Fresh Off the Boat

by Melissa de la Cruz

  3. Nachos Grande

  Tortilla chips, chili, cheese, refried beans, and jalapeño peppers. Delicious!

  Served with sour cream and guacamole.

  $2.95

  Soup of the Day

  Clam Chowder small, $.90, large, $1.75 Served with crackers. Delicious!

  HAVANADA!

  “Havanada?” asked Hank, a portly, bespectacled store employee who was our first customer of the day, as he squinted at our blackboard.

  I shrugged. “Havanada” was a joke of my dad’s. He had written it on the board last week. I didn’t get it either at first.

  “Havanada?” I’d asked. “Like Canada?”

  “No, no, no.” Dad shook his head. “Haffa-nigh-day! From Everybody Loves Raymond? Raymond goes to this Chinese restaurant and that’s what the Chinese people say to him,” he explained. My father was an avid fan of sitcoms and Saturday Night Live. He was also addicted to Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, and The National Enquirer.

  “It’s nothing,” I told Hank. I vowed to erase it as soon as Mom turned her back.

  Hank peered at the chalkboard for a long moment, then gave me his daily breakfast order: a can of Coke, since he usually brown-bagged the rest from home.

  “What are you reading?” he asked, spying a dog-eared book by the cash register while I fetched him a soda from the fridge.

  “Ayn Rand.”

  “Huh. Never heard of her.”

  What a surprise. I forced myself to grin. “I guess it’s no Grisham.”

  “That’s for sure,” he said, saluting me with the Coke can.

  “Hello, Hank!” my mother said, walking out of the kitchen to the lunch counter. “How are you doing today?” She smiled and bowed.

  “Very, very well, Marge! And you?” he asked. My mother’s name is Marphindiosa, but everyone in Manila called her Didi. Here, they called her Marge. It was strange to think of my mom as a Marge. It was a name that went hand in hand with a tall blonde with a hairnet who chewed gum and wore plastic earrings. Which was completely unlike my mother, who was dark haired, petite, wore platinum jewelry, and was brought up to believe it wasn’t proper for ladies to be overfamiliar with Juicy Fruit.

  “Not too bad,” Mom allowed.

  “How’s business?”

  “Up and down. Win some, lose some. You know how it is.”

  They exchanged a few more pleasantries, my mother trying out her newly learned American idioms (she and Dad were constantly “pushing the envelope” and “thinking outside of the box”). She was smiling and nodding the whole time, as gracious as she had been when my parents owned Café Arambullo, our five-star restaurant in the middle of Makati, where she played hostess to politicians and movie stars.

  The restaurant was Mom’s little side project, since she had retired from her banking job when Dad founded Arambullo Investments with his best friend, Ponce Sorriano, and she was finally able to indulge in her passion for entertaining. When I was in Catholic school in Manila, our chauffeur picked me up from the convent gates at midday and drove me and a few chosen friends to the restaurant to have lunch with my mother. It was her idea to provide “lunch theater” to the business executives that frequented the place in the afternoon. I spent my lunch hours polishing off plates of steak au poivre while watching innumerable performances of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. (I still know all the lyrics.)

  We watched Hank shuffle to the back of the cafeteria next to the microwave. I scowled into The Fountainhead. There was something so depressing about Hank—his scraggly gray hair, his deep crow’s-feet, the way his horn-rimmed glasses were taped at the edges, the way his shirts strained to cover a belly that flopped over his belt like a stack of pancakes. He was almost fifty, but he worked in the stockroom with teenagers.

  “You should be nicer to our customers,” Mom chided. “Always this big frown. Hank is nice! At least he buys Coke from us!”

  “Seventy-five cents. Big deal.”

  “It adds up! Look at those boys from the stockroom. They never buy from us. Never. Palagi nalang sa machine. Same prices! But instead of giving us the money—no, give the machine the money!” she said, wiping down the cutting boards furiously, which she did whenever she got upset.

  I steeled myself for yet another lecture about my lack of proper customer care, but was thankfully spared for now since she had to chop bananas and melons for the fruit salad. A few hours later, a gaggle of bouffant-haired salesclerks from Housewares descended, with their lunch orders for tuna salad half sandwiches, fruit salads, and Diet Cokes, and for the next half hour my mother and I worked furiously. Mom slapped mustard and mayo on wheat, white, or rye bread (unless you wanted a roll, which was 50 cents extra), layering slices of roast beef, turkey, ham, and pastrami accordingly. She scooped out potato or macaroni salads for the side dishes, while I handed out sodas, worked the cash register, counted change, or added sums to several running tabs (a few of our ladies were of the tuna-salad-today-pay-you-tomorrow variety).

  Mom lined up the orders with their receipts attached and it was my job to call out names once the order was ready.

  “Bertha!”

  “Mildred!”

  “Twila!”

  “Your order’s ready!”

  Only Mr. Bullfinch, the store manager, had the privilege of having his order personally delivered to his table (usually by me). It was one of Mom’s signature ideas, a special touch—to curry favor with and allegiance from the powerful, as she had once done with the most famous patron of Café Arambullo, none other than the president of the Philippines herself. Mr. Bullfinch might not have been the supreme leader of a small, third-world country, but to us, he was just as important. He had given my parents the license to operate the cafeteria.

  After the old biddies came the big-haired teenage girls from Cosmetics and Lingerie. Sears required its employees on the sales floor to dress “professionally,” which meant no denim, T-shirts, or sneakers. Most of the girls wore garish floral dresses and black tights with patent-leather heels, piled on too much makeup, and looked ten, even fifteen years older than they really were, when in reality they were only one or two years older than me. They liked to order nachos.

  My parents paid me ten dollars a week to work at the cafeteria. I once pointed out to my dad that my salary amounted to a subminimum wage, which made me an illegal child laborer. Dad argued that it was a “family wage.” It wasn’t so bad, though, because when the cafeteria was empty—usually around eleven o’clock in the morning, right after breakfast rush and before lunch hour, I could do as I pleased. I usually spent it window-shopping at the mall, lingering over the sequin-studded tank tops at Contempo, trying on boot-cut pants at Wet Seal, wishing I could afford the leather jackets at the Limited.

  When the last customer drifted off to a table carrying her tray, Mom wiped down the counter and surveyed the room with satisfaction. The cafeteria was busy, humming with the sounds of mastication and gossip. I went back to my book. Mom retreated to the kitchen to put another pot of adobo on the stove for the two o’clock round, when the burly Automotive mechanics took their break. They were always our best customers as they had heartiest appetites.

  A slim boy in a red baseball cap and a black Incubus T-shirt and faded jeans entered the swinging doors. Another stock boy headed for the Coke machine, I thought, frowning. But when I looked up to turn the page, he was standing right in front of me.

  “Hi, uh, can I get a Pepsi?” he asked.

  I nodded, and he smiled, revealing two perfect rows of shining silver braces.

  FROM: queen_vee@aol.com

  TO: amparo.dellarosa@info.ph.com

  SENT: Saturday, October 17, 3:30 PM

  SUBJECT: quick question

  Hi, P—

  Whitney and I are at the mall, doing major damage on our moms’ credit cards. (We found a free Internet station at the Burger King!) Just wanted to write a quick note and tell you what I think you should do about Rufi…First of all, make sure he calls
you ONLY when your parents aren’t home. Second, go to the party, but make sure your yaya doesn’t tell on you and make sumbung. Maybe you can bribe her with a copy of Kislap. Or you can get your cousin, the movie star, to sign an autograph.

  xo,

  V

  5

  Retail Therapy Salvation

  MOM AND I locked up at five o’clock on the dot. By four forty-five I had placed all the plastic trays with the M&M’s, Snickers, Kit Kats, and Twixes away in the pantry. If a customer came in and asked for a candy bar, I would have to unlock the door; pull out the stacked, six-foot-tall cart with the perforated shelves; remove every box until I got to the right one; reach inside; and hand him the one he wanted. In other words, they were out of luck. Mom chided me on my impatience but didn’t make a federal case out of it. She was as exhausted as I was.

  Closing up shop meant all the Tupperware for the sandwich fixings, as well as the cutting boards, metal soup pots, and cookie pans had to be washed, dried, and put away. Mom put on extrastrength yellow rubber gloves to wash everything in scalding hot water in the industrial sinks in the back. I placed the cold cuts, vegetables, and fruits in the fridge, wiped down the counters, turned off the coffee machine, and erased the blackboard, deciding to leave “Havanada” on to please Dad.

  We used an oversized grocery cart that Mom had stolen from the Costco parking lot and loaded it up with stuff we had to take home: two gallon bottles of mayonnaise and relish, boxes of beef bouillon base, and quart cans of yellow nacho cheese that couldn’t fit in the fridge, as well as the twenty pounds of ground pork for homemade longanisa sausages. Mom put the day’s tally ($175) into the red cookie tin (red for luck, according to the Chinese!) that we used to transport the money to the California Savings Bank the next business day.

  Our cafeteria was in the back of the building, past the security room, with its banks of monitors and a holding cell (where I once saw a woman being interrogated—apparently she had been caught stuffing her bag with boxes of panty hose), past the employee bathroom (much cleaner than the public one) and the rows of open stock arranged on steel shelves. “Look how much they trust us,” Mom said, marveling at the array of toasters, towel racks, and power tools we could have swiped at any moment.

  I wheeled the cart out to the loading dock, where the boys from the stockroom helped shoppers put their stainless steel refrigerators and fifty-inch TVs and Kenmore dryers in the back of Ford minivans and Chevy Suburbans. The boy who’d bought a Pepsi from us earlier was rolling a washing machine on a trolley behind a family of four. He wore a tan uniform shirt over his T-shirt.

  “Hi, Paul,” Mom said.

  I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. Mom knew everybody’s name at Sears. She made a point of it.

  “Have you met my daughter Vicenza?”

  “No, I mean, yeah. Hi.” He flashed his braces at me.

  I forced a smile, wishing I didn’t blush like I did. The stock boys at Sears were nothing like the Montclair Academy preppies. Most of them had rat tails or mullets, feathered in the front and long in the back. They bought their clothes from Hot Topic instead of J. Crew and Polo. Some wore gold chains and earrings. Paul didn’t look anything like the other stock boys—he didn’t have any visible tattoos or body jewelry and didn’t wear jeans that fell down his hips and ballooned around his legs. He had blondish-brown hair and green eyes, and he looked neat in his red baseball cap. But he didn’t look anything like Tobey Maguire.

  Mom said good night and the two of us walked to the parking lot. I pushed the cart out of the double doors, which Paul held open for us.

  “Thanks,” I said, looking down at my shoes.

  “No problem.” He whistled as he walked away, one hand on the trolley, the other in his pocket.

  The night was warm for October, or at least, that’s what I had been told. But it didn’t really make a difference, I was always cold. When we’d left Manila it was ninety-eight degrees—a normal day, humid and searing. When we landed in San Francisco, I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. I loved the zigzaggy hills and the sight of the Bay sparkling in the sunlight. But then the cold seeped through our clothes, into our bones; I felt as if I had never been warm.

  I’d always wondered what America would be like, and now I knew: freezing.

  A month before we moved, Mom and Dad had sat Brittany and me down for a “family conference.” Dad was uncharacteristically quiet, and Mom was grave. They were both so serious I thought someone had died. “We’re moving to America,” Mom had said. “Dad and I have decided. Business has been bad and this is our only option. We have no more prospects here.” That’s all they said—the only explanation they ever gave for their decision to leave the country. But I always wondered if there was anything else—something that they weren’t telling me. A month before, my parents had been planning a vacation to Disneyland Japan, and all of a sudden we were packing our bags and clearing out?

  In any event, I was shocked and excited. Leaving the Philippines! But what about high school? And all my friends? Peaches, Bing, and Con-con? What about Lola and Lolo and Tita Connie and Tito Dongdong? And all our cousins? Move? To America? Were we moving to Los Angeles? Or New York? Would we bump into Leonardo DiCaprio at the supermarket?

  The rest of the month was a blur. I spent every weekend at the megamall with Peaches, and we promised each other that we would e-mail every day. Dad left for San Francisco first, so he could rent a house and start his business. He never even had a proper good-bye party. He left the country as casually as if he were leaving for a weekend at the beach. It was up to Mom to sell the house, our cars, and secure the maids’ new employment with friends and families. Our chauffeur cried. He’d been with us for fifteen years—before I was even born. My grandmother stuffed twenty-five dollars into my wallet at the airport. It was more money than I ever had in my life, because according to the exchange rate, at fifty pesos to a dollar, Lola had actually given me more than twelve hundred pesos!

  To prepare for our move, I had packed my collection of three hundred books into five oversized cardboard boxes. Mom and Dad promised to have them shipped to our new home. They still haven’t done so. My backpack only held ten paperbacks—a couple of Harry Potter books, an Anne of Green Gables, and my torn copy of Little Women. I still mourn my lost hardbound copies of the entire Classic Treasury series (Jungle Book, David Copperfield, Black Beauty). I can’t afford to buy new ones. The boxes are probably sitting in my grandmother’s basement somewhere, attracting dust and mold.

  We didn’t own any clothes suitable for cold weather, so Mom had asked her seamstress to sew matching double-breasted velvet trench coats for Brittany and me. They were stunning—a deep violet which sparkled cranberry in the light, with square pockets and yoke stitching. I wore mine the first week of school, but Whitney said I looked Amish. I never wore it again.

  The plane ride was endless. On the little personal video screens they have in coach for trans-Pacific flights, I watched Good Will Hunting so many times that I memorized every line. (Matt Damon: “She doesn’t need me. Maybe she’s perfect right now.” Robin Williams: “Maybe you’re perfect right now.”) I dreamed I was Minnie Driver—curly-haired and kooky but so beautiful I could wear goofy oversized sunglasses and Matt Damon would still fall in love with me.

  When we arrived at the immigration counter, there were two lines: one for U.S. citizens and another for all the rest. The Americans were zipped through with barely a nod, but our line snaked down the room, past baggage claim, into the next terminal.

  Mom was nervous since we were entering the country on tourist visas but were really planning to immigrate. We’d heard rumors of instant deportations, friends of friends who had been sent back to Manila the minute they set foot in San Francisco because they had overpacked, because they had answered incorrectly, because the INS officer just didn’t like the way they looked. A relative who had moved to California two decades ago warned us not to pack bagoong, a salty shrimp paste that smel
led like feet that Filipinos like to eat with fruit. My parents took the warnings seriously, bemoaning the fact that they would never again have bagoong for their mangos. It was only a few months later that Mom burst out laughing, out of the blue. “Who in their right mind would travel with condiments?”

  But we weren’t laughing when we arrived. My mother wore her tan Burberry raincoat and her Christian Dior sunglasses. She was wearing her most expensive dress, her most impressive shoes. She thought it best to disguise the fact that we were leaving our country forever, flying the coop, never going back. Who in their right mind would immigrate in designer heels? We were playing the part of rich tourists.

  “Reason for visit?” the immigration officer asked, reviewing our passports (stamped, with our travels to Venice, to Singapore, to Thailand, to Luxembourg.)

  “My sister is getting married,” Mom lied, smiling.

  “Congratulations,” he said grimly. “Desired length of stay?”

  “Six months. We’re helping her get settled.” My mother’s hands shook as she held on to her Louis Vuitton handbag.

  “Taking the kids away from school?” the official asked, eyeing Brittany.

  “She’s only four. Not in school yet.”

  “And what about your other daughter?” He motioned to me.

  “Oh!” Mom said, flustered. “She’s—uh—she’s done.”

  He gave me a quick once-over then stamped our passports.

  Later, my mother admitted she almost peed in her shoes. She had meant that I had just graduated from elementary school, but luckily the official had mistaken her words, thinking she had meant high school, or even college. I was tall for my age, and in my velvet trench coat, I imagined I looked sophisticated and worldly. But perhaps the Homeland Security officer simply hadn’t bothered to check my birth date.

  I helped my mother wheel away our nine oversized suitcases, laden with all the material possessions we owned in the world. Mom had brought her Ming vases, cleverly wrapped inside Dad’s trousers and filled with his socks. My sister had packed her three-story Barbie town house. There was a VCR in there somewhere, too.