Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

She’s restless. Has she let herself believe that the marathon would root him here somehow, make him of Boston, blur away the Philippines and all the races he can’t run there? Outside the window, dawn — earlier and earlier with each day — has bathed Comm Ave in a shy light. In their bedroom, he’s still snoring. Quietly she finds the knit cap, gloves, and track jacket in his drawer. Downstairs, she laces up her shoes.

What’s gotten into her? Last year, Popsy brought home Jane Fonda’s book and videotape, along with spandex leggings and sports bras, for the girls to follow. Popsy and Kit lasted a few more minutes than Bitbit and the old girl, who collapsed almost immediately in giggles on the living room floor, and Toyang, who passed on the activity altogether. The most the old girl’s ever exercised is dodgeball, hula hoops — games that no one plays outside the school yard.

Kit

Kit and the old girl argue now and then about why she can wear gold studs but nothing dangling from her earlobes, why she cannot grow or paint her nails, why lip gloss is fine sometimes but never lipstick. Her birthday and Christmas wish lists are written in an alien preteen code the old girl can’t always decipher. Hair crimper. Caboodles. Kit’s the one the old girl thinks might have been better off in Manila, under the nuns: she’s always spent too much time in front of mirrors, but now she doesn’t even care if you walk in on her. She’ll smile and primp and pose as if you’re not there. She’s always been a ham, and talked about being an actress, but now she stars in school plays and tries to master every accent. Quinzee Mahket, the old girl hears her enunciate from the bathroom. Brawd stripes, bright stahs.

The Bug

She tried to talk him out of running, back in 1978, when the President announced new parliament elections and let her husband campaign from his cell. He thinks I don’t have the stones to take him up on it. Ha! You can take the man out of politics… The old girl said she was worried about his health, and about palace shenanigans. In truth, he’d been out of the game so long. Losing this race, she felt, might crush her husband even more than health issues, or anything the President might do. As usual, though, his “idea” was already a decision; he was asking not for opinions but for help. So she campaigned hard, and liked it. She liked the name of his new party, LABAN, which meant “to fight” and stood for Lakas ng Bayan, “People Power”: hopeful and aggressive, smart and macho all at once. She liked the gallantry that poor villagers showed her: tricycle rides from one stump to the next; umbrellas or, in a pinch, plastic bags to shield her from the rain; a hundred hand fans flapping to dry off her wet dress. She liked the noise that people made, at an appointed time, all the way from Taft Avenue to the Diliman campus: whistles and car horns and church bells making a ruckus till dawn. The old girl understood a little more — she who had never touched a serious drug in her life, who enjoyed solitude and craved quiet: the high of gathering and getting loud together, making a righteous kind of trouble.

And so it was the old girl, longtime realist to his idealist, who never was so shocked as he could be when people did him wrong — it was she who had to be consoled, when the palace-appointed ballot counters announced the tally, and the President, in the thirteenth year of his term, announced that his New Society had swept the vote again.

“Oh, Mommy,” said her husband, “you of all people didn’t expect ‘free and fair,’ did you?” How stupid she felt then! Even he ’d seen it coming. “You’ve caught the bug, Mommy! Only took you twenty-four years.” He found it cute — kissing her temples, jaw, and collarbone, on down to more.

The old girl’s husband likes to say that if she ever ran against him for office, he wouldn’t stand a chance. “First off, she’s the rich one,” he’ll say, with a thumb in her direction. (That’s how he’d always defended himself, as well, against those “man of the people” opponents who called him a rich wolf in tattered shearling. You’ve got me mixed up with my wife, and if you think I hold those purse strings, you’re more confused than I thought. ) He has said things like this in the parlor, while she pours him coffee and passes the tray.

No one, in their marriage, can be called rich now. Between lawyers and doctors and houses and five tuitions, they don’t, as a twosome, have much beyond what the old girl’s parents set aside for them, which anyway no one will see until her parents die.

Also, she’s the smart one. People laugh at that, before they catch themselves. How could the quiet one be smarter than the genius who can mouth off on a book after skimming its first page?

“And she’d get more from the White House,” he says. “She’s more cosmopolitan than I am. She’s practically American.”

On their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary — silver ice buckets, silver picture frames, silver candlesticks — he’d pressed a note into the old girl’s palm, written on a torn-out page of his prison Bible. Your eminence, only you can lead our exodus through the desert.

The old girl almost dropped it, like a burning torch. In his cell, during their visits, he’d started talking in a fuzzy way about letting go of his presidential dreams. “Don’t want to turn into some Filipino Ahab, obsessed with spearing Malacañang Palace,” he said, and the old girl wondered if he’d really read all of Moby-Dick in jail. “It’s not the only way to help people, is it?”

“Of course not,” said the old girl, trying not to sound too excited.

You loved being a reporter.

You loved running my father’s hacienda.

Maybe you’ll publish this book, and travel the world to talk about it.

Then, during the luncheon (no doves this time), when the band and dancing started, he said, “Did you give it to him?”

“What? To whom?”

“The note. The one I asked you to give the cardinal.”

Relief. Embarrassment. The old girl started laughing.

Mommy, what did you think?

She’d caught the bug, and now her head was too big to fit inside the church door.

“Don’t you worry, Dad. The cardinal will get your note!” The old girl dropped her head against his shoulder for the rest of the song. It was “Earth Angel.”

Glory

By Easter Sunday, the old girl’s husband still can’t jog more than a few blocks without wincing. This isn’t good, Mommy. The old girl senses his self-doubt, but keeps a poker face. At times like this, it’s crucial not to spook him with overenthusiasm. She must be careful as a bike rider on a steep downhill. No sudden movements. A few things she could say:

You’ve trained so hard. (Who cares if this is true?) No one can take that away from you. We’re proud of you already.

The rest of us eat better now, and get some exercise ourselves.

Bitbit and I have planned the best marathon-viewing party in Manilachusetts. Maybe on our balcony you’ll get inspired for next year.

“Whatever you decide,” she says instead, “I’m here to help.”

And so her husband strikes a compromise. He rounds up four colleagues — casual joggers his age — to band together, under Tim Brown’s name, and run the race relay-style with him.

Well, it’s something. It’s not quitting, but it’ll be easier on his heart and on the old girl.

He has just one request of his new team. He wants the leg in Newton, at Mile 20.

“My family lives right there,” the old girl hears him saying on the phone. “Spitting distance. They’ll want to see me from our balcony.”