“Daddy,” I say. “Why does Mr. Romy have a red face?”
Daddy laughs again. “Tito Romy,” he corrects me.
“Tito Romy.”
“He plays a lot of golf,” he says, laughing. Sometimes Daddy laughs and I can’t tell why. Sometimes when he laughs there’s nothing funny at all.
He takes a picture of Romy and his girlfriend sitting on the couch. Daddy walks toward them but a man he works with stops him to say congratulations and shake his hand. There are big sweat marks on the man’s shirt, under his arms and on his back. He smells too. Daddy smiles and nods. He tells the man to help himself to more beer and the man leaves. Daddy sits on the couch with Romy and his girlfriend. Romy whispers something to Daddy. He points to Sofia and pokes Daddy in the ribs. Daddy smiles as if he doesn’t want to smile. He suddenly looks a little sad.
“Emil.” Mommy walks by me. “Emil, turn down the music.”
Emil turns it down just a little but Mommy doesn’t say anything. She’s already gone. She’s standing by the couch talking to Daddy and Romy and Romy’s girlfriend. She has that smile like she’s mad and she smiles anyway. Her dress is pulled up a little behind and I can see her slip. I guess she doesn’t know. Daddy and Romy see it when she turns and Romy smiles. Romy’s girlfriend smiles too. It makes me mad.
“Do you think she’s really a beauty queen?” asks Lydia. She sits down in the chair beside me.
“She’s pretty,” I say.
“Well I heard my daddy say she’s not really a beauty queen.” Lydia waits for me to say something. “Well?” She pushes her elbow into me.
I push her back. “Stop that.”
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
“You were pushing me.”
“No I wasn’t.” Lydia gets up and leaves. I don’t feel so good.
My presents are piled on the table beside me. I pick one up and read the tag. “To Ma. Genoveva, Happy Birthday and God Bless, Love Tita Baby, Tito Ninoy, and Nina.”
Mommy is back at the couch with two glasses full of something for Romy and his girlfriend. She leans over and talks to Daddy who nods and follows her. Mommy’s dress is still pulled up in back.
“’Nay,” I say when she walks by but she doesn’t hear. They walk into the kitchen and I follow them.
“How could you invite him?” Mommy is talking softly but she’s mad. “Knowing he was going to bring her? What about his wife, huh?”
“I didn’t know.” Daddy’s eyes look tired. His camera hangs from his shoulder.
Naty and Mila have stopped what they were doing and they’re watching. Mila sees me and looks at me hard because she can’t say anything. She’s standing way on the other side of the kitchen and looking at me. And Mommy and Daddy are standing in the middle talking, but not too loud. I stare at Mommy’s slip and listen to them.
Then I look at Mila again and she’s still looking at me. I know what she’s trying to say. I go back out to the living room and look for Marisa. She’s sitting in a corner listening to Lydia’s mother.
“Ate,” I say and tap Marisa on the arm.
“Are you enjoying your party?” Lydia’s mother asks.
“Yes.”
“How old are you now?”
“Eight.”
“You’re getting to be a big girl,” she says.
But I know eight’s not very big. Marisa’s twelve and Emil’s thirteen. They’re big.
“Have you eaten yet?” Marisa asks me.
I shake my head.
“We’re going to get something to eat,” Marisa says to Lydia’s mother. “Would you like anything?”
“Oh no,” Lydia’s mother says. She holds her hand to her stomach. “I’ve already eaten.”
So Marisa and I leave. “She talks a lot,” Marisa says.
She picks up two paper plates and gives me one. The plate’s soft and I can bend it. “Don’t do that,” Marisa says. “Do you want some of this chicken?”
“Yes.”
“Pansit?”
“Yes.”
She fills my plate with lots of food and fills hers too. I tell her not to give me so much but she says to just eat what I can. We go outside with our plates and sit on the porch steps. The rain’s still falling and it’s cooler out here. I’m careful to sit where it’s smooth, not on the stones. I leave room so Marisa can sit on the smooth part too.
Marisa goes back inside to get us drinks. She comes out with two bottles of Mirinda Orange.
“Mommy and Daddy are mad,” I tell her.
“They’re always mad at something,” she says. She’s always getting in trouble so that’s probably what she’s thinking.
“I mean they’re mad at each other.”
“That happens,” she says.
I don’t feel like eating. “They didn’t argue before,” I say.
“They’ve always fought.”
“No,” I say. I feel like crying.
“Yes they did.” She stops eating. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” I look at my fingers. What do I say? I bite down on one of my fingers but not hard. It only hurts a little. “It’s just that…”
“They’ve always gotten mad at something or other.” Marisa wipes her hands on her napkin. She’s stopped eating too. “But usually they’re mad at me,” she says and laughs a little. She puts her arm around my shoulders.
“I guess,” I say.
“Eat your dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Just eat a little, OK?” Marisa says softly. She picks up my spoon and scoops up some of my fried rice. “This is very good.”
I look at it. There’s carrots and onion and shrimp and some other stuff in it.
“Come on,” she says.
So I eat it.
She gives me the spoon. “Just eat a little. You have to eat something.”
I eat a little more rice.
“Hoy.” Someone’s looking out the door at us.
“What?” we both say. We sound kind of angry.
Emil walks out and holds up his hands. “I just came out to talk.” He sits beside us. “You’re so friendly.”
“Sorry,” says Marisa. “We didn’t know it was you.”
“Mommy wants you to blow out your candles soon,” he tells me.
“Mommy sent you?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Guess they’re not fighting anymore,” says Marisa.
“Ha,” says Emil.
“Gemma.” Mila is looking out the door at us. “Gemma, we’re going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ soon. Your Mommy wants you in here. You too,” she says to Marisa and Emil. She leaves us.
Marisa and I get up to go inside. Emil is still sitting on the steps. “Aren’t you corning?” says Marisa.
“No,” he says. He pulls something out of his shirt pocket. It’s a cigarette. “Just bring me back some matches.”
“Mommy and Daddy are going to get mad if you don’t come inside,” says Marisa.
“I’ll be in in a minute,” he says.
I look at him sitting on the step. It’s hard to see him it’s so dark. I’m afraid he’s not going to come with us. “Please, Kuya,” I say.
“OK, OK.” He gets up and we all go inside.
Angel’s
Story
Angeling told me to walk her to the corner so she could catch a jeepney. That was the first time we ever truly talked. I walked her to the corner because I didn’t know what else to do with a girl who said do this, do that and expected these things to be done.
I didn’t know why she asked me to walk her. And neither did the others coming out of our classroom. They all became quieter so they could listen. Lucy even stared, but she has no manners. I could feel them watching us as we walked across the basketball courts to the school gate. Lucy was probably already making up stories. They made up a lot of stories and I’m sure I haven’t heard all of them. The first one I heard made me angry, and when I heard the second one, I told Efren’s girl
friend Lotlot that it wasn’t true. But everyone just believes what they want to believe. That’s how I got in the fight with Efren and ended up in the principal’s office where we both lied to Father Joseph. Efren and I are still friends. Even if he does believe the stories about her, he tells Lucy to shut up when she tries to tell them.
Angeling doesn’t care because she’s not in Columban anymore. I don’t think she cared even when she was. Lotlot says Angeling’s not going to school at all. Lotlot’s careful now. She tells me only what she thinks I want to hear because she believes Angeling was my girlfriend. But Angeling never was.
I never even spoke to her outside class until that day she told me to walk her to the corner. It was hot and she talked the whole short walk and I wondered if the reason she wanted me to walk her was so she could tell me all her stories. What she really wanted to do, she said, was to be a fashion model and designer. “You can’t tell because I’m wearing this uniform, but I design a lot of my clothes.” She told me about her boyfriend who was studying in Manila. But she didn’t like him anymore. “I want a Kano boyfriend,” she said. I didn’t know why she was telling me things that I wouldn’t even tell my friends.
“I want a Kano boyfriend so I can go to the States. I want to live in California.”
“Why California?”
“Because.” She turned to look for a jeepney. Then she looked back at me. “You lost a lot of weight this summer.”
“I got taller.”
A jeepney stopped in front of us. “We’re going the same way,” she said. “Why don’t we ride together? I’ll pay.”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I let her pay. A schoolteacher on the other side of the jeepney looked at me as if I was doing something wrong.
Efren and Freddy teased me the next day.
“So is she your girlfriend now?” Freddy asked.
“No.”
“But she likes you.”
“No she doesn’t,” I said because it was true. “She just wanted someone to walk her to the corner.”
“Oh, she can’t walk herself?”
“Emil,” Efren mimicked. “Emil, please walk with me to the corner.” That wasn’t even what she said.
“She’s got a boyfriend,” I told them.
“Who? That guy Jimmy, Joey, what’s his name? He’s in Manila.”
I wondered how they knew. “So? He’s still her boyfriend.”
“Nah. She likes you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Emil.” Freddy put his arm around my shoulders. “She asked you to walk her.” We headed toward our first class.
“She could have asked anybody.”
“No, she wanted you.”
“She wants you,” said Efren.
I stopped walking. “I don’t like her. I’m not interested.”
“Why not?” Efren asked. “Pablo says she’s very…” and he held his hands down with the first two fingers spread wide like legs.
“How would he know?”
“He took her to a movie once.”
“Pablo lies. I don’t want to talk anymore about this.”
As we walked into the room Efren nudged me hard in my side, then hurried to his seat before I could do anything.
I walked Angeling that day, and the next, and on and on. All those hot days we walked to the corner and rode home and I listened all the way. I thought for a while that maybe she did like me, like Efren and Freddy said. We sat next to each other on the jeepneys, smashed together by the other passengers. The day she was upset about her boyfriend we hid behind the kindergarten building and smoked and talked for a long time. He had come back to visit and threatened her when she refused to go out with him. “He’s not my boyfriend anymore. He doesn’t understand.” I put my arm around her and she hung onto my shoulder and cried.
But Angeling didn’t like me the way the others meant. She talked to me because she knew I wouldn’t tell anybody. She knew that from the very first, from the day she told me to walk with her. And I knew from the very first that she wasn’t interested. Sometimes I thought about her, and I almost kissed her the time she cried. But finally, I didn’t. I wanted to, but I didn’t because knowing how she felt--even if I tried to pretend she felt something else for me—I couldn’t kiss her.
Instead, I told her things I didn’t tell anyone else, because she didn’t laugh at me. I used to like Alma, I said. And she told me Alma was sweet but scared of everything. “Who do you like now?”
“The new girl. Remy,” I said.
“That’s better.”
She told me a lot of things, but I didn’t know much about her. I knew where she lived because, riding home in the jeepney one day, I asked her.
“You know where I get off?” she said. I nodded. “I live down that street. In the house next to the corner. With the green gate.”
So when she got off the jeepney, I looked. It was a small, neat house. The gate was the same green as the hospital where Lolo stayed before he died. That’s what it made me think of, a hospital.
“Did you always live in that house?” I asked Angeling the next time.
“Yes,” she said. “Since I can remember.”
I had hoped she would tell me more. I wanted to know about her parents whom I never saw. But to be fair, she didn’t see mine either. I didn’t go to her home and she didn’t go to mine. But she never talked about her parents. She never said anything like “Oh, my mother wants me to get this on the way home” or “My father will be angry if I’m late.”
One day on the way home she asked the jeepney driver to let her off by the cockpit. “Why are you getting down here?” I asked.
“Because I want to see the virgin.” She pointed at the stairs that led to the grotto. “Come on.”
We climbed all those stairs, losing count, to the grotto that was near the top of the hill. Angeling knelt at the base of the statue, truly praying instead of catching her breath like I was doing. The Virgin Mary looked newly painted in her white gown with the blue cloak. She held her arms out from her side and looked up to heaven. For a Virgin Mary I thought she had very prominent breasts under the white gown. After a while, I prayed because I thought I should. We shared a cigarette, then walked back down. “I’d never been there before,” I told her when we got to the bottom.
“Neither had I.”
When I got home, Mama asked me what had taken so long. “Who’s this girlfriend Marisa tells me about? How come you don’t bring her here?”
“She’s not a girlfriend,” I said. “She’s just a friend.”
“Why don’t you bring her here?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. My home was the last place she would want to go. It was the last place I would want her to go.
I was limping at school the next day because my legs were tired and sore. At first I tried to pretend nothing was wrong. But after a while, I forgot to do that.
“What did you do?” said Efren.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re limping.”
“I fell.”
“So why’s Angeling limping too?” asked Freddy
“Maybe she fell too.”
“Maybe you fell on top of her.” Efren likes being crude.
“Shut up,” I told them. We walked silently. Finally, I couldn’t stand their quiet. “We climbed the stairs to the grotto.”
“What grotto?” asked Freddy.
“Stupid,” said Efren, whacking Freddy on the head. “The one near the cockpit. Why’d you go there?”
“She wanted to see the Virgin.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She wanted to pray I guess.”
“She prayed?”
“Yes, she prayed.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
I found out when she told me she had a Kano boyfriend. He was tall, she said. With blonde hair. I was sure she was praying for him, for herself.
“We would have beautiful children,”
she said as we walked to the corner. “Because he’s tall and I’m tall so they would be tall too.” It was true. Angeling was taller than the other girls and most of the boys. I was a little shorter than her. But we were both slender and sometimes people mistook us for brother and sister. “The children would have brown hair, maybe blonde, and Kano noses.”
“And you would all live in a house in California.”
She laughed. “That’s right. And we would invite Uncle Emil to visit us.”
“Which I would do because I would fly my own plane. I’d be a pilot.”
“And you’d take us for rides in your plane. We’d go everywhere.”
“New York. Washington.”
“Paris.”
“Tokyo.”
“Nah,” she said. “I don’t want to go there.”
“OK, London then.”
“That’s good.” She laughed. “That’s good.”
When Angeling got off the jeepney that day I watched her and thought she was pretty, in a skinny-girl sort of way. She wasn’t exactly skinny, but she was tall and bony, which made her look skinny. And girlish. In spite of this, people always believed she was older than she really was. I think it was mostly because of her height.
Angeling told me she had met Tom, that was his name, outside a nightclub on Magsaysay. She was waiting for a jeepney. She didn’t say why she happened to be there waiting for a jeepney and I didn’t ask. They started talking and he invited her to have a Pepsi with him at Shakey’s where they talked some more. He asked her to see a movie with him the next night, on the base.
“So did you go?”
“Yes. It’s really pretty inside the base, you know. The theater was near a park that was right in front of the ocean.”
“What did you see?”
“The new James Bond.”
“It’s not that new.” I felt angry that she was so excited.
“Well it’s the newest. And James Bond is so guapo. All the women love him.”
“So what else?” I thought I sounded sarcastic, but Angeling didn’t notice.
“He’s trying to find out who killed this man. The man was one of their spies and he died in the middle of a restaurant. Just fell over into his soup.” She told me all about the movie, which wasn’t what I was asking about at all.
Mango Seasons Page 9
