Chapter 5 - Sweet Haven

THE tricycle taxi would have taken her from the airport straight to her parents’ doorstep, but Narita ordered the driver to stop a few blocks away so she could continue on foot through the neighborhood, past wooden frame houses that, after Manila, seemed so faded and small, so sadly provincial.

After the move, she had come back maybe once a year, staying no more than a week at a time, except for two whole months, in between jobs, when Naia was seven. Pet dogs had died, new ones had arrived to take their place. A pretty sort of vine with yellow flowers crept its way over fence posts and eventually took up residence over the garage roof.

Some things had not changed, she thought as she stood at the gate, waiting to see if anyone would notice her. The clutter in the garage had remained, and worsened. It seemed to her that the visible elements of the property could be sharply divided in two. Her mother’s were the yellow flowers and the neatly clipped grass and the orchids that bloomed profusely to one side of the lawn. Her father’s were the musty, oil-stained garage, the rust on the gate, the murky screens that covered the windows, the piles of newspapers and magazines that had fused through the creeping moisture.

As she hovered uncertainly, three muscular, enraged creatures charged around the corner of the house and assaulted the iron grills of the gate, barking and growling madly.

When she turned her gaze toward the garage once more, she realized her mother was watching, her bulk hovering just behind the screen door of the front entrance. It was a workday and yet she was home.

“Call the freaking dogs off!” Narita yelled.

Luth waddled out. She had gained a terrible amount of weight. The mongrels leapt and bounced, batting at her playfully. Luth cursed as their claws bit into the soft flesh of her legs.

Narita did not resist her mother’s embrace. She turned her cheek to be kissed, and winced as Luth’s lips left a smear of wet. The woman smelled of sweat and some other rich unshowered odor. Her body, engulfed in a shapeless print house shift, showed neither curve nor contour, and Narita shuddered at the dead, solid mass of her flesh.

“Naia uses your old room now,” Luth informed her.

“That’s okay.” She hated the tight little voice that emerged from her throat.

As they threaded their way through the junk in the garage, she heard the shuffle of slippered feet. A thin and stooped man who she could not believe was her father appeared in the dimness beyond the screen door. Her parents stood there, just one meter apart, seemingly unaware of each other. Every time she came home she experienced this moment of disbelief: that in spite of their blistering differences they had managed to stay under one roof all this time.

“Hey, Pa,” she said dutifully, squeezing through the door, which a box of papers prevented from opening all the way. He held out his arms to her with affectionate welcoming sounds. She held her breath as she pressed her cheek to his. She would never have guessed, by simply looking at him, how old and malevolent he smelled, of sweat and rot and unwashed shirt, like the forgotten wet gunk between the tiles in a corner of the kitchen counter, like a substance at the base of an old, sealed mayonnaise jar. She pulled away and cast her gaze over the living room. Every available surface held a pile of papers and letter envelopes and books. The piano stool; the music stand on the piano itself; the two chests, one inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the other carved with rustic scenes from old China; the spaces between the knickknacks on the shelves; the top of the coffee table and the space beneath—she had forgotten this aspect of her home. This, the chaos of her childhood, which was simply mirrored in the clutter of her own apartment. As she looked around, incredible exhaustion and despair came over her. The life and habits of all who struggled to make a living through words.

HER first clear memory was of a night when water flowed ceaselessly in a bathroom, and just beneath that sound, the rapid tread of adult feet. Back and forth they went, through the living room, past her bedroom door, to the hall table where the telephone sat, to the bathroom again. A car engine exploded into life, violating the night, and she heard the squeak of metal, as if a weight had been hoisted into the backseat. Her mother groaned, a terrible sound. The car drove away, leaving behind the fragrance of burned gasoline.

There was a long silence that merged with the fuzzy warmth of her pillow.

She awakened hungry, to a desolate house: there was a strange woman in the kitchen, hauling steaming sweet potatoes out of a pot the family never used, and when Narita demanded to know where her mother was, she was told to come and eat.

But she couldn’t—where was her mother? The strange woman wouldn’t tell. Was she in heaven? Her father had told her about that vast, white space where loved ones went when they were old or ill, tired of bearing their mortal flesh. Her mother had often complained of being exhausted all the time. The very notion of heaven made Narita mad with terror.

The strange woman heard her shrieks well enough, but met them with an impassive face. Perhaps she did not understand. Perhaps she was mute. In Narita’s distress it never occurred to her that the woman might have been too shy to attempt English, that indeed there was such a thing as language, as differences in language, which set insurmountable barriers between people.

But it couldn’t have been a day later that she saw her mother again, very tired and pale, covered by a clean-smelling white sheet, in a room of glistening white walls. Her mother lay against a pillowcase of a pristine quality never seen in their home. She smiled at Narita with lips that seemed dry and odd without the color she normally put on every morning. She seemed to hear nothing the little girl had said. It was as though she had left part of herself in that heaven where she’d been.

Narita had no awareness of the journey to this room—she had fallen asleep in the car, as she was in the habit of doing, and had awakened here.

“Take her away,” her mother mouthed, and her father took hold of the child’s hand too firmly for comfort, and guided her out the door. Narita saw that they were in a hallway. It opened out into the atrium of a huge building flooded with blue sunlight from translucent panes set in the high ceiling. The space echoed with the wails of children older than she.

“Look, can you remember?” said her father. “We are in the mission hospital. It was here that, three years ago, you were born.”

“This way, sir,” said a pretty young woman. She wore a white dress and white shoes. A stiff white object with twin points was balanced upon her head. An angel. Father and daughter followed her down another hallway. Then he stopped and hoisted Narita up, awkwardly, his arm cinching her belly. She faced a long glass pane. Her reflection gazed back at her, vague and dark. Then she saw what the room beyond contained. Creatures, no bigger than cats, in their white-and-pink pods. She looked down suspiciously, to where he pointed—one of them was so near she could have examined it with her hand if not for the intervening glass. It had a tiny pig snout. She could see the sharp fringe of its eyelashes and the infinitesimally fine ridges across the back of its curled pink claws.

“Antonia,” said her father. “Your sister.”

Immediately she felt a flaming dislike.

The kitten came to live in a crib next to the bed where her parents slept. Though its mewling and burping filled her with dread, she couldn’t keep away from it. At night, she climbed into her parents’ bed, to keep watch over it, but also in the hope that they would remember her existence. But she was firmly banished to the other room, which she was now to share with the woman whose speech she didn’t understand. The name of this woman was Murcia. She slept on the floor on a petate, a woven mat that, in the mornings, left a grid pattern on her skin. The permanent loamy odor of Murcia merged with the fragrance of strips of buli fiber. It was the hot, dense scent of sharing—the end of Narita’s singleness, the death of her specialness. From that time forth she would be shadowed by someone young and demanding, someone who wanted to see, hold, and taste anything that was hers.

They grew bigger, and she looked after the baby called Antonia, and sometime in that year or perhaps the next or the one after that, she began to think of herself as an adult. She was gainfully employed. Her boss was Murcia, the maid, who washed diapers, scrubbed floors, snipped off tufts of Bermuda grass with a pair of rusty shears. Every morning, her mother and father left for work, which was something terribly serious, because they argued incessantly as they bathed and dressed, and then came home at the end of the day to argue some more about what had been said and decided in those eight unseen hours. But Murcia was quiet, methodical, competent. Narita imitated her. She learned to slice beans and pluck the odd-smelling malunggay leaves off their stems. She foraged in the ditches on the other side of the road for kangkong, and learned to tell the green shoots apart from those of the morning glory vines. She begged for the honor of cooking the day’s rice from scratch. It was a game: Scrub the grains between her palms and fill the pot up with water a little past the second knuckle on her middle finger. Twist the gas tank ring, wrench the burner knob, and then, quickly, quickly, strike a match into life, before the smell of escaping gas overpowered her. Her fingers would fumble with the damp matches until one flared into life. The flames came roaring out of the burner, singeing her fingertips. Antonia, too small and useless for anything, would watch as blue fire tore up the sides of the pot. She had the kind of face that grew expressionless in the midst of rapture.

It was the same house, then as now, an artless half-wood, half-cement block structure, off a narrow road—unpaved for many years—that ended in the ocean. For as long as Narita could remember their home was cluttered, down to the last corner, with the bric-a-brac of years. There were bullfighter and flamenco posters, and a tiki god carved from what their mother said was sandalwood, and a row of seven-inch Scotsmen that she fancied were little girls, too, as their eyes were blue and guileless, and their plaid kilts and white knee socks were like her spanking-new grade-one uniform at the Sweethaven elementary school. There was even a funny silver elephant that Antonia couldn’t stop staring at. It had wheels for feet, and a clock was set into its side. It was a present, their father said, from Ceylon, given by a visiting student of the ministry. Their mother hated it with a passion. It was more than exotic; it was beyond the pale. There were numerous such tokens from all over the world—in those years, on top of his teaching load, their father worked in Sweethaven’s public relations office, where his beautiful English came in handy entertaining the foreign visitors, most especially the VIPs from the funding agencies. And of course their father had traveled. He had earned two degrees, an MA and a PhD, in England and America. They must never forget that. From time to time he was called on to attend something tremendously important called conferences, where his opinion was solicited and published afterward in real books. Their mother had never left the country. She rarely journeyed outside of Donostia, in fact. She needed to stay and mind the house, she told them when asked. But she was proud, very proud of him, and the girls were proud, too. There was no father in the world as clever and as laudable as theirs—if there were other fathers who traveled, they did it as deckhands on cargo ships.

There was always a gap between the Pastors and the world immediately beyond the hibiscus hedge that shielded their lawn from the dust of the road. “Out there,” it was rough and vulgar, filled with sun-blackened boys and girls who stoned the house in the hope of knocking fruit off the mango tree. For years there was a hole in the hedge worn through the passage of limber little bodies. In summer those scruffy children would sneak onto the lawn, grab the split mangoes lying in the grass, and vanish. The Christmas that Narita was seven, she was declared old enough to hand out candy to the children who came to carol. Once, she counted out eight pieces, one for each caroler, as they watched, their eyes huge in their starved and dirty faces. She handed all eight pieces, reveling in her Christian charity, to the smallest boy, and in a flash he was off, grinning, leaving the other seven children to stare at her, closing zombie-like in on the gate, their palms out, that pleading, demanding singsong that beggars make rise from their throats. The selfishness of it, the opportunism of that stunted, crafty child, swamped her. She slid the iron bolt home and dashed back into the house, wailing for her mother.

Antonia was simply terrified of intruding urchins—one thing in particular filled her with horror: the round white scars, like loose change, that speckled their legs and arms, shining through weeks’ worth of grime. Narita only had to say the magic words, “Hala, nuka!” pinching some random spot on the younger girl’s legs, and goose bumps would break out all over Antonia, as though those blemishes had a life of their own, could crawl off their hosts and undulate over dust and floorboards, launching themselves at flesh.

Narita was terrified of the children for a different reason. While Antonia fled shrieking, Narita would peer from her bedroom window and jeer at them as they passed, daring them to pelt the house with a stone or a green mango. This they never did. They would hang their sun-bleached heads and shuffle guiltily past, toward the beach, sometimes swiping a hibiscus blossom just to spite her. She had power over them, as long as she remained in the safety of the house and of her half language, a collection of Binisaya insults that she had picked up at school. If they had turned around and shouted back at her, she would have had no words to reply. If she had called to them in English, they would have mocked her and barraged the house with stones. That was what worried her, each time she peered out from the potted asparagus ferns to taunt them—that her toughness was fake, and that sooner or later she would be found out.

But there was no shortage of language within the confines of home. She discovered her father’s books early on: it seemed that, after his studies abroad, he had diligently shipped back every last book he had ever read or touched. Penguin classics, Life magazines, National Geographic, expurgated bestsellers from the Reader’s Digest, and the anthologies of literature that he relied on for his teaching. Where had all these books come from? How could he have afforded them? He never explained. They simply sat there, like three-dimensional wallpaper. She had awakened from the sleep of infancy to find them already gathering dust. The family shelves were filled by the time she was in preschool, the year he came home with his PhD. That was the year her mother and father began to enshrine and gild the memories of his foreign studies. Perhaps the books had come from secondhand sellers in the various countries he had traveled in. She could not tell which ones he had read and which ones he had always meant to read, or which ones were there to make his friends envious. She could look at anything she wanted, but was forbidden to lend anything out. The collection was sacred. It had to be saved.

ANTONIA’S abandoned room had become a repository, like the rest of the house. Narita set her traveling bag down by the bed and took in the younger woman’s leavings.

All around lay the evidence of Antonia’s brilliant, ever-unfinished enterprises. Sketches, murky with dust, were taped, forgotten, to the walls. There were a couple of drawings of a pretty little girl, one in a summer hat, and Narita supposed the model for both of them had been Naia, though they were so idealized it was hard to tell. There were some drawings of dogs, the family pets, she figured; and even a watercolor of a seascape, with a blue mound of island on the horizon. She thought the island might be Marmol, or Pagong, but the painting was so runny and imprecise she finally decided Antonia had painted it from her imagination, a melding of vacation postcards and the back covers of issues of Reader’s Digest from the 1960s. After an initial flaring of teenage brilliance, Antonia had lapsed into a kind of parlor art trance.

The basted pieces of a dress lay fading on a chair, untouched, it seemed, in the two years that she had been gone. When she peeled back a section of fabric Narita saw a label, Argenti, and understood that Antonia had bought the garment at one of the secondhand stalls at the market, and had tried, vainly, to remodel it. Why had she quit? For want of time? Or at the painful realization of the futility of her project? Where in Donostia would she ever wear a silk dress the color of emeralds? It was a hue that Narita herself had loved, as a girl, but which had been forbidden her, along with peach and pale pink and lilac, mint, garnet and purple, flaming orange and slate gray, lemon yellow and chartreuse, any sort of beige and any sort of white, for none of these colors—no color, in fact—went with her unlovely skin.

IN their childhood they had been known as the black Pastor girl and the white Pastor girl, but this stark distinction had less to do with race than with Binisaya, the language of Donostia, the language they spoke as well as English but that had been supplanted in their classrooms by Tagalog. The Binisaya they spoke was a language that made no compromises, especially not in the delicate matter of beauty. The word itum, for the color black, was the same word used to describe the dark brown skin that more than half the girls possessed. Anything paler than that was described as puti, which meant “white.”

Whatever gradations there might once have been, indigenous words to evoke the color of sand or bark or summer leaves or the luscious promise of certain fruits, had all been lost.

Even now, though she was well into her thirties, the memory hurt. She understood, with the distance of years, that sisters could never be equals, and that no two would ever have the same exact shade of skin. It had simply been her fate to be the darker girl, just as it was Antonia’s to enjoy all the privileges of being pale. She had not been pretty, and it hadn’t been her fault. “But, still!” she thought. “Still, I would have been entitled to something.”

She would never comprehend the imbalance in Luth’s love—protectiveness of the younger daughter, perennial disgust at the elder.

For Narita, transformation was the promise contained in the pots and vials on their mother’s dresser. These she pillaged with a fingertip, her ears ever alert to the sounds coming from the other rooms of the house. The creams and colors were of little use. Dark she remained. She’d sit, confronting the mirror, weeping in fear of punishment as the stolen makeup ran down her cheeks. Her mouth screwed up and her eyes puffed, the tears transforming her visage into something awful, mythic, a creature from the outlands, crunching up stalks of sugarcane and tearing wildcats limb from limb.

Antonia ran squealing around the furniture, pretending her sister was chasing her. Monster! Medusa! She stubbed her toe and tumbled, howling. Narita pinched her viciously, thinking, now Mother will kill me.

She could not recall a time when she did not fear her mother, hate her, feel useless and despised.

Man-hungry, her mother had called her once. Narita, at fifteen, was uncontrollable, one of her teachers had hinted—she was wearing makeup, her best friends appeared to be male, the high school and grade school teachers were in a tizzy over how the elder Pastor daughter might fall.

Man-hungry. The injustice of it lingered, stung. Narita had never allowed any of those boys to touch her. She had liked their company, their levity, the uncomplicated monosyllabic friendships, the occasional dirty joke. That was all.

There were other words her mother liked to use: retrobada, when Narita defended herself; ingrata, when she insisted she had rights; and finally simberguensa, “shameless,” summing up the entire package of her character. She cursed Narita in Spanish, bastard Spanish, overheard by her ancestors from some Creole master over the course of four centuries. In her mother’s mouth, the words became names of demons, black devils. She pronounced these epithets in the guttural accent of the sugarcane town where she’d grown up. As with her fellow schoolteachers, Luth’s English was fluent but accented. She did not care how she sounded. There was no need to mimic the mannered accents of Sweethaven’s professors, the accents from whichever country they had taken their postgraduate degrees. Her colleagues spoke the same way. They understood one another. The pupils listened to their teachers without complaint, without need for anything different.

All throughout their childhood, Luth scolded and clucked as she scraped under beds, dragging out rafts of dust and misplaced storybooks. On Saturdays, as she hung up the wash, her voice jarred the dust motes floating prettily in sunbeams, ruining the delight of morning glory flowers, their delicate fragrance and velvety throats. “Practice your piano,” she would shout at the girls. When they were seven and nine, the unsavory instrument, a varnished mahogany upright, had arrived in a crate with no warning whatsoever. “Surprise!” their father had cried. Soon after that, the lessons began, on windless Sunday afternoons, the teacher drowsing in the rush of air from the Hitachi electric fan, Antonia and Narita banging out Hanon exercises and John Thompson ditties. Sweat pasted their thighs to the vinyl-covered bench. It was always “your piano,” as though they had been personally responsible for the thing. “You are improving your piano,” their mother might say, or else “You will never master your piano unless you practice; don’t you dare look at me that way.”

If they had company for the evening, their mother would pluck white ginger flowers and bird of paradise from the ditch across the road. She would switch off the fluorescent bar and turn on the lamps shaded in filigreed brass or coarse tropical fiber. She would sit one of the girls on the bench and order her to play—“any piece as long as it’s recital”—for the arriving guests to exclaim over.

Neither girl had much passion for the music, but Luth kept both of them from doing housework just the same, because she’d read somewhere that it ruined talented hands. After Murcia took ill and went back to her barrio, none of the new maids could meet Luth’s standards or stand her scolding longer than a fortnight. So she suffered the cooking and cleaning herself. Luth’s sisters thought Narita and Antonia were spoiled, reading all the time. In the Character Education books, little girls were always pictured washing dishes and sweeping floors.

“A girl must be industrious,” the aunts declared. But the aunts were lower class—Luth herself would be the first to say that. While her sisters had college degrees, none of them had studied at Sweethaven, so they had to be content with government jobs in their town. The Pastors enjoyed a certain patrician status, conferred by the shelves of books in their home; no town mayor, no lawyer even, possessed so many books.

As for Narita, the black-skinned one, she fell from grace when she was ten, the year she started combing through her mother’s things. First were the old cosmetics, some already curdled in the heat. She puzzled over the fat, greasy pencils, one white, another the color of the sea before a typhoon broke. Then she dared open the perfumes, spiriting the bottles away from the stifling hot bedroom, releasing their fragrance out beyond the morning glory fence. Once a bottle tipped and spilled, assailing her with an odor of alcohol and soap; she did not recognize the odd name, Chanel No. 5, but knew it had been a gift from her father. She glanced wildly around, in case Luth was watching. She hid the empty bottle deep in her knickknacks drawer. She pilfered loose change from her father’s trouser pockets. She stole his cigarettes, too, and borrowed his lighter; she filched her mother’s cuticle nipper, her tweezers, the marking pen from her bag, a fountain pen from her father’s pocket. The house had so many treasures lying around, and her weekly allowance was a joke.

Antonia took her scratch pads and flipped them open for their mother’s inspection. “Look,” she said in an affronted voice. “Narita’s copying pictures. Here’s Veronica, here’s Wendy, here’s the mermaid from my storybook. She’s a bad girl. She cheats at everything.”

“Never mind,” Luth said tiredly, thinking, So she steals even those.

One afternoon when Narita was fifteen, she came home late and found her mother on the rattan sofa waiting, her eyes gleaming in the twilight. Luth grabbed her daughter’s wrist and sniffed her hair. Exhale, she commanded, and made a face at the sharp fragrance of breath mints, the odor of tobacco underneath. Narita quivered. She had spent an hour behind the Practical Arts building with a boy. There had been no kissing, no skin contact. She was neither beautiful nor outrageous enough for that, and besides, there’d been another girl and two more boys present. Narita could not recall a single thing they had said to one another. As for the fellow she wanted the most, he had never spoken a word. Never smiled, either. Just took long, thoughtful drags on his cigarette, bending, proffering the end of it so she could light her own. His silky black hair had brushed her cheek. She had a thing for long black hair.

Probing her daughter’s satchel, Luth found a packet of Winstons, a butane lighter, an eye shadow compact last seen on her own dresser top, and three joints. The boy had asked her to hold them for him so he could pass the security check unmolested. He was the kind of fellow who had his name and picture in the gate guards’ log: number three on the list of troublemakers. The guards would draw him aside and pat him down for knives before they let him into the compound; leaving, he would be checked for school property. That afternoon, the boy had disappeared as soon as he’d exited the gate, and Narita had held on to his goods in ecstasy. They were so priceless and potent she was sure they would burn a hole through her bag.

Now the joints lay like shriveled bird turds on the crocheted table runner.

Luth leafed in silence through her daughter’s Springback notebooks. She examined the notes scrawled to classmates. She gazed long and hard at the drawings of naked women in ankle-strap shoes that snaked, seventies psychedelic style, halfway up the margins.

“You are not to draw again, you man-hungry whore,” she said.

That week and into the summer Narita lost her allowance. It left her no choice but to lie in bed picking through their mother’s Harlequin paperbacks, glaring as her younger sister self-consciously opened a sketch book and began pecking away at it with a sharp black pencil. Antonia was given a mission: to report to their mother any attempts Narita made to break the no-drawing rule.

“Here,” the younger girl said, more than once, not generous so much as placating. Across the bed, she would toss one of the notebooks she had been using the previous term. She had already sliced out the pages that contained her obedient schoolgirl script.

But Narita was no longer interested.

“I’m getting out of here,” she muttered. “When I’m eighteen, I’m taking all my money and hiring a stud.”

She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She wore only a cropped T-shirt and a tiny pair of panties, and her legs were smooth and powerful. Her long wild hair fell hippie-like about her face, throwing her thin adolescent cheeks into shadow. There was murder in her eyes. “I’ll find myself a tall man with a hairy chest and six-pack abs. He won’t be cheap. I’ll take him for a ride in my red Corvette and then I’ll fuck him.”

Antonia, tart and breastless, stared at her in awe.