Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(43)
I remembered the name: Palos Verdes, the pool club where I fell from a slide and hit my head. I knew that we did not own the property. I broke into a sweat and swallowed my spit.
Mama and Norman laughed. She pulled her hair to one side, took her wad of false deeds, and gave it a kiss. He slapped his knees in excitement, wheezed for breath as he laughed, and said, “Mga uto-uto!” Gullible. Ignoramus.
What a relief it was to stop at the school driveway, open the hatchback door, and hop out to my day away from them. What a relief to not have to watch them flatter each other: incubus and succubus rolling around and lurching, tripping over their miseries.
“Hey, do well at school. It’s all we have going for you,” Mama said, filing her nails in the passenger seat. “See you after aerobics class.”
Mama hadn’t had a gym membership since the Gulf War. “Sure. See you.”
“Don’t fuck up school. You lose your spot there and I’ll really go nuts.”
I smirked. “Right.”
School mornings started with a chat in the bathroom or by the lockers. All lies. I told my friends, even the humble and genuine ones who could’ve given me grace or mercy or money, that all was well and that my pet dog was going to the groomer’s and my mama was getting me a pair of Guess jeans and my brother helped me with my homework and I watched last night’s episode of Thank God It’s Sabado. Then once they found me likable and amusing enough, I’d offer to draw them a portrait for ten pesos apiece.
“I can color it with glitter gel and mount it on cardboard,” I said. “You can put it up on your desk or give it to your boyfriend or post it on your locker.”
What an easy sell. Elma and I spent many years drawing people, practicing our craft, the craft I inherited from Papa: design paired with entrepreneurship. With a pack of glitter gel pens, I sketched on cardboard I’d picked from the recycling bin, faces and dresses—all inspired by the many fashion magazines I’d read with Mama—and laminated them with clear packaging tape. Those private school girls belonging to elite families never questioned my rate. If anything, they called it a bargain. I called it lunch.
I did what Mama and Norman were doing: made deals with those who had money and power. But I felt that what I was doing was honest—no cons, with a real tangible product, no forgery, no envelopes passed under the table, no dead birds, and no false deeds.
“Next summer we’ll make it up to Abra, and the rest, as they say, is history. Fuckin’, fucked by the Spaniards and Americans, Filipino history,” I heard Norman say once. “We snag the gubernatorial seat, and damn, that politics money’s gonna taste so good.”
Unlike him, I wasn’t sucking my classmates dry of their money, binding their hands—or mine—with imaginary handcuffs: my mother’s make-believe sales, plus Norman’s wiles and political ruses. I was surviving and, as I remembered Paolo had instructed me to do, being good.
The school bell rang at seven thirty and rang again at noon. My morning sales ensured my afternoon meal. And that meal afforded me a place at a cafeteria table, an in on a conversation about crushes and schoolwork and R-rated movies and shaving legs, a place where every preteen girl should be: away from hunger, isolation, and insecurity. Lunch was my place to be a normal kid again.
After lunch were three more hours of class. English and history were the only subjects I hadn’t nearly failed. With the distractions at home and the lack of light at night, I could never do my homework. With an empty prelunch stomach, I couldn’t concentrate during morning periods. I fared well with my English and history work because they came natural to me: stories. Papa used to tell us stories and made it seem like English was stories about people in other people’s heads, and history was stories about people on earth, dead or alive. One was crafted to tell truth, and the other to tell facts. I understood—no studying at home required.
I admired my English and history teachers. In forty-minute blocks, they warped us out of the mansion, out of the classroom, out of Manila, and out of the Pacific. The English teacher, Ms. Ria, read Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, Poe, and Plath to us. The history teacher, Mr. Santiago, introduced us to José Rizal, a writer and our national hero.
Mr. Santiago sat on the teacher’s desk, his legs dangling and swinging over the front side. He picked up a pen and twirled it with his fingers, and said, “What is this?”
The class said together, “A pen.”
“This is more than just a pen,” he said, smoothing his finger across to the felt tip. “This is a revolution.”
While the rest of the class furrowed their brows, pursed their lips, and scoffed at him, I fixated on the pen. Mr. Santiago’s way of storytelling reminded me of Papa’s. They both turned everyday items—coins, maps, pens—into motifs for fables and epics.
“José Rizal freed our country from Spanish oppressors by writing about the nation’s ills,” he said, picking up and brandishing a book entitled Noli Me Tángere. Touch Me Not. Rizal, born an Ilustrado and educated in Europe like my lolo, wrote books to expose friars and unjust treatment of Filipinos.
“Have you ever heard that phrase ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’? It’s true.”
I uncrossed my arms, leaned forward, and mirrored his facial expression.
He ended the class by saying, “And I think some of you here will one day wield a pen for a good cause, a purpose.”