In the Country (26 page)

Her husband met some students at the Charles River this morning, wasting no time in filling the void left by Yoshi and Miki. Later this week he'll hit the Harvard Club treadmills with a colleague in Boston. But the runners passing her now seem like loners, who took up running in order to win some time back for themselves.

In 1973, four months after his arrest, her extroverted, contact-hungry husband found himself in even deeper trouble. He'd been smuggling papers out of the camp, sometimes through the old girl and Bitbit, some of which ended up printed in the
Bangkok Post
and elsewhere. Whenever he recalls his punishment for it—
solitary
—she sees how much closer he came to dying then than during any hunger strike or heart attack. The handcuffs, the blindfold, the helicopter's guttering under his feet. The cell with no windows, only a neon tube that flickered harsh and bright. The dry bread, and the water he refused for fear of poison. Without his clothes or books or glasses, without the sound or smell of other life, without a place for him to go except into his own mind, his memory, he made lists. He started with his friends, then enemies: whom to reward and whom to punish once he made it out. And then lists for their own sake: milestones from childhood, classmates' names, teachers. Places and famous people, clothes he'd worn. Skills—would he remember how to fox-trot, or play mah-jongg, if he ever saw the real world again?

For three months, in Manila, no one would tell the old girl where he was.

And then in April, as abruptly as they'd taken him, he was back.

When he saw her, he wept. Not some stoic pallbearer's solitary macho tear, either. A full, blubbering breakdown. To speak, to say her name, took him a few tries.

Yoshi barks, straining at the leash.
Miki?
the old girl thinks, seeing a flash of white and fox-red fur streak past the reservoir. “Miki?” she says aloud, speeding up, letting Yoshi pull her. They jog down Beacon Street all the way to the cemetery, where the old girl lets Yoshi off his leash to sniff at shrubs, to search behind the tombstones, and finally to sit in the shade of a walnut tree. Miki, if indeed it was Miki, is nowhere to be found. Is it the ghost of Miki they've just seen, perhaps run over the day Dad lost her? Then it seems possible to the old girl that Miki just wasn't cut out for family life. That she was just biding her time with them in Chestnut Hill until she saw a chance, that morning in the Common, to break free. And now that Miki's nowhere in sight—again—the old girl and Yoshi make their way, flushed and panting, home.

“I wish I could have traded places with you, Dad,” the old girl said, the day he wept about his solitary confinement. She meant it. A month by herself in the green slopes of the Sierra Madre would not have broken her, she doesn't think, as it did him. What would have? What could they use against her? Her children? Religion? Movies always depict the lover as the bait that brings any hero to his knees. But real life wasn't like that. The old girl and her husband have already both survived without each other.

Armor

By the time her husband was imprisoned, no one wore a girdle anymore. And no woman she knew missed them—except for the old girl, during the frisks. On Sunday mornings, young, indifferent fingers, palpating every scar and ripple, then shunting her into the amphitheater. She thought of farmers poking animals upon the auction block, searching for defects to bargain on.
Giddyap, old girl!
She longed for that lost barrier, the sausage-tight elastic, the hook-and-eye trail down her spine, the bra cups peaked like two
salakot
hats, and almost as hard—
something
to protect her flesh from all this easy access.

Only that time of month offered reprieve. Their hands, grazing the sanitary-napkin belt, the bridle holding up the old girl's cotton saddle, would stop there and go no farther.

Toyang

When the old girl's husband hurts himself, three weeks into his training, she thinks he's saying
black guys.
“The goddamn black guys got me,” he wails. He was running with a priest friend in Franklin Park. In Dorchester.
Where Boston hides the black people,
their daughter Toyang has said. Manilachusetts wives have warned the old girl about riots in Mattapan, muggings in Roxbury, empty trash-filled lots on Dudley Street, burned-out buildings on Blue Hill Avenue. But in the living room, where he's collapsed on the sofa, there's no blood, no bruising.

“What happened?”

Black
ice.
He and the priest had just passed the Franklin Park Zoo when he stepped toe-first into a frozen puddle and turned his left ankle. He holds it, grimacing, with his shoes still on. “Oh, God. It hurts,” he moans as the old girl gently unties his shoelaces, as if she's reinjuring him.

Has he taken any aspirin or iced his ankle? No. The old girl helps him to the sofa, props his foot upon the coffee table under three throw pillows.

Toyang comes downstairs then. “What is it now?” she asks. Always more withdrawn than the others, Toyang now, in Boston, needs a disclaimer on her like the kind you see on overhead plane storage:
ITEMS MAY HAVE SHIFTED IN TRANSIT
.

“Dad hurt his ankle. Go put some ice in a Ziploc, would you?”

“I think it might be broken,” moans the old girl's husband.

His drama never lands well with Toyang, who stays where she is. The old girl always tries to model the opinion she'd like the kids to have about their father, even when she doesn't privately share it herself. Except Toyang rarely buys it. Toyang has wondered how “a quote-unquote ‘Christian Socialist' can fall asleep so often during Sunday Mass.” For one of her Boston College classes, Toyang once wrote an essay calling the Movement for a Free Philippines “a coalition not ‘of the people' but mostly of the rich—the displaced Filipino elite, wanting back their slice of pie.” The old girl had to beg her not to show it to her father or submit it to the BC
Eagle.
When the old girl moves him to their bedroom, saying, “I'm so sorry, Dad. I wish I could trade places with you,” she can hear Toyang saying, underbreath, “So she wouldn't have to hear you whining.”

Old Boy

The priest who married them had told them it would happen. That they would change, and grow—and even, if they stuck together long enough, start to see themselves in each other, the way some masters morph into their dogs.

After his return from solitary, they spent Saturdays together in the conjugal cabins. He was—she never told him, never would tell anyone—more of a lover there than ever in real life. No more “Wowowie!” or “Yehey!” but he noticed her in ways he hadn't until now. The hives anxiety gave her. The welts a toddler Kit, her nails improperly clipped by the
yaya,
left on her arm. He lingered on each inch, as if news of the outside world might be found in her flesh. And being weaker, from the weight loss, he was not so focused on the finish.

One Easter Sunday, a decade ago almost to the day now, he asked the old girl for a Bible, and a crucifix.
I think this cell could use one.
Jesus had visited his dreams and scolded him, for running too hard after power and away from faith. This from the man who'd once said, “Put in a good word for me, would you?” when he saw her at the rosary. Or, when he had to miss Mass, “Tell Him I owe Him one for all the yeas on rural redistricting tonight.” Once, during a fight, he called her Mother Superior.

But this new Dad wrote her a poem—not a good one, but the only one he ever wrote—on their nineteenth anniversary.

What had started as his closing statement to the military court, this new Dad was expanding into a book.

Valium

After they learn her husband's ligaments are stretched, not torn; after she gives him ice and aspirin, and rubs Tiger Balm into his ankle, and wraps an Ace bandage around it; after she moves his foot through exercises he'll never practice on his own; and he still complains of pain, she offers him the pills. A Manilachusetts doctor keeps a Valium prescription current for her, just in case. She's taken drugs—other than aspirin, that is—exactly six times in her life: five times in childbirth, and once in February 1973, when he was in solitary and no one was telling her. She remembers Valium flattening her in a useful way, helping her to focus on tasks rather than outcomes, removing the past and future, so there was nothing like regret, or fear. The present—leached of color, dulled a little—became manageable. She needed that. She needed things not to be sharp or bright.

He sleeps so deeply on the Valium that his snoring keeps her up, and wakes her early the next morning. In the living room, she tries to read. She brings
Running & Being
to the sofa and dips into the “Healing” chapter.
I am a runner-doctor with a defective constitution.
She finds nothing helpful.
At one time or another, something in every section of me has gone awry.

Could she have done a better job protecting Dad from Dad? He's worse off now than he'd have been without his hopes up. He never takes illness and injury as helpful messages, the body hinting
Easy there, you've bitten off more than you can chew.
To him they're little mutinies, his own cells betraying him. This never fails to put him in an existential funk.

She's restless. Has she let herself believe that the marathon would root him here somehow, make him
of Boston,
blur away the Philippines and all the races he can't run there? Outside the window, dawn—earlier and earlier with each day—has bathed Comm Ave in a shy light. In their bedroom, he's still snoring. Quietly she finds the knit cap, gloves, and track jacket in his drawer. Downstairs, she laces up her shoes.

What's gotten into her? Last year, Popsy brought home Jane Fonda's book and videotape, along with spandex leggings and sports bras, for the girls to follow. Popsy and Kit lasted a few more minutes than Bitbit and the old girl, who collapsed almost immediately in giggles on the living room floor, and Toyang, who passed on the activity altogether. The most the old girl's ever exercised is dodgeball, hula hoops—games that no one plays outside the school yard.

Kit

Kit and the old girl argue now and then about why she can wear gold studs but nothing dangling from her earlobes, why she cannot grow or paint her nails, why lip gloss is fine sometimes but never lipstick. Her birthday and Christmas wish lists are written in an alien preteen code the old girl can't always decipher.
Hair crimper. Caboodles.
Kit's the one the old girl thinks might have been better off in Manila, under the nuns: she's always spent too much time in front of mirrors, but now she doesn't even care if you walk in on her. She'll smile and primp and pose as if you're not there. She's always been a ham, and talked about being an actress, but now she stars in school plays and tries to master every accent.
Quinzee Mahket,
the old girl hears her enunciate from the bathroom.
Brawd stripes, bright stahs.

The Bug

She tried to talk him out of running, back in 1978, when the President announced new parliament elections and let her husband campaign from his cell.
He thinks I don't have the stones to take him up on it. Ha! You can take the man out of politics…
The old girl said she was worried about his health, and about palace shenanigans. In truth, he'd been out of the game so long. Losing this race, she felt, might crush her husband even more than health issues, or anything the President might do. As usual, though, his “idea” was already a decision; he was asking not for opinions but for help. So she campaigned hard, and liked it. She liked the name of his new party, LABAN, which meant “to fight” and stood for
Lakas ng Bayan,
“People Power”: hopeful and aggressive, smart and macho all at once. She liked the gallantry that poor villagers showed her: tricycle rides from one stump to the next; umbrellas or, in a pinch, plastic bags to shield her from the rain; a hundred hand fans flapping to dry off her wet dress. She liked the noise that people made, at an appointed time, all the way from Taft Avenue to the Diliman campus: whistles and car horns and church bells making a ruckus till dawn. The old girl understood a little more—she who had never touched a serious drug in her life, who enjoyed solitude and craved quiet: the high of gathering and getting loud together, making a righteous kind of trouble.

And so it was the old girl, longtime realist to his idealist, who never was so shocked as he could be when people did him wrong—it was
she
who had to be consoled, when the palace-appointed ballot counters announced the tally, and the President, in the thirteenth year of his term, announced that his New Society had swept the vote again.

“Oh, Mommy,” said her husband, “you of all people didn't expect ‘free and fair,' did you?” How stupid she felt then! Even
he
'd seen it coming. “You've caught the bug, Mommy! Only took you twenty-four years.” He found it cute—kissing her temples, jaw, and collarbone, on down to more.

The old girl's husband likes to say that if she ever ran against him for office, he wouldn't stand a chance. “First off,
she's
the rich one,” he'll say, with a thumb in her direction. (That's how he'd always defended himself, as well, against those “man of the people” opponents who called him a rich wolf in tattered shearling.
You've got me mixed up with my wife, and if you think
I
hold those purse strings, you're more confused than I thought.
) He has said things like this in the parlor, while she pours him coffee and passes the tray.

No one, in their marriage, can be called rich now. Between lawyers and doctors and houses and five tuitions, they don't, as a twosome, have much beyond what the old girl's parents set aside for them, which anyway no one will see until her parents die.

Also, she's the smart one.
People laugh at that, before they catch themselves. How could the quiet one be smarter than the genius who can mouth off on a book after skimming its first page?