THE SNOW HAS BEEN BUILDING UP, GRADUALLY, FROM A SOFT AND pleasant fall for the coming holidays, into a growing drift, into what the man on the radio says will be a blizzard in no time.
I’m still far from the city and miles away from the next town. There’s a rest stop a couple hundred yards ahead. I take the turnoff and park the truck under a tree.
The rest stop offers everything I could possibly need. There’s a small gas station, a bank of restrooms, a cafe and a grocery store. During easier weather it would be run over with Range Rovers or compact German SUVs, top-heavy with luggage and skiing equipment. Today there are only two or three other cars in the parking lot, each of them growing a mantle of snow.
I let the engine and the heater run while I double-lace my shoes and put on my parka over my sweater. Under all this I am already wearing thermal underwear and a shirt. I put on a woolen cap and dare a look at the rearview mirror. My eyes are scrunched up into a frown. Through all my years of driving around in America I never got used to all this cold.
I sit in the truck for a moment and contemplate the thirty yards between the car and the door. I turn off the engine, stuff the keys into my jacket pocket and flip my collar up. The heat fades quickly and the windows fog up. My breath comes out in little clouds. I open the car door, plant a foot outside, and then another, and then lift my body out and close the door behind me, all in one passably fluid motion. I stuff my hand in my pocket and squeeze the autolock button as I hustle to the door and into the grocery. All this happens in a kind of slow motion, and all sound is drowned in the growing howl of the snow and wind. My knee has been slightly banged by the closing door and there is a dull ache in my shoulder, caused, I guess, by all my twisting around to pull my parka on.
The place has been made to resemble a ranch or a log cabin. It’s warm and made to look friendly, with handmade signs announcing daily specials in pleasant block handwriting. I slip off my gloves and my parka and pick up a shopping basket.
As I turn into an aisle, my basket briefly brushes with another, then firmly locks mesh. I mutter an apology: “Pardon me.” I find myself face to face with Ditas, her hair short and curly, tinted a light brown. She’s in a checkered brown coat, over a blouse with the collar up. I remember my scowling face in the mirror and take my cap off. We’d look good in a picture, taken right now, with matching colors and warm, spontaneous smiles.
“Soy,” she stammers. “Soy! When was the last time!”
She knows it’s been long too, but forgets how long it’s really been. The last time was a fund-raiser at the Plaza Hotel back home. That was a few years after college. She was with the party of the guest of honor. I was with the press contingent. At the party I spoke to her for the first time since school, under the pretext of doing research for a feature story I was writing.
I was brimming with confidence then, charged with excitement about going to America. A cousin of mine had arranged for a position for me at a dental supply factory in Jersey. The position was officially “jobber.” I soon found out it meant seventeen years’ worth of long drives, all across America, from coast to coast, through the heartland, and sometimes even upward into Canada.
So I tell her how long it’s been, without all the sordid details, dressed in a rough estimate: “Twenty, twenty-five years—at least!”
“Well, you look great, Soy,” she says, her tone perhaps a little forced.
“Right.” I almost raise a hand to smooth my hair.
“Oh, you look okay. Getting old in all the right places, I guess. Not like me, huh? All fat and ugly.”
I give her my protestations. As we line up at the check-out counter I look at her basket: saltines, apple juice, green grapes, marmalade and a small wedge of cheese. I slide my stuff over before the total is punched. After a brief argument she agrees to let me pay for her basket, plus mine, which is just two bottles of wine, frozen cheesecake and some toiletries.
I cannot help but notice, though, how she’s grown a bit smaller. I have heard that age does that, among many things. But factoring my shrinkage, I’m still a head taller than her. I am now at fifty-something and peg her age at about the same. However, I’m thinking it could be my imagination. Over here, we’re smaller than most people. I’m used to doing business with big Americans, with their big bodies and big voices.
At the café we order two big cappuccinos and a slice of chocolate pie.
“So what are you doing now?” she asks.
“Oh, this and that. Rediscovering things. I’ve decided to go back to writing. Do you remember that I used to write?”
My question comes and goes unanswered, but she smiles at me, and I think it’s a smile of vague familiarity. Years ago, before America, I was winning contests and publishing in local magazines.
“And how is America treating you?”
“Okay, I guess. I’m well-fed, as you can see.” I afford an expansive gesture. “I’m worth one Social Security number and a Democratic vote.”
She smiles and gives me the once-over for the second time that day. For the umpteenth time all in all, I guess. In high school and college we were batchmates, but always in different classes and certainly different gangs. She played badminton at the Polo Club on weekends and flew to Hong Kong every six months to go shopping. I was one of those guys who had neither the money nor the nerve to court her. I was smug, though. I pretended that my choice of wardrobe—T-shirts, jeans and sneakers—was a matter of simplicity. Her reaction was quite as simple, and full of the smugness of the real kind: a once-over, a twice-over, and then she probably never gave me another thought.
“How’s your wife?” she asks, as if she has caught me remembering. “I mean, I assume you’re married, right?”
“Well, I was married,” I say, showing off my ring finger emphatically, where I imagine a permanently untanned stripe. “To my ex-wife.”
Most every separated man I know says “ex-wife” with a kind of relish, like it’s a place they’ve been to, like Miami or New York and they’ll tell you about it if you like, or even if you didn’t like. My wife and I were married, for all of four short years, without children, and with me spending most of my time on the road. To be honest, I can hardly remember anything, good or bad. Maybe talking about it on a Sunday morning, to a person I knew even before my ex-wife, makes me a little more thoughtful than usual.
Maybe, also, it’s Ditas’ accent: old and comfortable music to my ears, a Filipina kind of English, alternately hard and soft, hitting the words right in some places and not quite right in others. It moves me just to see her mouth moving and saying those words, speaking this way, to me of all people.
My turn comes to ask.
“How’s your husband doing? Alfonso, right?”
“Ponso’s doing okay. His business is holding up—he still owns that chain of pawnshops back in Cebu, plus lots of other little things. Remember Cebu, Soy? When was the last time you were there?”
“Haven’t been there in ages. Not since I was there last with you. Not since I was there when you were there, I mean. At the Plaza Hotel near the top of that hill. It was a charity dinner, remember?”
She was in a polka-dot dress, and stunned the crowd when she turned and showed her bare back. She arrived with the son of an important Cebu businessman.
I was writing a feature on “provincial beauties.” I interviewed her on the hotel balcony, right outside the ballroom. She ordered three or four cocktails for the interview and smoked Virginia Slims while we spoke.
“Those were wild times, Soy. I still remember them, and laugh about them sometimes.”
That businessman was Alfonso. She married him some years later, in a ceremony that warranted a page’s worth of photos in the Inquirer’s society section. Some time later I heard rumors that their marriage was over, that it had only been for show that they were still together at weddings and cocktail parties.
In the window behind her I can see that storm has let up a little bit during our conversation. The café is deserted, save for the waitress and the cashier and a young couple cooing to each other at the far end. Through the windows the landscape is so quiet and empty it looks frozen. Acres of white snow stretch into the distance.
“It’s so peaceful here, Soy.”
“It’s everything here. I always take it for granted, you know, until I look at the Filipino papers or hear about another kidnapping or another government scam. They say the peso’s still going down, and there’s no end to violence in the South.”
“Haay, you’re right, Soy.” She puts her cup on the saucer, brings a pale hand to her chin.
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Well, I am scared as scared can be. And everything just seems to work here. My son seems happier, more at ease. We went malling the other day and everything seemed to fall into place. I saw things in another light.”
“You bet!” I say.
Things fell into place for me, too. There were some rough spots, some tough times. I had a good marriage that made a wrong turn, but the divorce delivered sure and swift relief. I turned my life around, quit my job and even started writing again: public relations articles for an environmental advocacy group. You’d need to hold down at least a dozen jobs like that back home to hold you up. And that would be barely.
I pay good rent on a nice enough apartment with a small view, with enough left over for movies and malls and the occasional evening at the card table. I even have enough money to buy a Ford 4x4, second-hand, off a couple who were moving to New York. It’s a little worn around the edges, but it’s a lot better than the old Honda. And it cuts a sharp figure with the women. They’re also impressed, I think, by the fact that I can drive a stick, a talent earned hard as a college kid, over days of struggling with an uncle’s old owner-type jeep. I’d get my chance at the wheel after school, in exchange for doing chores. I’d ground the transmission down until that old jeep was practically unusable, but I had learned shift with or without the clutch pedal.
But I never learned to get up the nerve to talk to Ditas, who I saw everyday in school. I dreamed about her, about spending every spare minute of our time together, in the dorm and in the library, in the gym, even spending the night in the middle of the sunken field that lay at the center of our University, looking up at the stars. You see, in those days I wrote nothing but poetry, and even published some.
“So what do you do? How long have you been here?”
“Me? Oh, I just flew in. Only last week.”
“A vacation, then.”
“Well, you know how it is. One thing or another. The main reason is that my only son, Kaloy, has a medical condition and I’m having him checked here. That’s why we’re here, I guess, among other things.”
“Medical condition.” Politeness behooves me to repeat her concern. No, I don’t know how it is, exactly: that condition, or any one of those other reasons she has for being here.
“Yes, unfortunately,” she says. “Our doctors back home referred us to a specialist clinic around here. And you know what? When we went to the clinic I found out the specialist here’s Pinoy too. All the way here in the middle of nowhere!”
“Yep, we make the best doctors. Just like men make the best chefs. And yes, we’re everywhere. Look at me.”
She chuckles at the lame remark, although I can see that part of her mind is still on her son. I ask her about how old the son is and she says he is twenty-two: an early age to have any sort of medical condition but then, with what the world is coming to now, it is hardly any surprise. Things come up from behind you and then you just learn to take things as they come.
“Well, it’s—it’s cancer,” she reveals finally, and I can’t say anything to that. I haven’t had cancer in the family, not that I’ve heard anything about my family recently. At home there is only me. I don’t know what kind of pain is involved, or how much it costs.
“Cancer,” I solemnly repeat. I can see the storm’s white turbulence picking up in the window behind her. I try to imagine what it might do to the truck, remembering the other cars I saw in the parking lot, smothered in snow beyond recognition. “That’s too bad,” I offer.
Under her coat, Ditas is dressed in an expensive-looking white shirt and jeans, and her short hair is accentuated by those light brown highlights every woman likes to wear these days. On that night she wore her hair in a French braid, the fashion of the time.
I put a ten-dollar bill on the table and get up to pull her chair out. I help her into her coat and she begins to argue, but I’m quick and decisive. I ask her if she needs a ride and offer to drive her around the countryside because she seems to need the fresh air. The houses in this area are beautiful and some are about a hundred years old.
“Oh, Soy,” she says, and it can go both ways. But this time I don’t take no for an answer. I grab her things with a quick smile before she can reach for them, and we walk outside and head for my pickup. I put my hand in my pocket and feel for my keys.
The storm has let up a little. I can hardly feel it now, but I know it’s out there, gathering strength before it starts ripping everything up. Snow is quiet and friendly, but when it gets violent it causes water pipes to blow and freezes the homeless dead in their beds. It makes the roads slippery. I’ve seen a couple of smashups myself. In the last one there were even a couple of bodies. The cops pulled them out of their car and laid them out in the snow, side by side.
I had borrowed my uncle’s jeep for that evening—I was kind of hoping for something right to happen. At the time the idea of America accepting me had given me such strength, such hope. From the balcony of the Plaza Hotel there was a view of the sea on one end, and on the other, low mountains of brown and green. That was my last good view of home. •