And Now You Can Go (15 page)

I scoop cold water onto my shoulders and watch it trace over my body. Then I plunge my hands into the bucket and splash water between my legs. Forgoing the scoop, I pick up the bucket and dump the remainder of the water on my head.

On Wednesday, after the second operation, I go out into the hallway to prepare the next patient.

At the front of the line, on a gurney, is the blind woman I sat behind in church.

"Hi," I say. "How are you?" This is what I say to all patients to determine whether or not they speak English.

She says nothing.

Her kids jump off the gurney and it wheels a bit to the left. I wish I'd saved some stuffed animals for them. The youngest girl, the one my mother guided back to the pew, seems to recognize me. She smiles bashfully.

I take off the blind woman's old sandals. Hers are some of the few toenails I've seen that aren't painted with red half-moons. Hers aren't painted at all. I slip the light blue shoe covers over her bare feet. She shudders. She didn't know what was coming. In her blind eyes I see fear.

I wheel her into the room, where Dr. Cruz talks to her for a while. Even though she can't see him he sits across from her and looks into her eyes with care. He is a saint, this man.

He translates for me that she hasn't seen her middle daughter since she was a year old. She's never seen her youngest, who's now five. Today they're going to operate on one eye.

"Only one?" I say.

"We do only one cataract at a time," Dr. Cruz explains, "even in the States."

I ask how long before they can come back for another operation. "In the States," I add. "Two days," he says.

"Why can't she come back in two days, then? She's young and she's blind and she has three kids. Can you imagine what cooking for them must be like?"

How can he deprive her?

"Ellis," he says, and takes off his glasses, "we're here for just a short time and you see how many people there are. For each person we operate on, there's one person who doesn't get treated. If we do both her eyes, then she can see fine, like brand new, yes, but it means someone else is still blind in one eye, at least."

Everything, I remind myself, is for someone else, somewhere.

This time Dr. Cruz asks if I want to look through the microscope. As I adjust my eyes, I hear my mother say, "This might sting," and someone else's voice, translating.

As I peer through the microscope, Dr. Cruz points out the cataract lens to me. There's a thick yellow glow covering the woman's dark eye. Her eye looks like a planet. Her eye looks the way I think Mars might look.

I watch as Dr. Cruz extracts the yellow with a small needle. "Isn't it traumatic?" I ask.

"She sees the instruments only as shadows," he says.

I watch the probe needle go straight to the center of her pupil and I start to feel sick. I think of the duck eggs we eat at breakfast, the water and the hard embryo. The feeling of a thousand tentacles searching, reaching, starts in my stomach and then I can't breathe. I try to inhale and I just suck in my mask. My face feels like it's laminated in dry milk. I breathe in nothing. Then, through an inserter, Dr. Cruz squeezes the new lens into her eye and with

a lens hook he shifts it around in circles. I feel I may fall over on top of the blind woman, collapse on her, kiss her. Dr. Cruz rotates the lens around and around and says something to me about the haptics. From the hallway I hear someone's radio playing Cher. The question throbs through the walls: "Do you believe in life after love?" The lens clicks into place, like the colored dial inside a combination lock.

I sit down on a table where the instruments are laid out. No one seems to have noticed that I almost fainted. Not even my mother. When the operation's over I lift my mask and breathe in and out.

I help move the blind woman onto the gurney and wheel her out into the hall. Her lads run up to her side. Their eyes search hers. Her girls are dressed up for the visit to the hospital, their hair in ponytails. She did their hair before the operation. Blind, she combed it for them. When I was growing up, and my mother had to be at the hospital at 7 a.m., she'd braid my hair while I was asleep. That's when I slept on my back, like a princess. Now I sleep on my side, with one leg over a pillow when there's nobody lying next to me.

Viola and I put a patch on the woman's eye. I use three strips of white tape to keep it in place. The woman's skin is surprisingly cool. Her ears are pierced but earringless. In a few days, Viola tells me, out of that one eye, the blind woman will see.

One evening my mother and I leave the rest of the group to explore. We walk down a path, for about a mile, until we hit the beach. Since the last time we came down here, on Friday, it's been completely transformed. There are ten wall-less huts with thatch roofs staggered along the shore. The wind can breeze right through them. When I saw them last Friday, I thought they were gazebos, refuges for bathers. But they've been turned into temporary housing for those who have made the trek to the hospital. People have come from 150 miles away, and they sleep here each night until it's their turn for an operation. Each hut has thirty sleeping spaces, set up on the floor.

We hear music in the distance and walk until we see an open-air bar, a dance floor, and karaoke. Three women are singing what sounds like an old Filipino love song, their hands gesturing soulfully between their head and their heart. A half dozen couples dance. Kids chase one another; girls dance with their fathers, with their mothers, with each other. Some of the people on the dance floor are wearing white eye patches secured with diagonally placed strips of pink or white tape.

My mother and I stand on the periphery, watching. She's still wearing her skiing-cow T-shirt, which is now yellow with dirt and sweat and dust and wear. When my mother's happy, her mouth sometimes falls open like a marionettes. When the song is over I ask one of the Filipina patients what the song is about. I suspect it's about a woman waiting for her true love.

"It's about, how do you call it?" the woman, who has an eye patch on one eye and green mascara on the lashes of the other, says. "A squirrel."

"A squirrel?" I make the shape of the animal with my hands, emphasizing its tail. Then I point to a tree.

"Yes," the woman says. "That is it. Squirrel."

My mother and I walk back up the path, through the fragrant air.

There's a store open a hundred feet away. It sells fruit juices and bottled water and wind chimes made from shells. Each wind chime must have two hundred tiny shells attached to five hanging strings. In the wind and in the dark, I imagine their sound is that of insects chattering away through the night.

The senator's youngest son invites me to a rooster fight. On the way from the hospital to the stadium he talks politics. "Cory Aquino was the nation's first female leader," he says. "In 1986." He waits for me to be impressed.

He tells me about the aging B-movie idol who became the leader in 1998. "Like your Ronnie Reagan," he says. "No?"

When we get inside the stadium, there are very few women. Many of the men are wearing Tshirts that say the same thing in Tagalog. I ask what the Tshirts are about and the senator's son avoids answering; I have a hunch it's something about his father. The senator's son asks if he can place a few bets for me.

"Sure," I say. I shrug, but I'm excited.

The man at the betting desk has a calculator in front of him and, inexplicably, a towel over his shoulder. He takes my money and puts it under a paperweight-sized stone. Then he gives me yellow tickets, with hole punches.

Above the arena are banners saying the same thing: "Happy Birthday 'Boss' Sen. Robert 'Bobby' Roberts. From: Kristo of the Recreation Center." The only other signs read: "Referees Decison is FINAL"

Before each fight, blades are sewn onto the roosters' feet with thick red thread. Once in the arena, the roosters claw and cut at each other, drawing blood. When a rooster dies, both birds are transported off the field by the referees. The winning rooster has suffered too many gashes to survive—it inevitably bleeds to death while the owner shakes hands with those congratulating him. No one seems to care that the winner dies too: they've already determined which rooster was strongest.

I lose all my bets, every single one of them.

Over the course of the week, the doctors in the ophthalmology division perform a total of 141 operations. I start to eat fish. I fall in love with my mother. One night, when everyone's doing karaoke, Viola and I get up to sing "9 to 5." I take a ride on a jeepney. I don't even have to wave it down the way I would a taxi. I just jump on.

On our last day I try to find the schoolgirls in their red gingham uniforms to give them my sunglasses. I walk around town hoping they'll spot me and come running. I walk and walk, even near the school, but they don't come.

An old woman with feet so dirty I think she's wearing socks approaches me. She points to herself. She has no teeth. I take off my glasses and put them on her head. They're much too big. She pushes them up, like a headband, and smiles. Then she walks away.

That last night my mother and I walk back down to the water to dip our feet in. Today was the last day for operations, so all those staying in the huts have departed. I get the sudden impulse when we're on the sand, the sliver of a moon above a child's rendition of a smile, to cartwheel into the water. I strip down to my bra and underwear and throw hands down and legs over head over hands over legs over head until the water is up to my uterus. Then I wade out into the green-and-silver-marbled water until I can no longer stand. Pinching my nose, I curl up into a ball and sink below the surface. I let myself tilt forward and backward, upside down and sideways. There is no such thing as gravity, I pretend, no such thing as sleep.

Freddie picks us up at the airport. She looks good. She's wearing makeup over her birthmark. I've stopped wearing it on the scar on my forehead; I never wore much makeup, but now, since the incident in the park, I wear none at all. While my mother's standing by the baggage claim giving Viola advice about returning to a newly husbandless house, I ask Freddie why she started hiding her birthmark again.

She shrugs and smiles. "I think it was very manipulative of me to not conceal it." "What do you mean?"

"Part of me liked grossing people out with it. I knew that, later, they'd only feel bad about themselves. That's kind of manipulative, don't you think?"

"I guess," I say. I look over at my mother talking animatedly to Viola. "I can't believe you thought it was a good idea to give Mom that cow T-shirt."

"She loves it," Freddie says.

"So I've noticed." I put my arm up and over my sister's shoulders. I have to reach. She surpassed me in height when she was twelve, and I never grew much after that.

Waiting for me in San Francisco is a flat FedEx package from the representative of the world. Getting a FedEx package a week late makes me sad, like seeing carved pumpkins days after Halloween.

I shake out the contents of the envelope: a dozen wooden shapes and a diagram—the makings of a sculpture I am to assemble. I do, right away.

The sculpture is of an ostrich. It's less than a foot tall and wobbly. I slip my hand back in the package to see if I'm missing a piece to the ostrich, something that will steady it. There aren't any more pieces, but the representative of the world has enclosed a note: "
I tried to find you a hummingbird
."

Freddie tells us that before she goes back to England and I go back to New York, she's made plans for us to go camping near Santa Cruz for a night.

"We're all going?" I ask. "Already?" I'm helping my mother fold laundry. I think about hiding the skiing-cow T-shirt from her, just for a few days, until I go back to school. Then she can wear it all she wants.

"Yeah, you, me, and Mom."

"Not your father?" my mother says. I don't know why I'm still surprised when she sticks up for him.

"No," says Freddie. "Girls only."

This is how we divide the family: the women versus the man.

It wasn't always like this. Growing up, I was my fathers daughter; my sister was my mother's. Every night, Freddie would help my mother prepare dinner as I sat in the living room with my father, watching the football game or the news.

Shortly before he left home, my father suggested to my mother that they adopt a young boy. He'd become obsessed with newspaper articles about orphans in Bosnia.

"No way," my mother said. Freddie and I had finally gotten to the point where she didn't have to worry, she explained. We were managing fine on the money we had, but with another mouth to feed … "No," she said. "Sorry."

My father cut out the article and magnetted it to the refrigerator. When he left home without a word, the article was still there. I turned to it for explanation, as if it were a note he had left behind.

On Friday we drive down to the campground. Our canvas tent has two cots made up with clean sheets. At the foot of each bed, terry cloth towels he folded and fat.

"This isn't camping," my mother protests when she notices the cords from the electric blankets. Still, we can tell she likes it. She turns on a blanket right away.

The tent has one double bed and one single. "So we'll sleep in the same bed, and Mom will sleep in the single?" I say to Freddie.

"No," Freddie says. "I snore. Remember?"

In the afternoon we go for a hike along the ocean cliffs. "Hey," Freddie says, "look at the seal!"

I stare out into the toothpaste-blue ocean. I see nothing different. Freddie points. "Behind that rock," she says.

For a while we think we're talking about the same rock, but it turns out we're not. "There should be a better way to describe distance," Freddie says. She's always figuring out things that should be implemented, gaps that, if filled, would make all facets of life better.

Then I see the seal. "I see it!" I tell them. "Where?" my mother asks.

"Out there," I say. I stand behind my mom, with my fingers beneath her ears, trying to turn her face and direct her eyes. But it's useless.