Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Assumption

She only ever spent a year in the Manila convent school whose students called themselves old girls, but that was long enough for her to see herself as an Old Girl always. Her husband, who escorted old girl after old girl to debuts and dances in his youth, hated the term. You sound like mares the farmer doesn’t have the heart to shoot. Some old girls agreed. Ines Arroyo, on all fours in the locker room, neighed while Margarita Lopez spanked her rump through the red plaid pleats. Giddyap, old girl!

And yet, what better name for them was there than old girls ? As they jumped rope, memorized irregular French verbes, spiked and served at warball, drew shapes with compasses and protractors, sewed scenes of cottages and shepherdesses in little hoops, the one constant theme they were meant to meditate on was their future as wives and mothers. Old girls, like the Virgin Queen herself, were as pure and openhearted as children, but ready at the same time to shoulder children of their own, and households, when the time (not far off) came.

And they learned all this, of course, from nuns. Old girls themselves: aging maidens, ancient yet suspended forever at a specific point in childhood. Those sisters, who taught the old girl everything from home ec to geometry, loved her. Modest, humble, soft-spoken, they wrote on her report cards. Pious, simple. A girl who saw the point in outlines and index cards.

The woman answering the Boston Athletic Association phone scolds the old girl as if she were the opposite. “You’re much too late, sweetheart. What did you think? A marathon’s not something we just take up. ” The old girl hangs up, thanking her.

Doing her husband’s homework for him — it’s a habit, at this point. The old girl didn’t even mean to start. In school he was the kind of C student— gifted but needs to focus, waste of great potential —whose alleged inborn genius was never put to the test by trying. Relax, Mommy, he teases, whenever he sees her gathering data, making a nest of what she knows. There won’t be a test on this. Won’t there? There always is. Life is a test, she wants to tell him, and those who study well can lick it.

“Registration’s closed, Dad,” the old girl tells him at dinner. “Even if you made the deadline, you’d have had to run what they call a sub-three by September.” Hard, fast rules: how can he argue? He was four years too young to run for President, in 1969—finding his youth (people had called him Wonder Boy) a liability, for once. He’d had to wait, another skill he didn’t have in spades. And by the time the wait was over, the Philippines was under martial law — a welcome reprieve, thought the old girl at first, from campaigns altogether.

“We’ll find a way,” the old girl’s husband tells her cheerfully. He thinks like a Manila politician, still. As if they can bribe someone at the BAA. “We’ll grease the wheel somehow.”

Town

For all her husband’s sudden interest in Boston, the old girl is the one, between the two of them, who loves it here. This town’s the high point, to her mind, of a beloved northeastern triangle — from Philadelphia, where she rode out Manila’s war years at the school that produced Grace Kelly; to New York, where she studied college French and math.

Not that America didn’t shock her, at first. At Ravenhill, students talked back. Mount Saint Vincent daughters disobeyed their fathers. But much about America agreed with her. When a ’kano says lunch at one o’clock, it’s one o’clock, she wrote the man who would become her husband; by high school they were exchanging letters. I’m learning, when I speak, to — as they say in New York—“cut to the chase.” In the summers, when she went back to Manila, he’d tease her. What an egghead, he would tell her, for consenting to attend school all year round.

Some weekends, now, the old girl takes one of her children on the Amtrak down the Northeast Corridor. She loves even that phrase, imagining the country as a big house and its best cities as rooms along the main hallway. They’ve visited the Empire State Building and the Liberty Bell; had dinner with the nuns who taught her linear algebra and Stendhal; met her former classmates’ kids in Rye or Greenwich.

But Boston and its suburbs, she loves most of all. Especially — the old girl doesn’t care how corny or obvious it is — in fall, when the hills start to blush along the Charles River like a McIntosh apple. Winter, too, comes close: the Frog Pond frozen for skaters, the snow sugaring the red-brick houses just so. When he got his fellowships to teach at Harvard and MIT, they linked into a four-mile cluster of Filipino expat households stretching from the Jesuit priests at Boston College to the nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Manilachusetts, some have called it. They’re the ones who found the old girl and her husband their own red-brick colonial on Commonwealth, piped with white shutters and white columns and a white banister around the second-floor balcony, as if designed to hold a memory of snow even in August, when they came, in 1980. And — no use denying it — his name means something different in Manilachusetts than it does in Manila. Hero. Freedom fighter. Prisoner of conscience. Some still even call her husband Senator in greeting, as if no time has passed since 1972, unlike the fair-weather friends who started taking the long way around their house on Times Street, in Quezon City, and kept their children from her children, as if bad political luck were a communicable disease, which of course it is.

The old girl’s husband, on the other hand, is restless here. She’s known this for a while.

Whenever they’re enjoying Boston — the best of Boston — home comes up, for him. The worst of home. At Fenway Park, for their son’s birthday: “It’s so damn civilized here,” he complained. “In Manila, they’d have oversold the seats. Some gago would yell ‘Fire!’ to clear the stadium, and there’d be a huge stampede.” He laughed, as if stampedes were charming, something that deserved his nostalgia. On Brattle Street, the rare nights they met to watch a film together, leaving the kids at home: “Remember how you wore your raincoat at the one movie theater in Concepcion? Because of all the fleas?”

Training

The two Akitas — Yoshi and Miki, gifts from a Tokyo congressman — accompany the old girl’s husband on his first jog. He doesn’t like to be alone. Yoshi and Miki aren’t running dogs, any more than his canvas slip-ons are running shoes. The most pampered and, at the same time, most neglected dogs she’s ever known, they’ve been raised as her husband might have raised their children, if she weren’t around. Reward biscuits have made them flabby. They’re jumpy, flesh trembling beneath the white and fox-red fur, because they never know when their next walk will come. The old girl’s husband bathes them with too much of their eldest daughter’s Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo. But he doesn’t plan for who might feed them when he flies to speak in Managua or Los Angeles or Kuala Lumpur.

He hasn’t thought, either, about who’ll drop off Kit, their youngest, at school, now that he’s out jogging in the mornings. That’s been his one job, in the mushroom-colored Chevrolet Caprice he has all to himself. (She and the children share a blue Dodge Diplomat.) “I can’t train earlier,” he tells her (he doesn’t like the dark); and later’s not an option: once he’s on campus, he wants to stay till evening. (The same reason he’s exempt from picking Kit up in the afternoon.) If you had to find parking in Harvard Square, Mommy, you’d understand.