RelinqWish

At one point in my life my sister (who has big round eyes as opposed to my chinky ones) said, “When you look at things, are they like some movies where there are black things blocking the top and bottom of the screen?”

The best part about having slits for eyes in this predominantly round-eyed country is that people always assume your eyes are small and puffy. Nobody ever notices if you lost sleep or spent the night crying.

And it’s easy to blend in when you’re in Chinatown.

My father was fighting before he was born. After the Japanese set his mother’s hut on fire, they pointed their bayonets at her belly and threatened to shoot. At that point the fetus Manolo kicked with a force that caused his mother to fall to the ground and the soldiers to run away. 

He told me this story eating piping hot empanadas doused with vinegar in his hometown,  San Manuel. I was on his shoulders and we were waiting in the plaza for the Black Saturday procession.  After the dull greening brass of the wind section had passed, people gathered in a mumbling huddle to watch the townsfolk carry statues of saints and the life-sized Cristo in a glass coffin.  He pointed his cousins out to me, so I asked, “Why aren’t you carrying Jesus too?” With his left hand he grabbed his right wrist and waved it at me. “I can’t,” he said.

I never thought there was anything wrong with my father before that day. To me the extra swish in his footfalls came with each evening he was at home.

Manolo caught polio during the war and was told he would never walk again. But he kept dragging his paralyzed side around like a dead Siamese twin. By the time he was grown his disability had become indiscernible except for a shrunken right arm and a minor limp. In place of physical activity his life became a rigorous mental exercise, devouring books, heading school papers and leading debate teams. Ladies swooned when they received his love letters, giggling in school halls with their Pageboy haircuts. The war had caused poets to be few and far between.

I wanted to write it down before I forget it. Ironically it’s from an old acquaintance (I think “friend” would be presumptuous) from the University:

“Promises are not enough, there must be contracts. Same as doors, there must be locks.”

An email I got today after submitting my story to my 15-person Gotham workshop panel:

Your story Soup is the best one I've read this year. I just wanted to say that I'm humbled to be one of the first to read it, because I'm certain it will be published as soon as you want. It would be a crime against humanity not to publish it. Keep on doing what you do, because it's amazing.

Soup

It was Friday and the tamarind broth was boiling. When I broke the ginger root at its bifurcation I knew what I wanted was between her legs. Last night, in the tangle of hair and mouths, after Lisa complimented me on my substantial breasts, my hanger-like shoulders, she said, "Let's keep this above the waist.”

Fuck you, I thought, throwing the ginger into the pot. Pieces of tomato and onion rose from the bottom like disturbed sediment on an ocean floor. I was making my version of sinigang, a sour soup with milkfish and chili peppers. She said it was Joaquin's favorite since they started dating in college. I told her that at the end of each week the air in our home would be pungent with its smell, awaiting Joaquin’s arrival from the university. I wasn’t competing, I was commemorating. Besides, I thought I’d return the hospitality by inviting her over after I had spent the week at her house. My excuse was that I didn’t want to be alone.

I found Lisa seated at the back during Joaquin’s wake. The red in her eyes matched the heart-shaped anthuriums of the sympathy arrangements behind her. Joaquin used to say that Lisa had eyes like the wings of a bird, and when I recognized them on Sunday I felt air come out of me like I had been holding my breath for months.

Last night, after Lisa had cordoned off her property with pillows and sheets, I put my clothes on and waited for light. I left her sleeping and walked to town see what the fishermen had caught that morning. The path to the fish market was lined with vegetable vendors who recognized me from the weekly harvest of local produce I used to do with Joaquin. The smell of crushed banana hearts thickened the air, and I had figured from the first face that greeted me that they had heard the news. Manang Rosa, the lady who sold bamboo shoots, put a bunch of them in my basket and said, “You should be strong, you’re so young. You’re still a baby.”

I knew Joaquin had left Lisa after she’d gotten pregnant and refused to have his child. “If we couldn’t take that step, then where were we headed?” he told me during one of his many Lisa stories a couple of years back. I remember thinking how adult it was to have that kind of honor in a relationship. When I repeated this to her, she was smoking one of her long cigarettes in her backyard and coughed before she told me her truth: “He left me to be with you.”

“Me?” I said. Lisa looked at me with squinted eyes, her moist lips bitten by her light yellow teeth. I cleared my throat.

“Long story short,” I said, and that was how I started it. I was making a friend and didn’t want to be dramatic. When I was a freshman, my mission was to get my Art History professor’s attention. Joaquin reveled in it, I was pale and skinny at sixteen and before the internet you could only find porn in the black market. He put me on the pill and told me to finish school, though I had the whole thing planned out, complete with our kids’ names. They would all be fair-skinned mestizos like their father, who would desire me everyday for the rest of his life, beginning on our wedding right after graduation. I thought 1997 would be a great year for that. Instead it became the year he caught a blood cancer and died.

“On the same day as Princess Diana!” I said, laughing. Gauging from her face she wasn't amused that my voice didn’t even crack once. I didn’t tell her that it was always my intention to cap my solo production of his funeral by singing Carole King’s So Far Away after I gave his eulogy. When I was done with the song I saw Lisa sob into the shirt of a stranger and it gave me an eerie satisfaction to see someone else cry. It made me forget for a second how the whites of Joaquin’s eyes dried out and turned grey when he died.

When the funeral ceremony was over, Lisa found me in the playground outside the crematorium and sat down beside me. Each link on the swing's chain was making its own squeaky sound when she said, “The greatest tragedy in life is that there is no background music.” There were about a hundred people at the wake and I was all hugged out, but at that point on that rusty bench, only her shoulder felt familiar to me.

She lived nearby and I had accepted her offer to spend the night. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go. In her yard while we laughed and told stories of Joaquin’s adolescent and grownup adventures, she caught me staring at her breasts through her thinning shirt. I hated that I thanked her for the moment with an unwanted glance, but she said nothing. She folded her arms across her chest, took a deep breath and said, “We’ve both had a little too much today.”

I heard Lisa’s steps coming down the stairs as I was washing my hands to set the table. I turned my back to open the cupboard, and as she got closer it felt like she was climbing my spine like each segment was a foothold on a palm tree. She took the dishes from me and had started to arrange them when she said, “Are you always like this?”

“Sure, I like to cook,” I said, ladling the piping broth into bowls and making sure the rice was cooked perfectly.

“No, Gina, I meant about last night. . . .”

“I want you to have some soup,” I said, carrying the bowls to the table where she sat, her hair falling down to her collarbone where I felt my mouth should be. I cut the fish in half and thought I should have the bottom part. “No, this time you should get the head,” she said.

The steam made beads of sweat on her forehead and this made me ache right below my navel. The spoon in her mouth as she slowly sipped the hot liquid was a shovel about to hit me on the back of my head. It could dig my grave, find a treasure or a secret tunnel – anything.

Lisa exhaled.

“I don’t think I’ve eaten like this before,” she said, licking her fingers after she ate the fish with her hands.

“This is all new to me, too,” I said.

The day ended with our naked bodies in parallel arcs like the chili peppers left in the pot of soup. We had eaten all we could as we knew it wouldn’t keep much longer.

“I hope this is what you wanted,” she said as I drew her closer, my nose twitching from the hair on the back of her neck. I caught a whiff of my lips as I closed my eyes and smelled sinigang and Lisa on them.

It was what I wanted. I was back in our home and I was laying on our bed with Lisa, my hand between her thighs. It felt like how it was for four years until last week, but then it didn’t, I thought, when a breeze passed and gave me goosebumps on my back. From the window came the crackling sound of the wind through the trees, in between that, the ocean from far away. At that moment I knew that this night would be like many others to come. On this night there would be no songs.

(Using a maximum of 8 adjectives/adverbs and not using is/was a verb, have a character commit a crime)

Mama hated taking Cara to the supermarket because the girl would be a mouth exercise in saying no.

“You’re just going to keep pointing to stuff we can’t buy,” Mama said that Saturday morning.

“Please, I won’t ask for anything, please?” Cara begged, and she knew she would keep her promise. Last week for school opening Mama already bought her the notebook she wanted, but told her it had to be saved for the subject she liked the most.

“Okay but no pointing,” Mama said as Cara put on her sneakers and ran to the car.

Rusty’s Supermarket in Manila’s business district had the assortment of American cereals and Willy Wonka candy Cara would get to have only when she played with her friend Tonito in his Forbes Park home. Mama made a molar-sucking sound when she saw Cara staring at the bright colors in the Imported Goods aisle.

“I’m not pointing!” Cara said as Mama’s shopping cart passed, carrying the Angus steaks for Valentines Day and the Almond Roca chocolates that were going to be hidden in the corner of the refrigerator that gets the least light, waiting for a birthday or a special guest.

At the checkout when Mama put their items on the moving rubber belt, Cara watched the Almond Roca cans, fuchsia in a sea of plain local packaging. She leaned her back against the racks of candy bars and gossip magazines as Mama dumped the steaks on the conveyor. With her eyes focused on her mother’s loot, her hands grabbed a pack of Wrigley’s gum and slipped it into her back pocket, where it burned her buttocks, sending a line of sweat down from each of her temples, one from guilt and another from excitement.

When they got home, Cara ran out of the car and into her room. She rubbed the package of gum sticks between her nose and mouth, sucking in the odor that reminded her of Vicks Vapor Rub. Her mouth started to water when she thought of the gum on her tongue, how it would be covered with a fine powder that would dissolve in the same saliva that would afterwards soften the rest of it, like cardboard soaking in a puddle.

Cara swallowed. She tiptoed across the room and reached for the top of her bookshelf. With her other hand she put the unopened pack of Wrigley’s in between the pages of the notebook Mama asked her to save. Cara ran downstairs with a minty smell on her hand, and a fresher smile on her face.

…before I regress back into my constant adolescent self and get reminded of the noise, chaos and difficulty of the subject matter I am about to discuss - because I need to look back at this someday when it’s really time.

Last night my partner said that I “can have kids if I want,” and I said, “I’m not going to have a child because you said I can have one if I want.” 

She said, “But I want you to be happy.”

So I said, “A banana split will make me happy.”  

And then I said that we are in such a great place right now as a couple, that things have fallen into place and I can really say that we have a happy and healthy relationship and that I couldn’t ask for anything more. And that I wouldn’t want to rock the boat. Not right now, I said.  I fell asleep with that thought and in the middle of the night I woke up and had such an epiphany that I promised to write down as the reason I want to have a child one day.

I want to raise a child in a home with love, respect and affection. I want someone to grow up and witness this great caring his or her parents have for one another, and to know how much joy he brings them, just by being there. I want someone to know my partner the way I know her, and to know me the way my partner knows me, so that if something should ever happen to us, our love is not a secret that dies with our passing. I want to raise this little person to have little snippets of me and my partner in her, and to find extreme joy in just looking at and talking to this person – because that is exactly how I feel about her (other) mother. Lastly, I want someone to grow up and make a contribution to the world, even if it’s only her kindness and goodness of heart, even if it’s only his faith in love and life, and even if it’s only his respect for all people.

Sometimes I just feel lucky to have what I have that I want someone to benefit from it, and maybe have what I never had growing up:  Being able to look at adults and say, “That’s what I want in life. I want to be that happy, that loved and that content at home that all the struggles in life don’t matter so much anymore.”

I loved that President Obama’s acceptance speech had in it a quote from one of my favorite movies American History X (if you haven’t seen that, what are you waiting for?):

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature." (Abraham Lincoln)

Finally a First Lady who doesn’t look like a robot – discourse to follow shortly.

Only for the totally bored and needing some cheering up:

http://cdn1.ustream.tv/swf/4/viewer.45.swf?cid=317016