America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  Roni was letting her mother spoon cold rice onto her plate. Early? she asked. I don’t have to go to Auntie Carmen’s?

  Right on the dot, Pol promised. His English was less foreign to Hero’s ear than his Tagalog; warped and rich, like an old record. It was the English of no country—genteel and full of idioms, which were just ways of moving the sentence forward. He said things like right on the dot, or hit the nail on the head, and whenever he ended phone calls with strangers, he would say, Thank you, you’ve been very kind, regardless of whether or not they’d actually been kind. It was more effective if they hadn’t been. The words flustered and delighted the people on the other end of the line, which was generally the effect Pol liked to have on people.

  Roni put her right leg up, and tucked her left leg under her. She mashed together a Vienna sausage with a small mound of rice, then brought it to her mouth. Hero didn’t know yet that the girl didn’t really know how to eat with a fork and knife. Perhaps naively, Hero hadn’t expected an American-born girl to eat with her hands, or to lift her leg up onto the chair.

  Roni chewed, then swallowed, then shrugged again. Okay, she said.

  Pol gestured with his cigarette, smiling to Hero. It’s settled. Nimang, you’ll pick her up after school. Two o’clock. Let me show you how to get there, hold on, I’ll get a pen and paper.

  While he searched, Paz said nothing, just rubbed at her own arms in quiet disapproval. Seemingly just to say something, she said to Roni, You want more rice, when Roni had more than enough rice on her plate.

  * * *

  That was how Hero got permission to use the Toyota Corona that Pol had driven to pick her up from the airport. Paz drove her own silver Civic, a newer model than the Corona and eternally covered with a fine layer of dust and lime scale. Pol’s Corona was at least ten years old and a shocking shade of blue. It had been beige when he’d bought it; he’d chosen the blue himself. He’d even changed the emblems—they’d originally been black and silver, and he’d had them replaced with gold-plated ones. The last touch was the spoiler, which lifted up from the car’s back like a shark fin. Pol was clearly proud of the car; Paz had made her peace with it.

  Hero liked driving the Corona, liked the reason that had put her behind the wheel in the first place. Pol had lifted an invisible burden from her shoulders by putting a concrete weight there instead, a daily responsibility. She liked the drive from the house to the school, the one long easy path in which Jacklin Road turned to Abel Street. She liked the wide, poorly paved roads, the huge sequoia telephone posts, and the smaller, desiccated trees that dotted the streets. She liked the houses, despite most of them being a familiar variation on her least favored architectural style, the Spanish colonial. She liked the loping, crooked hill she passed after North Milpitas Boulevard, a hill that brought the car closer to the thing she liked most of all: the strange new sky, low-hanging and close, deep and limpid, a body of water rather than a sky, so that she felt she was submerged in it rather than standing under it.

  When Hero arrived at the school the first day, following Pol’s directions, she realized she didn’t know where exactly in the school she was meant to pick the girl up. She drove into the parking lot, found one of the few remaining parking spaces. Parents who had parked were standing in front of their cars, chatting with each other. Most of them were Filipino.

  Just as Hero turned the ignition off, she was startled by the loud, long ring of a bell—she grabbed on to the steering wheel instinctively, arms locking, breath chopped short, the pain from her clenched hands radiating down all the way to her elbow, up into her armpits.

  When she came back to herself, someone was knocking on the driver’s window. Hero blinked, looked up. Roni was standing outside. There was a large scratch on her face.

  Can you let me in already? she hollered.

  Hero didn’t know how long she’d been waiting there. She reached across to the passenger seat, pulled the lock up with some difficulty, trying not to wince. Roni rolled her eyes, crossed in front of the car, and opened the passenger door, climbed in. What happened to you, how come you were breathing like that?

  What happened to your face, Hero asked instead of answering.

  Roni shrugged. I got in a fight.

  During school? Why didn’t your teacher—

  No, just now. Just after class. Roni was putting her seat belt on, shoving her backpack between her legs in front of the seat.

  With who?

  Can we go home? Roni demanded.

  It became a regular thing, the fighting at school. Or, it had been a regular thing for a while, and Hero was only just beginning to enter into its ceremony. It went with a number of odd things she noticed about the girl.

  Hero had seen cases of eczema before; she’d had it herself when she was a child, the face in her baby photos slapped-red and raw. Everyone’s baby photos looked like that, in the De Vera family. It was hard for her to think of a Filipino she knew who didn’t have eczema at some point. But she hadn’t ever seen a case like Roni’s before. At first sight, the eczema only—only—covered the left side of the girl’s face, a ring around her mouth, a few patches down her neck, and two twin patches on the inside of each elbow. But daily life revealed that the mottled scarring crept down Roni’s armpits (seen when she lazily stretched her bare arms, tank-topped), striped up and down her inner thighs (seen when she ate at the table while reading, tucking one leg beneath her and lifting one foot onto the chair, so that her knee was cheek-height—the way peasants eat, Hero’s mother, Concepcion, would sniff), behind her knees (she ran around in shorts), between her toes (she wore thong sandals that were too big for her, probably from an older cousin, possibly male), and along the lines of both thumbs (she gestured, often wildly).

  Roni made a great show of being unbothered by it. Most of the kids with eczema who Hero knew—and most of the adults, for that matter—adopted the habit of wearing long-sleeve shirts, long pants, high necks; of hiding their hands behind their backs, of looking down instead of meeting a gaze. But Roni liked oversized tank tops, liked neon shorts and jelly sandals that made her feet stink. She didn’t seem to have shame.

  Then there were her eating habits. At home, sometimes Roni ate in enormous quantities, at all hours of the day: canned Vienna sausages and rice, canned corned beef and rice, her mother’s pork neck bone sinigang and rice, her father’s baked ox tongue and rice, ramen noodles either cooked in the Styrofoam cup or crushed raw in the plastic bag and eaten like chips. But then there were days when Roni wouldn’t eat at all, refused even to drink, was repulsed at even the idea of food. Some days would find her melancholic—days when her defiant, adultlike chatter would fade and she would withdraw into her reading or her TV watching, barely looking up at the world around her. And then, sometimes, there would be days of choleric fury. Hero learned that those were the fighting days.

  One afternoon, only a few weeks after she arrived in Milpitas, Hero came to the school parking lot and Roni was nowhere to be found, even when all of the parents’ cars had driven away. Hero left the car and circled the school grounds, which weren’t large. She finally found the girl in a patch of grass behind a row of classrooms, locked in a snarling knot of children’s bodies.

  Hero had to drag her, gnashing and biting, while a boy at the bottom of the pile shouted, IGOROTA IGOROTA IGOROOOOOTAAAAAAAA. The boy was as dark as Roni.

  The girl squirmed in Hero’s arms all the way back to the car. She was heavier than her scrawny limbs suggested. Lemme go lemme go lemme go lemme go—

  When they reached the door, Roni sprung out of Hero’s grasp, backed herself against the car, panting. Then she leapt forward, growling, making to run back to the scene of the fight.

  Hero caught her around the ribs, locking her in the bend of her elbow. Ano ka ba?!

  Roni went still, slumped against the side of the door. Exhausted suddenly, her face ashen and distant. She closed h
er eyes. Her bangs were sweaty, rumpled. She didn’t push them out of the way. The eczema ring around her mouth had grown, was creeping down her neck and shoulders, creating a kind of hauberk. Hero felt, uneasily, that she was looking at something not altogether human; the hush of dull rage lifting from the girl’s body had something creaturely in it, predatory and wounded, something that knew how to fight and not remotely how to speak.

  Hero reached across Roni’s body and put her key into the the passenger door lock, making Roni startle abortively at the click. Let’s go home.

  Roni didn’t do anything for a long while. Then she opened her eyes, opened the door, and got in. When Hero was sure the girl would stay inside the car, she walked around and got in, too.

  * * *

  That night, Hero was watching over Roni while Paz and Pol were at work. Paz was working at the Veterans Hospital from seven in the morning to two in the afternoon, then going straight to the convalescent home from three in the afternoon to ten in the evening. Pol was pulling a double shift himself at the computer chip company, working both the afternoon and the night shift straight through. Hero hadn’t yet had a chance to talk to them about the fight that afternoon, or the many fights before then; she told herself she would tell Paz when she got back home.

  Hero asked Roni what she wanted for dinner. Gloria had brought over adobo and pancit that afternoon, while Roni was still at school. Gloria was the first of Paz’s sisters that Hero had met, that first day in Milpitas; one of her younger ones, short, very dark-skinned and giggly. She spoke only hesitant Tagalog, and very little English. Paz said she worked in a nursing home as a cook. Pol said it was Paz who got her that job.

  When Gloria came to drop off the food she prepared, her husband Tino sometimes accompanied her to help carry the containers. He didn’t appear to have a job. The first thing he did when he walked through the door was to make his way to the refrigerator, asking Pol on the way if he wanted a beer. Pol rarely wanted a beer; he’d never liked drinking, even when Hero knew him back in Vigan. That didn’t stop Tino from having one, or three. Sometimes it was Jejo and Freddie who came to help carry the containers. Hero assumed Jejo and Freddie were Gloria’s sons, but Paz told her they weren’t, without telling her whose sons they actually were.

  Gloria brought food to the house at least once a week, sometimes twice. She brought things that Hero recognized but rarely ate in Vigan, afritada and adobo and pancit, which Hero associated only with festivals and holidays. She brought the foil-wrapped meat loaf Hero thought of as embutido, but which Paz called morhon. Paz would come home at midnight from a sixteen-hour shift and make sure everyone in the house had eaten, saying she’d already eaten at the hospital, before heating up a plate for herself in the microwave and eating it alone. Once, Hero ran into her on one of those nights, sleepless as usual and looking for a glass of water. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d interrupted someone in the midst of watching pornography; there was a private sensuality in Paz’s solitary eating, in the look of guarded guilt that came over her face at the sight of Hero in the entryway.

  Roni was making a face at Hero’s suggestion. I don’t like adobo, she said. I’ll make pizza. She went, barefoot as usual, to the freezer, and pulled two packages out of it.

  Who doesn’t like adobo? Hero joked. Pilpina ka ba?

  Roni turned her head, face hard and foreign. It looked like she’d heard that question before, been teased and asked to prove herself in just this way before.

  I am Filipina. I just don’t like adobo. I like other things more.

  Hero knew that; she’d seen the girl eat neck bones with relish, gnawing the meat down to the cartilage and then gnawing that, too. She’d even seen Roni eat dinuguan—she apparently had a taste for the sabaw, preferring just the dinuguan sauce with rice, leaving the meat and innards for everyone else. At the time, Hero had asked, delicately, if the girl knew what the sauce she was eating was made of. Roni had been amused by Hero’s tone. Pig blood, she’d replied, shoveling a spoon of it into her mouth, then grinning with black-stained teeth. Oink oink.

  Hero watched as Roni stood on a chair to put the frozen pies, their plastic wrappers removed, in the microwave one after the other. When the first pizza was done, Roni put a paper towel over it to keep it warm, and slipped the second one in the microwave. When the second one was done, she slipped it onto the plate and gave it to Hero.

  Take this one ’cause it’s still hot, Roni said, and retrieved her own pizza from the counter, removing the now-greasy paper towel and throwing it in the garbage can. Hero took two butter knives and two forks from the drawer, and handed one pair to Roni, who used it just to slice her pizza into fours. Want me to do yours? she asked. Hero wondered if Pol and Paz had told Roni to cut Hero’s food for her, but Roni’s face was open and impassive. Hero nodded.

  When they sat at the table, Roni put her leg up and ate the pizza with her hands. Her pizza looked like the cheese atop it was already congealing, but still she ate it with gusto. Hero’s pizza, on the other hand, was indeed still hot, steam rising from it.

  Hero was touched by the small gesture of courtesy, at first only minutely, and then, for no reason at all, deeply and wholly. It was possible she was going to cry, here in this kitchen, for the first time since she’d arrived in America. To prevent that from happening, she stuffed her mouth with an entire quarter of the pizza, then huffed and gasped as the molten bite burned her tongue.

  Haltingly, she chewed and swallowed until her tongue was numb. Then she said to Roni: I had eczema, too, when I was a kid.

  Roni blinked up at Hero and, with her mouth full, just said: Mm-hmm.

  The more she spoke, the more Hero became aware of her own accent, hesitant and affected. I really hated it, she continued. She pushed up one of her sweatshirt sleeves to show her own now-unblemished arm and said, I used to have it all up and down my arms, like you. It was really itchy.

  She lifted her own chin slightly. I still have scarring on my neck. See?

  Roni bore the tolerant look of someone enduring a swiftly waning amusement. Does yours hurt, Hero asked, somewhat desperately.

  Roni didn’t have to push up any sleeves to reveal her arms. She simply turned one of them over to better showcase the landscape. Yeah, it hurts.

  The creams don’t really help, Hero encouraged.

  Roni shook her head. Nuh-uh. And I’m going to hell anyway, so.

  Hero was prepared for sharing anecdotes about childhood eczema, and not nearly as prepared for the abrupt left turn into hell. Roni said it without a trace of fear or despair: she had an arm and she was going to hell. There’s an engkanto who likes me, she went on.

  You know about engkantos? Hero said. Then, pulling herself together: That’s not—it doesn’t mean you’re going to hell, who told—

  Grandma thinks it’s a kapre, Roni went on, like Hero hadn’t even spoken. There was a kapre who liked her back in the Philippines.

  Hero knew what engkantos and kapres were. But she’d never known anyone in real life who claimed to be liked by one. Roni took a bite of her pizza, placid. Hero felt slightly dizzy.

  After swallowing, Roni continued: They’re bigger.

  What? Hero said. Oh. The kapre. Yes. They’re bigger. I think.

  You don’t know? Roni asked. You’re from there. She said this without judgment, sounding genuinely surprised.

  Hero didn’t know how to say, My family doesn’t believe in that kind of thing, we went to university. She had to remind herself: Roni is your family.

  My mom and dad didn’t really talk about that kind of stuff, Hero said.

  The words mom and dad, the word stuff, felt tarry and thick in her mouth. She pressed her tongue against the back of her teeth like the words were something bitter she’d eaten.

  Oh, Roni said. Papa doesn’t either. But mom does. And grandma does. You know Grandma’s a bruha.

  Th
at, Hero had heard about from her own father, years and years ago: Paz was a probinsyana, ragged-poor, and her mother was some kind of superstitious village healer-type bakya who didn’t approve of Pol and had refused to meet his extended family, even after the marriage. After Paz’s immigration petition had successfully brought her mother over, Grandma Sisang chose to live with Paz’s older sister, Carmen, and her younger sister Gloria, in an apartment on the other side of Milpitas. Not with Paz.

  She doesn’t really like me, Roni said, still munching away on the last hand-torn fragment of her pizza. But she knows how to heal me. Kind of. Or Mom said.

  Grandma even killed a chicken and sprinkled its blood around the house once, Roni added. But that didn’t work. She shrugged.

  So for now I’m still going to hell. Or I’m gonna die so the engkanto and I can play together.

  Then she pointed at Hero’s plate. Are you gonna eat the rest of your pizza?

  * * *

  Hero had met Paz just once, back in Vigan. Tito Pol had invited Paz to Lolo Tranquilino’s funeral. Tito Pol never brought women back to the De Vera compound, and even Josefina had only come a few times throughout their marriage. That the now-divorced Pol was bringing along one of the promdi nurses he was fucking, not just to a De Vera gathering, but to his own father’s funeral, was a scandal of delicious proportions. It was one of the last times Hero would step into the home on Calle Encarnacion, the place where she’d spent her childhood. At that point, only she knew that she was going to drop out of medical school.

  Paz was a few years older than her; looked younger. Hero saw her alone on the veranda, in a black dress patterned with what looked like large sampaguita vines. Her center-parted hair reached just to the top of her ass; it was the most expensive-looking thing about her. She appeared to understand that beauty, at least, was also a kind of wealth. From the veranda, Paz was looking down into one of the back courtyards and watching the clutch of cooks hover over an enormous cauldron, filled with boiling oil. They were preparing to make bagnet. The slabs of pork belly were waiting next to the cauldron in a metal dish on top of several layers of cloth. The cooks had been preparing the food for days. They’d marinated the bellies, boiled them the evening before, and fried them once earlier in the day. Now they were waiting to be fried again, and then again, until the skin crisped up, popped and split.