And Now You Can Go (13 page)

I turn the
Raft of the Medusa
postcard over, but this one's blank, the message unwritten.

My mother is taking forever. She hasn't come back. It's been maybe fifteen minutes since the pilot made the announcement. When the fasten-seat-belt signal is turned off, I go to the back of the plane to find out what's happened. Perhaps my mothers locked in the bathroom, or even passed out. Maybe the turbulence caused her to knock her head against an overhead cabinet.

But I find her talking with three flight attendants. She's examining a mole on one woman's neck. The mole has three hairs sprouting out of it.

"It's fine," my mother tells the attendant.

I'm reminded of my mother's failed attempt to get a job with Alitalia.

My mother introduces me to the flight attendants. They tell me how wonderful my mother is, how lucky I am, how we look alike (which is not true). My mother writes down the name of some rash medicine for one of them, tells another about a special kind of stocking that will prevent her legs from swelling. To the one with the mole she says: "Remember, men are like trains. There's always another one coming along."

The flight attendants give my mother a bottle of champagne. They wrap it in a white cloth napkin used for meals in first class.

We switch planes in Honolulu, and because my mother once lived there, she uses the pay phone to make local calls to her old friends.

She comes back to where I'm waiting. I've been studying the pie chart on someone's abandoned
USA Today
. "Who'd you get through to?" I ask.

"Lorelei." "The crazy one?"

"Who said she was crazy?" my mother says. "You did."

She sighs. "Well, I don't know if she was crazy, but she would go through my garbage and read my letters."

When we board the next flight, I have a window seat. The pilots voice comes on too loud. He gives a special welcome to the passengers who are on the medical mission. One person claps.

My mother is reading an article in the in-flight magazine. "I can't believe this," she says. I look to where she's pointing. The article is about a diplomat and the phrase my mother is focused on says he was educated in Europe.

"I'm going to start telling everyone I was educated in Europe," she says.

"You should," I say. She went to a one-room schoolhouse in a neighbor's barn, with children of all ages in the same class. "I'm going to start saying that," my mother says.

"I know," I say.

My mother starts practicing. She puts on an affected accent; on top of her heavy Italian one, the accent she adopts sounds like maybe she's retarded. She turns to the man sleeping on the other side of her, in the aisle seat, and says, "I was educated in Europe."

Then, it happens: I picture my mother in the park instead of me; I hear her talking to the man. She's criticizing his negative attitude when there are others less fortunate. She's teaching him to tie his shoelaces without using double bows. She's telling him about Naples, how she and her brother are the only surviving members of a family of five.

I'm relieved, almost thankful, that I was the one in the park—not my mother, not Freddie. Would either of them have survived? I feel wretched for wondering.

I pull down the hard shade and sleep. When I wake up it's Friday—we've lost Thursday— and we're in Manila.

It's 6 a.m. and already hot. My hair curls in the humidity. My skin feels like the inside of a banana peel. Manila looks like Hawaii but with smog and traffic.

Three buses are waiting for us. My mother and I sit next to each other. I give her the window and she accepts. When did this happen? When did she stop insisting I take the window seat, that I eat the last wedge of an orange, that I use the money in her wallet for paintbrushes and canvases even if it meant she had to wait to get her hair cut? Maybe the change is happening right now, maybe it happened when we got off the plane.

Getting out of Manila is slow. There are no lanes on the streets and everyone wants to be first. We're heading north, up toward a town called Santa Barbara. I've been told it's a five-hour ride.

When we get out of the city, we pass rice fields on our left and our right. To keep the sun off, women and men and children wear hats so large they cast elliptical shadows. The women wear white genie pants with elastic at the ankles. I see a girl with long braids do a cartwheel, then another, and another— a chain of them. When she stops, she stands still for a moment and then topples over. Along the road, fruit stands offer watermelon and mangoes. At first I don't even recognize them as the fruits I know, because the colors are more vibrant, like in a Gauguin painting. The watermelons aren't oval, but round.

We veer left, at first, and then take the coastal route. Out the windows we see steep mountains on one side, the side my mother's on, and the South China Sea on the other. The difference dizzies me. Near small towns, buses called jeepneys pass us on the dusty road. The jeepneys are modeled after old American military jeeps, but they're extended. Two rows of seats face each other, the passengers sitting in them like opponents on a foosball table.

"Where are the bus stops?" I ask Dr. Cruz. He's in charge of the mission, and already I like him. He grew up in the Philippines, studied ophthalmology at UCLA, and comes back to his country every year, sometimes twice, to perform as many operations as he can for free. He and his wife raise all the money for the medical supplies.

"No bus stops," he says. "It doesn't even stop. It goes so slow that you just get on and off where you want."

On the hood of each jeepney stand four sculptures of horses, lined up like they're pulling a carriage.

When we disembark in Santa Barbara, two girls in ponytails and school uniforms—red gingham jumpers over white blouses—approach me. "
Maganddng hapon
," they sing. They point to my face. One says, "Can I have?" I don't know what she's asking for—I'm not wearing jewelry. For a second, I think she's pointing to my skin color. We haven't seen any white faces since Manila.

"Give to me," says the other, giggling. She's pointing to my sunglasses. "No," I say. "Not now." I smile and shake my head.

"Can I have?" the first one says again.

I tell them they can have them when I leave. Or I try to tell them this. "In one week." I hold up my fingers and count out seven days.

We're staying in an old hospital that looks, from the outside, like a long-abandoned and decrepit grade school. On the sec-ond floor are dorm rooms for us: the doctors, nurses, and me. My mother and I stake out our beds. I unfold my cot, like I'm opening a huge encyclopedia to the middle page. Stiff striped sheets have been laid out for me. On the top ends, I can see the bite marks the clothespins made when the sheets were hung out to dry.

Three men have claimed cots in our room. I look to my mother to see if she's noticed the rooms are coed. She has and she's talking to the men, one a doctor, the other a nurse. I tell myself that this is good for me, all of it.

Two bathrooms bookend our floor: one for the men, one for the women. Handmade signs hang on the walls: "Do Not Flush Unless Necessary" and "All Papers Into Garbage Go." A basket sits next to the toilet seat.

My mother and I go out for a walk around the town. A jeepney passes us and some of the children in it wave, their hands going back and forth like they're wiping steam from a window. We pass a pedicab—a moped with a Cinderella carriage attached to its side. For a moment, it looks like the moped and the carriage are racing. A man with a baseball cap

with an "M" on it drives the moped. Three women sit inside the carriage, two looking forward, the third facing out the back.

We walk past a Kodak camera booth. Six women stand shoulder to shoulder in the booth, under yellow arrows that advertise "Kodaks Sale of the Century." I can't imagine they have more than one customer a day. My mother buys a roll of film and inserts it in her camera. They are all beautiful women, all under twenty-five, with dark silky hair and skin that looks soft to touch. Around their necks hang gold necklaces with small pendants. One of the women wears a shirt that says "USA," another a shirt that in pink cursive says "
Ring My Bell
."

My mother aims the camera in the direction of the six employees. "Cheese," she says, and I smile at them encouragingly, to make sure they understand what she's saying. I can't get the grin off my face for the rest of the day.

We walk down to the beach with its bone-white sand. I sit down and roll in it. My mother laughs. We take off our shoes. I pinch my light pants at the thighs, hike them up, and walk into the warm water. My mother folds up her khaki pants, three inches at a time, until they're bulky shorts. Thick blue varicose veins snake down her legs. I'd almost forgotten about them, so their sudden reappearance shocks me. They've grown more pronounced; they don't match her young face. "Mom," I say, and I walk close and bend over and trace them with my fingers. They're like roots of old trees rising through the soil.

"I got these from still going to work," she says, "even when I was nine months pregnant with you."

This is how she boasts.

As we walk back to the hospital on a dusty path, we notice a woman following us. She points to my mom's sunglasses, which, for no good reason, are pink. "I want them," the woman says. My mother offers her an apple instead.

That night some of the wealthy townspeople, a senator and his sons, throw a dinner for the Americans. They call it a "crab feed." The people from the local church have been invited. The nuns wear heavy blue habits and large silver crosses on long chains; the priest wears a Hawaiian shirt.

"Do you like crab?" the priest asks my mother.

"That's my middle name," she says. This is something she's picked up from my father. He says everything is his middle name.

It's supposed to be a "native party," the senator tells us. He's wearing white shoes. Everyone I've seen so far wears flip-flops. The table we're seated at is covered with banana leaves. I push the crab that's been offered me over to my mothers side of the table.

Across from me the senator's sons are flipping through the binder of karaoke songs. The older son points to my rice dessert and says that it's called
puto
. "However," he says, "the word for prostitute is
puta
."

"Interesting," I say. My fingernails scratch at the banana leaves, trying to trace a pattern. He smiles. He can't be more than twenty-three. "So," he says, "you're eating a male whore."

The younger son invites my mother and me to come to the rooster fights. "I'll place bets for you," he says first to my mother, and then to me. He's running for office one town over.

After dinner there's karaoke. Some of the nurses perform "Dancing Queen" and the senators sons sing "Beast of Burden." The priest belts out "Jailhouse Rock." A doctor requests "Love Me Tender." With one hand he holds the microphone; his other hand is placed over the anatomically correct position for his heart. "He's a cardiologist," my mother whispers.

At the end of the night, my mother hugs the priest good-bye and he looks embarrassed. "I shouldn't do that," he says. "Here, priests don't hug. Here, hugs are not a priest's middle name."

I can't sleep. I'm not used to being in bed in the same room with so many other people, with men I don't know. I concentrate on the breathing of the nurse next to me, but it's erratic. A doctor whose last name I can't remember is snoring. My mother is on the cot to the left of mine. I try to match my breathing to hers, but it's too slow. Two fans spin in the room. One is on the floor, the other on the ceiling above my bed. I stare at this one for so long I feel I'm falling face-down into its blades.

. . .

In the morning I'm woken by the sound of voices below. Into the room pulses the sunrise— the colors of the watermelons and mangoes we saw for sale on the road. The others in the room are still asleep. I move toward the window and look out into the square in front of the hospital. Last night it was empty, so I'm not prepared for the sight. Three thousand Filipinos are standing or sitting on the street, on the lawn. Some have set up camp under red-and-white umbrellas that say "Coke Is It." More buses are pulling up as I watch. The drivers honk, trying to part the crowds. The word is out.

A teenage boy on the grass spots me looking out and points up to me. Other people start yelling, trying to direct my attention to their parents, their children, themselves. I step back from the window.

It's not even 6 a.m. The doctors and nurses and local volunteers wake up and we sit around a circular table with a lazy Susan in the center. Breakfast consists of dried fish and fresh mangoes. The dried fish is gray. I run my fingers over its beef-jerky texture. Pink and blue eggs have been put in front of us, as though it's Easter. The blue ones are duck eggs. I watch some of the doctors and nurses crack open the blue eggs, slurp the liquidy white, and then eat the yellow ball inside. "The embryo," one of the nurses says to me.

I turn to Dr. Cruz and mention what I saw outside, how there were more people than I've seen at a concert, at a baseball game.

He tells me when he was growing up here he didn't even see the poor people. I ask if he grew up in a wealthy community.

"No," he says. "You just didn't see them—they were like sand, like the sun." Then he forks more dried fish onto my plate.

. . .

Dr. Cruz opens the hospital doors at 6:30 and police officers wearing brown uniforms and carrying bats try to keep the people in line. The would-be patients approach like diagrams of family trees. Far back they're in large masses, but up close they've branched off, trying to get through the hospitals four doors. The doctors and nurses have set up screening rooms so the patients can be seen, one at a time, their problems ascertained. There are eight units of surgery on this mission: gyne-cology; gastrointestinal; burn; hernia; ear, nose, and throat; ophthalmology; general surgery; and orthopedic surgery. It's Saturday and the operations won't start until Monday.

I've been told that throughout the week I should distribute a few toys or sunglasses at a time to those waiting to see the doctors. So while the patients are being screened, I go out to the crowds with a duffel bag of stuffed animals slung over my shoulder and pulled in close to my chest. I spot a woman with a child and offer her a stuffed turtle. She grabs two more toys: a dog and an elephant wearing a business suit. "I have more childrens," she says.