Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Follow-through is not these men’s problem. Their problem is forethought.

But not, it should be said, fore talk. While the other marathoners eat, sleep, and breathe the marathon, the old girl’s husband is busy talking the marathon. “The men’s field is deep this year,” he tells the kids at dinner, as if he’s followed a shallower men’s field for years. “You’ve got Greg, for instance, wanting to redeem himself from the disaster of ’eighty-one…” Greg and Bill and Budd and Tom and Benji — as if he’s known these guys for years, as if they’re friends. And who knows? If he meets them, someday, they might be.

He can talk, the old girl’s husband— susmariosep, how he can talk! Give him an audience — of one or one million, passive or ill-tempered or smitten or skeptical, it doesn’t matter — he’ll go all day. The old girl sometimes tunes out during his daily speechifying — runs through grocery lists, the children’s schedules, a convent-school memory here, a question for her weekly phone call with her mother there — and when she tunes back in, contrite over what seems a longer-than-respectful span of time for a wife not to listen to her husband, he won’t have even noticed; the old girl’s husband will still be talking.

After she turns off the TV and sends Kit to bed, the old girl smells McDonald’s grease from the study. He must have convinced Bitbit or Ben to take him to the drive-thru after dinner. Through the rustle of wax paper she can hear her husband on the phone.

“I’ll wear the flag,” he says. “Either Bitbit will sew a cape out of it for me, or else I’ll find blue shoes, red socks, a yellow headband. What I’m asking is, beyond the photo, isn’t there a number twenty-six somewhere in our history that I can use? Some patriot that Spain locked up for twenty-six years? Twenty-six POWs tortured by the Japanese? Twenty-six international human-rights protocols violated since 1972? A symbol would be nice, beyond He ran the marathon. The more recent the better. Find that for me, would you?”

Bitbit

Bitbit, her eldest daughter, is twenty-seven. Bitbit’s beau proposed to her before the family left Manila. Now, in Boston, more than eight thousand miles from him, she’s wearing her mother’s engagement ring. Her sisters have thrown Brides magazine and Emily Post’s Etiquette and the Tiffany Blue Book at her. They’ve dragged Bitbit to Newbury Street to try on gowns. But Bitbit doesn’t care for all that. She only wants to stay home, flipping through her parents’ wedding album.

She shadows her mother everywhere, as she has from the beginning. Little Mommy, her father calls her sometimes. Everyone else has called her this Tagalog word for “hand-carried belongings” since she was small, always at the old girl’s side and in her image. Privately, the old girl also named her for the way their hearts seemed to sync up (she could swear she felt it), toward the end of that D.C. honeymoon, a comforting call-and-response between her full-grown throb and her daughter’s tiny, growing pulse: Beat-beat. Beat-beat. Beat-beat.

Gear

He didn’t pick an easy season to start running. March in New England: blizzards one day, sun-starved coeds airing out their eyelet dresses and sandals in the slush the next. The old girl passes them along Massachusetts Avenue on her way to buy her husband the proper clothes. She doesn’t know what’s proper, but she knows it can’t be Ateneo Blue Eagles shorts over long underwear. It never occurs to the old girl’s husband that people might laugh at him, which must be the secret of people who are never laughed at for long.

Not wanting judgment from someone like the BAA receptionist, the old girl spies on what the other customers — all of them men — are buying and grabs the same for her man: knit cap, gloves, muffler, tracksuit with stripes down the legs and across the chest — and then a second pair of gloves, to replace the ones her husband will surely lose.

“Women’s is this way,” says the salesclerk, at her shoulder, startling her.

I’m here for my husband, she’s said, in other contexts. He’s the politician. But he’s not “the runner” yet; in fact he’s only slightly more a runner than the old girl is. So she lets the clerk show her a corner table, with a few leggings and sweatshirts, braided headbands and neon wristbands, fanned across its surface. A sports bra stretched across a headless mannequin like taupe armor. “Know what size you are?” The old girl looks around before whispering, “Medium,” but no one in the store cares. “And are you satisfied with your current pair of running shoes?” The old girl’s not sure if this clerk really believes she is a runner, or pretends to believe that to sell more. But she doesn’t correct her. There are no women’s sneakers, only a pair of gray New Balances she buys in both her husband’s size and hers (men’s minus two, the clerk suggests). And then she buys the children some.

Ringing her up, the clerk asks, “Have you read the Bible yet?” Out from under the register comes a book entitled — rather hippie-dippily, the old girl thinks— Running & Being. “It’ll change your whole way of training.”

On her way back to the station, she sees runners everywhere. Have there always been so many? She notes what they’re wearing, wondering how soon she might have to go back to buy him a hooded sweatshirt, a pair of sweatpants, a lanyard for his keys. She starts to read Running & Being on the T. Scanning the chapter titles — a few she would expect, like “Training” and “Racing,” and airy-fairier ones like “Living,” “Discovering”—she flips to the one, ironically four chapters in — called “Beginning.” Can tomorrow be the first day of the rest of our life? What if the other passengers think, between this book and the bags at her feet, that she is the runner; that she’ll shed this trench coat and these rain boots when she gets home, baring her neon spandex like some secret fitness superhero? Let them, she finds herself thinking. She doesn’t mind.

Parlor Talk

It is not exactly true that — as the old girl has written the family back home — she has no servants in Newton. There’s a maid. One maid, Tweety, shared by five different Manilachusetts families. The old girl has her Tuesdays. On Sundays, Tweety goes to Chinatown to fulfill all five families’ requests for patis and mung bean noodles in one trip.

It took some getting used to, having no one but the old girl and Bitbit to cook and clean in Tweety’s absence. There were years on Times Street when she had one yaya per child. They slept in the old girl’s house, knew the old girl’s rules and preferences. Right hand doesn’t begin to cover it. With them the old girl felt multiarmed like an Indian deity, invincible.

One thing no maid ever did — in Chestnut Hill, or Concepcion, or Manila — was serve the old girl’s husband and his guests in the parlor. That, everyone knows, is a job for the wife. High-born and well-schooled though she may be, only the old girl can pass through, a ghost carrying a tray. Rice cakes, if it’s Manila; pan de sal or buttery pastries and pitsi-pitsi. Or something savory, like squid balls on bamboo sticks. In Boston, pretzels or club crackers, nuts, crudités, and cheese. The old girl knows which congressman and which professor has a taste for what.

She never expects more of him than how her own father behaved around her mother, reaching for the biscuit or the cup without a glance in her direction. And most men follow his lead.

But some have been jumpy, suspicious of her. The Huk captains her husband had over in Tarlac were tense and wary, never out of their fatigues. They held their coffee cups in their laps without sipping. Didn’t touch the food, eternally afraid of betrayal.