Certainty
I sang an old love song in front of the moon. the row of bangkas anchored nearby rolled rhythmically as the soft wind carried my voice towards the sea. I may have been off-key, but I was bold, buoyed by moonlight and night breeze. Rowena and I were sitting on the dike. She looked back at the row of stilt houses and murmured something about the neighbours hearing. My hands clapped in time with the tune, hoping she would sing along. Seeing the shy smile on her face stopped me from singing. I swayed my shoulders closer and grazed her knee with my hand. Her eyes widened when I kissed her for the first time. The waves splashed gently against the dike. I saw our future. She was older with deep laugh lines but with the same waistlength black hair and dimpled smile as she’d ever had. Behind us, houses were dark. Some had windows open to let the night breeze in.
After school, I headed to Rowena’s, feet almost tripping over each other. She was watching her two younger siblings while also gutting fresh fish then salting and drying them into buwad. I shadowed her as she wiped her brother’s snot and gave her pregnant mother a long gentle massage. I carried pails of water with her from the community well while her brothers pleaded for ice candy and banana-que. After we stored the newly dried fish, she planted a soft kiss on my cheek.
I was always looking for her. It was a game we’ve played since childhood. I looked for her at the dike where bangkas were moored, but she wasn’t there, and at Manang Marta’s corner store where she did odd jobs in exchange for canned sardines and fresh eggs. I finally found her at the community well doing laundry, pounding dirty clothes with a laundry mallet then dropping them on the mounds of either white, black, or coloured clothes beside her. Old biddies surrounded her. She didn’t talk, but she laughed when they laughed, as if she knew why Mario had left his wife after eight years of marriage, or why Gina needed to stop trying for another child after her third miscarriage. She gasped when she heard how Pedro had leapt out of Nida’s bedroom window when Nida’s father came home. How he limped back to his place with blood and mud congealing on his shins. When she smiled at them, I wanted to break up the camaraderie, take her with me to Barangay Central so we could pick up the Balikbayan box my Aunt Janelle had sent from Vancouver. Suddenly, Manang Marta splashed Rowena with water from her pail. Rowena drenched, looked naked. Her shirt clung to her breasts. As she squeezed the water from her long hair, I saw her belly button, the small space between her thighs, and the outline of her panties under her wet shorts. Behind empty boxes and crates of Tanduay rum and Red Horse beer, I looked around to see if anyone noticed the bulge tenting my basketball shorts.
At night, my fantasies sometimes revolved around the young actresses Mama read in her magazines. Mostly, it was Letty, the main actress from Deep Within Her, an old porno Uncle Edwin showed me when I was thirteen. Letty was tall and blonde, with a coquettishness that made men want to do her every bidding. When I first saw Letty, she was leading a much younger man to her bedroom, wearing a sheer nightie that showed nothing underneath. My uncle believed Letty would teach me how to appreciate women, a comment I was confused about as it contradicted with my Catholic mother’s harsh opinions of how porn and half-naked starlets only teach immorality and godlessness. It was why she avoided entering her brother’s room as he had two large posters of Letty. Uncle Edwin worshipped her, comparing the women he met to what he’d call his “Letty Standard.”
I tried not to think of Rowena when I ran home from seeing her almost naked at the well. As I locked my bedroom door and hid under my blanket, I was already anticipating Letty’s response, imagining my hand fondling her creamy breast and her long hairless legs wrapped around my waist. But as I closed my eyes and bit my mouth, her body transformed from white skin to tanned brown, the colour of ripe tamarind. The breast that had been too full for my hand shrank to a delectable size. In my mind’s eye, I looked down to see Rowena’s dark eyes.
Rowena went to the local public school, which was a twenty-minute walk from her house, while my all-boy’s Catholic high school was an hour away by car. My uncle usually dropped me off and picked me up with his old Toyota Tamaraw, his other pride and joy. That day, before we left for school, I told my uncle not to pick me up as I was going home by myself. He raised his eyebrows at me in suspicion.
“Where are you going?” he asked. Before he lit a cigarette, he looked around to see if either of my parents was coming out of the house.
“Your asthma has been bad lately,” I said. I shifted my backpack from my left shoulder to my right, not looking my uncle in the eyes.
“Where are you going?” He repeated and dropped the half-lit cigarette on the floor, snuffing it out and kicking it towards the middle of the street.
“Candy?” I took out several Halls lemon drops from my bag and offered it to him. He took one then raised his eyebrows again waiting for my answer. Uncle Edwin was willing to do almost anything, a night boat ride out to sea, a motorcycle race, or drinking with the palahubogs until dawn. My parents believed he was squandering his life by not properly finding a wife.
“I’m going to leave school early, maybe jump the fence,” I said.
“Rowena?” He sat on the front of his car.
“I want to pick her up from her school.”
“Your mother is worried.” He lit another cigarette.
“So, you won’t pick me up this afternoon?” I asked, hopeful.
“The janitor is a friend. Tell him I’m your uncle.” He smiled. We both got in. I rolled down my window and turned off the a/c when he started the engine. “It’s nice to be stupid in love at this age,” he said. He sped out of his parking spot and flicked his cigarette butt into a nearby ditch.
“Why is it stupid?”
He laughed.
When I picked up the Balikbayan box that my aunt had sent, the package had fancy chocolates, “I love Canada” t-shirts, several pairs of Nike shoes, and an approval letter for my Canadian Permanent Residency application. Two years ago, without the family knowing, my father had asked my aunt to sponsor me. He could have told us when I went to the city to get tests done, which he made up excuses for, telling my mother it was for an asthma check-up. “His cough lasted for a few months. Don’t you want to be sure?” Upon reading the acceptance letter, my mother smashed the bottle of red wine on the cement floor. Her fist was clenched. Her long apron coming loose. My mother was short, less than five feet, but that night she seemed to tower over my father.
“He’ll go to a good school. Have a guaranteed job. He won’t be like the palahubogs hanging around at Marta’s. He won’t turn out like…” My father quickly looked away from my uncle who was seated on the sofa.
“Me?” My uncle chimed in sarcastically. He got up and the boxes of Ferrero Roche and Godiva chocolates cascaded down to the floor.
“This is good. I promise.” My father pleaded, opening his arms for a hug, but my mother stormed out. The wine pooled around the sides of the Balikbayan box. My first thought was how to tell Rowena.
My uncle left for the city. In the days after, my mother sorted and cleaned the pantry and refrigerator. She avoided my father’s touches, angrily swatting his hands.
A sudden tropical storm destroyed some of the stilt houses in Rowena’s neighbourhood. Waves higher than the dike crashed into thin walls and with indifference carried away personal belongings: photo albums and bibles containing pictures and names of distant relations and long-forgotten ancestors. A stray dog died, dragged by the sea. Rowena’s neighbours fished for their wet clothes and soggy shoes. I cleared shattered bamboos, carried buckets of water so she could scrub the mud off the walls of her family’s wooden house, folded clothes with her, and watched her wash rice for dinner. The semblance of normality helped ease the rigidity in her shoulders and unfurl the furrows knotted in her forehead. Outside, men reanchored broken bangkas to moorings. Despite the drizzling rain, women hung wet clothes to dry. Once everything was in order, as much as one could expect until the next typhoon, we stood on the dike. The once placid sea churned, restless and petulant, dragging and smashing rubble against the dike wall.
I tried to sing Matud Nila, her song, but unwanted words came in a rush, stumbling over themselves, and piling in an uncomfortable heap beside her. “I’ll be back. Soon. I’ll write and send gifts. I promise.” She crossed the little wooden bridge to her house and closed her front door. I could not say what I wanted to say in words I knew, so I stood on the bridge and finally sang the refrain of her song in the hopes that she would understand.
I came back early in the morning, at the time when the fishermen, despite the typhoon the day before, were back from sea. Neighbours opened windows and shouted at children to help with the gutting and salting. I heard the sizzle of pans, the frying of eggs and dried fish. The door opened and Rowena’s oldest brother Jan ignored me. He was eighteen but looked older, burdened by a drunk father who didn’t come home and the weight of feeding a family of six, soon seven. His left pinkie was missing, lost in a boating accident while hauling a school of milkfish.
“May I talk to her?” I pleaded, clutching the thick rope holding the wooden bridge together.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.” He bent down to find a cigarette inside his fishing bag and when he found one, he tucked it behind his right ear. His hair had streaks of orange the colour of burning coals. Sun, salt, and sea wind had made it coarse. Rowena’s pregnant mother came out to sit on the small porch. She was due anytime.
“Hello, po” I greeted.
Rowena’s mother fanned herself with a small cardboard box. The next-door neighbour tossed urine out onto the murky sea. With a spool of rope, Jan checked his nets for rips.
Rowena walked with her girlfriends whenever I picked her up from school, surrounded herself with her younger siblings when I visited, or ignored my chalked messages which I wrote on the dike floor. Her younger brothers threw stones at me. On my way to her house, her neighbours stopped me and rubbed my cheeks as if my luck might transfer to them. They told me I would probably love snow. They babbled about leaving typhoons behind; how poverty would be a thing of the past. I wouldn’t become like the corner store boys, palahubogs, men who live drunk on cheap rum for lack of anything to do, really, for lack of everything.
I was reluctant to pack. My mother even more so. We ignored the big new shiny luggage that could fit three small children in the middle of the living room floor. I still went to school, waking up at dawn to bathe and change into my uniform, taking a jeepney at 7:00 a.m. so I could be on time to sing the national anthem. My mother encouraged my behaviour. She packed my lunches and served me breakfast before leaving. She left the luggage where it was, cleaning and doing her day-to-day chores around it. At night, I pretended to sleep and listened to them argue.
“Kayat ani! Dili ka kasabot?! Canada!”
“He does not want to go! His decision. Dili imo!”
During dinners, my father would describe Vancouver and his sister Janelle’s easy life. “She traveled to Europe,” or “Janelle bought an apartment next to the beach. She said it’s ‘prime real estate.’ Not like here,” or “The university is not far. It’s big; you’d need a day to walk around,” or “You’d learn French. First person in the family to speak French.”
The day I left, I snuck out from the rapidly growing celebration happening outside my house. My father drank with the neighbours. The sun was at its highest and there was no wind. My red and white “I love Canada” T-shirt stuck to me like a second skin. Neighbours warned me I’d get sick or, even worse, ruin my nice clothes. Luko, the town drunk, gave me his broken umbrella.
“Baby’s coming out,” Jan said, guarding the door again.
“I’ll wait.”
“Aren’t you leaving?” he asked.
“I’ll wait.”
We stood in silence on the small porch. Jan tied and untied a length of rope. I hummed her song. For a long while there was silence, then came a series of long primal screams followed by soft mewling.
“Another mouth to feed,” Jan said. The old midwife opened the door. Rowena sat next to her mother, wiping her sweat and tears. Jan dropped the rope and left.
When Rowena came out, she handed me a pail of linens soaked in blood and excrement. We walked to the community well, avoiding each other’s gaze.
“Send chocolates—” Rowena’s next-door neighbour shouted.
“Perfume—” Another shouted.
“Johnny Walker—”
“Bring me with you!” Luko joked after I gave him back his broken umbrella.
Rowena walked ahead as many hands touched my forehead or shook my hand. I had to free myself and run after her, the pail banging on my right knee. When we stopped next to the empty crates of Red Horse beer, I focused on the small mole above her collarbone.
“I promise—” I started.
“Go,” she interrupted.
At the community well, the same women waved at Rowena to hurry along. Dirty laundry suds flowed down to a narrow canal. Laundry mallets pounded on blue jeans. Hands wrung camisoles and dresses dry. Someone howled in laughter. Rowena grabbed her pail, turned her back away from me, and headed towards them. Twirling her long black hair into a tight bun, she squatted next to Manang Marta and started washing the blood off her mother’s soiled clothes.
Photo by Jordan Opel on Unsplash
Read more