Chapter 16 - Sweet Haven

BUT it was unfair. Narita had taken care to remember them, every few months and at birthdays and Christmas, in envelopes stuffed with money, and boxfuls of clothes and toys. Like a secret disease, Naia had sapped her, prevented her from choosing the kind of jobs she would have wanted—she would have liked a nest egg somehow, to rely on while she waited for a good position, one in Makati or Ortigas, to open up. Instead, she had always been a paycheck shy of being turned out of her apartment.

With the years, Antonia became caustic. She had long abandoned all hopes of working abroad; her life, as she wrote Narita, revolved around her surrogate daughter. She was so busy, she admitted, that she had no more time to paint.

Then she was a secretary for one of the Sweethaven administrators, a terrific strain on her; she was by nature such an introvert, and accustomed to being served. She strove to be pleasant and memorize everyone’s names and titles. She made coffee. The determinedly wholesome chatter, the watchful humility that pervaded the culture of Sweethaven—all were a torment.

When she was deemed to have gotten enough education, she started teaching basic humanities courses, following a track that was well beaten by the time her father had first set foot on it thirty years before. It was a life that pleased everyone, a dignified and low-risk life.

And then came the day when she surprised Narita with a phone call at work, saying she was in Manila and could they meet for coffee? The hotel Antonia named was cheap and rather disreputable, in the Ermita district. Narita passed it often, those days when she walked partway to work for the exercise. She had never been inside—she’d marked it as a place where malnourished women in animal-print leotards had profitable sex with their towering Caucasian escorts.

Antonia was seated at a table off the lobby. The younger woman had gained a little more weight, and because her hair had been lightened to an odd tea brown, her complexion seemed a bit dusky, an adjective that would never have applied before. She looked … well, like a schoolteacher who, after the milestone of thirty, had started to let it all go. In a few more years she would be a minor version of their mother.

What was going on? People who worked in Sweethaven didn’t just step into airplanes. They couldn’t afford it, not even the budget fares. She must have been planning this trip for weeks. It occurred to Narita that Antonia might be ill, that she might be in the capital to see some specialist. Her mind leapt, fleetingly, to breast cancer, heart disease.

The mystery was solved in a trice.

“I’m leaving the country,” Antonia declared. “This time it’s for real.”

At this revelation, relief and the old envy swamped Narita, and she realized she would always greet good news from her sister with ill will. She knew that several times Antonia had sent out to various universities in America for brochures on graduate programs. So she had won a scholarship at last. Narita hoped, for her sake, that it was a long-term, generous one.

“Congratulations.” She smiled to cover these shameful thoughts.

Antonia leaned in, as though the people at the next table might be remotely interested in her life, and whispered, “I’m getting married. He’s from Finland. His name’s Lasse Hakkinen.”

Narita’s mouth popped open. “Lasa?” she said.

“I guess.” Antonia grinned self-consciously. “I suppose. I can’t really pronounce it myself.”

Narita sought desperately to conceal her shock. Shock, and something else: a treacherous flicker of satisfaction. A white fiancé was not good news. She hoped her sister would not notice. She knew she was being prejudiced, but she didn’t care.

“How did you meet him?”

“On the Internet. We’ve been corresponding for years.”

“For God’s sake, Antonia, please don’t tell me he’s some old—”

“Oh, he has children,” her sister said, having anticipated the question, it seemed. “He has a handsome son.”

“Oh Jesus. Finland—and I suppose his son’s called, what, Nokia?”

“Urho,” Antonia said pettishly. “It’s a very famous name.”

It was too much: the news, the situation, the very opaqueness of the language that had spawned those strange syllables.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Antonia shrugged. “What good would it do? I knew you would have done your best to discourage us.”

“Why a puti, for God’s sake?”

“Why not?”

“What did Mother say?”

From Antonia’s silence, Narita realized she had come in on the tail end of some dire family drama. She was furious. How could her sister have kept her engagement a secret? How was Naia taking it?

But part of her anger had to do with the sheer surprise of it. Antonia was not a people person. She wasn’t supposed to get married—certainly not before Narita did. That was an accepted fact that went all the way back to their childhoods. Narita was the wicked rebel; Antonia the grim introvert. If the latter confided anything lengthy and intimate, it was to the safety of a diary—increasingly, scathing dialogues with herself. As she learned the formulas for pleasing teachers, collecting As with minimal study and a smile, Antonia curled herself inward, selecting her friends from the books she read and the movies she saw. Even now, her letters, so self-absorbed, were a torture to read.

“Do you love this guy, Antonia?”

The younger woman acted as if she hadn’t heard the question; and perhaps she hadn’t, because it was at that moment that the waiter arrived with Narita’s order and another slice of cake. And when the sisters had settled down once more, Antonia began to talk about other things.

“Father’s been diagnosed with diabetes. His cholesterol levels are way up. To look at him, you’d never suspect it; that’s one benefit of having a skinny frame. Mother’s cholesterol’s up, too, by the way. They’re so stubborn. Won’t exercise. He sits in front of his computer for hours. She vegetates in front of the TV.”

Narita didn’t know what to reply. She refused to feel guilty.

“They’re old, that’s all.”

“They’re ill. That’s that. And they’re expensive.”

“What are you saying?”

“All I know is that one of us had better start earning in foreign currency soon.”

This was too much. Antonia had no right to judge Narita’s life and career, especially since she, wasting her talent, had made so little of hers. Narita very nearly got up to leave, but something—pity, or curiosity—kept her silent and in her chair.

“When are you going?” she managed to say.

Antonia clamped her lips together and averted her gaze to the entrance of the hotel, where a couple had just entered. Narita wished she could honestly say that in that moment her sister looked dreamy and hopeful, walking on air, but her expression was the same one their mother had worn, at cash registers, digging into her purse for stray peso coins as the counter girls waited. She turned to look at the couple that had seemingly caught Antonia’s attention: a little Filipina and a white man, much, much older, holding hands. They were speaking to one another, their words lost in the rumble of street noise that entered the lobby with them. It was plain neither was comfortable with the language they had chosen; it was also plain to Narita that the transaction was temporary, a few hours or a few days at most. But to humor her sister, she said, “There goes another lucky lady, preparing to ship out.”

“Lucky, sure, with that face.”

“You could sketch her on the tablecloth,” Narita quipped, but Antonia wasn’t biting.

“Some get sent back.”

“Some do.”

“In a box.”

“Good God. Why think of those things at this time?”

Anyway, it was the maids in the Middle East, Narita thought distractedly, the Ginza district entertainers, who came back in caskets. The Internet brides, the mail-order women, they did return, eventually, but with their clumsy husbands, their yellow-skinned children in tow. It was amazing what powers of transformation a half-breed toddler wrought. A brown woman accompanying a white man was nothing but a whore. Add a child, and suddenly the union was legit—suddenly he was a devoted husband and she the affluent, deft, and generous wife.

HER ordeal did not end there, for just then the elevator doors opened and out strode a man. He was of average height for a white fellow and was somewhere in his late fifties, which seemed a very unsurprising age for a white fellow in this part of the world. He wore shorts and sandals and an appallingly patterned cotton shirt. At least, she thought, he still has all his hair. What was so alien about his appearance? Meeting a foreigner, she did the usual spot check—pink skin, blue eyes, impossible height. And of course, the nose, but she’d be damned if she admitted to her colleagues, let alone her sister, that she coveted a tiny triangular nose, sharp enough to open mail with.

But the eyes were a safe enough fetish. Few could refute the rarity of blue. Even caustic teenage Antonia, constructing the husband she would have someday, had wanted blue eyes. But what color? Cornflower, Prussian, cobalt? They searched their memories of their Crayola boxes, those pure hues that they had held over the stove, for the thrill of watching them melt. “Gas-flame blue,” Antonia had giggled at last. “Burning bright.”

Lasse Hakkinen stood there in his tallness and his pinkness and in the preciousness of his eyes. He was looking in the wrong direction, toward the entrance, and then he spotted the sisters and came toward their table. He was not smiling. He seemed displeased, actually, or maybe the air-conditioning wasn’t strong enough. Antonia introduced them. Narita shook the sweating hand. She didn’t remember what any of them said. The softness with which her sister spoke seemed forced, and the smile wavered at the corners of her mouth. She realized that Antonia was ashamed. Or was she—didn’t she seem, after all, to relax, to gaze up at her fiancé in bliss?

But as Narita bade them good-bye, Antonia leaned over as if to kiss her sister’s cheek, and whispered, “Oh, darling, I am enjoying, I am enjoying.” She giggled. Narita felt sick.

TWO months later, her visa approved, Antonia flew. She stayed with Narita the week of her departure, as though guilty for having kept her life a secret from her sister for so long. Perhaps she had been hoping for connection, some rekindling of that bond from their childhood, some mention of the teenagers they had been, even. But Narita was at work for the better part of the day, and six days a week at that.

But they did have the mornings together. Narita would awaken at ten, as people who work on newspapers often do, to find that Antonia had laid the table for breakfast and that the rice was warming in the cooker. She would make tea and cook some eggs and garlic sausages, and she did all this professionally and without spilling anything. Narita kept up her token protests about the food, saying she would gain weight, and each time, her sister would chuckle and say, “What’s a couple of pounds?” And then they would sit down to eat. Afterward, the meal cleared, they would linger over more coffee, as their parents had done every Saturday when the two girls were children.

Narita pointed this out, thinking it might draw one of her now-rare smiles, but instead Antonia snorted, “Huh,” sounding exactly like their mother.

“You don’t know what they’ve become,” she said.

OVER the span of a week Narita came to understand this need of Antonia’s to get away, get as far away from the house and Sweethaven and anything to do with being a Pastor. It was a sense of shame, of being past thirty and still living at home, husbandless and without much of an income. She did her part, Narita supposed, paying the utility bills and such, but it was not enough; to be honest, she was not a showpiece anymore. Their cousins on both sides, and many of the Sweethaven kids, were working abroad. They were nurses. They worked in old folks’ homes, they taught school in inner cities where no American teacher cared to go. Antonia had tried to be a nurse, but failed; after that, their mother had dared her to be the artist she had always threatened to become; and at that, too, she had failed.

“I am like a dog,” Luth would brag, “a dog who keeps silent and then, without warning, bites.” Their mother had a way of talking, of spacing her words (with a glint of malice in the eye) so that her victims, powerless to walk away, could only listen for the words that they knew were coming. At last she had informed Antonia, “You live here on sufferance.” Except she said it in Tagalog, to cheapen the younger woman—Nakikitira ka lang dito.

“The fuck with you,” Antonia had screamed at her. “Why don’t you go to America yourself?”

“And then I saw how frightened mother was,” Antonia said. “I saw that for all her bossiness and bullying, that was all she was, an old woman balanced on the Pastor family pedestal, afraid of tipping over.”

“WHAT’S going to happen to Naia?” Antonia said on one of those mornings, and there was such grief and regret in her voice that Narita couldn’t speak, and sat there stirring her coffee and hoping that the moment would soon pass. She thought of the younger woman packing the battered overnight bag she had been carrying at the airport, trying to decide which of her clothes might be worthy of a Finnish summer, knowing at last that whatever choices she made would be irrelevant. Turning a book over and over in her hands, and then a watercolor set that had never been opened, and then an album of photos. Take nothing with you. Leave everything behind.

Naia had been impatient to get to band practice the morning of Antonia’s departure. It was her first year in the band, and although she wasn’t particularly talented on any instrument, they had given her one of the glockenspiels, mainly because she looked so cute in her little white uniform. “Give me a hug,” Antonia had said, and Naia had torn away, frowning, not wanting to be late. She’d set her sights on being a majorette, and perfect attendance at practice helped a great deal.

“I’ll write you a note,” Antonia had promised her, with a sigh.

“You’ll be back in three months!” Naia had snapped, and banged her way out the door. Separation anxiety, Antonia reasoned.

“How could you have deceived her?” Narita said, glad for a chance to pass the buck. “She’s not a child anymore. She would’ve understood.”

“No, she wouldn’t. She’d have given me hell. I had to do all my surfing in secret. She thinks women who marry foreigners are all mail-order brides.”

So did you, at that age, Narita thought, but held her tongue. It was all very strange.

“But she does know about … the Finn?” she said instead.

“She thinks I’m going on a scholarship. It’s better this way. She’ll brag to her friends, and I’ll keep my reputation.” Antonia hunched her shoulders in a sheepish manner. “Lasse and I are soul mates. But no one will ever understand that. They’d all think he was some wife-beating drunk no countrywoman of his would look at. It would break our father’s heart to have that kind of gossip circulating about me.”

“My God, you will marry him.”

“As soon as I’m off the plane. And then I need to file an application for residency. Don’t worry, I’ll come back as soon as I’ve raised the money.”

“And now you’ve left the explaining to Mother.”

“I think it’s time you did the explaining. You are Naia’s mother, after all.”

Narita accepted this rebuke in silence.

Antonia’s fingers closed over hers.

“Narita,” she said. “I cannot tell anyone about this. Until it’s there. Until it’s happened. For luck. Luck. Do you understand?”

TWO years had passed since Antonia left. She had wanted to draft a proper letter to Naia on the flight from Donostia to Manila, but her handbag, with pen and paper, were in the overhead luggage rack. Every change in the sound of the engines had filled her with terror; she hadn’t dared move.

Narita did not know when Antonia had at last summoned up the courage to write the girl, to tell her she was never coming back. She would have played safe, Narita thought—secured the bond between herself and the Finn before cautiously writing home. And when at last she made up her mind, when she knew for sure that the loneliness, the incomprehensible language, the culture of indifference, were all worth it—had she been strong enough to tell Naia outright? Did she send the news in an e-mail, an electronic greeting card, a long scrawled poem? Or had she, unable to shed the all-too-Filipino trait of vacillation, continued to give the girl hope? Narita did not know. How different their lives might have been if she’d come clean, Narita thought. A small note, a true good-bye that Naia could have kept in the bottom of a drawer or in a wallet. Or even a phone call from Narita’s apartment in Manila, when toll charges would not have been an excuse. Closure. “Here,” Narita might have said, picking up the receiver and forcing it into Antonia’s hand. “Tell her now.” But in her own distress at her sister’s leaving, she had been all too eager to fill those last days in ridiculous pursuits. Shopping. Restaurant dinners paid for with her gift checks from work. “This is something you can’t enjoy in Finland.” The confusion of the capital city, the pollution, the murderous buses on EDSA, and Antonia’s frequent embarrassments in the language, Tagalog, which in Sweethaven she had had little occasion to use.

The malls had humbled Antonia, from Shangri-La to Star, as did the scrawny well-turned-out women glimpsed behind the wheel of a late-model car. When Narita tried to explain how everyone in the city lived from paycheck to paycheck, deal to deal, their desires upgraded in proportion to their income, she gave a small lopsided smile, half of superiority, half of disbelief. They went shopping in bazaars for clothing, used and new, and although it was high summer, they found all four seasons and more among the export overruns—cheap, because in that climate few people were interested. The highlight was when Narita dove into a bin and pulled out a pair of sheepskin boots in the younger woman’s size. The clothes were more than mismatched woolen seconds from China and Dri-Fit jackets off the garment mills of Luzon. They were raiments. They had power: they conferred upon Antonia an identity that was rightfully hers.

ON THE transcontinental flight, Antonia did not sleep. She sat in the twilight of the cabin, among the forms of her fellow passengers huddled beneath airline-issue blankets, and a few times thoughts of Naia crossed her mind, but her immediate reality was too exciting to ignore. She looked at the Filipino passengers, and what she felt for them was contempt. It annoyed her that she who had always been respected, an honor student and a teacher and a Pastor, was now the novice among these experienced world travelers. On her left was a seaman bound for the Middle East, on her right a loquacious janitress at a fast-food restaurant. These amiable brown-skinned folk knew the codes of this new world more thoroughly than she did. She gazed at the European passengers, and they frightened her, and fascinated her, and angered her at the same time. You have no idea who I am, she thought. You think I am like these small, hopeful forms that have finally fallen asleep to each side of me; you pass judgment on me because of the features of my face. She thought of the time she and Narita had journeyed together on the night boat to Cebu, and they had scrutinized the slumbering passengers, whispering, “Equus!” “Scabies!” “Mail-order bride!” Now she knew how it felt to be on the other side. Her life of precariousness was only beginning. But no matter what, she was escaping, and she swore to herself she would never, ever forfeit this chance.