The rhythmic clacks of tiles being shuffled for mahjong, now in its sixth hour of play, rumbled on along with the adults’ continuous chatter. My titos’ stories got more colourful and the volume louder with the passing time and the growing pile of empty beer bottles until, finally, when they got too loud and raunchy, my mom said, “Hoy, bastos,” and shushed them quiet, a command met with raucous laughter.
We can hear them from the basement, where we are attempting back bends and splits inspired by Nadia Comaneci’s perfect ten. The boys opted for a Starsky and Hutch shoot out, hiding behind the washer and dryer, suitcases, empty boxes, and paint cans in our otherwise stark, cemented indoor playground. We were told to stay inside and avoid other kids because Mom said the neighbourhood kids are “salbahe” and have no manners. “Can you believe it, I heard a boy talking back to his parents,” she said.
Our house is a gathering place for Filipinos each Sunday. My cousins, the ones born in Canada who cannot speak Tagalog, were part of the regulars plus the Inocente family who Dad met when he first arrived alone in Calgary in 1971 to work for an oil and gas company. We live closest to St. Mary’s, so everyone just ends up here. There is always somebody new these days — from Winnipeg, from Toronto, from the Philippines — and when they find the Catholic Church, they find us. I’m not even sure who my real relatives are because everyone at the house is a Tito or a Tita whether they are my real Uncles and Aunties or not.
The adults call each other Doctor and Attorney when they get together for these events even though we all know that Dr. Santos mops the floor at Foothills Hospital and Attorney Villalobos is a security guard downtown. Dr. Santos saved my brother’s life, Mom said. My brother was holding his side in pain in his room one day and Doc took one look at him all bloated and feverish and drove him to Emerg. The next Sunday, instead of the usual batch of garlicky pork adobo, we made Doc’s favourite: a fish relleno that took forever to prepare. I had to remove the fine fish bones from the flesh so my mother could mix the sliver-free concoction with onions, potatoes, peas, and raisins, then stuff it back in the skin and sew it up to the fish shape it once was.
At the Stampede that summer, we lined up for free pancakes even though Dad objected. “We are not beggars,” he scolded. I thought everyone looked strange wearing gingham shirts, denim vests, and cowboy hats and greeting each other with a “Yahoo!” My dad usually wears suits to work, but during the Stampede when the “greatest outdoor show on Earth” is on for ten days, he wears blue jeans and cowboy shirts just like every single person in the city. I didn’t want to be a cowboy. I wanted to wear my moccasins instead of boots. Also, I had a vest with fringes so I wanted to dress more like the girl in Sister Dolores’s book of Western pioneers — “Indian child,” it said on the photo. I even have the same long black hair that I wore in two braids.
I like this girl Pauline in my class who also has long black hair that she sometimes wears in braids. She doesn’t seem interested in school at all but she is the best in art class. I saw her drawing of an eagle in flight that she drew from her imagination, not copied from a book even, and I wish I could draw like that. Pauline is the only other girl in my grade who is different, an outsider like me, and I am always disappointed when she doesn’t come to class, which is most of the time. “Find another reading partner,” Sister Dolores would snap on her way to the office to call Pauline’s parents. When she is in class, she’s usually very quiet, looking down with her curtain of bangs covering her eyes, while she doodles in her notebook. Or else she’s looking out the window absentmindedly, touching her long braid draped over her left collarbone, hand over hand as if slowly climbing an infinite rope. I once asked Pauline what shampoo she uses to get her hair so shiny. “My mom rubs special berries on my hair,” she said. My mom only buys the $1.44 sale shampoos from Woolco even though my sister and I keep asking her to buy the fruity herbal essence kind. I asked Pauline what kind of berries her mom uses and where I could find them but she was quiet and gazing outside again. Later, on the playground, she told me she will ask her mom if I can come pick berries next spring and that made me happy. I have not been invited to any of my classmates’ houses before.
It snowed in October and Mom went into a panic because I swear to God her worst fear is us freezing outside in the winter. We discovered that my hand-me-down coat was too small, so the following Saturday, we went downtown to The Bay to buy a new one. Dad didn’t want to drive us because of all the construction. “Too many one-ways now and there is no place to park. It’s faster for you to take the Number Seven bus,” he said. We were about to enter the store from the doors on Eighth Avenue when I saw someone who I thought was Pauline. I ran to her but it was a different girl who had the same long shiny black hair almost to her waist. She was with an adult, maybe her dad or grandfather, and they were leaning on the windows of a store that had a display of cowboy boots and leather saddles. The grandpa smiled at me in the same friendly way my titos did with their flushed red cheeks and sleepy eyes when all our good TV shows were finished and we’d say good night to them. I opened my mouth to say hi but Mom called me to hurry up. As I was holding the heavy glass department store doors open, another woman rudely shoved past us like she didn’t even see us, her tense grip pulling her two kids closer as she warned them in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: “Stay away from those drunks on Eighth Avenue Mall.”
I like it when the other families come to the house a little earlier on weekends. When the adults are busy in the kitchen, the men smoking, laughing, and telling stories and the moms frying lumpia or stirring pancit noodles, they send us kids to set up their mahjong table in the living room. I double fold a flannel blanket and smooth it out as a tablecloth while my sister takes the mahjong suitcase and carefully scatters the tiles on top. None of us kids know the rules of the game. All we know is that the adults stack the tiles face down and build walls in front of them, two layers tall, then take turns drawing tiles that they then hide from each other’s sight. They also discard an unwanted tile to the centre before the next person can draw. I think the game is about matching patterns, flowers, bamboo sticks, dots, or Chinese characters, and yelling “pong,” “kong,” or “chow,” and pretending to have tiles that you don’t have so other players will discard the ones you really need to win the game.
We make up our own games. We stack the tiles into tall structures, building towers like the kind we see sprouting in the city centre, then knocking them down to hear that clacking sound as the tiles hit each other. Another game is to tumble and swirl the pile of tiles in the middle the way the adults do, then instead of building walls, we stand the tiles on their ends just a little bit apart to make a curvy snake pattern that weaves on the surface of the table. We’d play rock paper scissors to decide who would get to push the first tile, then, breathless with anticipation, we watch the lucky winner gently push the front one to start the magical scene of the wall of tiles falling one by one like dominoes.