Chapter 14 - Sweet Haven

THE BEST part of Narita and Antonia’s childhood was the surfeit of paper in their home. At the start of every summer, their mother would clean out her classroom and take back to the house whatever notebooks the pupils had abandoned in their desks. Their father, too, had tons of unclaimed term papers, perfect for recycling. Without the annoyance of school, they were free to travel wherever their fantasies took them.

There wasn’t much they could do to entertain themselves in summer anyway. There was no tennis, no hiking, no boating, no skateboarding—not that they had the money for any of that. Besides, in that climate, all the outdoorsy things that fantasy American people did were impossible. The burning April sun kept them in their rooms, and in May, the threatening monsoon, combined with the humidity from the ocean, soaked them in sweat. Their father liked to joke that May was the month when no one was worthy of human company.

One year their mother found a treasure in a corner of her classroom. It was a book about the size and thickness of an old Life magazine, and it was called How to Draw the Head. There was a name scrawled in a margin or two; nothing she recognized, but she knew well enough that she had stumbled upon an object of extreme value, an object certain to be missed. The girls begged her to keep it a bit longer, say, a week, before turning it over to the principal’s office, and when she wouldn’t relent, Antonia suggested that they bury it, deep down in their closet, so that their mother would eventually forget.

It was Antonia’s book. In the span of a fortnight, she made the leap from doodler to portrait artist, slouched over the study table, her fingers making minute and patient movements over the paper. She invented faces of people she had never met, chiseled Nordic faces with by-the-numbers proportions.

Sometimes Narita stole through her sister’s sketch pads, wondering who these people were who seemed so genial—on the verge, it seemed, of speaking. The Caucasian faces embarrassed her, being so different from hers and her sister’s and those of the people around them. As there were no suitable boys and girls in the neighborhood, Antonia seemed to be inventing her own friends. The depth of her loneliness was chilling.

Narita wasn’t too bad with a pencil, but she didn’t see the point in making pictures unless they told a story. It was that summer that their paths diverged. Antonia was simply the better artist. To cover her frustration, Narita went swimming at the university pool and hung out at the faculty homes where there were kids her age. She brought home Stephen King paperbacks, cassette tapes to copy. But Antonia lost all interest in these treasures. She drew; Narita read with headphones on. And then, one day, she flipped through a sketch pad Antonia had left lying around and found the creature.

The face was half human, half horse, with broad, flaring nostrils and thick chapped lips. There was a name: Ramon. There was even an arrow pointing from drawing to name. Surely a high school classmate, whom Antonia had never told her about, and this by itself was a revelation: Antonia was getting crushes on real people. No more Ice Cream Soldiers, no more Captain Dwyers. It was a miracle.

Antonia must have realized Narita had been going through her things because, the following day, she called her sister over as if seeking official approval.

“What the hell have you been doing?” Narita said, feigning innocence.

How to Draw the Head was over. The younger girl had broken free of the book’s prescriptions and had drawn six men, one after another, six imperfect men. The first bore a striking resemblance to Humberto Manguerra, the reverend, who was often at the house and who used to sing with Daniel in the men’s glee club. The second looked like their uncle Policarpio, their mother’s younger brother, who’d gotten himself stockaded during Martial Law. The third looked like their father’s father, an elegant man with deep-set eyes that the Pastors maintained were Spanish. And the fourth was unmistakably the meanest security guard at the high school gate, who had never let her through until he had thrust a varnished baton into her schoolbag as though to inspect it.

“Portraits!” Narita said.

Antonia fixed her with a withering look. “No. Templates,” she corrected, in their father’s lecturer voice. “Filipinos are a homogeneous race. There are only a handful of faces in this archipelago. What you think constitutes individuality is just a matter of age, degree of wealth and nutrition, factors impacting the same basic features.” She flipped through the pictures again. “I’ve been practicing. I’ve been looking around. I never take the sketchbook out. I fix the images in my mind. I think I’ve isolated most, if not all.”

She tapped one of the drawings with a pen. “This is maybe the most common. It’s broad in the cheekbones, very Malay, very flat in the nose. It’s a nose like a palm frond laid on its face. It looks like a rowboat turned upside down.” She snickered. “This face, this face isn’t true Filipino. It looks like it came from Amoy a hundred years ago with only a loincloth as baggage. Look at the lips, how the teeth behind push them out, like so. We won’t shade this one. Pale yellow doesn’t translate so well in graphite. Now look at this specimen. It goes with a big belly and a shark’s tooth on a piece of twine. It’s the kind of face you would see paddling a canoe in the South Pacific.”

Narita began to giggle. It was brilliant, all of it. “But they’re not human!”

“Oh, they are. Very lifelike. They’d recognize themselves if they were real.”

She thought she might make a token protest. She was, after all, the family rebel.

“You’ve made them ugly, Antonia, like you weren’t one of them, too.”

But her sister shook her head. “You only think they’re ugly because you can’t accept the way we look. The way you look.”

“How do I look, then?”

“Polynesian?” the girl shrugged. “Negroid?”

Narita’s face turned hot, for her cousins had flung similar insults at her when she was small, and yet their father had taught her, by way of consolation, that there were no ugly people in the world; specifically, that everyone was beautiful regardless of their origin.

“You’re not a scientist,” she shrieked. “You’re a racist. You pick out the most shameful things about a human face and fixate on them. What do you take yourself for, an Americana? You’re only Filipino, Antonia Pastor.”

And she ripped the sketch pad from Antonia’s hands and flung it across the room.

THAT was the summer they followed mixed-race couples down the main street of Donostia, ducking into doorways if the man or woman turned around, and examining the magazines or knickknacks or roast chickens that had caught their attention some moments before. Antonia was working on a new project: a study of the Filipino female face. She was convinced that the average Sweethaven face was inauthentic, diluted with Chinese and Spanish strains. To get to the ultimate face, one had to get down to the ultimate poor: the squatters whose huts sprawled over the swamp that came almost to the dockside, the wives of the sugarcane cutters in the vast plantations beyond the city, even the madwoman who wandered through the marketplace naked but for a skin of filth.

One morning they were at the Philippine National Bank closing out their kiddie savers accounts when a woman swept grandly through the doors. It was high summer, but she wore a long shiny coat of black with a fuchsia lining. Beneath it peeked a red tank top. Her legs were encased in red capris. On her feet were high-heeled black patent leather slides. Her hair looked like it had been washed in artesian well water all her life, including that part of her life spent in whatever land had inspired her to sling on her finery. She tippy-tapped her way to the teller’s booth and somehow one of her stiletto heels caught their mother in the toe, right where an ingrown nail had been making its presence known for weeks.

“Ka-arte, murag si kinsa!” their mother snapped.

“Ikaw nang gabalabag,” the woman retorted.

Their mother didn’t leave it at that. “I have every right to be here,” she said.

“Kinsa ba kang mag-Ingles-Ingles diha,” the woman spat, mocking Luth for speaking English and putting on airs.

“Dried-up old monkey,” Luth said. “A mail-order bride.”

Antonia was staring.

The dried-up monkey face translated well to graphite. It had small eyes and a button nose, not a flat nose. Between that nose and the upper lip of the rather wide mouth was a substantial expanse of face that, Antonia explained, was stiff from the effort of looking superior, giving it a distinctive, simian effect. She thought “mail-order bride” was too good a name to waste, like “Maid in Hong Kong,” but she could not decide which of her facial templates it belonged to. She finally figured out that it could apply to them all. One was not born a mail-order bride. It was a choice, a condition one worked for.

Antonia was fifteen. She could not accept that a woman might send her address and photo to an agency, that a man elsewhere in the world might send letters to that photo, and if the correspondence went well, they might marry and come to live in a better place.

“It’s cheating,” she said.

“Well, who can blame them?” Narita said. “Who wants to be stuck here forever?”

“Would you do the same?” Antonia badgered her. “You once said you would hire a stud to sleep with the moment you turned eighteen. And then you’d run away to the States. What if the studs all wanted a Pontiac? What if you couldn’t raise the airfare? Would you hire yourself out to some old turkey like those women did?”

THEY were beginning to realize that their father had no desire to leave Sweethaven, no matter how hard their mother nagged. Without his ambition, the door to America was closed. That was something else they would have to accept, that they were Filipinos, and access to the places they had been bred for was denied.

They saw the black sateen coat one more time that summer, entering a cheap restaurant escorted by a white man. Their mother had taken them to the seamstress to be measured for new uniforms. Although both of them knew she had no spare change, Antonia begged her for a snack. “Ma, could I have a fruit shake, please, I’m burning,” she whined, and so they entered the restaurant, on the couple’s heels. They followed them to the counter, watching the twosome point to the pans of meat and vegetables behind the glass, and Narita suppressed a deep sense of inferiority, at the reminder that there were people in the world who could eat anything they wanted on a whim. Two women accompanied the couple, of the same slatternly extraction as the girl. Their mindless chatter filled the air. The man was a pink-skinned fellow of Nordic proportions—his companions barely came to his elbow, despite their stiletto heels—and she noticed that he paid for everything they ordered. A spark of mischief appeared in Antonia’s face. The restaurant was quiet except for the hum of a blender from the kitchen. From up in his aerie, the Nordic man rumbled impatiently—“Stop complaining, or we go home.” The dried-up monkey woman winced to her friends, but when she craned her neck to look up at her man, she was all smiles.

“No, no, no, darling, I am not complaining, I am enjoying, I am enjoying,” she said.

THEY were galloping into womanhood, the two of them, smart and wicked and boyless, despite their accomplishments. Narita suspected it was because they hung out together too much, but she couldn’t shake her sister’s clinging need for approval, and she supposed she needed her sister as a sounding board, for her cold-hearted opinion. She worried for Antonia. The girl was clearly talented and so brilliant, but only in the fields that interested her, such as drawing ugly people, and resurrecting dead orchids, and making complicated slipcovers out of scraps of cotton cloth. Narita didn’t dare think what she might grow up into. Her grades were good enough, but Narita couldn’t see her working in an office, getting along with regular people. It wasn’t that she couldn’t speak the vernacular of the place—no, her problem was that she couldn’t bear to listen to it, to anything that was said in it, to the individuals who used it. She was people-proof.

The strangest part was Antonia’s duplicity. She had a pretty face and a responsible smile, and left new acquaintances with the most positive of impressions. She knew, instinctively, the recipe for pleasing people, giving them what they wanted to see. Her success at school poster competitions, for instance—she would begin by choosing a central image, a seedling perhaps. She would add a hopeful child, a man in a hardhat, a wife in a housedress, a factory or an airplane or a ship. A tame dog would materialize by a knee, for cuteness. All faces would be oriented heavenward for emotional impact. Tribal weave-work would be appropriated to fill any inadvertent space. In this way she was always rolling in minor wealth. Not a semester went by when her artist fingers didn’t win her some sort of medal. People Power had come and gone, but if anything, New Society imagery was alive and well, and she had imbibed it all, by osmosis, poring over the art at the back of telephone books and their parents’ old Marcos-era magazines. Everyone thought she was profound, and would move on to greater things.

NARITA had gotten her looks from her mother’s people. She hated her face: it was tolerable only when she grinned. She had spent the entirety of high school grinning at people to win them over. Smiling hurt, but she kept it up. She had realized, the hard way, that when her features relaxed, unguarded, they resolved themselves into a scowl. Her brow was heavy, her lips thick. She looked like a cattle thief or one of those indigents down by the waterfront, scraping the rocks at low tide for mussels. It seemed, while she was growing up, that everyone at Sweethaven was beautiful and refined—and cruel, too, for unless she smiled and spoke out, they always seemed to assume she was stupid.

The cruelest of all was her own sister, whose forays into anthropology had culminated in Narita’s face glaring out one morning from the sketch pad propped on the piano. Narita Tadhana Pastor was a native. She didn’t belong.

SHE supposed the turning point, the moment when she emancipated herself from their childhood, was that March night when, driven mad by the summer heat and the demands of the baby, they fought, and she cut Antonia with a paring knife. It was no ordinary cut—the neat little instrument slashed into Antonia’s palm, severing a tendon, and on top of that she had bled, mightily but without a whimper. Their father had to drive her down to the mission hospital in the middle of the night, and the morning after, he had stripped the seat cover from the passenger side of the car, rolled it into a ball, sealed it into a garbage bag against the dogs, and buried it in a far corner of the yard. No sense in the scavengers finding it.

The hand had required an operation, which healed badly, and only after a very long time. Antonia, quick and impatient and believing herself indestructible, couldn’t keep the bandages dry, insisting, after a couple of days, on looking after the baby, changing her and feeding her and picking her up when she cried. Narita didn’t know how much of this was for dramatic effect and how much was Antonia’s own neurotic belief in her saintly competency.

She wore the bandage a long time. In the pictures taken from those days, she appeared to be wearing a white lace glove as she cradled the baby, a white glove as was the fashion among brides. They traveled to Cebu a couple of times that summer, Antonia and her father, to have the wound looked at by specialists. They assured her that with proper exercise she would regain full use of all her fingers; that the scarring was minor and did not in any way detract from her overall beauty, and that she would be well advised to keep the hand placidly at her side and refrain from broad and unwomanly gestures with it.

It was the hand she used for writing, so the exams she had been ferociously studying for were out of the question. The injury set her back an entire semester. Maybe it was then that she lost her zest for competition, for trying to prove that she was the smartest person in the room.

Narita didn’t know if the two of them could ever have been cleanly and symmetrically healed, for she herself left for Manila that May. There was no Internet—did anyone remember what it was like in those days? There were no DVDs for burning high-resolution documentaries of a baby’s progress, no digital cameras, and no mobile phones. There weren’t even any pagers. If they’d been invented, no one she knew made use of them, not even in Manila. A stranger to the city would have been lucky to find accommodations with a phone line, and that phone would have to be shared with the landlady’s kids, who could cling to the receiver for hours.

So as they stood grimly side by side in one corner of the airport terminal, Narita holding the baby, Antonia cradling her bandaged hand, they knew, without a shadow of doubt, that this was the end, the absolute good-bye. They did not talk. They avoided each other’s eyes. As little girls, they had once exchanged letters over the course of a year, pretending to be two different people, narrating adventures that each one had made up, getting together each evening to review the course of the tale and agree on which personages were to be married, divorced, cuckolded, jailed, or dispatched. Now the thought of writing, with the same humor and the same desperate intensity, seemed repugnantly intimate.

A security guard called an announcement into the terminal. Everything was very loose in that time: no PA system, no metal detectors. The flight to Manila was the event of the day. The plane was ready for boarding. It was time to leave. Narita’s parents were talking, laughing softly to themselves: a rare moment of solidarity.

Their mother said, “Remember when you were small and your father had to leave us for conferences abroad, how you waved and waved at the plane from the wire fence until it had taken off?”

“And I would wave back,” said their father.

“And Antonia would squeal and jump around in my arms,” their mother chuckled.

“You waved a book from the window, so we would know which of the hands was yours.” Narita said. “It was a red book.”

“I don’t remember,” said Antonia, adamant.

“This is for you,” their father said, and handed Narita an object. She looked down. It was a hymnal, bound in red, the kind they sang from at the Presbyterian church. It was so typical of him, such a sentimental thing to do. She held on to it, not wanting to offend him, and Naia twisted around in her arms, trying vainly to see what the flat, red thing was all about.

The security guard called out again. At last she eased the baby into her sister’s arms. She remembered how warm and smooth and damp Naia was, how soft her cheek felt, how precious her skin looked: as pale and fragile as the inner layers of an onion.

At the foot of the stairs, she looked back. Her family had moved to a spot by the terminal wall, almost lost in the confusion of well-wishers flush up against the wire fence, and they were all waving good-bye, Antonia with her bandaged fist, Naia with her jasmine hands.