Wander Girl

by Tweet Sering

  Everything Helen did was “sooo galeng Ate!” Clap-clap-clap! I trusted—and therefore, shared—her taste in everything from books (all coming-of-age stories like Judy Blume’s Forever) to music (everything Brit—Prefab Sprout, The Style Council, Scritti Politti, Everything but the Girl, the Housemartins) to movies (everything American with teenagers in it—Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Say Anything) to guys we would like as boyfriends (John Cusack, C. Thomas Howell, Anthony Michael Hall, John Cusack, John Cusack and “Putang ina! Ang gwapo talaga ni—” John Cusack).

  Helen was 13 when she discovered the joy of cursing, and, therefore, relished every opportunity to let an expletive sail through the air. Within seconds the door to our bedroom swung open and there was our mom standing in the doorway, demanding to know which of her two eldest daughters had just said a very bad word.

  “What bad word?” Helen asked innocently, slowly sitting up on the bed on which she had collapsed hugging the latest issue of Tiger Beat bearing John Cusack’s adorable baby face on the cover.

  “The...” But my mom’s proper upbringing prevented her from uttering the words. “What you just said.” Silence as her eyes moved from me to Helen and resting there.

  “Oh, I think you meant...” I began. “Ate told me kasi to ‘Put it here na. You know, putitherena,” not having any clear idea what exactly I was supposed to “put” and where; and why Helen had to shriek it out.

  Of course, my mom saw through us; she may have been sheltered but she wasn’t a fool. “I hope you girls know that bad language is very unbecoming of a woman. It reflects very badly on your upbringing. And I’m telling you, you will not get the respect of decent boys that way.” With that, she quietly closed the door behind her.

  “Put it here na,” Helen repeated, chuckling. “Smooth, Hil.”

  “I think mom was really offended,” I said, throwing a worried glance at the door.

  Helen snorted and went back to the business of adoring John. “It doesn’t take much to offend mom. Decent boys, my ass. If they’re so precious, she can have them. Stick them right up there with her figurines.”

  “Do you think we should say sorry?” I couldn’t let it go.

  Helen looked up. “For what?”

  “For...”

  “For saying things she can’t say? Hello, Hil, Mom comes from another planet, can’t you see? She can’t even say ‘shit’ and has to spell it out. I mean, what is it? It’s just a word.” She sighed, as though this discussion exasperated her. “It’s not our fault she’s uptight. She really should learn to loosen up.”

  Helen had a point. Our mom did seem to come from another planet. She was rather high-strung and was inordinately worried about everything: about why the school bus hadn’t driven up yet, they should’ve been here three minutes ago; who, besides our teachers, were coming with us on our field trip—can they guarantee the safety of the whole class, they’re so many of you; don’t ride your bikes beyond the gate, make sure Yaya Bering is watching you; call me at the office when you arrive home from school; did Dad call, why hasn’t he called yet, Naku, why hasn’t he called kaya? Could something have happened to him?

  She was a control freak who gave the same instructions to her employees and household help at least five times until their eyes glazed over. Since my dad had the habit of walking away after a second repetition of her instructions, she would follow him out the door to his car and call out the rest of the three. And for the longest time, she would stand over us girls as we brushed our teeth, just to make sure we were doing it correctly (using slow vertical strokes, down and up, and not horizontally) until Helen changed the lock on the bathroom door, bolted it, and kept our mom out while Helen brushed her teeth. Vigorously. Horizontally.

  Since it had been basically established early on that our mom’s ways were not our ways (to use her oft-repeated phrase when describing the will of God), my immediate instinct was to go the opposite way she went.

  Take her manic church-going. I could name a million other things I’d rather do than hear Sunday Mass. It was like going to the dentist. You had to keep still throughout the whole proceeding and you couldn’t wait for it to be over. I also had this habit of dozing off during the sermon, which never failed to scandalize my mom. “Hilda, wake up, wake up! Mahiya ka naman sa Diyos! All he’s asking is your attention for one hour every week, tapos tutulugan mo lang. My goodness!” That’s how free I was of Catholic guilt—I wasn’t very Catholic to begin with.

  When she’d tell us to cover our eyes during a movie’s kissing and sex scenes, I would pretend to, but would sneak a lingering peek. One sneaky peek while watching Zapped! at home was long and educational enough for me to conclude, at age 15, that, “Heeey, that’s not so bad. In fact, it even looks like a lot of fun!”

  That’s how free I was of Catholic guilt—even when it came to sex. Somehow, I never thought of my virginity as something I had to “save” for my husband. Since marriage was supposed to be something older people did when they were done with college and were slaving away in offices, we wouldn’t be carefree teenagers sneaking behind our parents anymore. Where was the fun in making out then?

  One day, as I was reading the newspaper at the page my mom had left it on (the travel section, of course) and underlining words whose meanings I would later look up in the dictionary (as was my new hobby), I stumbled upon an interesting-looking one.

  “Wanderlust,” I read. “Wanderlust,” testing the sound of it.

  My mom hung onto that last syllable “lust” and decided it wasn’t a word she’d like included in her daughters’ vocabulary.

  You can guess what happened next. On that day, “wanderlust” became my official favorite word in the whole world. Even before I knew what it meant.

  First Contact with the West

  For years, I was familiar with only the dictionary meaning of “wanderlust.” It wasn’t until I was 17 and was on my first trip to Mindanao with my best friend Lulu that I began to know how it felt, what it really meant.

  Lulu and I first met on the front steps of our freshman dorm. From the moment I heard her muttering “Jawajawajawajawajawa!’ machine-gunfire style (a term that was yet alien to me) as she accidentally slid down the steps, arms flailing in the air, I knew then we would become great friends. She had the same devil-may-care attitude as Helen, the same confident swagger, the same penchant for... colorful language.

  Lulu’s dad, Carlos Guarin, was governor of Surigao del Norte, a province on the northeastern tip of Mindanao. Listening to her speak with overflowing regional patriotism, though, one would think she hailed from the Republic of Surigao. She hardly spoke a word of Tagalog, even to the befuddled Jollibee crew.

  “Inin mga yater! Who said Filipino was Tagalog? Do you think these dickheads will speak Bisaya when they’re in Mindanao or the Visayas? Nooo. Why should I be expected to speak their stupid language? Na-buang na.”

  “Um, Lu,” I often found myself reminding her. “I am Tagalog.” Did that make me a dickhead, too? Or...a buang?

  She would sigh heavily and, touching my arm sympathetically, say, “It’s OK,” As though this were a tragedy we just had to deal with.

  All through our four years in college, we hung out with “her people”—guys and girls from Davao, Iligan, Cebu, Cagayan de Oro, Butuan—that my speech began to take on a strange accent my family couldn’t place.

  “Ano ka ba, Bisaya, Intsik o ano?” my dad liked to inquire.

  I was fascinated with my college friends. They were a hodgepodge group of high achievers that included a national chess champ, a debate team captain, and DOST (Department of Science and Technology) scholars. They engaged in debates for fun, which could sometimes turn heated, and I, being of a non-confrontational nature, would try to slink away before they turned to me for an opinion.

  Sometimes I’d be proud to be in such a circle, but oftentimes, I’d just feel like a fraud. What business did I have being with these brainiacs, I’d think.

  Helen and I w
ent to the same university (UP-Diliman) and even shared the same room when I moved to the upperclassman dorms during my sophomore year. She had already been in college two years ahead of me and had her own set of interesting friends, but we still hung out most often with each other, this time with Lulu in tow. “Your sister’s cool” was Lulu’s first and final verdict on Helen when I introduced them to each other. And Helen showed her approval by inviting Lulu to sleep over at our house on weekends. Sometimes a boyfriend would join us; Helen had three over the course of four years, Lulu had two and I had one, Gabe, at 20.

  The summer of my freshman year, Lulu invited Helen and me to Surigao. She bragged about the white sand beaches, the clear aqua waters, the great waves.

  “You know Boracay?” she asked.

  We nodded.

  “Tae..”

  There really was no need for sales talk. I was dying to venture out of Luzon and into the land most Manileños feared, from where all the Manila broadsheets only delivered dire news of kidnappings, war, deadly floods. It was to be my first lesson in the importance and, as the travel writer Pico Iyer wrote in Time magazine, the “necessity” of travel.

  Helen couldn’t come along as she was taking summer classes to lighten her oncoming senior year load. And my parents wouldn’t have allowed me had Tita Nita, Lulu’s mom, not called them to personally guarantee our safety.

  “Surigao is a peaceful place,” she assured my mom over the phone. “Hilda will be safe with us. All that war is waaaay down in the south, very far from us. Besides, my husband wouldn’t stand for it,” making Tito Carlos out like he was Fidel Castro.

  And he was, it seemed. When we landed at the Butuan City Airport after an hour-long flight from Manila, men in dark sunglasses and white short-sleeved barong, speaking into hand-held short-wave radios, swooped down on our bags and ushered us out to a black Land Cruiser. One of them attached a siren on the roof of the F150 that preceded us, and as another Land Cruiser trailed behind, we settled back into our seats for the two-hour drive to Surigao City.

  I let out a breath that I didn’t realize I had been holding.

  “Sorry about that,” Lulu said. “My dad likes to feel important.”

  “Well, he’s governor; he is an important man.”

  “He thinks he is. There’s a difference.”

  We’ve had this discussion before—about how Lulu abhorred politics, which she grew up with, but loved her parents and Surigao.

  “I wanna do something for the province,” she said, a sentiment typical of the students who attended UP. “But I really wish those people would get off their asses and work, too, instead of just waiting for their politicians to hand them jobs at City Hall, at the capitol building, and in all those other government agencies. Do you realize,” she told me, shifting in her seat and sounding very much like Helen arguing her case with our parents for a night out with her friends, “that Surigao has no industry of its own? No industry besides politics. Do you realize that?”

  No, in fact, I didn’t. I’d been really busy with trying to make it to my classes, working on my application for this student org, and deciding whether or not I should go out with this fratman—I mean, what if we were out on a date and somebody from a rival frat suddenly attacked us with a dos por dos, you know...

  “What’s Surigao known for, huh?” Lulu continued. “Nothing. And it’s such a shame because we have all those beautiful beaches and islands and waterfalls. What’s the point of beauty when no one’s beholding it?”

  “Yeah, too bad,” I said, distracted by a body of water outside her window.

  Lulu followed my gaze. “That’s Lake Mainit, the biggest lake in Mindanao. Pretty, isn’t it?”

  The lake was as still and clear as a large mirror. The stillness was undisturbed, save for a solitary fisherman in his banca.

  “Nobody comes here to see this,” Lulu said wistfully, staring out through the glass. “One day they will,” she added with such conviction that I had no doubt that day would come.

  I wondered whether Lulu’s passion for her home province was true of most politicians’ daughters. Did they have to go through a kind of seminar about wanting to do something themselves for the place they grew up in? And in those seminars, did they also issue a syllabus on personality development?

  Lulu was nothing like the people I knew in high school. She was so confident, so sure of herself, so—

  “That’s the Spawn of Satan,” she said of a tall, lanky boy who passed within earshot in front of us. “They also say he’s my older brother. Oh, look, I hope that coconut falls on his head and cracks his skull open.”

  Dysfunctional.

  We had arrived at the family’s General Luna beach house after a four-hour boat ride on the family’s catamaran (named Lourdes after Lulu) from Surigao City to Dapa in Siargao Island and a 30-minute land trip in a pickup to the beach town of General Luna. Her brother, I later learned, had arrived in town a day earlier and had claimed the bigger of the two rooms, the one with windows facing the sea.

  The governor’s property was right in front the beach, in a quiet, isolated area of the island. The whole property lay on a thick carpet of Bermuda grass that there was no need for us to wear slippers. Away from the grass was a 10-meter stretch of sand gently sloping towards the water. Towering coconut trees grew in abundance around the main house.

  When, amazingly enough, the coconut did fall (was there a Bisaya way of willing things to happen?) but landed meters away from her brother’s feet, Lulu leaned back in her chair with a disappointed, “Jatis!”

  The roots of their Israel-Palestine-like animosity date back to the day when she was 12 and her brother, who was two years older, read an entry in her journal about a crush she had on a member of the drum-and-bugle choir from the Chinese Chamber.

  “You caught him reading it?” I gasped, thoroughly appalled at such a horrible transgression.

  “No. He recited the juiciest parts of it at the Sunday lunch table.”

  Holy fuck! “What did you do?”

  “I cried, slid under the table and stayed there until my dad threatened to overturn it. But not before throwing my mom’s bowl of ginamus at The Spawn’s face.”

  She said, he still hadn’t apologized for his crime. “My mom says I should forgive him already. But how can you pardon someone who hasn’t shown even the slightest remorse?”

  “So what do you do? Just ignore each other?”

  “Basically. And wish each other ill.”

  I couldn’t fathom the idea of a cracked-skull Helen, nor of me wishing her such a fate. So, unconditional sibling love wasn’t a norm? I didn’t realize hatred within a family could exist. How could two very different girls with vastly different backgrounds and experiences, such as Lulu and I, be such good friends? What did we have in common besides a dorm and a love for 5 p.m. fishball breaks?

  “Australian surfers!” She bolted from her chair and ran to the water’s edge in her chartreuse bikini. Two heads bobbed in the distance. “Why are they still here? Surf season’s over.” But her girlish glee told me she didn’t mind that aberration at all. She turned and strode past me to the cottage. “Get your stuff. We’re going Down Under.”

  After stuffing my necessities—hair brush, hair spray, towel, sunblock, Walkman, and a tape compilation of my favorite new wave love songs—Lulu and I ran to the side of the cottage.

  She stopped dead in her tracks. “Ay-ay, anjawa! Spawn took the pickup!”

  Undeterred, she grabbed my hand and we jumped on a habal-habal, a motorcycle fitted with a plank so that it could seat eight people slapped front and back against each other, as well as behind and in front of the driver (no kidding), and gave the driver instructions in rapid-fire Surigaonon.

  After holding my stomach muscles in for balance and clutching Lulu’s shoulders for about 15 minutes, bumping along on a dusty road lined with coconut trees, the driver let us off at a thatched-roof bar called The Shake Shack. Parked outside was the Guarins’ silver Isu
zu pickup.

  We parted the curtain of beads that hung down the entrance. There was reggae music, along with large posters of Bob Marley and pro surfers. Colorful knickknacks that looked like voodoo dolls lined the shelves along one wall. Two old surfboards hung alongside another. A brown-haired Caucasian man and a Filipina whom I assumed was his wife waved at us from the bar as we entered.

  We were on the other end of the island, the edgier place, the preferred spot of the kind of young travelers who sported cornrows, wore a tangle of friendship bands on their wrists and beads around their necks, and lugged backpacks large enough to fit a two-year-old kid. They looked like the rebels of their mother countries, the kind who said “peace, man” and passed the hash. Which they did, Lulu said, with a knowing look

  It was obviously low season because there was just Lulu’s brother with two blonde boys seated at a table by the window, and us.

  “Hey,” the shirtless of the two greeted Lulu and me.

  He had longish dirty blonde hair that he tucked behind his ear in the manner of a girl and eyes so light it was hard to tell their color. The other one sported cropped hair a la Sting, but his eyes were less intense than the singer’s. They were the round, brown, friendly eyes of a Dachshund. How cute, I thought.

  “Hey,” Lulu said back, taking a seat at their table. Within minutes, it was clear Lulu had wrestled the boys’ attention from her brother, and he stood, tossed money down on the table for his beer and left. “Da, lagi. Sent him packin’,” she hissed at me.

  The boys weren’t surfers, after all, nor were they Australians. Ben, the shirtless one, and Tristan, the Dachshund and cuter of the two, were 21-year-old American volunteers of Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity project, having just graduated from Penn State University, and still deciding what to do with their lives. They had just finished building new houses in Laguna and were traveling around the Philippines before heading back to the States.