5. There is a black-and-white photo of Grace Holden from her junior high-school year. The same year I’m in now. I was looking at the Saint Agatha’s Facebook page, and there it was. I memorized it. In the photo she’s standing at her open locker and her eyes are closed. Her books are scattered on the floor, and she’s laughing. Her hair is in her face. She looks happy. She looks like she likes who she is.
So in my history notebook, I write this list:
1. 2003
2. SURFER!
3. Tree tattoo OMG
4. Knows Germannnnn
5. UCLA genius
6. Best photo ever, wish it were me almost
And then I cross out everything.
1. 2003
2. SURFER!
3. Tree tattoo OMG
4. Knows Germannnnn
5. UCLA genius
6. Best photo ever, wish it were me almost
I do this instead of reading about Martin Luther and European peace treaties in the 1600s.
I look at the cross-outs. Then I look again at item three. I start to draw.
It’s an automatic thing my hand does sometimes, drawing.
I think of Ms. Holden’s arm, and the shirt sleeves slipping closer to her elbows as she lectures and quizzes. I draw the branches of the tree, and I imagine the trunk beneath the sleeve. I draw the outline of her hand.
It doesn’t look as lifelike, of course. It looks like a cartoon trying to be real. But I keep going. I draw the shape of a surfboard, and an outline of the letters UCLA.
I hear my mom turn on the radio. She arranges our leftovers on plates. The ghost of her sigh travels up to me. I know she’s sitting alone.
I fight to climb back into the moment. To be the version of me that would make them happy.
I go downstairs. My mom is back at the table, playing Sudoku again. I reach under the couch. I pull out our old sungka board and a dusty pouch of shells.
“Sungka? So ready to lose to me again?” my mom teases.
“You said it’s time for me to succeed always,” I say. “Why not try now?”
She rolls her eyes, but I can see she’s happy about my invitation to play. We haven’t played sungka in months, since I started junior year. My dad always tells her to let me win, but she always repeats: “She has to earn her win.”
I sit cross-legged at the coffee table. She sits on her knees. We clink the shells into the indentations of the wooden board and play Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who goes first. She does, scooping the shells and dropping them, one by one, across the board.
She tsks me when I gather seven shells into my hand. “You never have a strategy,” she says.
“You’re just trying to distract me,” I say. Really, I don’t care if I lose. I’m soothed by the feel of the old wood board, the tapping sound of the cowrie shells. My mom’s shells start to run out soon; she’s winning just like she predicted.
We finish my cold fries and our burgers. We share my Neapolitan milkshake.
The landline rings. I let it ring. If it’s Kuya Jun, he can leave a message or just call Pa.
The ringing stops.
Then it rings again. My mom scolds me to get it. I pick it up; a dial tone.
When I sit back down at the coffee table, my mom’s cell phone rings in her purse. She looks out the window, the reverie and strategy of our sungka game breaking. “So dark na,” she says to herself.
She digs into her purse and misses that call too. The landline rings again. “Naku,” my mom mutters, exasperated, and answers.
“Yes, this is she,” she says, using the official voice she uses when she talks to the principal, or to her managers.
I look at the sungka board, trying to calculate as fast as my mom does, even though I know it’s impossible.
She hangs up, exasperated.
“That client,” she mutters.
Then my dad opens the door, limping and grinning. But there’s pain in his grin; it keeps flashing from grin to wince. His left foot hits one of the cardboard boxes, and he gasps. We rush to greet him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says. He sits in a chair, panting. “Just swollen, not broken. I can still move the joint, look, oh.”
My mom tugs his left pant leg up. His ankle is shiny and swollen.
“Just a sprain,” he says. “No break. Ice and then I’m okay.”
“The client keeps calling to complain you’re too slow,” my mom mutters, “and here, now, you can’t walk. You drove home like this?”
We act as Papa’s crutches, helping him over to the couch. My mom takes out the frozen peas and carrots she uses for fried rice, and sets the bag on his ankle. “Aray!” Papa cries, then relaxes. “Grabe. I step off the sidewalk only. Mali.”
“Just rest,” my mom says.
I look through a stack of DVDs. I pick out one my aunt brought back from her last trip to Manila, a pirated version of Gagamboy. Filipino Spider-Man. The cheap insect costumes and the self-deprecating jokes always make my dad giggle.
He falls asleep on the couch during the scene when a cockroach lands on a lady character’s face. My mom removes the thawed, mushy peas and carrots from his ankle, drapes a blanket over him, and turns off the movie.
I go back upstairs, tear the pages from my notebook, and toss them in the trash.
February 12, 2009
Thursday of the Fifth Week of Catholic Ordinary Time
My dad’s bedroom door slams, waking me up.
Not that I slept that well, after my homework for Morality class.
I wake enough to realize: He never slams doors. This is weird. I hear muffled Tagalog. The tinny voices through the computer speakers.
“Corazon Maria, shower and take your breakfast or I’ll throw it!” my mom calls up to me.
I check the clock; it’s too late for a shower. I throw on my uniform and splash water on my face. I linger near my dad’s door. I hear him, but I can’t make out the words, just the rhythm of his Tagalog.
Soon I’m sitting between my parents at our table. No one chats, so I just look at the plastic flower-patterned table cover. They both sip their Nescafé. My mom takes hers black. My dad adds spoonful after spoonful of sugar, his usual. But there’s something heavy about how quiet he is now.
I pour hot water into my own mug, add a pile of powdered hot chocolate, and poke one of the lukewarm eggs my mom fried us. I squirt ketchup on the plate, scoop some rice next to it from the night before, and eat the red-yellow-white salty mix. No sausage or bacon today. Maybe my parents are rationing. I don’t ask for any.
“Still cold this morning,” my mom says, and shivers.
“We need heat,” my dad says. “Sana umitin. We are creatures of the tropics, the islands.”
“You guys are.” I yawn. “Not me. I’m, like, just Californian. And it gets cold here.”
My dad clatters his fork onto his plate. I jump, wondering what annoyed him so much. “What?” Is this one of his jokes?
“You think you’re not part of us?” he asks. And then I know it’s not a joke.
I can sense something under his anger: sadness, or fear. I glance at my mom for help, like I usually do in these rare moments of my dad’s coldness, but she looks at her coffee.
“You are FilAm,” he says in Tagalog, his low voice even lower. “Huwag mong kalimutan yan.” Don’t you forget. “When people here look at you, they see that. They see you come from us.”