking, not at all.” You laughed. “Is it brave, or crazy? If I was thinking, I’d go home. I had no job. I had no place to live.”

The job that brought you to him, to this building, was still eighteen years away that day. There would be lucky accidents and Doris and a change of laws and many other rooms to tidy in between. But as it happened, when you backtracked through the gate, and spent some of your last bills on a taxi back into the city, on a crisp, clear day like this one, you came very close to him and didn’t know it. You just didn’t know exactly where to go.

As far as towers went, you hadn’t even been in this land long enough to know the difference between tall and high.

“I want to see the highest building in this town,” you told the driver.

So he brought you here.

Dad

The old girl’s husband — fifty-one years old, the 165-pound champion (as he likes to put it) of a triple-bypass surgery — tells her on March 1, 1983: “I had an idea, Mommy.”

Mommy is what the old girl’s husband calls her. And idea is a generous word for whim or flight of fancy, the kind of ill-considered impulse he’ll have often and won’t quit till he’s pulled it off (he almost always does, if barely) or failed (more rarely, but with flying colors). Not scheme or plan —God knows the old girl’s husband can’t be bothered with anything like a plan.

“It just came to me,” he says. “I thought I’d run the marathon this year!” As if the race has been, in previous years, an option he just didn’t exercise. Such glee in his voice. As if of course the old girl will see it as he does. The best idea in the history of ideas.

Right now they live in Chestnut Hill, in Newton, Massachusetts. So when her husband says “the marathon” he means the marathon: Boston, mother of all. Not counting Greece, of course — original but defunct. Not with his colleagues, either — men his age or older, with wives and kids and coronary issues of their own — but with his students. Young, fit Kennedys-in-training — with, the old girl guesses, egos to match or trump her husband’s. They run it every year, they told him during office hours, which the old girl’s husband holds not in an office but at the Bow and Arrow Pub, in Harvard Square. How had he lived on Commonwealth Avenue for two years and never caught the bug, they asked, on Patriots’ Day? They must have talked about Pheidippides, poor messenger, croaking at Athens, just before (the old girl imagines) her husband slammed his pint down on the sticky bar declaring, “Goddamn it, count me in.”

What kind of race has the old girl’s husband ever run, in his life? The electoral kind. The skills that once won him those races — the glad-handing, the tippling with rice farmers in the north and the fasting with Muslim pineapple canners in the south, the all-nighters, the stump speeches, the bouncing of babies while flirting with their mothers — would hardly get him through this one. Athletes turned in early, didn’t they? They didn’t smoke or drink, avoided fatty foods. And never mind the hours of training, the miles of preparation —never her husband’s strong suit. The old girl’s husband thinks of preparation as a kind of joke. The hero, in his myths about himself, is always slightly unprepared for his adventures. She’s known this since they met. They were both nine years old. He told her he’d snuck into a grade five classroom and stayed. I don’t really know fractions, but no one said no. The old girl can already hear (six weeks from now — too soon, by any measure) his loud, braggy revisions: “I didn’t even own a pair of decent rubber shoes!” And just before that, who will stand at the abandoned finish line, while the street sweepers check their watches? Who’ll hold the water or the smelling salts, wiping the sweat or vomit, tending to him like a nurse except a nurse gets paid, picking up the pieces, in a word, when all his grandstanding comes back to bite him?

The old girl, that’s who.

“Dad,” the old girl says— Dad is what the old girl calls her husband—“that’s about twenty-six miles, I think.” She knows. Twenty-six point two, to be exact. But delivery matters, in this marriage. Impossible, insane, or even not a good idea would just cause a digging-in of heels and land her in the camp of killjoys and naysayers, never a chorus he heeds. I think, perhaps, or Is it possible that are the better notes to strike.

“Twenty-six?” the old girl’s husband says, with his trademark puffery. “Is that all?”