America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  But you never thought of packing it all in and moving up to Frisco, you never had any suburban angst; you liked the smallness of your world. The only negative was that if there were any girls who were maybe interested in putting their faces in between your legs, you never met them. Or there was an alarmingly high possibility the girls knew your family—had eaten barbecue or sung karaoke in your grandparents’ restaurant, had worked at the hospital with your mom, had their house exorcised by your grandma. The gift of the small world was that it was small. The curse of the small world was that it was small.

  * * *

  Back in the Philippines, you’d been an easily possessible kid. That was the only way of putting it. It wasn’t rare for children around you to be occupied every now and then by some minor engkanto—early demon possession was more common than pneumonia—but your case was probably the worst in the barrio. If you’d grown up in another type of family, richer, college educated, then maybe you would’ve been put in a hospital, or sent to church, or forbidden from going outside. If you hadn’t been born on stilts above Manila Bay, the homes demolished within a year of your birth and everyone relocated to places like Santa Mesa, a concrete block along the San Juan River where Quezon City’s raw sewage drifted along on its way to the Pasig, then maybe the possession thing would’ve become a real problem. But you were, and so it wasn’t: your family and neighbors accepted with clinical detachment the existence of dwende, hexes, the possibility of being fucked up from head to toe by something you couldn’t see, only feel. Everyone knew what the symptoms looked like when a lowly, lonely demon with abandonment issues had a crush on you.

  Your grandma, the preeminent bruha of the barrio, knew most of all. She knew when the voice coming out of your throat wasn’t your own; when you moaned, I feel heavy, I feel heavy, she knew how to take that foreign but familiar weight from you. She was your first doctor. The first person to tell you that you weren’t special, and mean it as a promise; the first person to put a cold hand on your sweating face and laugh-reply to the question you mumbled into her sleeve: Of course you’re going to live, stupid.

  Your mom didn’t want anything to do with your grandma’s work, refused her inheritance of herbs and demonry, and instead dove headfirst into her destiny, the other word for which was modernity: modern women didn’t rub coconut pulp and Efficascent onto their neighbors and friends; modern women didn’t negotiate child custody rights with engkantos; modern women kept studying at home even when they’d gotten pregnant just out of high school, modern women were the only kid in the barrio smart enough to get a scholarship so they could take night classes at a nearby nursing school, modern women let their childhood friend turned shotgun husband drink half a bottle of Ginebra then beat them blue almost every day until their own mother had to take them aside, look them in the eye, and declare: If you don’t leave him, I’ll take Rosalyn and go to the States myself, with or without Boy’s green card or your visa. And bahala ka na sa buhay mo.

  When you were a kid, Lolo Boy used to tell you the stories that his father and uncles had told him: about the signs they’d seen in Sunnyvale and Mountain View that said GET RID OF ALL FILIPINOS OR WE’LL BURN THIS TOWN DOWN; about the Filipino men attacked with clubs and slingshots in Exeter for bringing white girls to a local carnival; about the hundred-strong mobs of white men who raided ranches that employed Filipino workers, like the one in San Joaquin Valley where Lolo Boy’s father had thinned lettuce for years.

  Lolo Boy was sixteen when he came to live with his father and uncle in California, picking and handwashing asparagus, peaches, melons. For most of his young life, Lolo Boy had known himself to be a United States national, free to leave his tiny fishing village in Abucay, where the Dutch once massacred nearly three hundred Pampangans in an attempt to take over the region from its Spanish rulers; free to come to America and look for a job; free to have rocks thrown at him by white men who didn’t even want those jobs. That was how he knew he belonged to America. But in 1934, he became free; an alien. In the end, Lolo Boy, his father, and his uncles took their prematurely arthritic limbs back to the Philippines, knowing that if they chose to remain, as many did, Boy would likely never see his mother or older sisters again.

  The only work Boy found upon his return was on the U.S. naval base in Cavite, first as a dishwasher, then as a cook. His father drank the rest of his years away; his uncles, much the same. By the time Lolo Boy got his green card, his father was long dead of a heart attack and Boy was in love with a sharp, stalwart girl who cleaned the rambling Santa Mesa house of a navy accountant. A twenty-year-old named Adela with a six-year-old daughter, a fading Ilocano accent she never explained, two gold teeth, and a stare Boy couldn’t shake.

  Lolo Boy stopped talking to you about all of that by the time you entered high school. In fact, Lolo Boy became quieter and quieter as he got older; new people just assumed he didn’t speak English. They were always surprised at how American he sounded when he finally did open his mouth. Sometimes you got the feeling that he spoke Tagalog with people in the restaurant just to keep his hand in, out of obligation more than any real sense of ease in the language.

  You don’t know why he told you all of that in the first place, since you never heard him and Lola Adela talking about it between themselves. It was like he thought laying his heart bare to a kid was the same thing as laying your heart bare to a pet, or a priest. It didn’t really count. Of course, half the things Lolo Boy told you were things he’d heard from his father and uncles—back when he, too, used to be a kid-pet, a kid-priest. If there’s one thing you’ve learned, it’s that everything counts when you’re a kid.

  You, your mom, Lola Adela, and Lolo Boy all lived in San Francisco at first, in that tiny studio apartment on Eddy Street, before moving to Milpitas on the advice of one of Boy’s friends who said there was a Filipino restaurant looking for a cook. It took almost another ten years before the owners of that restaurant finally sold it to Lolo Boy and Lola Adela. It was the first place anyone in the family ever owned in America.

  The restaurant would forever be your real home: the place you went when your mom yelled at you over your report card, the place you went after you and Jaime had sex for the first time, the place you went to watch your grandma divine the maladies of strangers, making your own seem manageable for once.

  When you became Bay-famous for your makeup skills, you were offered not a small number of higher-paying jobs at fancier salons: in Sunnyvale, in Mountain View, in Stockton, in Modesto. You might have even afforded rent out there. You didn’t even blink. You stayed at Mai’s. You never told anyone about the job offers.

  * * *

  It was because of your grandma that you eventually got into manga. She’d been into komiks growing up and gave you a bunch of her old ones from the Philippines, things like Reyna Bandida, Darna, Pobresita, old issues of Hiwaga and Espesyal, so old and weathered the color had stripped off the covers. You’d read them religiously in Manila, kept reading them in California until you were about ten or so. You only stopped because you had to focus on your studies, scrub your accent away and conjugate English verbs. But you never lost the love of them, and when a comic book shop opened in Milpitas, you and Jaime checked it out together, begged Cely to drive you even though she only had a learner’s permit and was technically only supposed to drive with an adult in the car. You never went back to that comic book shop after the first couple of times, put off by the cool reception of the white men who ran the store, the only white people you ever came across in Milpitas.

  Ruby was the one who introduced you to Japanese manga and renewed your love for komiks, which now you called comics. You and Ruby used to be inseparable when you were kids, growing up together as the daughters of the same strip mall; she, so delighted to meet someone who would appreciate her meticulous translations, and you, so delighted to hang out with someone who didn’t already know everything about your family. Sometime around high school you drift
ed apart, though; felt like her parents didn’t want her hanging out with a Pinay with an undercut and a tattoo and no path to Stanford or anywhere like it, didn’t want their daughter going to the restaurant, to parties with people like Jaime or Ruben, with their spoilered cars blasting music from one end of the parking lot to the other. Your relationship became a transactional one, with only the translations to bind it, and you and Ruby never again shared the complicity you’d had as children. Though sometimes you caught a look on her face, the sheepish knee-jerk smile of someone running into an ex.

  In high school, you tried to go back to your grandma’s komiks, just out of curiosity, but page after page swam in front of you, senseless, until your vision blurred and you had to shove the magazines away. Tagalog, the first language you’d ever spoken, and now you could barely read a sentence. It wasn’t just reading; for years you’d replied in English when your grandma talked to you, stopped understanding the teleseryes and movies that your mom picked up at Magat along with pastillas and sampalok. Now you couldn’t even read fucking komiks. Not for the first time, your own mind terrified you: the careless black-hole greediness of it, that you could leave things there thinking they were safe, and then turn around and find that they’d been eaten away, gnawed on without mercy or honor so that not even the bones were left, destroyed nonchalantly by something mightier in you, something mightier than you, some big-time fucking asshole, whose name was, what, even? Forgetting. You could forget an entire world, the person you’d been there. It scared the shit out of you.

  It scared the shit out of you—but not enough to go back and try to learn it all again. Most of the time, when you had the shit scared out of you, you ran. And so you ran from it, the eaten-up place where your first language had been. Ran like hell, left it for dead.

  * * *

  You clocked Hero’s hands the second time you met. Once you looked at them, really looked at them, it was pretty obvious something was fucked up there, had been fucked up for a while, probably. You’d never broken a bone in your body—but. You were pretty sure that what you were looking at was old. Both thumbs, gnarled-up and knobbly, not just double-jointed. Fucked, like. Not like an accident. Like someone else had broken them, maybe. That didn’t have to be it; Hero might’ve just had a bad fall sometime in the past couple of years. But twenty years on, you still remembered the telltale signs of getting beat on, what that looked like on a woman, so when you saw Hero’s hands, you thought the worst. What you thought at the time was the worst. Though later, as always, you’d realize that what you knew about the worst of the world, the knowledge about life you’d stored up, tart and proud because of where you’d been born, what you’d run from, what’d made you, all amounted to—mostly nothing, like anyone else’s stupid history. It didn’t make you any wiser or stronger, the way you hoped, the way you usually played it. It just made you you.

  You saw Hero’s hands, and then after that, you started noticing little things, like the way Hero opened a door more with her wrist than with her hands, or if she had to grip the knob, then she’d use the four other fingers, trying not to tax the thumbs; the way she held a cup at the base, and never at the handle, sometimes with two hands, steadying it; the way she drove with her palms, mostly, the touch light—kinda hella scary, to be real; the way Hero flattened the manga you lent her, breaking the spine so she could read the books splayed out on the table without having to really lift and perch them in her fingers; the way Hero’s teeth were always a little yellow, her tongue a little white, probably because she couldn’t brush her teeth for very long; the way you never once saw her hold a pen or pencil, or even write anything down.

  In daily life she used her hands—if you weren’t looking for it, you probably wouldn’t look twice. And plus the injury, or its effects, didn’t seem consistent, anyway: there were some movements that Hero did that you would’ve thought would hurt like hell if you’d broken your thumbs as badly as Hero looked like she had, like maneuvering a stick shift, or picking up Roni’s backpack by the strap even when the kid said she could carry it herself.

  The other thing that bugged you out from the beginning was how Hero didn’t even look like she minded being called Hero. It was a fucking ridiculous name, ridiculous even for Pinoy nicknaming standards, so ridiculous you skipped all the way past the safety of mockery into full-blown tenderness like a sucker. You should’ve known then that that was the beginning, should’ve recognized what was in your gut, roaring up in your organs, something terminal and excruciating, like the bad ending of the whore you’d been so good at playing on stage when you were eighteen. But you’d always been a dumbass, so.

  You didn’t even realize what you were feeling until right after Hero and Roni left after that first meeting, and by that time, as usual, you’d already made a fool of yourself by being yourself—the way you always were with new people, hella dramatic and flirtatious but with no real roots in it, no firm ground underneath it, the way you were with everyone. Only like a minute after Hero left the salon did you figure out that you didn’t want to be the way you were with everyone, with Hero.

  When you offered Hero a job at the restaurant, you’d done it mostly out of solidarity, had figured out quick that Hero didn’t have any papers. What you hadn’t counted on was how good Hero would be at it. She had a natural knack for serving people at the restaurant, had a way of being invisible at the right times and then silently appearing to provide an extra fork when it was needed. Hero was detached, but her boundaries were nothing like the ones you’d thrown up in phalanxes when you were a kid, new in California, snarling at anyone who looked at you sideways because of how you pronounced the letter f. Hero was like one of those upper-class Filipino homes in the Bay that your fam catered at sometimes, the Couples for Christ houses, the ones with polite owners who paid on time, called Lolo Boy kuya, took the trays off your hands. It was only after you’d been in the house a couple of times that you’d wise up to the fact that you’d never really gone past the entrance.

  It didn’t take long for you to start giving Hero stacks and stacks of manga. You didn’t realize afterward that Hero must have figured out quick that your tastes generally ran toward romance, that everything you recommended to her was mainly about girls feeling out their independence, falling in love with boys, who were generally either stable and responsible from beginning to end, or rude as shit at first but then juicy-soft the minute the heroine ever got into some real wildness. The stories all ended the same way—thank god for that. You knew that Hero didn’t think much of your reading habits, that she found the stories sentimental and full of clichés, was possibly even offended by some of them, although she was polite about it, thanking you for the latest book even if it had been patently obvious that she’d thought it was a pile of steaming tae not good enough to spit on.

  Hero knew the kinds of stories you liked, which meant Hero thought she knew something about you: what you wanted out of love, what you wanted out of life, the things you dreamt about, the things you touched yourself to, the things that dragged you without protest into the undertow of dreamless, fearless sleep. She likes dumbass romance between boys and girls, so that’s what she really wants—that was how Hero’s thinking probably went. It felt like Hero was just waiting for the moment to come when you would just shake yourself awake from some heavy-ass dream, blink a few times at Hero like you didn’t recognize her, and the feelings you’d been feeding and feeding off of would just vanish, like a hunger that went away the more you starved it. Like she was just waiting for you to wise up and get with some dude. Jaime, probably. The manga-perfect kiss, framed with flowers. Dumbass romance. Boys and girls.

  Better to give up and get the fuck out now, crowed the biggest and smartest part of you, the part whose job it was to acutely detect when you were out of your depth, or when your dumbassness was approaching life-ruining levels. The part of you that said Enough after the last onstage primal scream. The part of you that visited Jaime in jail, sta
red at him through the glass partition, picked up the phone and uttered the first words you’d spoken to each other in three years: You look like shit, Lowme.

  Okay, so you were out of your depth. The life-ruin meter was wailing. That was all true. But it was too late—too late to have your mind changed by something as minor as the truth. You didn’t want a way out. You wanted a way in. Any way in would do.

  * * *

  Hero knew what she was doing when it came to fucking. You saw for yourself the way Hero would go home with almost anyone who asked, those first few months when you were just friends and you had to grin and turn your head, stand around at parties up in the Excelsior and wait until someone whispered in Hero’s ear. But you saw Hero leave with a girl once at a party in San Jose, which meant it was on the table, at least. Hero went home with almost anyone who asked—so you asked. It wasn’t that deep. Or that was what you needed Hero to think.

  Less than a year later she was letting you nose around her pussy like a teenager at prom, licking overextravagantly at folds that you usually ignored on yourself, or poking, shallow, into Hero’s hole, hoping for a reaction, not really getting one. Then Hero asked you to use your hand.