LYNN SMELLED IT IN THE MIDMORNINGS, CREEPING UP FROM MAYBE two balconies down, coming through the laundry room window, into the dining room, across well-scrubbed tiles, where it picked a path among the colors on the carpeting, the scents of dinner, of last night’s whiskey and wine, up her calves, slipping into the easy grooves of her house dress, hanging in the still, bright air and drifting into her nose, from where she imagined it wound its way down into her stomach, through her blood, and into her womb, where her baby, three weeks old, smelled it and perhaps recognized it, too: the durian, king of fruits, large, thorny outside and yellow and thick like spoiled milk inside. “Tastes like heaven, smells like hell,” the foreigners quipped. She could eat a mountain of it when she was a child. Now she had had enough of the fruit and the old joke, but she could not stop the smell.
Her amos had entertained guests until late the night before, but as always, were up by seven and had a cab waiting for them at eight-thirty. Lynn had remained asleep through all this and didn’t rise till nine, to a table with last night’s dinner settings and a day’s worth of chores laid out for her. Any of her previous employers might have scolded her for being tardy, but she felt lucky enough to have a kababayan couple as her amos, who afforded her more than a small measure of kindness.
The durian was opened like clockwork—when the smell hit the air she knew it was ten-thirty. Even so, Lynn treasured hours like these when the apartment was all hers. She would turn up the TV in their room, taking care to remember the channel and volume settings. Sometimes she would power up their hi-fi system. They had warned her not to touch it, because the components were expensive and very delicate, especially the vacuum tube amplifiers that ran hot—so she turned them on in the exact sequence she had seen Kuya Noel do it. In idle afternoons she played her CDs and danced the “otso-otso” the way she had seen it in her friends’ videotapes.
There was this space, between the morning rush and the noontime chores, and there was the afternoon stretch after everything had been done and she was only waiting for one of them to arrive—usually Ate Lara, who called ahead to inform her whether they would be eating out that night or she would be preparing dinner herself. This was a good early warning device.
There was also the quiet hour after they retired to their bedroom and she had finished tidying up the kitchen. She punctuated that private time with a twist of the clothesdryer dial: the timer ticked and the red light came on, and she groped the top of the laundry shelf for her cigarettes and smoked two or three on the small balcony by her quarters, before curling up to sleep with a Tagalog romance novel.
Sometimes, from out on the balcony, she heard her amos making love, the sound of their happy sighs tripping quietly through the dry Singapore air. They had been trying for a baby, Ate Lara had confessed to her once. It was the only thing that was missing. They’d been here two years already, and were already quite adjusted to life in the new city. They had found good friends among the expatriate community, bankers and managers, Pinoys like themselves, who they shared weekends with. Sometimes they drove to East Coast Park, where the beach reminded them of the Mindoro surf and whose divespots almost recalled the deep off the Batangas coastline.
Lynn remembered her own seaside, where she went with her mother when she was very young. The busride took them outside their town and led them further outward, to the southern coast. Ma-a beach was a deserted sweep of rough beige sand. It hurt the feet when she walked barefoot across it but there was also a pleasure she couldn’t resist. Years later she remembered it when she made love for the first time, to Tiboy, a kind of pain that was gentle and firm, that moved when she moved and stopped when she stopped. She looked at her mother, and there she was, a stretch of beach, standing still and looking at her.
The day that she remembered at Ma-a beach was her birthday, and in the morning of that day she grimaced as her mother marked her forehead with a bright red cross of chicken blood. Blood attracted good fortune and warded off the bad stuff. Her mother also told her not to walk on her knees unless she was in church, because it made you see ghosts of old relatives. I knew she meant the ghost of her mother, the one they called Lola Glo, fat and fearsome-looking, with piercing eyes and stringy white hair––which was how she looked even when she was alive.
On Saturdays Lolo Angel would take her along in the twincab for a ride out of Mabini and into the city. Her mother would frown at him for spoiling her, but he never listened to her when it came to his granddaughter. The twincab bore his name, painted on the sides, below “Emergency Rescue” and above “Barangay Captain.” There was also “Official Use Only,’” stencille in red, right above the rear wheel. “Official use also,” Lolo would laughingly say to their mother. To Lynn, it was her first official transport out of the fields and dirt roads.
Tagum City was the first city in her life. It was hot, dark, and dusty. Her lolo took her to the arcades and the shopping centers and the markets, all cloudy with dust and cigarette smoke. The air was always full of the sound of jeepneys and their diesel scent. When Lynn returned her mother was always waiting with a good meal. Lynn and her grandfather knew it was her way of saying not everything came from the city, that their town was good for something, too. During the afternoon they were away she had had the house cleaned and their things tidied: the books and magazines were back on theis shelves and Lynn’s toys back in their baskets, returned carefully to their place above the aparador that dominated the small upstairs living room.
After a long bath and before retiring to bed, mother and daughter always brushed their long hair with a hundred slow strokes. They looked in the mirror and remarked with wide smiles how little difference there was between them—perhaps in Lynn’s eyes, slightly turned down at the corners, or there in her mother’s cheek, identically spare and smooth, save for a dimple, her mother teased, tracing its almost invisible edge with a finger. When Lynn turned to show it to the mirror the dimple disappeared and they remained, for the time being, identical twins.
For boys their town had few. It was only during her high school years that her interest was ignited by a dark-skinned transferee from the city, Tiboy––short for City Boy––who wore his nickname proudly. He was beautiful, even when Lynn knew the truth about him: he had been recalled back to the province, ruefully, by his parents, because he had begun to slack off in school and started going with the wrong crowd and was even, some whispered, suspected of being a drug addict. Back then nobody had ever met a real live addict before.
Tiboy wore real Nike shoes, not the fake ones the other boys bought from the market. He smoked Marlboro Lights, not the cheaper Miller or Memphis, and spoke just like the city boys that Lynn always saw in the Tagum City malls. But Tiboy was homegrown, just like her. His father tended a small ube plot for an absentee landlord and his mother sometimes made maruya and biko to augment their income. When Tiboy was not sitting at the corner store smoking and cursing and drinking Pale Pilsen—what they mostly drank in the city, instead of tuba or gin or fizzy Gold Eagle Beer—they knew he was helping out on the farm.
In the easy times between harvests, Tiboy smoldered for her love. As she sat on the wooden bench outside the sari-sari store he laid smoke rings in the air and threw smoky spears through them. Her silence was golden. It gripped him in a kind of fever while he waited for her to say something. She was cruel to Tiboy but that was the fashion of her age, to treat the ones you wanted like you couldn’t care less about them. Like many girls their age it was her style to be cruel to boys and conniving with the girls. Their weekly immersions in the city gave them the edge—they made sure to buy the newest hairbands and plastic bracelets. Once in a while Lolo Angel would buy her the cassette of their choice—always music she always heard on TV: theme songs from the evening soap operas, or the loud dance music from the afternoon variety shows.
Tiboy was insistent. He sent flowers through a farmhand or a neighbor. They were sniffed at, displayed for a day, sniffed at again, then thrown into the trash, card and all. But even then, Lynn knew she would one day like him.
THIS, TOO, WAS THE MODE OF HER NEW LOVE. HE WORKED AT THE shipping line daytime and squeezed in time for her over the weekends. He waited for her at streetcorners and cafes, sometimes for hours, while she shopped for shoes with her friends and gossipped in the parks.
Just like her city boy, he was dark and smelled sharply of sun—amoy araw—not like the others, amoy ewan, smelling not of natural things but of something else she couldn’t quite place a finger on. Spices? Sweat? She thought she could stand it when she had smelled it the first time at the airports, to her then an intriguing smell, exotic, then exciting, quickening as they filed into the tube for her first flight out of Manila. Then, she thought, to calm herself down, it was merely from one city to another, with crowds, roads and potholes.
Her first foreign airport was Chang-I. It quickly became her favorite place. The largest airport in the world, the brochure said. She filled her handcarry with free maps, guide books, magazines and leaflets. Even, she remembered, the pink advisory against tuberculosis and FMD, remembering also the thought balloon in her head, similarly pink: why, not me.
Then years later the tuberculosis became so real, as real as those cops she saw once, in Chang-I as well, on one of her rare trips home. The airport police were so armed to the teeth they looked like soldiers. After 9/11, who wouldn’t be paranoid? Now she learned never to say “why, not me, of course—it could never happen to me.” And so she was glad to see them, a gaggle of them trooping from somewhere undisclosed to somewhere mysterious, denying themselves the convenience of the walk-a-lators and the brisk comfort of the golf carts that sped officiously through the smelly crowd, waving the slow ones aside with their brisk horns and yellow lights. They were the first and last Singapore policemen she ever saw, marching with a padded cadence, an Asian cadence, she had thought then, brisk and light, accommodating shorter legs and, perhaps, quicker minds. This was Chang-I airport but there was a Chang-I prison, too, it had dawned on her then, as much of the OFW-oriented literature had sought to remind her.
Tuberculosis, the word, turned as bright pink as the advisory paper, taking one of her closest friends and textmates by complete surprise, The woman had been working there all her life, leaving her marriage and her children behind but earning enough money to buy them a house and a Tamaraw FX—a kind of Toyota she’d never even seen, but, as her family had assured her, would be the workhorse for three businesses and last almost a lifetime. When the TB struck the image of the Chang-I cops returned.
Before the woman flew home there was a week of frantic calls for help. She was quarantined by her employers and given advice by the ministry. They tried to console her with text after text, and even pooled some cash together for her new life back home. It amounted to nothing much, but what could they do? A week later she called from Manila to tell her about how dark it was, how polluted, how they picked her up at the airport on the FX, battered from use and stuffed to overflowing with relatives, and she felt like turning around and going back.
The day it all became real to Lynn was a Sunday. She had awakened early, dressed carefully, deciding on a color combination she had never tried, put on some perfume, all to cheer herself up. She picked up the customary note left by her Ate Lara on the fridge, instructing her on what to prepare for dinner, slipped out the door, exited the apartment building and walked down the low hill to the bus station. She took the no. 5 bus and got off at the footbridge on Scott’s Road, where there was a pharmacy at the other end.
In the subway restroom, she unloaded the plastic bag on the dresser. There was a pack of cigarettes and a pregnancy test kit. She lit a cigarette and read the label for contraindications. She unwrapped the white plastic stick and stood over the toilet bowl. She let go of her pee and poked the tip through the gentle stream. She smoked as she waited for the little window to show something.
A cleaning auntie was working in one of the toilet cubicles. She was old and small, and she thought of Aling Clara, who had left their town as a young woman. When she returned she had lost all her teeth and her body had bent so small that she was smaller than any of the twelve children she bore over all those years she was away. Unfair, she thought, remembering Lolo Angel at the same age—probably even older than this cleaning lady—still getting elected barangay captain and driving his twincab and drinking large amounts of gin. Men could grow old like that, sitting quietly and thinking about the lives they had lived while their wives and daughters kept them company, kept the house clean and laid the gin and the coffeepot on their table, with one glass and a cup and saucer.
There were times, for example, when she thought Lolo Angel only asked her to accompany her to the city because he needed someone to be with him, a minder, while he met with other government officials from other towns. It was this way too with some of her friends here. Their amos would invite them to a day of market-shopping or window-shopping—only because they needed someone to talk to during idle moments, or someone to eat with. It was a treat and it was a job, and you were lucky to have both.
While the leaflet that she carefully read clearly indicated through illustrations that she should expect—or not expect—an upright plus sign in the little white window, what developed was more like an X and not a plus, or at best it was a cross-eyed-plus. She held the plastic thing straight up, then straight across her vision. The X, crooked, unruly, gave her a strange comfort. That was probably why they called it the comfort room—the CR—as Filipinos called it, even when it was a lavatory such as in a plane or a washroom such as she once knew it in school. There was no single straight way to call it. From this angle it wasn’t an X either. It was nullified, negative like a cocked die. It was haphazard, disorderly, like the way she marked her questionnaires—X single, married, separated, widowed. Tourist X overseas contract worker. Six months one year X other. Then the feeling was gone, those stupid thoughts flushed away, and she was all of a sudden sure and she was out of there, walking along Orchard Road again, slipping like any old permanent resident past the Filipinas and the Filipinos, Ngee Ann City Takashimaya and the vivid green corner at Scott’s road. She knew she could walk blind and oblivious through all of Singapore and reach home without thinking a single thought, a U-Turn at the junction, up the hill, right at the apartment building, into the first elevator bay, out at the twentieth floor, left across the apartment where there lived an old Indian who owned a shopping mall. Everywhere here there were millionaires, if you counted up the dollars, added up the forced savings, took away the taxes and multiplied by 31 point something. Even that something was unimportant, taxes for the experience, spare change for the church at Zion Road, where, even as a newcomer, she knew they would be there, many of them who spoke Bisaya like her and who danced the “otsootso” and knew who Kristine Hermosa was, with her big bust and her big white smile.
But X also meant cross-eyed and twisted, and would her baby be so? She had read somewhere that scientists could weed out defects from the mother’s womb. Or had seen it from the Discovery Channel while she was dusting the master’s bedroom. They were at the doorstep of a new world where the unborn and just conceived could be scanned and screened and decisions could be made that could never have been made before. Hair color, eye color, height and body type were determined like a multiple choice quiz: black brown X blonde, X blue brown black.
Lynn wondered where the unwanted would be received. There was a limbo for unbaptized babies. What might the limbo of the unwanted ones be? She thought of the multiple-choice quiz, like an election sheet she once saw when she went with a friend who wanted to cast a vote at the embassy, and laughingly lamented, as they munched on Mos Burgers at Plaza Singapura, how she had to choose among ex-teen idols and basketball players. Lynn imagined a country filled with cast-off choices, sent there to make a home out of what they had. Well, she thought, smiling a little, they would have each other.
Every six months they had to submit to a comprehensive medical exam. Pregnancy meant deportation. That was on a form somewhere, or a thought balloon perhaps, delivered to her by one of those instant friends she made at bible study sessions or while shopping. She made many friends that way. It was the way she looked, maybe, somebody told her “maganda ang bukas ng mukha niya”—she had a face that opened beautifully, she tried to translate, into English first, then into Bisaya, though neither meant anything. The friend told her while they were being mischievous, “boy-watching” as they confessed to themselves, a guilty pleasure that counted among the archaic, like “joyriding,” as Lolo Angel called it, into Tagum City.
The Filipinos looked like gods here, with their wavy black hair and deep, beautiful eyes. There was also that way of moving that breathed experience, in the long, slow flights and shiprides that took them through Athens, Paris, Abu Dhabi, London, Dublin and Dubai. They had families back home that waited for them, counted on their every word and every cent, and she guessed that was what made them look darker and shine brighter.
Like Tiboy, too, her new man promised her many things, and she knew that he was like a god that way, too—all full of promises and hope, but too burdened with responsibilities in this world and the other. That other world was home, or Ormoc, where he was trying to rebuild his family life, ravaged by that storm many years ago. It sounded like it was an excuse to avoid the responsibility but who knows, Lynn said, and remembered her own town and the first time she went home, many years ago.
“Let’s just create a heaven on earth here,” he had said. And he was serious when he said it. They’d done it right before and it was the time for guilt and seriousness. Lynn laughed at that. Remembering it now, she had the idea that she’d been laughing with his sperm fresh inside her, that by that time it had fertilized her egg: that was the baby’s first laugh, at the baby’s first joke. She knew, of course, that nothing would happen, that everything was semipermanent here.
But Lynn said yes, and even when she was late, maintained the idea that it might be heaven, to begin again. When she was young she was hooked on that. It was her grandfather, really, who would bring her whenever there was a new movie, a new store or restaurant. She could not believe then that a city could be always changing, that something could never be satisfied with its old self.
HER AMOS BROUGHT HOME A NEW TV THAT NIGHT. THEY MADE IT out like a surprise to Lynn because it meant she would be getting the old one for her room. They knew she longed to see the game shows and variety shows her friends would always talk about. They spent long Sunday afternoons watching tapes or talking about the latest celebrity gossip. Kuya Noel hooked up the cable and stepped back for her to see. His smile was proud—was it a little sweet and nervous?—while she testily flipped through a couple of channels. For a fleeting, fleeting moment she thought she could do it with him, be tender and firm with him, enough for him to like her, and there would be another moment, a blind one, in her room or in the laundry area or, for God’s sake, as long as she was dreaming, in the master’s bedroom. It would need only a moment, or even a moment within a moment. She could not deny that she had thought about it once or twice before, even as a stupid little momentary thought, but now, she knew that when things get desperate one thinks of the most desperate things.
As she stood on the dark balcony and looked at Kuya Noel’s white underwear tumbling end over end in the window, he imagined life with him, and she could not deny that it would be a dream. For expats there were no restrictions at all. As she thought about their dinners out, their Sunday jaunts to the East Coast, her body was a tight, curled up shape under the bedsheets, trembling out of desperation, but in the presence of another being, like a ghost. Lolo’s ghost, perhaps? She recalled the times before when she wished it would appear. But here it was, not a ghost, but her baby—her foetus, she corrected herself, remembering the Discovery Channel—another thing, an undefined presence, inside her, but outside her, too.
If she had a choice, she would make this a beautiful child a man, dark-skinned, certainly, with deep blue eyes—why not?—and a soft voice and wide, sharp shoulders upon which she could lay her head, tired of her whole life. He would be but eighteen or nineteen and she, old as her mother was and looking like her mother, too. Fifty-five, sixty, almost old enough to be his grandmother. Even married women and mothers would fall for him. ‘Mariosep, even men would fall for him, because he would be gentle and refined and neutral.
She imagined him leaving him on the very last day of his youth, on the cusp of his birthday. High noon, the light full and hard on his features. “Aalis na ako ’Ma,” Juan Pablo Miguel, as he would be christened—and why not? she always wanted a mestizo—would say, similarly leaving her, many years from now, an impossible sight with his dark hair and sinew, the jaw that looked especially strong and powerful from a certain angle, his knifelike look as he took the first jeep that trundled up the dusty road to the city. He would be gone anyway, ‘no?—and it made no sense to think of him. But then, as she had always thought, as long as she was dreaming, there he was, a perfect child at the end of a long line, an impossible, imaginary character with an impossibly Spanish name.
She would leave him anyway, ‘no? The way it was on the day she mentally shrugged off Angela and became simply: Lynn. She wanted to be serious, driven, no-nonsense. She knew three Angelas and an Angelo but she never knew a Lynn. Lynn went up to her mother and told her, “Aalis na ako, ma,” went up the street to the main road with a trolleybag full of clothes and her diploma, her transcripts, her bio-data in a plastic envelope under her armpit.
That Sunday, at St. Bernadette’s, Lynn found herself on her knees, praying to her Lolo Angel. The first time she felt this desperate was years ago, in a motel in Tagum City. Tiboy, the first man in her life, lay slumped face down on the sheets, part of his dark body covering hers, her right arm free for a cigarette. She was sure she was pregnant and it would be the best time for Lola Glo to appear. It would be her punishment for being so careless, so restless. Not only had Lynn stolen Tiboy away from his farm duties, but she had given him her virginity and officially started her smoking habit.
But the baby never came. She wept with joy at the sight of her lucky blood. Weeks later, she would commit another sin, by leaving him without telling him—’’’ni ha, ‘ni ho,’’ as they used to say.
Through the years they were apart, Lynn had known—through friends at the bible study group, through the internet—that her town hardly prospered in the years that followed. Local and national elections produced new barangay captains and congressmen, but nothing, no real roads beyond the cracked and pitted path that existed, no real businesses apart from the sari-sari stores and the vulcanizing shops, nothing ever materialized. The barangay hall and the plaza beside it put on new coats of paint and wore them out before the next election, and Lolo Angel would be campaigning again, having a drink with his kumpares at every corner, or alone, while he was plotting his moves.
She thought about the times she saw Lolo Angel, huddled over his bottle and the AM radio. How she wanted to ask him why he drank so much of what he called his ‘’pampagana.’’ It was one of his jokes, to be sure, to be calling a bottle of gin as a way to help the appetite. If anything, she observed but did not tell him, it only helped his appetite for more gin.
And this too, this addiction to alcohol—school had taught her that it was no hobby or habit but a deadly chemical addiction—would she inherit it? Well, if addiction, the pure form of it, was inheritable, then she certainly had it. No sooner than her Marlboro Light was out than she lit another, and with one hand. There was smoothness and girlishness and when she did it that way Tiboy said it was as mesmerizing as watching the pistons of an engine pumping gasoline in delayed synchrony. It had turned into a sort of dance, with a beauty that detached itself from the ugly truth her teachers told her about cancer.
Her grandfather once apologized to her for his drinking. Sins like this were handed down from generation to generation. He didn’t know his father or his grandfather, he said, but for his part, he had committed many other bad things and he knew these things were passed on. As she looked at his dull, sad eyes and the white roots of his dyed hair, and she feared the future in store for her. You can’t escape it, she thought to herself, that is heredity.
There were pills she could take, exercises she could perform. The other day she had asked a friend about it, speculatively, in a “what-if” tone, who referred her to another friend who had done it. Lynn thought of heading for Lucky Plaza where the rest of her group hung out on Sunday afternoons. Pinays sold that stuff along with thong panties and phonecards. Some of them, she had heard, deposited them in the CRs at Lucky Plaza. One of the papers ran a picture. That was cruel, the decision delayed until five or six months—there was the form already and a little crumpled expression, like the baby was surly because it was too sleepy to wake up.
On a wide avenue clouded by the shade of acacia trees, choked end to end with shopping malls and hotels, she imagined how it would feel. For a moment she thought she could compare the pain of delivering to something she knew. Men wondered, too, she knew, as Tiboy had wondered once. It was a “women only” pain, she explained, like dysmenorrhea. We can’t imagine how circumcision feels, she had told him, reaching over for his manhood. Or what it’s for, she had added, tracing its odd manmade shape.
But she couldn’t imagine childbirth either, she thought, as she stood in the elevator. Gravity bore down as she went up and she grew conscious of her added weight: two cells that weighed like twenty pounds of flesh. She was born six point seven pounds, she remembered. As though birthweight was an important thing: people always feigned a pleasured shock whenever someone was eight-point-something.
And there it was again, lifted by one of those rare Singapore breezes, an invisible thing carried by another invisible thing. Here, she could smell almost nothing, just a faint trace hanging in the air hours after the fruit was split open, but what a trace. Back home, airports and hotels banned it at the height of its season, but they couldn’t stop you for bringing it in. After all, there would only be the smell, they couldn’t arrest you for it, but it was a fruit you couldn’t hide.
She had changed, she felt, perhaps irrevocably, into something she hardly recognized. To her her hands had become rusty, crumpled things, and her feet, bare and swollen rags. Perhaps her child couldn’t escape that, too. It would be born limp and tired, overloaded with things it couldn’t help but remember. And would it be good to bring something like that into the world? No, it would not be Singapore, but Tagum, or even the town of Mabini. She’d be home, more citified than Tiboy ever really was. Now it was a clump of cells, as one of her friends, before her procedure, explained to her—no, not even—for Lynn, this early on, it would just be a couple of cells, twins cut from the same egg. She had listened and learned enough from high school biology and NatSci in freshman college. A single egg, pierced, split into two, then a geometric progression, then, as Mrs. Gentolia, her high school biology teacher, announced, from years before, “the miracle of life!” Still, an egg, or two half-eggs could not think. They weren’t even brain cells. And even if they were, they’d simply be passing that spark of a thought back and forth. It took a million, maybe even a billion, brain cells to formulate the idea of pain, or laugh at a joke, or remember or calculate anything.
She was losing time. She needed to think faster than geometric progressions could progress.
Lynn returned very briefly, six years after leaving, for the very first time, from a very separate life and very separate concerns, but gathered and straightened by the sad news of Lolo Angel’s death and by the same cracked, pitted dirt road that led from the city. She recognized it: that small-town feeling her friends had told her about. It grew huge inside her as her taxi sped into her town, large and nauseatingly humid, with its dirty sidestreets radiating from the plaza like branches, like thorns.
She remembered the mirror and the long quiet nights and it was time to cry for Lolo Angel, at last. There was their mother, broken at last by something, and it had to be her father’s death. No other tragedy had shaken her as much, not the demise of her mother, or of her husband, not even by her departure, eighteen at the time, for college, for Tagum City, and the city after that, and the city after that, and for a good long time.
When she saw her mother she could not help but cry, for her mother and her town, who both were wordless and quiet after all the excitement of her arrival. Her mother ran from inside the house just as Lynn emerged from the tricycle on the dirt path, self-consciously squinting from the heat—more humid, she imagined—since a long time, and they shrieked and their hair stood on end, and embraced and jumped up and down, and finally stood stunned and still, the town and Lynn and her mother, each looking exactly the same as before.
Lynn was the star of the funeral. They made it look like a full reunion. Lynn brought playing card, T-shirts, toiletries, a walkman, a mini-compo and a TV set. There was more and more—new table utensils and drapes from Ikea, costume jewelry, bras and panties— collected over months, gradually deposited into the balikbayan box by her bed. But the biggest surprise was that she had managed to stay—in her mother’s embarrassing words, ‘’slim and seductive’’ as she was six, seven years before when everybody had seen her last. Lynn wanted to say it was all that walking, and you should see the Hong Kong Pinays, but ended up saying ‘’it’s the genes, look at you,’’ and they looked at her, pushing sixty, with the loneliest saddest face they had ever seen.
Tiboy sent her a tape. It came in the mail, sent many weeks earlier. The package was there when she got home. It wouldn’t fit in the mailslot so they laid it on the mat. She had thought once that he would take her back, Tiboy with his large, enveloping darkness, swallowing her into him. He now lived at the long-winded address on the envelope, an apartment, a street, a subdivision, a district, Tagum City.
She fired up the stereo system. It was automatic to her: first the black box that was the line conditioner, then the amplifiers, then the pre-amplifier, then the CD player and the cassette deck. She waited for the little lights to switch from red to green, pushed the “eject” button, then slid the tape in.
The glowing vacuum tubes on the amplifier threw an almost unbearable heat on her face as she watched the little toothed wheel turning. Lynn heard Tiboy’s breathing first, so close to the mic that she flinched. The horrifying sound of his breathing filled the apartment. When his voice came on it sounded funny and tinny, not as she remembered it, beginning with “Angela Lynn…’’, the pause following it heavy and unsure. Lynn’s hands flew swiftly to switch off the tape.
When she curled up to sleep that night she shifted her feverish prayers and wished her patron saint would shift her baby to the Samsons. Kuya Noel would be ecstatic, and Ate Lara would be complete. There would be bridal showers and advance gifts in pink and blue. There was a store in Great World City that was full of things for newborns and their mothers and she had even passed it once, months before. It would be one of those “miracles” Mrs. Gentolia spoke about—something nobody would know about but would set everything truly, instantly right.
The baby would be born and she would be assigned to look after it when they were away. And in those private moments, what would she do with it? She would teach it the same language—they were the same folk after all. She would tell stories. About where she’d been—everywhere: the beach, the mountains, the city. A dozen different houses, done up in a dozen different styles: Victorian, colonial American, Asian fusion and Filipino style. And from all the fast friends she made, she knew much, much more. A lot of it was gossip and stuff about politics back home but there was much more she knew. It wasn’t all work, she had learned that from Lolo Angel—it was “official use also.”
IN THE HOSPITAL WAITING AREA THERE WAS A WOMAN SITTING BESIDE her, also a Filipina, she could tell, from the shape and weight of her face. The hospital was like a TV hospital, busy and alive and full of equipment, the air smelling of disinfectant and that faint odor of people. She wondered if the silent miracle had occurred and the doctor would give her the usual cold smile instead of writing up an appointment for her at the Ministry of Manpower.
Lynn afforded a thin smile at the woman, with her eyebrows slightly raised in a kind of open gesture. It was not because she merely wanted to be polite, but because she knew Pinoys were prone to making open-ended gestures like that. Here it was a mark of identification that, once returned, rendered strangers instant friends, instant sisters. She made a mental note to make sure that when her amos arrived, nothing would be out of place, and everything, even she, would look untouched. •