Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

For three months, in Manila, no one would tell the old girl where he was.

And then in April, as abruptly as they’d taken him, he was back.

When he saw her, he wept. Not some stoic pallbearer’s solitary macho tear, either. A full, blubbering breakdown. To speak, to say her name, took him a few tries.

Yoshi barks, straining at the leash. Miki? the old girl thinks, seeing a flash of white and fox-red fur streak past the reservoir. “Miki?” she says aloud, speeding up, letting Yoshi pull her. They jog down Beacon Street all the way to the cemetery, where the old girl lets Yoshi off his leash to sniff at shrubs, to search behind the tombstones, and finally to sit in the shade of a walnut tree. Miki, if indeed it was Miki, is nowhere to be found. Is it the ghost of Miki they’ve just seen, perhaps run over the day Dad lost her? Then it seems possible to the old girl that Miki just wasn’t cut out for family life. That she was just biding her time with them in Chestnut Hill until she saw a chance, that morning in the Common, to break free. And now that Miki’s nowhere in sight — again — the old girl and Yoshi make their way, flushed and panting, home.

“I wish I could have traded places with you, Dad,” the old girl said, the day he wept about his solitary confinement. She meant it. A month by herself in the green slopes of the Sierra Madre would not have broken her, she doesn’t think, as it did him. What would have? What could they use against her? Her children? Religion? Movies always depict the lover as the bait that brings any hero to his knees. But real life wasn’t like that. The old girl and her husband have already both survived without each other.

Armor

By the time her husband was imprisoned, no one wore a girdle anymore. And no woman she knew missed them — except for the old girl, during the frisks. On Sunday mornings, young, indifferent fingers, palpating every scar and ripple, then shunting her into the amphitheater. She thought of farmers poking animals upon the auction block, searching for defects to bargain on. Giddyap, old girl! She longed for that lost barrier, the sausage-tight elastic, the hook-and-eye trail down her spine, the bra cups peaked like two salakot hats, and almost as hard— something to protect her flesh from all this easy access.

Only that time of month offered reprieve. Their hands, grazing the sanitary-napkin belt, the bridle holding up the old girl’s cotton saddle, would stop there and go no farther.

Toyang

When the old girl’s husband hurts himself, three weeks into his training, she thinks he’s saying black guys. “The goddamn black guys got me,” he wails. He was running with a priest friend in Franklin Park. In Dorchester. Where Boston hides the black people, their daughter Toyang has said. Manilachusetts wives have warned the old girl about riots in Mattapan, muggings in Roxbury, empty trash-filled lots on Dudley Street, burned-out buildings on Blue Hill Avenue. But in the living room, where he’s collapsed on the sofa, there’s no blood, no bruising.

“What happened?”

Black ice. He and the priest had just passed the Franklin Park Zoo when he stepped toe-first into a frozen puddle and turned his left ankle. He holds it, grimacing, with his shoes still on. “Oh, God. It hurts,” he moans as the old girl gently unties his shoelaces, as if she’s reinjuring him.

Has he taken any aspirin or iced his ankle? No. The old girl helps him to the sofa, props his foot upon the coffee table under three throw pillows.

Toyang comes downstairs then. “What is it now?” she asks. Always more withdrawn than the others, Toyang now, in Boston, needs a disclaimer on her like the kind you see on overhead plane storage: ITEMS MAY HAVE SHIFTED IN TRANSIT.

“Dad hurt his ankle. Go put some ice in a Ziploc, would you?”

“I think it might be broken,” moans the old girl’s husband.

His drama never lands well with Toyang, who stays where she is. The old girl always tries to model the opinion she’d like the kids to have about their father, even when she doesn’t privately share it herself. Except Toyang rarely buys it. Toyang has wondered how “a quote-unquote ‘Christian Socialist’ can fall asleep so often during Sunday Mass.” For one of her Boston College classes, Toyang once wrote an essay calling the Movement for a Free Philippines “a coalition not ‘of the people’ but mostly of the rich — the displaced Filipino elite, wanting back their slice of pie.” The old girl had to beg her not to show it to her father or submit it to the BC Eagle. When the old girl moves him to their bedroom, saying, “I’m so sorry, Dad. I wish I could trade places with you,” she can hear Toyang saying, underbreath, “So she wouldn’t have to hear you whining.”

Old Boy

The priest who married them had told them it would happen. That they would change, and grow — and even, if they stuck together long enough, start to see themselves in each other, the way some masters morph into their dogs.

After his return from solitary, they spent Saturdays together in the conjugal cabins. He was — she never told him, never would tell anyone — more of a lover there than ever in real life. No more “Wowowie!” or “Yehey!” but he noticed her in ways he hadn’t until now. The hives anxiety gave her. The welts a toddler Kit, her nails improperly clipped by the yaya, left on her arm. He lingered on each inch, as if news of the outside world might be found in her flesh. And being weaker, from the weight loss, he was not so focused on the finish.

One Easter Sunday, a decade ago almost to the day now, he asked the old girl for a Bible, and a crucifix. I think this cell could use one. Jesus had visited his dreams and scolded him, for running too hard after power and away from faith. This from the man who’d once said, “Put in a good word for me, would you?” when he saw her at the rosary. Or, when he had to miss Mass, “Tell Him I owe Him one for all the yeas on rural redistricting tonight.” Once, during a fight, he called her Mother Superior.

But this new Dad wrote her a poem — not a good one, but the only one he ever wrote — on their nineteenth anniversary.

What had started as his closing statement to the military court, this new Dad was expanding into a book.

Valium

After they learn her husband’s ligaments are stretched, not torn; after she gives him ice and aspirin, and rubs Tiger Balm into his ankle, and wraps an Ace bandage around it; after she moves his foot through exercises he’ll never practice on his own; and he still complains of pain, she offers him the pills. A Manilachusetts doctor keeps a Valium prescription current for her, just in case. She’s taken drugs — other than aspirin, that is — exactly six times in her life: five times in childbirth, and once in February 1973, when he was in solitary and no one was telling her. She remembers Valium flattening her in a useful way, helping her to focus on tasks rather than outcomes, removing the past and future, so there was nothing like regret, or fear. The present — leached of color, dulled a little — became manageable. She needed that. She needed things not to be sharp or bright.

He sleeps so deeply on the Valium that his snoring keeps her up, and wakes her early the next morning. In the living room, she tries to read. She brings Running & Being to the sofa and dips into the “Healing” chapter. I am a runner-doctor with a defective constitution. She finds nothing helpful. At one time or another, something in every section of me has gone awry.

Could she have done a better job protecting Dad from Dad? He’s worse off now than he’d have been without his hopes up. He never takes illness and injury as helpful messages, the body hinting Easy there, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. To him they’re little mutinies, his own cells betraying him. This never fails to put him in an existential funk.