Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

And in America, some men feel guilty enough to take her presence on themselves. Not in some weighty way, just long enough to log that she’s been seen. Something along the lines of You’d better figure out your stance on that, buddy, or She won’t vote for you. They cock their heads at the old girl, lightening the mood, some cupping hands beside their mouths to feign a secret from her. It seemed gallant, at first — the old girl’s husband is a lot of things, but rarely that — until she understood the joke. That a woman, a wife, could have serious political opinions at all. As if the old girl would ever not vote for her own husband, they seem to be implying. One of the Akitas could walk into the parlor, sniffing for crumbs, and they’d make the same joke. Better figure it out, buddy, or Yoshi here will never vote for you.

Fuel

Over the years, the old girl and her husband’s dialogue about food has (as he gently puts it himself, when his political opinion — or even, once, his party — changes) “evolved.”

In the late fifties and sixties she was still the bride who raised an eyebrow, shook her head when he reached for the fifth beer or the second dessert. Peking duck and rich white chocolate were his weaknesses. A young and pretty wife who kept those in check for you was, back then, no less a status symbol than the armored car or bulletproof vest.

The old girl did not think, in 1975, almost three years into his prison term, that that same beer- and Peking-duck- and white-chocolate-loving man could be serious about a hunger strike. When he floated it — his protest against a military trial for civilian crimes he didn’t commit, or weren’t even crimes when he supposedly committed them, before martial law — the old girl said, “Whatever you think is best, Dad.” That’s how little she believed he would go through with it. Even when he did begin, she waited for him to grow bored, plan his next dramatic gesture. Until she saw him on the twelfth day, looking positively Caravaggian. His breath — cold, sepulchral — sent a shudder through her. The hunger strike inflicted, in one month, all the aging the former cub reporter, baby mayor, Wonder Boy had previously skipped over. When it came to food, after that, all the old girl cared about was that he regain some of his lost weight and color in his cheeks. He could eat Peking duck for breakfast as far as she was concerned.

Then she saw him clutch his chest and search for breath after Christmas 1979. Indigestion, she thought at first. The shock of pork stew and pineapple ham after so much bland prison cuisine. But seeing his face grow gray and damp, like uncooked clay, she called in the guard. Angina pectoris: a dirty, vaguely genital-sounding diagnosis. She begged him to get triple-bypassed in the States. Not Manila — who would put it past the President and First Lady to arrange “mysterious causes” on her husband’s operating table? “Cabbage surgery,” the Dallas surgeon called it — for coronary artery bypass graft, “and also for the kind of diet you’ll be on afterwards, the rest of your life.” His voice, so reassuring; that word cabbage —the old girl had visions of a sweetly ordinary life ahead, slapping his hand away from the butter or the gravy. But the cabbage diet lasted about as long as his vow not to bad-mouth the regime abroad. About as long as the daily breathing exercises he abandoned, saying he’d rather suffocate than watch that spirometer ball go up and down its plastic piston, over and over. Before his stitches healed he started booking speeches in New York, Columbus, Ithaca. A pact with the devil is no pact at all.

Now with the marathon approaching, in a decade when everyone’s counting calories and cholesterol, the old girl serves up skinless chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, brown rice.

“What’s with the prison food, Mommy?” says her husband.

“If you want to be a marathoner, start eating like one,” she says.

“All of us?” says Toyang, their second to youngest. “ We’re not running the marathon.”

“Yes, all of us,” the old girl says. “Dad could use our support. Unless you want to do your own cooking — in that case, by all means, eat what you like.”

Miki

Something’s wrong. The old girl knows it after she drops Kit off one Tuesday: “Kung Liligaya Ka” (If You’ll Be Happy) is blaring from the master bedroom. She follows a trail of gray puddles through the hallway and up the stairs, to Imelda Papin’s melancholy voice:

If you’ll be happy in the arms of someone else,

and if her love is paradise to you,

who am I to argue with what you desire?

It’s enough that you loved me once.

He lies on their bed, still in his sweaty workout clothes, his sneakers muddying the down comforter. He’s locked in an embrace with Yoshi, whose nose is resting on his shoulder. Humming gloomily with Imelda Papin, he now and then chimes in on a word— forever, tears, apart. He could hear something a million times and not have memorized it.

“We lost her, Mommy,” says the old girl’s husband. He buries his face into Yoshi’s fur, and the pillow. Miki has disappeared, distracted by a squirrel on the Common. After bathing them last night, the old girl’s husband didn’t bother to put their collars back on. “I was in a rush this morning. Knew I had an early meeting before class. Now, I can’t go anywhere.”

The old girl doesn’t ask whether he’s done anything about Miki besides mope. Instead, she unties his shoelaces. I’ll take care of it. She convinces him to get into the shower, sets out a sweater and trousers for him. No need to miss your meeting. She finds a photo of Miki and makes a MISSING poster. $200 REWARD. Her husband drops her at the copy shop in Back Bay before heading off to Cambridge.

She tells him she’ll catch the T home after posting copies all around the Common. But the sun’s out, glinting off what’s left of the snow. It’s not too cold. In the sneakers she bought in Cambridge, bouncier and gentler on the feet than the flattest loafers she owns, she walks herself home.

Popsy

The old girl can imagine one of them, out of the seven, as a marathoner outright: Popsy, her second oldest.

Popsy moves fast. Popsy commutes each day to East Cambridge in what the old girl’s husband still calls rubber shoes, on top of scrunched tube socks and panty hose. Two pairs of leather pumps — one black, one brown — wait in a steel file cabinet in Popsy’s office.

She’s their only breadwinner these days. How competent Popsy looks, with her briefcase and pencil skirts and pearls! Her personality— pamparampam, they call it, like the trumpet fanfare that feels like it should announce her arrival in any room — seems built for shoulder pads.

They call her Popsy for the sweet ice Popsicles she loved as a child. But she’s grown into the fatherly sound of it, too. More than her dad — the visiting professor in jeans and polo shirts and sneakers, a suit only for speeches, off on Mondays and Fridays, nothing scheduled before eleven — Popsy wears provider clothes and keeps provider hours. Home by six-thirty or seven in her suit, her insteps aching. She devours what the old girl makes for dinner, while Bitbit, “little Mommy,” pulls out Popsy’s chair and clears her plate; the old girl’s first- and second-born reenacting some domestic dinner scene from a 1950s TV show. Whatever Dad earns on a speech goes right back into the Movement for a Free Philippines, but Popsy has the family-man instinct toward “blowouts” and pasalubong on payday. Those Fenway seats for Ben’s twenty-second. The IBM in her father’s study, installed in secret and festooned with a big red gift bow while her father was in Singapore. They can hear him, from downstairs, typing on it with two fingers — slowly, torturously, until Bitbit or the old girl would rather seize his yellow notepads and type for him than hear more. (All old girls had to pass stenography in high school. An insurance policy in case they — God forbid — never married.)