The Last Karankawas(3)
We look to Maharlika. It’s her child, after all. But she has turned around from her seat in the pew and faces us calmly, half a smile on her face. She props her chin in her hand and waits for something. For us, we realize. To answer.
The girl watches with steady eyes, no longer frantic. She is different from us. In this church, on this day, is when we look the most alike; gathered together, you see our similarities. Our skins the same mixture of brown and gold, our heights the same ranges (from five two down to an eyelash over four feet), the same broad noses. Beneath heavy lids, our dark eyes peer out; when we smile, our cheeks spread like the curves of a heart. Maharlika’s girl has the look of our mixed children—many of us have married American men—but she is darker, more distinct, the skin of her shins marred by scrapes. She looks like a palm tree climber, a jetty jumper. She looks like the child who would challenge our kids to a game of tag and then jeer at them to run faster, to move their goddamn asses why don’t they.
He is blond because … We trail off, trading glances. Because he has always been.
Because this is how he appeared to the people of Cebu, back in the 1800s, some of us chime in. (Is this true? We don’t know. We might be making this up.)
“It’s weird,” Carly says, a six-year-old who has formed a clear opinion that cannot be shifted in the least: The blond child Jesus is weird. The end.
But now Maharlika speaks. “It’s not weird.” She squints at her daughter, shakes her head. “This is our patron saint, Carly. It’s the way it has always been back home.”
“Okay,” Carly says. She shrugs. “Your home is weird then, Mama.”
Maharlika sits back in her pew, the frown still on her face. We do not know what that frown means for her, but we share it, too. For now.
* * *
See us. See: We have put on our best, nothing less will do for Santo Ni?o. Our best means a dress, a long skirt frilled with lace or adorned with rosettes like Betty Villanueva’s. Our best means silk slacks and tops that flutter about Baby Manon-og’s arms, drape over Beeb Macaraeg’s full breasts. Our best means jeans and sweatshirts for Lolo Diaz and Precious Orocio (tomboys, the rest of us hiss, a word more offensive in Tagalog than in English; we don’t concern ourselves with that). And we have done our best—what we can—with this coarse, heavy hair of ours. We have curled it around our faces, pulled it back in prim knots, wound it up in braids or ponytails. Some of us, like Rosie Santos, wear bright scarves to cover scalps stripped clean by chemo. Some of us wear hats because the Black ladies of Galveston wear them to the Baptist churches and we find them dazzling. Some of us have retained the black black black of our youths (and some of us, we won’t say who, are savvy with L’Oréal bottles).
See how Maharlika’s hair, black like ours, is loose around her shoulders. She has a red knit sweater that is too warm for our January; gold glints at her earlobes. See, as we do, without surprise, that she wears men’s khaki slacks. They drape too large around her thighs, and she has rolled them at the cuffs to keep from tripping over them. Recognize, as we do, that they are his.
A year ago, when he finally ran off, he left behind three generations of women—his mother, Maharlika, and the girl—plus his dress clothes and a case full of Vitalis hair tonic bottles. We urged Maharlika to donate them to the church, but she took to dabbing Vitalis on her temples or beneath the fall of hair. When she stopped doing that, she began wearing his clothes: a threadbare undershirt, a necktie dangling between her breasts, too-long socks stretched up to her knees. We pursed our lips when she stumbled into meetings red-eyed, reeking of liquor, her man’s jeans hitched around her waist with a belt.
We should have said nothing, but we could not help ourselves.
You can’t keep doing this, anak, we scolded, narrowing our eyes. What would the Blessed Mother think? The Santo Ni?o? You shame them. You shame us. We said this over and over—we had no sense of the damage we were doing—until one day she crumpled under our voices. She collapsed into a worn-housedress-overlarge-button-down-shirt-and-Crown-Royal-bottle pile on the floor of Marlo Suayan’s rec room. She buried her face in the hem of her dress and cried wounded-animal noises.
The Blessed Mother, she wailed. Iniwan niya ako. Everyone has.
No one has abandoned you, we snapped. We were impatient, frustrated by her grief. Be stronger, we willed upon her. We had overcome worse back home. What was a vanished husband to the streets of Metro Manila, the slums lining the trash mountains we walked past daily? What was a dead mother—who had died comfortable, in an air-conditioned hospital with tile floors and ketamine—to the crunch of broken glass and rocks beneath bare feet? Here in this country we started anew, our work valued, money—more money than we had ever had—sent home to help the ones we left behind, which we could never do if we had stayed. What is American grief and loss compared to Filipino grief and loss? Smaller. Bearable.
We are lucky, we said aloud. Your mother was lucky. You do not know how lucky we are. But she kept sobbing. Everyone was gone, everyone had left her.
So we did, too. We bundled Maharlika into Marlo’s husband’s car, made him drive her home. We did not call to check on her for a week; we planned the song arrangement for the next Santo Ni?o reception instead. We needed the space, we thought, and so did she.
We were selfish.
Later we left messages—Call us back, huh? Anak, we just want you to be well—that she did not return.