The Last Karankawas(5)
Viva Santo Ni?o! one of our husbands shouts, and we turn toward the sound, obedient, accepting.
Viva! we call out.
Mabuhay ang hari ng mga hari!
“Mabuhay!” That is Carly, clapping her hands with joy. Maharlika says nothing; she does not look at us. If she had, we could have told her we understand that she never wanted this role of single parent. In this place we pretend is the Philippines but really is just a steaming island off the American coast with palm trees that are not ours and oyster-shell gravel that is not ours and brown-skinned people who are not us. We were wrong to think that if she had just been stronger, she could learn to love all of it.
Maharlika shoulders her purse, lifts Carly to her hip, and leaves the parish hall without a glance back. We do not try to stop her. We wouldn’t know how.
* * *
Some other things we don’t know, at least not yet:
That in two weeks, Precious Orocio will be deported because she lost her job and let her papers lapse. Not an uncommon story, but then she ran a red light and was discovered. Her tears in the airport will ruin us. A month later, Betty Villanueva will follow her back to Manila—her papers were fine, but her father was sick. We are nothing if not dutiful.
That tomorrow, Carly will practice the tinikling with her best friend, a boy—Mexican—named Jess. She will teach him to pound the bamboo poles (they use twigs from the live oak on Dolphin Avenue) in time to the clap-clap-CRASH clap-clap-CRASH of the song she sings. She will tap her foot in the space between the sticks as if testing the water in a bath. She will make him practice with her every day after school when he doesn’t have Little League.
That two months from now, before her night shift begins, Maharlika will kiss Carly goodbye, lift her mother-in-law’s hand to her forehead in blessing, and head out the door for work. Her mother-in-law will find a note, and she and the child will never see her again. Some of us will hear, through our relatives on Mindoro, that Maharlika bought a secret plane ticket home. Carly will grow up under her grandmother’s care—learn Mexican and American ways, learn half a history. But she will master the tinikling a month after her mother leaves, the step-shuffle-twirl without smashing her foot between the twigs; she will laugh so brightly that Jess will laugh, too, not understanding what she has gained.
That eighteen years from now, Hurricane Ike will sweep through Galveston, snatching palm trees up by the roots, sending water and refuse from the bay into our homes and the wooden floor of Sacred Heart. We will move the feast day and fiesta to a church in south Houston, one with reliable AC and cushions on all the kneelers. Sacred Heart will be renovated, revitalized, but the Santo Ni?o fiesta will never come back to it.
That twenty-one years from now, one of us will receive a letter from Precious Orocio, who thinks she saw Maharlika walking into the church in San Teodoro. She can’t be sure, Precious, but she would swear it was Maharlika by the man’s barong she wore. And her bearing, of course—like something queenly holding her up. Her hair had gone white, ran loose around her thin shoulders. She raised her chin as she entered the room, Precious wrote. When people called out Kumusta ka na? she looked right through them.
IGNITION
Carly
She isn’t sure what triggers it, why her bubbling anger geysers up and out. At first, the fight is all noise, Carly screaming I’m going and you can’t stop me, her grandmother hollering back You’re not going anywhere, me entiendes, their voices spiraling in a shrill kind of harmony. Yes, I am. No, you’re not. But then something cracks behind Carly’s eyes. She leans in close—so close she spots a streak of Pond’s cold cream still white on Magdalena’s jaw, breathes in the Vicks Magdalena smears nightly on her chest, its sharp smell pricking her lungs—and hisses, Do not tell me what I can or can’t do.
For that one electric moment, Carly feels infinite. Flames ignite deep in her breast, the words spill like golden smoke between her lips: a woman, she is a woman now, after all, and will claim her own power. But no sooner have the words left her lips than they are replaced with a gasp, her grandmother’s palm popping hard against her mouth, quick as lightning from a blue Galveston sky.
It isn’t so much the force of the smack but the shock that snaps Carly’s head back. Magdalena has not struck her in three years, not since she was twelve, grounded from going with the other junior high cheerleaders to Moody Gardens for the day because she made a C on a social studies test, and she stomped her foot in the doorway of Magdalena’s bedroom, declaring My real mom would love me enough to let me go. The slap she earned that day still reverberates in her muscles on occasion—when they drive past the apartments on Holiday where she knows her parents had lived but Magdalena looks purposefully straight ahead, or when she catches Mrs. Suayan or any of the other Filipina ladies at Sacred Heart watching her during Mass with faces like scales, weighing her against the woman they once knew but of whom Carly has only cobweb shreds of memory. But this has nothing to do with her mother, not this time.
She simply wants to borrow the car and drive herself to Katy, where Jess is playing in a summer baseball league his mom insisted he do to keep his skills up during off-season. And maybe she only has a learner’s permit, but hasn’t she been driving for nearly a year, all over the island and even into the Bay Area a couple times? Can’t she be trusted with this quick trip up for the morning game, bringing the car back before Magdalena’s Saturday shift at the school library is over? She makes her case, her voice calm—that won’t last long—and she smiles hopefully. So can I, Grandma? But her grandmother snorts. A game? So vas a ir an hour away, through the city, for a game? Because you can’t watch Jesusmaría play any day of the week right here? Laughs and shakes her head, making Carly seethe with the injustice of it, and then the fight, their voices rising and falling, the slap that ends it.