In the Country (23 page)

That week, the lies you'd told the supervisor came true. Your feet clanged with such misery at work, you might as well have been stepping on glass. The bleach and toilet paper felt like bricks you had to push uphill. Even friends at church noticed a limp. That nurse you knew told you to toss your Keds for clogs that got her through her double shifts. You did. They didn't help.

John waited by his door that Tuesday night. “You've looked so tired,” he said. “Can I help?”

You stepped back, fearing he might reach for you.

“I know I'm not supposed to care,” he said, steering you to the sofa. “Or act on caring, anyway. You don't have to tell me why you're sad, either. I have an idea, though: you rest here. I'll clean the office.”

You almost laughed. “I don't think so.” And yet the leather felt so cool against your back. Your eyelids sank watching him take the handles of your cart.

Twelve minutes later, you woke with your feet up. John had finished at the window. He stared at the buildings.

“No one builds castles or cathedrals anymore,” he said. “I read that skyscrapers are how cities show off, in our time.”

The next night he was standing by the door again. The next night you removed your shoes. Each time, you fell asleep and woke to John dusting his cabinets or replacing his trash. These naps never lasted more than twenty minutes, but calmed you more than your own bed at night. You lay there—Esmeralda, daughter of the dirt, born to toil in God's name till your hands or heart gave out—reclining like an infant or a queen, a hundred levels aboveground. Priests had promised you this kind of peace in heaven.

You shall feast on the fruits of your labor, and your works shall follow you.

One of those nights you dreamed about your work. The office floor had thickened into soil, and you were pulling the cleaning cart behind you by your teeth. As the cart grew heavier, you turned and saw Pepe, dropping his woodwork and tools and motorcycle and replacement parts for small electronics into your garbage bag. Your heart rejoiced: you hadn't seen Pepe in years, and here he was. Visiting you! How did he find you? Still, it dawned on you in this dream that you had to keep walking and could not stop. And Pepe could not follow, only wave good-bye and shrink behind you as you carted his burdens away. You woke in tears, sitting straight up and swiveling your legs as if you'd just remembered an appointment. John was on his knees, dusting the table by the sofa. His gloved hands caught your stockinged feet before they hit the floor.

“Are you all right, Es?”

You shook your head. “I have a problem with my feet.”

He nodded. He didn't speak, only pressed his thumbs along your instep. You were silent too, letting the sore bones and stiff muscles speak for you. You looked up at the cratered ceiling tiles and closed your eyes. His forehead touched your knees, bone against flat bone.

“I missed you,” he said afterward—his suit, your uniform, stretched across the table like ghost bodies.

Months after he'd disappeared, Pepe turned up again at the rehab farm.
Relapse,
said the once-addicted priest,
is just part of the process.
His rule for returning men was
three strikes and you're out.

Emerging from the darkness underground a few blocks north, you hobble to the river, coughing clouds of dust. On the grass a rescue worker tears a white sheet from a gurney into strips. Red tears rain down his face. You think again of saints. You collapse to your knees, a park bench for your prie-dieu.

You'll catch your breath here, that's all. Before you head back south. John's tower stands, without its twin, still smoking in the distance. He's still there. You're sure of it.

Why shouldn't you expect a miracle? You found Pepe, fine and floating in his cradle, didn't you? What could have killed him didn't, because you were there.

But Pepe was a child, and without sin,
some voice reminds you. God's book does not mince words about what happens to a man who does what John has done, what a woman like you deserves.

Is today a judgment, then?

God doesn't say.

And so you offer what you would have offered on the day you were prepared to find your brother dead.

Take me.

You'll walk into this river, wash away your sins. And if he lives, you'll see to it yourself that he lives right. You'll walk into this river and you won't come out.

You know that bargains aren't prayers. This kind of pagan trade isn't what Jesus meant by
sacrifice.
Today, though, you'll try anything.

And when you hear the second rumbling, you don't run. When smoke, the second night in one bright hour, again snuffs out the morning, you kneel and wait, elbows on the slats, hands clasped at your brow, stubborn as a statue while the glass and dust and paper coat the town.

You've come this far. Why wouldn't you go back for him? You came into this world with few advantages, but faith is wealth, and you, Esmeralda, are rich with it.

For one whole year you both avoided the word
love.

For one whole year you never talked about the future.

What you discussed, what kept you listening to each other all those hours in his office, was the past.

“I almost didn't stay here in this city,” you told John.

“Get out of here,” he said. By then you knew what this expression meant.

You were playing the game that lovers play, when lovers can't believe their luck. What if John had worked for that firm and not this one? What if the cleaning company had sent you to a midtown building? You never would have met. And farther back in time, and farther: what if John became a fireman or cop, like his brothers? What if you never left the Philippines?

“It's true,” you said. “Mrs. Guzman, the one who brought me, couldn't keep me. She said she didn't know that living in this city was so hard. She bought me a plane ticket and called up a family she knew in Manila.”

You told John about shopping for souvenirs at the airport. The T-shirts: so expensive. Snow globes you shook to watch the salt-shaped crumbs fall on the mini-skyline. People on the farm would ask about the snow—what would you tell them? That you hadn't stayed long enough to see it? You looked at yellow-taxi postcards, bright red apple magnets. People would ask about the skyscrapers. Had you ever climbed to the top of one? What would you say?

“I kept thinking of this rhyme that day,” you said to John. “The Guzman kids liked it.”

Because John's head was in your lap, your hand combing his white hair, you sang it.

If I were a spoon as high as the sky,

I'd scoop up the clouds that go slip-sliding by.

I'd take them inside and give them to Cook

to see if they taste just as good as they look.

“I never learned that one.” John smiled. “How would the sky taste, do you think? If we got close enough?”

“Soft but crunchy,” you said. (You had wondered too.) “And good for breakfast; just a little makes you full.”

You told him somehow you weren't finished with the city. Something kept you here. The city wasn't done with you.

“It's brave, what you decided,” John said. “When you think about it.”

“But I wasn't thinking, not at all.” You laughed. “Is it brave, or crazy? If I was thinking, I'd go home. I had no job. I had no place to live.”

The job that brought you to him, to this building, was still eighteen years away that day. There would be lucky accidents and Doris and a change of laws and many other rooms to tidy in between. But as it happened, when you backtracked through the gate, and spent some of your last bills on a taxi back into the city, on a crisp, clear day like this one, you came very close to him and didn't know it. You just didn't know exactly where to go.

As far as towers went, you hadn't even been in this land long enough to know the difference between
tall
and
high.

“I want to see the highest building in this town,” you told the driver.

So he brought you here.

Dad

The old girl's husband—fifty-one years old, the 165-pound champion (as he likes to put it) of a triple-bypass surgery—tells her on March 1, 1983: “I had an idea, Mommy.”

Mommy
is what the old girl's husband calls her. And
idea
is a generous word for
whim
or
flight of fancy,
the kind of ill-considered impulse he'll have often and won't quit till he's pulled it off (he almost always does, if barely) or failed (more rarely, but with flying colors). Not
scheme
or
plan
—God knows the old girl's husband can't be bothered with anything like a
plan.

“It just came to me,” he says. “I thought I'd run the marathon this year!” As if the race has been, in previous years, an option he just didn't exercise. Such glee in his voice. As if of course the old girl will see it as he does. The best idea in the history of ideas.

Right now they live in Chestnut Hill, in Newton, Massachusetts. So when her husband says “the marathon” he means
the
marathon: Boston, mother of all. Not counting Greece, of course—original but defunct. Not with his colleagues, either—men his age or older, with wives and kids and coronary issues of their own—but with his students. Young, fit Kennedys-in-training—with, the old girl guesses, egos to match or trump her husband's. They run it every year, they told him during office hours, which the old girl's husband holds not in an office but at the Bow and Arrow Pub, in Harvard Square. How had he lived on Commonwealth Avenue for two years and never caught the bug, they asked, on Patriots' Day? They must have talked about Pheidippides, poor messenger, croaking at Athens, just before (the old girl imagines) her husband slammed his pint down on the sticky bar declaring, “Goddamn it, count me in.”

What kind of race has the old girl's husband ever run, in his life? The electoral kind. The skills that once won him
those
races—the glad-handing, the tippling with rice farmers in the north and the fasting with Muslim pineapple canners in the south, the all-nighters, the stump speeches, the bouncing of babies while flirting with their mothers—would hardly get him through this one. Athletes turned in early, didn't they? They didn't smoke or drink, avoided fatty foods. And never mind the hours of training, the miles of
preparation
—never her husband's strong suit. The old girl's husband thinks of preparation as a kind of joke. The hero, in his myths about himself, is always slightly unprepared for his adventures. She's known this since they met. They were both nine years old. He told her he'd snuck into a grade five classroom and stayed.
I don't really know fractions, but no one said no.
The old girl can already hear (six weeks from now—too soon, by any measure) his loud, braggy revisions: “I didn't even own a pair of decent rubber shoes!” And just before that, who will stand at the abandoned finish line, while the street sweepers check their watches? Who'll hold the water or the smelling salts, wiping the sweat or vomit, tending to him like a nurse except a nurse gets paid, picking up the
pieces,
in a word, when all his grandstanding comes back to bite him?

The old girl, that's who.

“Dad,” the old girl says—
Dad
is what the old girl calls her husband—“that's about twenty-six miles, I think.” She knows. Twenty-six point two, to be exact. But delivery matters, in this marriage.
Impossible, insane,
or even
not a good idea
would just cause a digging-in of heels and land her in the camp of killjoys and naysayers, never a chorus he heeds.
I think, perhaps,
or
Is it possible that
are the better notes to strike.

“Twenty-six?” the old girl's husband says, with his trademark puffery. “Is that all?”

Assumption

She only ever spent a year in the Manila convent school whose students called themselves old girls, but that was long enough for her to see herself as an Old Girl always. Her husband, who escorted old girl after old girl to debuts and dances in his youth, hated the term.
You sound like mares the farmer doesn't have the heart to shoot.
Some old girls agreed. Ines Arroyo, on all fours in the locker room, neighed while Margarita Lopez spanked her rump through the red plaid pleats.
Giddyap, old girl!

And yet, what better name for them was there than
old girls
? As they jumped rope, memorized irregular French
verbes,
spiked and served at warball, drew shapes with compasses and protractors, sewed scenes of cottages and shepherdesses in little hoops, the one constant theme they were meant to meditate on was their future as wives and mothers. Old girls, like the Virgin Queen herself, were as pure and openhearted as children, but ready at the same time to shoulder children of their own, and households, when the time (not far off) came.

And they learned all this, of course, from nuns. Old girls themselves: aging maidens, ancient yet suspended forever at a specific point in childhood. Those sisters, who taught the old girl everything from home ec to geometry, loved her.
Modest, humble, soft-spoken,
they wrote on her report cards.
Pious, simple.
A girl who saw the point in outlines and index cards.

The woman answering the Boston Athletic Association phone scolds the old girl as if she were the opposite. “You're much too late, sweetheart. What did you think? A marathon's not something we just
take up.
” The old girl hangs up, thanking her.

Doing her husband's homework for him—it's a habit, at this point. The old girl didn't even mean to start. In school he was the kind of C student—
gifted but needs to focus, waste of great potential
—whose alleged inborn genius was never put to the test by trying.
Relax, Mommy,
he teases, whenever he sees her gathering data, making a nest of what she knows.
There won't be a test on this.
Won't there? There always is.
Life
is a test, she wants to tell him, and those who study well can lick it.

“Registration's closed, Dad,” the old girl tells him at dinner. “Even if you made the deadline, you'd have had to run what they call a sub-three by September.” Hard, fast rules: how can he argue? He was four years too young to run for President, in 1969—finding his youth (people had called him Wonder Boy) a liability, for once. He'd had to wait, another skill he didn't have in spades. And by the time the wait was over, the Philippines was under martial law—a welcome reprieve, thought the old girl at first, from campaigns altogether.

“We'll find a way,” the old girl's husband tells her cheerfully. He thinks like a Manila politician, still. As if they can bribe someone at the BAA. “We'll grease the wheel somehow.”

Town

For all her husband's sudden interest in Boston, the old girl is the one, between the two of them, who loves it here. This town's the high point, to her mind, of a beloved northeastern triangle—from Philadelphia, where she rode out Manila's war years at the school that produced Grace Kelly; to New York, where she studied college French and math.

Not that America didn't shock her, at first. At Ravenhill, students talked back. Mount Saint Vincent daughters disobeyed their fathers. But much about America agreed with her.
When a 'kano says lunch at one o'clock, it's one o'clock,
she wrote the man who would become her husband; by high school they were exchanging letters.
I'm learning, when I speak, to—as they say in New York—“cut to the chase.”
In the summers, when she went back to Manila, he'd tease her.
What an egghead,
he would tell her, for consenting to attend school all year round.

Some weekends, now, the old girl takes one of her children on the Amtrak down the Northeast Corridor. She loves even that phrase, imagining the country as a big house and its best cities as rooms along the main hallway. They've visited the Empire State Building and the Liberty Bell; had dinner with the nuns who taught her linear algebra and Stendhal; met her former classmates' kids in Rye or Greenwich.

But Boston and its suburbs, she loves most of all. Especially—the old girl doesn't care how corny or obvious it is—in fall, when the hills start to blush along the Charles River like a McIntosh apple. Winter, too, comes close: the Frog Pond frozen for skaters, the snow sugaring the red-brick houses just so. When he got his fellowships to teach at Harvard and MIT, they linked into a four-mile cluster of Filipino expat households stretching from the Jesuit priests at Boston College to the nurses at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Manilachusetts,
some have called it. They're the ones who found the old girl and her husband their own red-brick colonial on Commonwealth, piped with white shutters and white columns and a white banister around the second-floor balcony, as if designed to hold a memory of snow even in August, when they came, in 1980. And—no use denying it—his name means something different in Manilachusetts than it does in Manila.
Hero. Freedom fighter. Prisoner of conscience.
Some still even call her husband
Senator
in greeting, as if no time has passed since 1972, unlike the fair-weather friends who started taking the long way around their house on Times Street, in Quezon City, and kept their children from her children, as if bad political luck were a communicable disease, which of course it is.

The old girl's husband, on the other hand, is restless here. She's known this for a while.

Whenever they're enjoying Boston—the best of Boston—home comes up, for him. The worst of home. At Fenway Park, for their son's birthday: “It's so damn
civilized
here,” he complained. “In Manila, they'd have oversold the seats. Some
gago
would yell ‘Fire!' to clear the stadium, and there'd be a huge stampede.” He laughed, as if stampedes were charming, something that deserved his nostalgia. On Brattle Street, the rare nights they met to watch a film together, leaving the kids at home: “Remember how you wore your raincoat at the one movie theater in Concepcion? Because of all the fleas?”

Training

The two Akitas—Yoshi and Miki, gifts from a Tokyo congressman—accompany the old girl's husband on his first jog. He doesn't like to be alone. Yoshi and Miki aren't running dogs, any more than his canvas slip-ons are running shoes. The most pampered and, at the same time, most neglected dogs she's ever known, they've been raised as her husband might have raised their children, if she weren't around. Reward biscuits have made them flabby. They're jumpy, flesh trembling beneath the white and fox-red fur, because they never know when their next walk will come. The old girl's husband bathes them with too much of their eldest daughter's Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo. But he doesn't plan for who might feed them when he flies to speak in Managua or Los Angeles or Kuala Lumpur.

He hasn't thought, either, about who'll drop off Kit, their youngest, at school, now that he's out jogging in the mornings. That's been his one job, in the mushroom-colored Chevrolet Caprice he has all to himself. (She and the children share a blue Dodge Diplomat.) “I can't train earlier,” he tells her (he doesn't like the dark); and later's not an option: once he's on campus, he wants to stay till evening. (The same reason he's exempt from picking Kit up in the afternoon.)
If you had to find parking in Harvard Square, Mommy, you'd understand.

The old girl makes the best of it. For twenty-eight years she's been adjusting to his ideas. No fair to violate a silent but long-standing contract now. Didn't she upend her life, at twenty-two, based on a line—a single line—from one of his letters?
I'll see you when we're both home.
He'd gone to Korea during the war. She'd planned, all senior year, to move to New York, get her JD, live with her college roommate. But he'd never, in their years of growing up in close proximity, of running into one another at baptisms and weddings and wakes, mentioned the next time. And the moment he did, didn't the old girl cancel her job, and Fordham Law, and the Upper West Side studio she was supposed to share with Mary Ann; and return to Manila?

After the wedding, didn't she agree to skip the Pangasinan beach honeymoon they'd booked? Didn't she follow him instead to Washington, D.C., and spend most of four months alone in a rented Arlington apartment while he did research in Langley?

And when he ran for mayor and won, didn't she—Manila-born, Manhattan-bred—pick up and move to that country town that always made her feel half-drugged and half-asleep? Into a house that creaked and tilted like a ghost ship all the time, under the feet of villagers who entered as they pleased, roaming the halls, demanding rice or milk, the bathroom or the telephone? He wouldn't let her strip the walls or fix the floor, which was always giving Bitbit—just learning how to crawl—splinters.
It's all some of our constituents can do to keep a roof over their heads. Can't show them up in their own town.
He didn't want curtains at the dining room window, where townsfolk liked to watch them eat.
Even seeing us fight is good. Lets them know we're just like them.
And fight they did. About the time the old girl washed her hands after shaking a peasant's:
You think Bitbit will remember a cold she had as an infant? That man's
grand
children will never forget how you insulted him. Never.
About the old girl driving to Manila for Bitbit's checkups:
There are plenty of good doctors here.
About her visits to Clark Air Base at sunset—when the village electricity shut off, every single day, till sunrise—to dine with American friends. He won that one. She tried cracking Flaubert and Proust at home by candlelight, but country heat and boredom made her a stupid reader. For the first time in her life the old girl needed soap operas: the bold strokes, plot twists spectacular enough to pierce through her haze. Running out of radio batteries became the great crisis of her young wife- and motherhood. When the voice of the
Pusong Sinugatan
narrator warbled, as if he too were half-drugged, half-asleep, she thought she might go mad.