Chapter 6 - Sweet Haven

SHE was nineteen the year she brought her mother a durable and unforgettable gift: she was pregnant.

Luth was correcting papers in the living room, her bare feet up on a cushion because her cheap shoes pinched. Narita chose the chair opposite the sofa.

“Ma, I need an abortion,” she said, and started to cry.

Luth did not speak. In the silence, Narita went on before she could lose her nerve, telling her about the sore breasts, her bladder bursting in the mornings, the period that had never come, though she had prayerfully pasted a sanitary pad to her underwear for seven mornings running. Deep within her a force had accelerated her heartbeat and invaded her throat with a new and constricting rhythm. She fell silent, and still her mother did not speak. “Look,” she said, sobbing anew, “I have money.” She produced a battered airmail envelope from her purse. There were several thousand pesos in there, culled from her allowance and borrowed from her younger sister, who that year had won a prize in a school painting contest. As the envelope sagged open, Luth turned her face away from the sudden wet-market smell of worn bills. “I have a doctor in mind. I know where to go. Antonia will come with me.”

“What does your boyfriend have to say?” her mother said at last.

“He doesn’t know.”

But she was lying; she had told Zenon the week before, and he had walloped her across the face so hard that she toppled upon the dank bedspread in his rented room, her head hitting the plywood wall with a thud. If she went through with the abortion, he would put both his hands around her throat and choke the life out of her, he’d said, barring the door. In here she would stay until the baby was too big to be extricated without killing her as well. As she’d struggled to get past him, she’d called out for help, once, twice, and the radio in the next room had fallen silent, but none of his housemates had come to her aid.

“I’m going through this alone,” she now sobbed to Luth, and put her arms to her face.

Her mother saw the blue bruises below her wrists. At this, her pain flared into anger. “But why did you have to do this? How could you. Whore. Liar!” Abruptly, she diverted her attention to the fourth-grade quiz papers. She resumed checking them as though her life depended on it, slashing red marks into their dingy surfaces with her pen. “I thought you had reformed. Shameless. That’s all you’ll ever be.”

Her mother issued orders like the plantation overseers of centuries past, and never asked questions. She would never admit her ignorance. Or the possibility that she might be wrong.

“I cannot understand how you allowed this to happen to yourself,” Luth stormed. “It is not the natural course of events, these forays into intimacy.”

Shame checked Narita’s tongue.

“First must come respect. Then, in the fullness of time, hope—and a proposal.”

Her mother had never discussed the relations between men and women before, except to carp about the immorality of the world.

“Then, acceptance,” Luth went on, her voice rising at the word, and Narita caught the ghost of an old excitement she had felt, or dreamed about until it was beyond real.

“Then love. And with the proper understanding between families, marriage.”

The girl waited.

“And after marriage, then and only then: passion!”

“That’s a crock of shit,” Narita said.

Luth gave a profound sigh. The girl knew she had won. She felt neither triumph nor relief.

“You’ll have to go to Cebu for it; I can’t have you visiting a doctor in this city.”

Always this need, thought Narita, to maintain the family image.

“And don’t tell your father. That would only mess things up.”

A COUPLE of days later, Narita packed a change of clothes and bought a couple of tickets on an overnight boat to the next island. Antonia was a silent, judging presence by her side—a small spare girl, hair scissored bluntly at the chin, her eyes focused on an inner landscape. They walked the interminable concrete pier, past crates piled twice the girls’ height, keeping well away from the forklifts. Narita felt waves of disgust from her sister, and wondered how much of it was on account of the abortion to come, and how much was due to her own weakness, her weepiness, the inferior specimen of a man she had chosen for a lover.

Their cots were down in the hold, near the waterline. Sticky orange canvas affairs, never washed or wiped down. The odor of tar, an eternal feature of the docks, made her violently ill, and she clung to the railing where a thousand other hands must have rested. The vessel shuddered away from the pier, and as when she was a little girl and making this journey for the first time, she examined the black ocean, and the froth, green and white in the ship’s lights, which slopped directly beneath her as the bow cleaved the waves. The thrill was in staring into that seductive glass green, envisioning a single, decisive leap into its warmth.

The aging ship had begun life hauling cargo in Japan. The toilets were porcelain trenches in a wet and muddy floor. On the walls, the emergency evacuation instructions were in characters none of the passengers would ever crack; no one had bothered to change them. Dragging herself away from the railing, she stumbled over canvas luggage and great bails of egg noodles. The hallway space had been halved by a row of occupied cots. There were so many people on this vessel; there were too many people in this world. She found her place in the chilly compartment, where, like Antonia, fifty others were already prostrate, closing their senses to the thrum of the motors and the suffocating nearness of fellow humans. A steward went around absently tossing threadbare sheets onto each cot. He held her gaze for a moment, flirting.

That entire night she sat, looking caustically around at the men and women innocent in their sleep, scrutinizing their scaly feet, their worn denims, the precious purses they clutched to their chests. Walkmans soothed the lucky few through the darkness of their dreams.

The creature in her registered as a queasiness in the pit of her stomach. She sucked on one sweet after the next, but as soon as her mouth was empty, gastric juice and sausage garlic arose, grain on grain emerging at the top of her throat, invading her sinuses and nostrils. As it slept, tucked within the membranes of her abdomen, the thing fired bitter chemicals into her bloodstream. Tissues divided, flesh grew, with her every breath. Whose features resided within the bud of its face? It was as though Zenon lay clenched within her, his hands curling into the iron fists she had come to know.

Narita and Antonia stood at last on the concrete of the docks, trying not to show their trepidation. It was the first time they had been unsupervised in Cebu, this hot and sprawling city, so large you had to take a jeepney or a cab to get anywhere important, so affluent despite its beggars and filth. Packed with pretty clothes, double-feature cinemas, muggers, street vendors, bookstores, pickup girls, brand-new cars—and yet small and inferior compared to the unknown monster that was Manila.

They took a taxi from the docks to the abortionist, reading out the address from the slip of paper in Narita’s hand. The office was in a block-long concrete building; there were elevators, and carpeting in the hall. The two of them glided wordlessly past these novelties, their hearts hammering—they had seen so little of the world. The tallest building in Donostia was the Sweethaven library, all of four stories—that and a crumbling bell tower from which lookouts had once scanned the horizon for Moro sails.

The doctor had gained some renown, through the whispered advice of women she helped, her reputation spreading beyond Cebu to the neighboring islands. The sisters found a waiting room that was as cramped and innocuous as a dentist’s clinic—cacti in the window, and a secretary who chattered, her eyes never meeting theirs, as a cross-stitch bouquet emerged beneath her nimble fingers. “Which one of you is the patient?” she said, and a look of embarrassment passed over Antonia’s face.

Narita gave her real name. She felt no shame. She felt as a novice might, on the cusp of a rite of passage. They sat down on the hard green cushions. Antonia fished out an issue of Mod from beneath the corner table and pretended to immerse herself in a fashion spread. Breathe, Narita commanded herself. This would be no worse than a root canal. She’d had a root canal in high school, had fainted, but survived. There was one other patient in the waiting room, a woman in her thirties who examined the two of them critically; stolidly Narita sat, refusing to meet that judgmental gaze. When she turned to check on her sister, she saw that the girl was drawing something on the thick sole of her deck sneaker. It was a fetus, in ballpoint, like a prawn with a domed head. Antonia’s eyes met hers. Idiot, Narita thought.

And then the secretary motioned them in.

The abortionist couldn’t have been very old, but she was as gray as her waiting room, and when Narita tried to smile, nothing registered behind the lenses of her eyeglasses. She asked the young woman if her periods were regular. If she’d had intercourse with anyone in the last three weeks. How often, and how many days, exactly.

There were no lab tests, not even one of those disposable-kit urine examinations that Narita had seen advertised in American magazines. “Well,” the doctor said, shrugging after her recitation, having noted down a few dates. “You are pregnant. Now what do you want us to do about that?”

They wouldn’t let Antonia into the inner room, where all the procedures took place on a rubber-shielded cot. Narita caught her sister’s eye and shook her head, begging her not to leave. The receptionist took Antonia by the arm and pulled her, firmly, back out into the waiting room.

Narita undressed and lay down. On the wall above the cot was a framed poster, a watercolor, daisies and roses in a vase. She shut her eyes, whimpered as the doctor probed her with a couple of gloved fingers slicked with some clammy gel. “I haven’t even touched you yet,” the woman scolded. The fingers became an implement. Narita’s vagina became a channel to mysterious chambers, one following the next, chambers she had never been aware of before, now clamped apart and explored with cold steel.

The doctor left her. She lay on her back, feet in the stirrups, until her nerves began to fray; instruments clinked, water ran in a sink somewhere. She had no real thoughts. It was silent, as though it knew as well—the creature whose heartbeat flickered at the base of her throat. There was no sensation in her gut, no sourness now at the back of her tongue. The secretary came in.

“There are no aberrations in the way your uterus lies,” she said. She spoke in Binisaya. Narita gazed at her, waiting for what she would say next. The woman named a sum of money. It was bigger than they had budgeted—unless they sacrificed the taxi rides, she and Antonia would not have enough money for tickets to a movie theater, where she had planned to rest, for five hours if need be, until it was time to head for the pier and catch the night boat back to Donostia.

“That fee is already cheap,” the secretary said, noting her hesitance.

“I will pay it,” Narita said, adopting Binisaya, too.

The woman handed her a tumbler of water and a small cup of clear plastic. In it, three white pills rolled. There were no blister packs to identify them.

“They’re Tylenols. Two are. The third will make you drowsy.”

“And then?” Narita whispered. “Will I have to pay extra for the anesthesia?”

“They’re all you need. And the antibiotics afterward. It’s a small procedure. Only a blood clot. Don’t worry, she does this all the time.”

Narita began to cry. The assistant gave a quick snort and disappeared behind the curtain. It must have been the no-nonsense manner of the whole procedure—foolishly, she had anticipated a long lecture on proper behavior and birth control, as from a Christian counselling hotline, only face-to-face. She had never quite believed in God, but now she had her doubts—what if he was real, what if she would be found out? All her childhood she had been told that abortions were wrong, but on the wall of the hospital corridor where her pediatrician worked, there were stickers warning against having too many babies: she did not know which side was right. She knew nothing about babies. They were noisy, selfish little nightmares—but these three little pills in the cup, what was she to make of them, what if they were placebos and the assistant had lied? Once she swallowed them, there would be no going back. She had been pragmatic and emotionless, as she had imagined a frontiersman might be, shooting a dog torn apart by a weasel, but she was no frontiersman; she’d never even lived outside Sweethaven; she could never belong among the courageous men and women in the movies and in her books. She was only Narita. She had never made decisions. She was scared of her own red blood. She wanted her mother, she wanted her sister. She wanted to thrust the howling red bundle of her soul into their arms and be rid of it, absolve herself of herself.

The doctor stuck her face around the curtain

“How old are you?” she said. “Twenty, you said? Last week we had a girl in here. Fourteen years old. She didn’t cry, and neither should you.”

When Narita stumbled back into the waiting room, pale and shivering, shirt in disarray, she found her sister blinking back tears of her own. “Oh God, it’s done,” Antonia said. She put an arm around Narita’s shoulders, to steady her.

In the taxi, escaping from that place, Narita told her the truth. “I couldn’t go through with it. I put on my clothes and got out of there. The weird thing is neither of them stopped me.”

“Shit!” Antonia threw her body into the air and landed, hard, on the upholstery, so that the driver checked his rearview mirror in alarm, thinking they’d been rammed. “Stupid girl!” she raged. “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.”

And then they shopped. They ordered the driver to take them to the largest department store he knew. They threw away their money, the contest prizes, months of saving from their allowances. Ripped, cropped tops were in fashion that year; they grabbed a couple each, and a pair of skinny denims for Narita, daring her body to wear them, and funky sneakers, and some ragged, lacy stuff for their hair. Antonia bought some fragrant oil pastels in a wooden case.

They were ravenous, drowning—girlhood’s last gasp, or a frantic attempt to deny what was on its way. Their third sister, their daughter, only the merest flicker at the base of Narita’s throat, a minuscule force, a riptide in her blood.

IN the old days they sent away girls who brought dishonor to their families. The convent girls of Manila were dispatched to their ancestral provinces, while small-town girls languished in thatch-roof huts in the depths of the coconut groves. Wherever one lived, there was always somewhere else more remote, more anonymous. Someplace where a young woman could spend nine months repenting at leisure, gazing at a cheap wall calendar, a freebie from the local rice mill, with Alpine meadows and Norwegian fjords saturated in unbelievable color.

The Pastors did not send her away. When she and Antonia got back from the trip on the overnight boat, Antonia rallied their parents for a whispered conference. Narita said nothing, simply lay down and faced the wall. She had a small cassette tape and a precious collection of cartridges recorded off the only FM station in town. She would listen to them for hours, those Top 20 hits from five or seven years back, songs and deejay ramble that over the years she had come to memorize. She clung to them as one might to a comforting hand.

Her parents had never met Zenon, though many times he had dropped her off at the house, after midnight, sometimes in a tricycle taxi, sometimes aboard a motorcycle he had borrowed from a buddy. They knew she had been seeing someone, but to them he had been no more than a voice and a shadow, smelled more than seen, in the residue of stale cologne and sweaty T-shirt that lingered by the front gate after he had driven off. She had always kept a key ready, but her mother, wise to her ways, would bolt the front door by eleven o’clock. Narita, giggling and cursing, would scale the chicken-wire fence, steal around to the back door, and wait until Antonia, alerted by the rustling and agitation of their dogs, unbarred the door to admit her.

In a sense, Antonia was at fault, too, for Narita’s shameful condition, and scrambled to get back in the good graces of their parents. Narita would listen for her voice, emanating from the kitchen, the master bedroom, the garden, where her words blurred beneath the hiss of the hose.

“To think he would have lived in this house,” she would sneer. “He’s a loser, a gofer. Go fer this, go fer that. He’s one of those pathetic little nobodies on the fringes of the crowd.”

“I thought he ran for the student council,” their father might say.

“He lost. He was last. Eight votes was all he got.”

Inevitably, whatever tale she began about him evolved into invective that grew more and more hysterical as she spoke.

“He talks like a peasant; he mixes up his o’s and u’s. Wears the same clothes for a week.”

“You don’t have to like him, but you could at least respect him. He was your sister’s choice.”

“Oh, stop defending people, Pa. He used to hit her.”

Her righteous anger comforted Narita, like hot chocolate, or a damp cloth pressed to her forehead. Throughout her childhood she had never been ill; not as often or as dramatically as Antonia, and she enjoyed her new status of moral invalid, of refugee.

She lay with relief on the soft, cool bedclothes burned with little holes here and there from her forgotten cigarettes. The sheets still smelled of smoke, an odor that would not disappear until after several launderings. She had taken up smoking because it was cool; she had given it up, cold turkey, for the baby, fearing the wrath of an Old Testament God.

From time to time the phone rang, and she would hear a door slam, her sister’s rapid tread through the living room, and Antonia’s voice, breathless, as she snatched up the receiver. Antonia was mechanical and unfailingly polite as she took wrong numbers and calls from their father’s colleagues, speaking entirely in English, as though front-lining a huge and elegant corporation. A few times, Narita started out of sleep to catch the pleasant sincerity of that voice: “No, Narita’s not here. She’s out of town. I don’t know when she’ll be back.” One afternoon, the words were sibilant and spaced far apart for emphasis: “No, she doesn’t want to talk to you. I’m putting down the phone now.”

She lay in bed, too depressed to rise, and allowed Antonia to protect her. Once, the younger girl asked, “What did he do to you? He’s been all over himself apologizing. Why can’t you entertain him just one time?”

She burst into tears. Her sister did not persist.

She cried off and on for three days. Sitting at the foot of the bed like a temple guard, Antonia watched over her, flipping through an art book from the collection of their father’s father, the glossy color prints glued to the yellowing pages as they’d been in the days before offset printing. Narita kicked at her, hating her for being the pretty one, for taking her looks for granted, for always getting her way. She imagined grabbing the sewing scissors and shearing through the curtain of fine black hair that half-covered her sister’s face until her scalp showed through in patches.

Antonia was enrolled at the College of Fine Arts, to the dismay of Luth: one daughter who was a dropout and another who wanted to paint. Their parents had willed her to become a doctor, but because they could never have paid for that kind of tuition, they hoped she might at least become a nurse. There was a nursing shortage in the States, and the hospitals wanted Filipinos, who were considered diligent and meek and genetically oriented toward nurturance. The summer before, Luth had taken both girls to the College of Nursing to meet the dean herself, who was hefty and imposing and the last person Narita would have cared to be nurtured by.

“My girls are interested—” Luth began, and a knowing smile spread across the dean’s face.

“Why?” she demanded. “Because they want to go to the States?”

A few humiliating minutes later, they were out on the sidewalk, Antonia walking fast, her cheeks flaming, Luth struggling to keep up, Narita jeering to herself at the unexpected development.

“I don’t want to go to the States. I don’t need to go to the States!” Antonia spat.

“You think you are superior; you look down on people who earn an honest living,” said Luth.

“Nurses do a shit job.”

“You cannot say that about Dean Vergara.”

“She’s a bitch!”

Now they whispered, Antonia and Luth, as Narita lay quietly, listening for their voices through wood and the synthetic mattress: Who was to support the child?

“Her?” Antonia exclaimed, giving a short bark of a laugh. “She’s heading to Hollywood. She’s gonna have a grand career. She plans to be a screenwriter.”

“Be serious.”

“I am!”

One afternoon, Antonia came to see her elder sister, her face lit with pride. “I’ve decided,” she said. “I’m going to be a nurse after all. It’ll pay the bills.”

“Shut up,” Narita said, fighting nausea. “I know you. You don’t fool me.”

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” the younger girl said, gently gathering up the sirigwelas pits Narita had dropped to the floor. “I can do it.”

“Go away.” Narita could smell manipulation. Sure enough, the following day, Antonia burst into her room, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“I hate this!” she yelled. “This is the fucking end of my life. A nurse! All I’ll ever be is a fucking nurse!”

All through the summer, Antonia sat humming to herself as her sister napped and wept. “Write anything new?” she would say to the older girl’s swollen face. They knew it was farewell to their long childhood of spy novels and comic books and clandestine trips to the smelly cinemas downtown, of adventure tales scribbled out in twenty minutes flat, of postnuclear war stragglers suddenly emerging in the jungles of Vietnam, of erotic fantasies cribbed from the pulp fiction in Luth’s stash.

Together they observed the old Narita dying slowly, the Narita who was reckless, loud, and brave, who leapt up at the throb of motorcycle engines outside the gate, the Narita who stole out after dinner in tomboy shorts and red geometric earrings to put in a couple of hours slugging beers at some beachside shack with boys who were not strangers and not lovers: just friends of friends who happened to be there for the evening, boys whom she had no reason to fear, boys whose eyes were permanently set on other, prettier girls.

One afternoon in late summer, Antonia brought up Zenon. “He’s gone. I went to his boarding house, but they said he’d taken the boat back to Zamboanga. Flunked totally out of engineering.”

“You went to the boardinghouse?” Narita said thickly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to square it with him. They laughed at me. Thought I was the new girlfriend. I didn’t care.” She kissed her sister. “It’s wonderful. Now he’ll never bother us, and you can come out of hiding, never mind the scandal. Is that the baby? I could have sworn it moved.”

She indicated, with a toss of her head, the camera that sat on the bookshelf. “I’m taking that with me into the delivery room. I’m going to document all the gory details. You’re gonna love me for it.”

“I hate you,” Narita said.