November 2, 2005

• Borders On The Ridiculous

  Prologue

  There are many ways to commit suicide. Some are more eloquent than
  others, I suppose. And I guess it could mean many things, depending on
  where you gre up and all that. You know, like it could be noble and
  shit. Die for your country…. But I don’t think that’s really suicide
  then – I mean, it’s supposed to be for teenagers with emotional
  problems getting rejected when they ask a date out for prom. Or
  veterans that relive war in their heads until the only thing that can
  make the screams stop is a revolver. At least, that’s what the movies
  make it seem like….
  But this isn’t a story about kamikazes or wars. This is a story about my sister.

  Version 1.3: release date 11/11/83

  I made the duck embryo dance on my tongue.
  “Ewwww! Stop it!” Eve laughs. Her pudgy toddler hands slap at my face,
  but it’s good to hear her laugh and I chew the delicacy and grab
  another egg.
  Distracted by a line of chicks that scurry across the dirt, Eve gets up
  from the porch steps and runs after them. I push myself up also, trying
  to keep her in my line of sight but the nanny’s daughter opens the
  screen door.
  “Your yayay wants you,” she sullenly says, and disappears into the house.
  Walking over the threshold into the coolness of my grandmother’s
  parlor, I smell it. Verbena, roses, sage. The witch doctor is here, and
  I turn to sneak to the chicken coop but yayay’s stern voice stops me.
  “Come say hello to your Aunty.” And I press the back of Aunty’s hand to
  my forehead, aware of the dust dissolving with sweat on my skin,
  feeling like a pagan at the feet of these wrinkled, white-haired,
  ageless women.
  Aunty says something in Tagalog and yayay laughs. I sit down on the
  stone floor and wait for whatever candy she’s going to give me. But
  Aunty looks at me with her tiny eyes made huge and bulbous by thick
  glasses. And when she starts to talk, she keeps looking at me, but
  she’s telling my grandmother my illness.
  “You are surrounded by spirits,” Aunty says. “And they protect you.
  That is why you get hit by a truck and live with only a scar on your
  knee.”
  I scratch absent-mindedly at the long scar.
  “You will be protected your entire life. You are dear to them.” And
  then she pauses and takes a sip of water. She glances at yayay, fans
  herself, then looks at me again.
  “But your sister…. she is weaker than you. But stronger. You need to
  take care of her because …. ” and here she breaks off, says something
  in Tagalog and I shake my head, not understanding.
  “While she is young,” Aunty continues. “Evelyn will be easy to watch.
  She adores you now and minds you, but when she’s older…. You can’t
  protect her when she’s older…. God gave you and your sister special
  gifts, and some spirits are jealous of that.”
  I listen with all the gravity of a ten-year-old. Meaning to say, I
  listen, but keep my eyes on the brown paper sack on her lap, waiting
  for candy.
  Her wrinkled hand of brown spots and gold rings reaches into the bag
  and pulls out sweets wrapped in a jubilee of paper. I take them and put
  them in my pocket and run out the front door to find Eve and give her
  some.

  I found her in the chicken coop rubbing chicks on her face.
  “I fed them!” she exclaims when she sees me. But then I hear it – a
  silence that’s foreign in this wooden cave. I look around and all the
  chickens are still, the only movement is their feathers ruffling in the
  breeze. I look at Eve again and ask “What did you feed them?”
  She points at the bag of sand we use to prop the coop door open.

  You know that moment in movies when the main character realizes
  something and his eyes get all huge and he backs away real slowly and
  the music starts to sound kinda suspenseful? It took me years to
  realize that this was that moment, staring at my sister with her baby
  fat, the sunlight glaring off the yellow chicks in her hand and at her
  feet, completely oblivious, surrounded by death.

  We spent our early childhood in the humid jungles of our grandparents’
  farms, in the polluted wilderness of Manilla and motorcycles,
  surrounded by cousins who all called her Baby Eve. And our parents,
  strangers who visited a few months a year, lived and worked in
  different countries, traveling engineers going where the government
  sent them. We saw them as foreigners, really, coming into our house
  with the cold fogs of London or the yellow dust of Nigeria always
  creating a barrier of distrust and abandonment.
  There are pictures of me celebrating birthdays with my cousins and the
  neighborhood kids, playing tag and chasing the dogs that roamed our
  farm. And there are pictures of Eve sitting on the stone floor of the
  kitchen, her legs black with soot and her fingers grabbing hold of her
  dirty toes, looking at the photographer (Mama? Yayay?) with an
  expression of guileless joy. But this picture that someone framed and
  put on the coffee table was taken the day we arrived at San Francisco
  International to live with our parents – illegal aliens for years to
  come but still faithful to the belated ideal of the American Dream.

  “There are so many white people,” Eve had said as she held my hand. A
  couple walked towards us, the woman bent down and hugged Eve. This was
  mammy. She had an anxious happiness to her gestures, a frazzled
  frenetic static that made Eve jumpy and she squeezed my hand. It’s too
  late, I wanted to say to mammy – she’ll never love you like she loves us;  me, yayay, and yoyoy.

  She didn’t talk for a long time. I think she didn’t understand why we
  had to leave Nabua to live in San Jose in a neighborhood where
  neighbors didn’t know each other and the doors were locked during the
  daytime. She didn’t understand, for the longest time, why she couldn’t
  play beyond the boundary of grass, why her kingdom had been reduced to
  a small cement enclosure, why there were no animals.

  When the new baby came along, we moved again.

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  • 1:09 am
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