The penis or the pregnancy? That would have been a far more interesting dinner conversation. We’d be here all night with that one, for sure. If I had to wager a bet, though, I’d say it was more the pregnancy than the penis. I go back to the subject of my curiosity. “Did she kill her husband?”
They fall into silence, replacing words with electrically charged airwaves to communicate. Each member is buzzing with her own unique frequency. Bzzzt, bzzzt. Who is going to answer this question? Pffft, pffft. You answer! Ping, ping. Why, me? How dare you put that burden on me! After that miscarriage? Kzzzzm, kzzzzm. That was ten years ago! Get over it! Then, the other ladies look at each other like they finally homed in on one common frequency. Why should we? This is not our house. This is not our snoopy, ill-mannered devil of a child. As gracious guests would, they defer the burden to Mama. All their eyes shift to Mama, burning her like God decimated Sodom. At least, Lot and his daughters had an escape route. Mama has nowhere to run, except maybe the garden. That’s the family motto right there. When in doubt, run to the garden.
Mama laughs it off and gives me a hearty kick to the shin. I grimace in pain, which the mothers mistake for a smile and that all is well. “Who’s up for dessert? Why don’t we go to the garden for coffee and cake? Samantha, will you please?”
The humble servant has been dismissed. I serve the cake and coffee, and leave them be, sort of. I hide behind the kitchen door and eavesdrop on the conversation that followed.
“Now, Tessie, those are just rumors. The police didn’t find anything,” Mrs. Bautista admonishes Mrs. Cruz.
“But, remember the funeral? She didn’t even cry. No, not one bit! She just stood there. And, she wore red while we grieved poor, old Burt in black! I still think she did it.”
“I bet she poisoned him, made it look like an overdose. I mean, she is from the outside,” Mrs. Paulino adds. Her voice trails, as if the outside was an out-of-this-world dimension. Outside is just the city. It’s not as scary as they make it sound. Some of them were from the city before they married their husbands. But, they needed a reason to stay here, to like it here, to build a home and raise their children here. They thought denouncing the city would serve the purpose. “She knows people and things like that. Robbers and murderers and infidels, that lot.”
I take a teensy little peek and see Mama flinch at the mention of outside, her mind perhaps going back to the years I could scarcely remember, the early years when we lived in the outside. I leave the adults to their post-Bible study gossip and pay Mrs. Alves a visit as promised. She was already waiting with tea and biscuits, and immediately sets up the chessboard as soon as I arrived. We get to playing, with her awarding me the white first-move handicap. She sees me fidgeting in my seat, shifting glances between her and the board. My hand trembles as I move a pawn to the center.
“Is there something on your mind, Sam?”, she asks, cradling a pawn between two fingers. Without looking her in the eye, I move my knight. She responds by moving a pawn forward.
“Sam, don’t be shy now.”
“Mama’s friends said you killed your husband.”, I blurt out. She takes a breath and rubs her temples. Clearly distracted by what I just said, she makes a mistake by moving her bishop a square too far. I guess some words don’t reduce to words over time.
“Do you believe them, Sam?”
“If I believed that, I wouldn’t be here.” She reaches across the table and gives my hand a gentle squeeze. There it is again: hellfire. It travels up my arm before searing my heart. Blood brings the fire to my needy cells. In the space of a breath, I’m burning all over. She senses my struggle and withdraws her hand.
“They’re right, you know. I did kill him.”
She laughs, sad and bitter, like when you pick yourself up and dust your knee after a nasty fall. You try to laugh with the world around you, see the joke the way they do. But, they don’t have the skinned knee. They don’t have the taste of asphalt on their mouth. They don’t share your pain. The chess pieces stay where they are, as if they too hang on to every word of her story. “If you knew Burt, you’d never think he had a bad day in his life. Always had a smile on his face. I was twenty-one when I fell in love with him. Got married. I didn’t think about how the world saw us. Forty-five and twenty-one. He didn’t mind. So, why should I? Like you, he was good at chess. He’s read every book there is. He climbs mountains. Every day with him was an adventure. Every day brought with it something new. Ten years and not once did I feel tired of our life, of him. I thought we’d grow old together until I found him frothing at the mouth from an overdose.” She pauses to see if I would laugh or form a bad impression about her. Am I one with the crowd, stone in hand and ready to point and judge and fire?
“His doctor said it was depression. He said people with depression don’t always know they have it. They just feel it. Or, rather, they stop feeling things. They could smile at you or hug you or cry at your pain, but they’re not there. It’s just a show of emotions that aren’t there. Still, I blamed myself for not seeing it. If I had known, I could have saved him. I felt so guilty and ashamed. Not once did I go to his wake. My sister-in-law urged me to get out of the house and see just how many were grieving for Burt, how many lives he touched, as if that would bring him back. But, I couldn’t even get out of bed. Every time I manage to sit up, I see our photo on the bedside table and I wonder how many times he kissed me and told me he was happy when he wasn’t. And it’s like the ceiling falling down on me. Have you ever felt like that?”
I want to say anything remotely related to having the ceiling fall down on me. I want to say I feel trapped every day, caught between so many things. I love Mama but I can’t deal with the friends she loves. I grew up here but, as I grow older, it becomes harder to feel like I belong. I am taught to stay away from Clara but here I am, playing the unlikely confidante. But, nothing comes out. Any passing thought is a pathetic, petty blip compared to what Clara had to go through.
“Morning of the funeral, I finally came to. The sun beat down too hard. A wake-up call from nature, I guess. I gave myself a long, hard look and realized that this is not the woman he married. Not the woman who filled his life with meaning. I can’t send him off like this, I thought to myself. So, I did my hair. Put on make-up to cover the puff in my eyes.”
There was a scratch to her voice. I think it was a heartache trying to come out, but she wouldn’t let it. She pushes it down with a huge gulp of tea. It must be lukewarm by now. “I took sedatives to calm me down. Took some more until I couldn’t even cry. I made it to the car, had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling. I felt no pain. My husband’s dead and I can’t even cry anymore. At least I showed up. At least I looked good.”
I wasn’t at that funeral. It was an affair for the adults, so Mama and Dada dropped me off at the Guzmans. This was before the fall-out with Christina, so we were still pretty close then. I couldn’t remember much of it now, but I’d bet we probably wasted the afternoon checking out boys on Facebook like we always did. She would rest her head on my chest, while she scrolled upward on her phone until her thumb ached, and the smell of her hair always got me thinking of green granny apples.
I hold Mr. Alves’s funeral in my imagination. The grass is green. The sky is blue. The sunlight is pastel, just warm and dreamy enough. I could see Clara cutting a slender red line in that sea of black. I see her parting the grievers in the same stilettos she’s wearing now. She stood there staring at the love she couldn’t even mourn because she was all loopy with sleeping pills. A tear threatens to escape my eye. I rub it off with a swipe of the finger before she notices.
“I don’t know when exactly they started treating me differently. But, I guess it just happened over time. People stopped inviting me to dinners. Wherever I am at the supermarket, no matter the hour, the aisle is always clear for me. They always leave one empty seat beside me in church. Some of them say it’s because I wore red at the funeral and didn’t cry. What if I wore black? What if I appeared
in crutches and wailed out loud all through the service? Would that have made a difference?”
Dinah Torres crosses my mind at the question. If she had not torn up that letter, if she had been more careful of her affairs, would that have spared her life? I was from I-St. Therese, the classroom next to hers. If I had said a word when they squeaked at Dinah, would it have made a difference? If I had praised her singing, instead of just eavesdropping before walking past the Music Room, would she have had reason to live?
I move the rook. Check and mate. I check the surprised smile on her face. She challenges me to another game, but a look at the clock advises me against it. I have been ‘jogging’ for over an hour now. Mama will be furious if I’m out for too long. I hurry my goodbye and run back home without fainting or tripping or stumbling on a branch or getting hit by a car.
I catch the convoy of SUVs backing out of our street. I wave each of them goodbye, see you in two months. I am in such a good mood I even smile at Mrs. Bautista. She responds with that librarian scowl of hers.
“Well, someone’s in a happy mood.” Mama kisses my forehead. “All this running is changing you, Sammy, I must say.” She crab-clips my stomach between her fingers and embraces me from behind. “The jelly belly feels smaller, too, would you look at that?”
“Ma!”
“You’ve been jogging a whole lot.” She says it like achieving an acceptable level of fitness is a crime. If it were any other teenage daughter, that kind of logic hardly made sense. But, for someone who breaks out her running shoes once a year, three days in a row is an awful lot of exercise. Suspicious behavior. Shady Samantha on her night runs. I go to my room and finally relax. I let my hair hang loose. I unhook my sports bra. I take a shower and get ready for bed. My phone glows white and I pounce on it like a lion after a lean hunting season. I have regressed to a giggly 13-year-old.
You better give me that rematch. Haha.
Will text you. :-)
Good night, Sam.
I am kept awake by thoughts of another night run, of grudge-match chess over tea and biscuits and stories with Mrs. Alves, of Mrs. Alves, period. Inside me floats the seed of a secret. It keeps moving around, fluttering on by, looking for good soil. It pinches when Mrs. Alves smiles at me, digs deep when she brushes my hand at chess. It is taking root between the fibers of heart muscle, threatening to grow to epic proportions. A mustard seed. A mustard seed of a secret. Only I know it’s there.
Chapter 4
DADA HAS A secret, too. He thinks he’s so clever, like super-spy kind of clever. He thinks he’s the only one in on it. He doesn’t know that I know. Only Mama is out of the loop, and neither of us has the balls – well, at least, I don’t – to break it to her. Why fix what ain’t broken, why break what is fixed, can I get a hell yeah? No? Okay. Amen is fine.
This is how I came to know Dada’s secret. One time, Dada left his laptop at work, so he borrowed mine. He said he just needed to check his email real quick, see if something new came up. I was up to my eyeballs in a term paper for Socio 101. Screw electives. You elect to take them out of the goodness of your heart, and they flat-out destroy you and your chances at the DL.
“I’m going for a nap, Dada. Just leave it on my desk when you’re done.”
Like all college-level naps that grow exponentially with time, my fifteen minutes of rest stretched to thirty minutes. Thirty minutes became an hour. A snooze turned the hour into two. I went back to working on my paper all bleary-eyed and craving for a sandwich. I deleted my paper draft by accident and hovered to the Recycle Bin to come get it. I clicked the trash box icon, and saw a thumbnail photo that knocked the breathing wind out of me. I slapped myself awake, pinched my arm just to make sure I was seeing it right. Dada was half-naked in bed with a man. I didn’t know if it was the same man that started the War of the Flying Plates and Shrieking Insults between Mama and Dada that long time ago. I deleted the picture, tried to forget about it, never did. I didn’t tell Mama about it.
“What do you want for dinner, Da?” Mama asks as she makes a quick inventory of the freezer. It’s funny how Dada is taken aback by such a basic question. He shifts around in his seat, trembles as he puts down his mug of coffee. He keeps biting his lips, which is a sure sign he’s sitting on something.
“I’ll be home late, Ma. We’re squeezing in an emergency planning session to fix some critical production issues at the plant. Most likely just have dinner at work.” That had too many serious words to be anything but a lie. Emergency. Critical. Dinner at work. I look down at the bits of egg on my plate and stab them with a fork. I want no part of this conversation. It is too early in the morning for shadiness. But, as luck would have it, Mama forces me into the burden of decision-making. We are a family, after all. She asks what I would like for dinner. I say bacon just to get the impasse out of the way.
“No, we had pork yesterday. Let’s have fish, instead.”
“Bacon is not pork. It is a hug, Ma. It is life.”
Dada thinks I don’t know what he’s up to when he says ‘dinner at work’. He may fool Mama, but he isn’t fooling me. Mama believes with all her heart that time, space and Jesus can change a man. Mama thought that uprooting Dada from the city was enough to remove him from the temptations he once fell to. Fifty-two Sundays of counseling and he’s suddenly cured. Perfect marriage, restored. Could you be cured from something like that? Could you be anybody but the man you are? Or, do you just live the life you want but keep it hidden?
The chess rematch I promised Clara doesn’t go my way, bringing our little World Cup of Chess to a deadlock. We were both trying to lure the other into traps. The way she danced out of each one had me thinking I may have finally met my match. In the end, it was Mrs. Alves calling check and mate. I felt like I just had to prove myself in an Advanced Calculus exam. A cold drink ought to fan my overheating brain.
She offers me wine. Bossa aka lazy, lazy jazz plays on surround-sound speakers. The music follows me everywhere as we make our way to the backyard garden. I hardly notice the huge splashes of paint on the wall – abstract art, I think it’s called – or the wood-carved dining chairs. I am busy watching Mrs. Alves walk this labyrinth of a house, her kingdom of minimalist black and white and pops of red. I am tuned to the frequency of the clacks of her stilettos. My eyes follow the pony tail of wine-colored red as it swishes left-right-left-right. Her dress hardly ever sways. It’s practically a second skin. When she faces me, I am taken by the wing-tip and the matte red lipstick. Her earrings are a hundred prisms under the chandelier light.
The air isn’t as hot today. It’s just the right kind of warm. From here, I could see the houses below. They’re like fallen stars, some yellow, some white, some burned out. She sits on the garden sofa and gestures me to come sit beside her. We sit apart, at opposite ends. I can’t bring myself to come closer. We look out into the night, instead of trying to make sense of this gulf of upholstery between us. I cradle a sweating glass of Coke in my hand, while she swirls the glass of wine and brings it to her nose.
“Do you ever stop thinking?” I ask.
“About what?”
“About things. About thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
I wonder if she likes herself when she doesn’t sparkle, when she doesn’t tower over people, when her bandage dress doesn’t hug the curves of her waist like a clingy boyfriend on a third monthsary jealous rage.
“I mean, what do you do when you don’t have to be you?”
She sighs and bites her lower lip. Appearances matter in this tiny, little nowhere town of ours. And, these kinds of conversations are the opposite of keeping appearances. Tension takes hold of her face, but quickly fades away. Her jaw slacks. Her mouth breaks into a grin.
“Oh, what the hell,” she mutters. She walks across the garden and extends her hand to me. I’m not quite sure what is happening, what I have opened with such a question, where the hand would lead me to. But, I get over my reluctance and take her hand. I foll
ow her to the bedroom. Like the rest of the house, it’s big and bare. It’s like each piece of furniture had to go on an American Idol audition before they can make it to this inner sanctum. It’s almost the size of our house, which means it’s thrice as empty. Light from a dying bedside lamp doesn’t quite reach the corners of the room. I am held at the door by an imaginary police line that says CAUTION in big, black, don’t-mess-with-this letters. This is a crime scene. A crime in the making.
“Okay. You have to promise you won’t tell. Not a word of this outside.” She lays a firm grip on my arm.
“I promise?”
“Scout’s honor?”
“I have no honor, scout or otherwise. But, yeah, okay.”
Mrs. Alves nods at me and asks me to come inside. What have I gotten myself into now? What if this thing she does when she doesn’t have to be herself is like that movie I saw on the internet? She tells me to sit on the bed while she gets things started. She tells me to relax, which always kind of means there is nothing to be calm about. She kneels down to open a small cabinet. I catch a glimpse of a brown Louis Vuitton packed to the bulging point. Or, is that an Hermes? Birkin? I am hopeless with designer luggage. I close my eyes and see images of whips and cuffs and leather.
“Stop that,” I murmur.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I am so deep into my leather-laden thoughts that I miss the black game controller hurtling my way. It hits me right in the forehead. I have never found such relief from a head knot before.
“Oh, thank God, a PS4.”
“Why? What did you think was under there?” Mrs. Alves narrows her eyes as she walks to the bed. “Now, scoot.”
She takes one side. I take the other. Like in the garden, we keep to our own little ends, separated by upholstery. I am so close to the edge my left butt is floating in air. She lets me choose the game. A button-mashing bout of Tekken sounds just about right to diffuse this tension. “So, are you going somewhere?”
Don't Tell My Mother Page 3
