When the Elephants Dance (31 page)

“Bayad …”
He held out his hand, and I paid him.
“Saán siyá nakatira?”

I gave him the name of a village far away. I waited for her to get in, then gave the man the money. Corazón’s eyes became as big as pork buns when the
kalesa
started to move and I was still standing on the roadside. She didn’t scream or anything. She just held on to one of the metal posts and looked sadly at me as the
kalesa
drove away. I had instructed the man to take her to the next province, a good five hours away.

When I arrived home everyone peeked around me.

“Oh, how was your first day at school, Corazón?” my mother called out.

“She’s not with me.” I walked past my mother, wishing she would reach out to hug me.

“You did not wait for her?”

“Was I supposed to?”

“This was her first day of school!”

I shrugged. “Maybe she ran away.”

“Anna, I know you’re hiding something from me,” my mother snapped.

I began to cry. I wanted to say, “All you care about is Corazón,” but the words became lodged in between my hiccups, until they were pushed down deep where I could not find them.

“Come here, Anna,” Tita Lulu said.

I walked slowly to her. I hated the way she smelled, like old mothballs and tiger balm, but I wanted so badly to be held.

“You know you are special to us. Corazón is not like you. She has pale skin
like a ghost. Yours belongs to a true Filipina.” She gave me crocodile words, as my father would say. Fake words, but they made me feel better.

Ate Yu went to my mother. She knelt beside her.
“Ate
, go and rest. Take a hot bath to relax yourself. I will prepare it.”

I followed Mama, wanting to apologize, but when I got there I heard her talking.

“Even if I had taken Janna earlier to the doctors, as I know everyone is whispering, we would not have had the money to pay for it. Say what you will, this gambling puts food on our table.”

I frowned to myself, because I knew she was alone. I edged my way to her bath and saw her talking to the rising steam. She heard my footsteps, turned abruptly, and gasped, “Janna, my baby.”

“It’s me, Anna,” I said, sniffing. “Mama, don’t worry. I will take care of you.”

“Oh, Anna. Only you. I thought it was Janna.” She looked away from me. She did not reach out a hand to braid my hair or tuck my shirt in. I knew then that I no longer existed for my mother. Her heart could not handle my sister’s death. It was as if I had died with her. I was like a walking ghost. A rose thorn woven into her clothes, poking at her. A sore reminder of the child she lost.

M
Y FATHER DID
not return with Corazón until three in the morning. I heard my father’s footsteps, angry like hot coals, stomp up the stairs,
poom, poom
. The door to my room swung open with a bang and my father stood over my bed with Cora beside him.

“You tried to give me away.” Corazón’s face was swollen from her tears.

“Anna, ha. You cause everyone trouble.” Papa threw back the sheets and spanked me five times. My thin sleeping attire was no match for his hands that were thick with calluses, and I immediately began to sob.

“No, Papa!” I heard Corazón cry. I looked over through my tears and saw her disheveled hair and the outright fear. She had probably never been spanked in her life. I screamed louder with each spanking. I received ten in all. My father was no fool, and he knew the dramatic display I was creating for my new sister. When my father was done, Corazón came to me and hugged me, but I pushed her away.

“Leave me alone; your face is all wet.” We both went to bed crying.

M
Y HEART DID
soften a little toward Corazón after that. But you see, even then my mother without knowing ruined any chance of Cora and I ever
accepting the idea of becoming sisters. Just when my mind began to let her in, my mother would do something to shove her back out.

A few weeks after our truce, Corazón and I played quietly with our dolls in separate corners. This may seem cold to you, but that was progress for us. I usually could not stay in the same room without taunting her. That day my mouth was silent, closer to a smile than a sneer. It was Friday evening, and my mother had her mah-jongg visitors over that night. My heart was content for once. It was now more than a year after Janna’s death, and although I had not forgotten her, my soul was restful. The rock at the bottom of my stomach had begun to float. I listened as Ate Yu brought out my mother’s new set of mah-jongg tiles. The cheaper ones came in flimsy boxes with plain-colored backing on the tiles. These tiles my mother had bought soon after Corazón moved in were like a work of art.

“And why not? I am entitled to use a little of her allowance. We have given her a new home, a new family.” Mama explained loudly to my aunts how she had come to use all of Corazón’s July allowance from her inheritance to purchase the tiles. My mother always spoke loudly because she was afraid to lose the listener’s attention. When they were children, Mama’s elder sister had been dubbed the smart one and Mama the beautiful one. This was how my grandmother had raised them. As if a woman could not be both beautiful and smart.

The tiles came in a wooden box with an arched top. It had a latch of wrought iron and a key. The box itself was lovely, deep red flowers on intricate vines hand-painted against a black background. From a distance, it gave the box the illusion that real vines and flowers covered it completely. Each tile had the same flowers painted on the back in dark olive and red.

As the four players sat down to play, my mother, Tita Lulu, Tita Babelyn, and Mang Albert, I could hear the clink of the pieces as the players laid them out on the table to check that the suits were complete.

Mang Albert sat in his favorite spot with his wide back folded and creased like that of a hippopotamus. He smoked so much that the ceiling directly above him had a large yellow stain the size of a frying pan that radiated outward. He always came with his wife, Aling Karing, who sat beside him to watch. It fascinated me to watch Aling Karing, who was a big-breasted woman with narrow hips. She and Mang Albert traded places every few hours. Aling Karing would slip her hand under her own shirt during the games and touch her breasts. Tita Babelyn swore they cheated with hand signals, but my mother still invited them, and Tita Babelyn still agreed to play.

As we sat playing with our dolls, I heard the conversations from the mahjongg
room, in between the exclaimed,
“Pong!”
when a person matched three of a kind, or
“Chow!”
when they got three numbers in consecutive order. The tiles, as they were mixed for a new game, rumbled like rain against a tin roof. I could see the players mixing with their hands palms down, as if they were massaging the table in big sweeping inward circles.

“Hoy, alám mo,”
my mother confided in a shushy voice meant to be a whisper but was not a whisper at all. “When Corazón is older, she will give her mother’s business to us. Joker!” my mother shouted, slamming down a tile, hoping for a wild card.

“Has she said this, Mirabelle?” Aling Karing asked.
“Pong!”
She laid down three of a kind face up.

“Well, of course she has.” My mother coughed.

I glanced at Corazón to see if she had caught any of this, but she was busy finding a matching outfit for her doll.

“She is a beautiful little girl.
Parang anghél,”
Mang Albert said. Like an angel.

“Oh, and her skin. Like cream,” Tita Lulu, the traitor, said. “She has a nose like the queen of Spain, proud and perfect.”

My mother lowered her voice, but I still heard.
“Hoy
, do you think Anna will ever be pretty? She is so plain, huh? Her hair too curly.”

“Ate Mirabelle, namán,”
Tita Babelyn said with a giggle. How bad of you.

I knew my mother fished for compliments this way, saying something negative so that someone would raise her up by contradicting her with just the opposite.

“Oh no,
ate
, of course she will be beautiful,” Ate Yu said.

Maybe that was all Mama was doing that day, fishing for compliments for me. But that did not stop my chest from turning in pain when I looked at Corazón. Until then I had not thought about how we looked. Until then I hated her only for trying to take Mama away. Now I envied her perfect skin with the little freckles. I noticed the dimples she had when she smiled, and the golden hair, and then I saw her nose. It was so straight and perfect, like the American dolls, like the Russian doll she had tried to give me when she first arrived.

Corazón chose this moment to turn and smile at me. Her cheeks were rosy from playing, and she was happy to be next to me. “Anna, do you want to have our dolls talk together?”

“I hate you,” I said, and pushed past her to play alone with my Filipina doll in the garden.

I became obsessed with Corazón’s nose. I would lie awake at night and
push at the bridge of my nose from both sides, encouraging it to grow straight. I went so far as to steal a wooden clothespin from Ate Yu and clip my nose together at night. After a few days my nose became sore to the touch.

The evening before a school voice recital, as I secretly watched Corazón’s profile, I ran to the bathroom and looked at my nose sideways until my head hurt from crossing my eyes so much. That night I stayed up as late as I could, pinching my nose harder than the clothespin, using my own hands, alternating hands when one grew tired. I will have a straight nose by morning, I told myself.

In the morning when I ran happily to the mirror, I had a dark red line going down the entire face of my nose. It was still as flat as ever, but bruised and thick from swelling.

“Anna, what has happened to your nose?” my mother gasped at the breakfast table. “You look sick. What will we do about your recital tonight?”

“I bumped into the wall last night,” I explained, eating my breakfast. I caught the knowing looks and the poking elbows my aunts gave each other.

“I think she looks pretty.” Corazón tried to put an arm around me and smoothed out my long braids, but I wriggled my body out until her arm fell away.

That night at the recital I put on my best performance yet. I sang “Bayang Magiliw,” our national anthem, to the rooftops. I pretended I was the loveliest bird. The crowd stood and clapped, but they were laughing as well.

I heard a man in the front row say, “What a voice, but look at that nose. What is wrong with her?”

“Leprosy,” the woman next to him replied.

I heard that all night long, and many years later in my head.

A
S WE GREW
older, my feelings did not change toward Corazón. If anything, I treated her worse. It embarrasses me now to think how much I enjoyed the pranks I played on her. But none were worse than the ones I played after our seventeenth birthday. I still remember the pretty napkins laid out on two long buffet tables. They were peach colored, with embroidered lavender around the edges. Corazón had sewn them. She had learned to sew like the best seamstress in the village.

How did we find the money for such an elaborate party? Well, of course my mother suggested it. She kept on dreaming out loud in front of us. She would say things like “Oh, my girls are growing up. I wish I had enough money to give them a proper party.” She said those things knowing Corazón could not resist.
And when Corazón offered to use her own money, my mother then pretended it would be an embarrassment. “Oh no, I could not allow it. What would people think?”

She did this until Corazón said, “Mama, you can say it is your money. That you have saved up for it.” You see how clever my mother was? She was able to give us an elaborate party and tell the guests that it was from her own purse.

Even so, it was a special evening because it was our coming-out party, our debutante ball. It was a grown-up party, with music and young men. All the parents were invited to come view the possible future daughters-in-law.

Our house was not big enough to hold all the people my mother had invited, so Mama had nagged until my father had built a pavilion with a canvas roof outside in case of rain. There were tiny lanterns the size of apples hanging on wires around the dance floor, which was just the ground swept as clean as possible of dust. Ate Yu had swept all day, while my two aunts laughed and gossiped away.

I had worked and saved for a Western-style gown, and when it came packaged in a brown box from “Stevenson’s of New York,” I could barely breathe. The gown was too long, but Ate Yu helped me to hem it. It was beautiful, powder blue with large puffy sleeves that ended at my elbows. I had purchased matching gloves that stopped at my wrists.

My best friend, Nene Villanueva, was one of the first to arrive. She held my hands as she came through our door. “Oh, Anna,” was all she said.

I shooed her words away playfully with my hands. We peeked through my bedroom window as the young men began to arrive. “Come, let us see our choices.” Many of the young men we had never met. It was my mother who had sent out the invitations, to the nearby schools and to our neighbors. We giggled as each boy came through the door and promptly went into the dance circle to pick up a cup of punch and study the crowd, looking for friends.

“Too tall”—we laughed—“too short, too dark, too pale … oh, look at that one. Is that a boy?”

“I might want to dance with the one in the light blue
barong;
we would match,” I said.

“Oh, and that one with the nice smile.” Nene covered her mouth.

“I have two picked out so far. See that one there with the white
barong?
Look at the way he throws the punch down his throat. And that one, look at those shoulders.” I sighed.

“Huh, what if he throws whiskey down the same way? And the one with the shoulders, I bet he could punch very hard when he is angry.”

“Oh, Nene.” I hugged her.

“Where is Corazón?” Nene smiled; she and Corazón had gotten close at school. They had similar interests in sewing and schoolwork.

I rolled my eyes. “She asked Ate Yu to help her finish the last of her fitting. Papa offered to buy her a dress. And Tita Babelyn says she has enough money to buy all of Stevenson’s, but she still wanted to make her own dress!”