Monstress (17 page)

For a day and a half he sat in a cell with other men who looked the way he imagined criminals did, threatening and silent, always watching. “I didn't move. I didn't want to close my eyes. I was scared.” Before they finally let him go, an officer asked if he had learned his lesson. He promised them he had.

Fortunado crossed over to the window, closed the blinds. “Althea?”

“Gone, maybe. I don't know.” From the jail he rushed to Althea's boardinghouse, and the housemother told him she took the first bus back to Wisconsin, where she couldn't mix with men like him.

“You'll find her,” Fortunado said.

Vicente said nothing.

Fortunado saw what looked like rings around Vicente's wrists, red as a burn. “Handcuffs,” Vicente said. “They kept them on the whole time. It feels like they're still on.” He put his hands, palms up, on his lap, unable to make a fist.

“You were brave, Vicente.”

“I was stupid.” He turned and lay on his bed, and told Fortunado to turn off the light on his way out.

Fortunado returned to his room. He sat on his bed with his back against the wall, remembering what he saw: Vicente's eye bruised purple and blue, the gash in his lower lip. And now he could hear Vicente on the other side, turning and breathing as he tried to sleep. Once, those sounds had comforted Fortunado, made him dream of them together, holding and loving each other. But now, all he heard was loneliness, Vicente's and his own. For this, Fortunado stayed awake through the night, and wept for them both.

T
housands filled the street but the human barricade was gone, replaced by squads of police who fended off protesters with batons and shields, and arrested dozens more. Fortunado squeezed Vicente's hand as they moved farther out onto Kearny Street, moving in whatever direction the crowds would allow. “Almost there,” Fortunado shouted, as though a true destination was finally in sight. He tightened his grip, tried to move faster, but from the side a protester rushed by, slamming into them. Fortunado fell.

The asphalt was cold against his palms, and gravel jabbed the back of his neck. Above, the sky was black and starless.

Two girls in Berkeley sweatshirts helped Fortunado to his feet. “You okay?” one asked. “Do you have someone with you?” Fortunado steadied himself, and just as he told her yes, he realized that Vicente was gone.

He could hear his name—
Nado, Nado
—but everywhere Fortunado looked he saw only strangers, hundreds of them, shouting and waving their signs. He forced his way through the crush of bodies, searching for Vicente's voice and face, until he finally reached the other side of the street. He staggered up the front stairs of an apartment building, hoping the higher ground would help him find Vicente, and from the top step he caught the flashing headlights of a white van at the end of Kearny Street. It was the shuttle for the West Oakland Senior Center, and one by one, a line of I-Hotel tenants climbed inside. As the last man boarded, Vicente approached, his feet dragging. From inside the van, tenants beckoned to him, but then Vicente stopped, let the suitcase fall from his hand. He was standing in the same spot where Fortunado had found him weeks before, asking strangers where he was, if they knew the right way home, and Fortunado remembered seeing him from afar, pacing the sidewalk corner, a man stranded on the smallest piece of land.

There was no pacing or panic now, just the stillness of a person taking in the view before him. Vicente looked at Kearny Street, watched police beat down and drag away protestors through the aimless mass, their signs fading and torn, gone. Then, as if he had finally seen enough, Vicente turned away, picked up his suitcase, and stepped into the van. Fortunado imagined him crossing the eight miles of the Bay Bridge, speeding over water as though moving from one country into the next.

The van pulled away slowly, and then it was gone.

Fortunado would make his way to the West Oakland Senior Center later; another shuttle would come. If not, then he would seek temporary shelter somewhere in the city, and find Vicente tomorrow. For now, Fortunado rested on the top step, and across the street, the I-Hotel looked like a silhouette of itself, a darkness against the city. But higher up was a last square of light, and Fortunado remembered leaving his bedside lamp on from the evening before. His was the only window lit, and in a matter of hours, daylight would make it dim and empty as all the others. But night would fall and the room would glow again, until the lamp itself finally died, or until someone turned it off.

L'amour, CA

M
y sister, Isa, speaks English and Tagalog. But one word she could say in many languages:
koigokoro,
beminnen,
mahal,
amor
. “It's the most important thing,” she used to say, “the only thing. L-O-V-E.
Love
.” So when we learned that we would be moving to California, to a city called L'amour, she called it home, the place where we were always meant to be. I believed her.

This was January of 1974, our final days in the Philippines. Isa was sixteen, I was eight, and we were from San Quinez, a small southern village surrounded by sugarcane fields and cassava groves, with a single paved road winding through. Every house was like ours, made of bamboo and nipa and built on stilts, and every neighbor was somehow family. No one was a stranger where we lived.

Like many Filipino men at the time, my father joined the U.S. Navy, and after he had served in Korea and Vietnam, his request for a transfer to America was finally granted. “Our plan from the very beginning,” my father said. My mother stayed silent, rubbing the leaf of a houseplant between her fingers until it ripped. My brother, Darwin, who was twelve, said he didn't care one way or another. But Isa started packing that same day. “L'amour, L'amour,” she went on, like it was the name of a special friend she had that others never would. Friends and neighbors called her haughty and boastful; our oldest cousin called her an immigrant bitch. “
American
bitch,” Isa corrected her, and called our cousin a village peasant who would never know a bigger world. “You're stuck here forever.” As though no place was worse than the one you were from.

This is us on the plane, the day we leave: across the aisle my mother stares ahead, barely blinking, never speaking, and my father rifles through papers, rereading each document as though he can't figure out its meaning. Darwin sleeps next to me, so deeply that I double-check the rise and fall of his chest to make sure he isn't dead. On the other side of me is Isa, and only when she looks at me do I realize I'm crying. She unbuckles my seat belt and lets me sit on her lap, promises me that I'll be fine in L'amour.

We land in San Francisco but we keep moving: as soon as we claim our boxes and bags, we board a shuttle van and head south on the freeway, turn east hours later. I'm lying down for most of the ride, my head on Isa's lap, feeling our speed. We never traveled so quickly or smoothly on the dirt roads back home; I could almost sleep. But suddenly we're slowing, and the driver yawns, “Almost there.” Isa looks confused, then panicked, and when I sit up all I see are endless fields of gray stalks, the miles of freeway we leave behind, and, up ahead, we seem to be driving into a cloud. “Fog again,” the driver says, and down the road, a sign becomes clearer.
WELCOME TO LEMOORE, CA
, it says
,
ENJOY YOUR STAY!

They sound the same—
L'amour,
Lemoore
—but I know they're not. “Lemoore.” I tug at Isa's sleeve. “What's that mean?” She doesn't answer.

We exit the freeway, turn into the Lemoore Naval Air Station. We drive through foggy streets to a section of military housing, passing rows of gray and concrete rectangular houses with low, flat roofs, then down a block that ends in a cul-de-sac. “That's ours,” my father says, and we pull up to a house with a faintly lit doorway, newspaper-covered windows, a grassless yard. We step out, unload our cargo, drag boxes up the driveway to the front door. Most things are too heavy for me to lift, so I stand by the van to guard our belongings. Across the street, a balding blond man mows his dry, yellow lawn. Two houses over, a lady with a shirt that says
RENO!
soaps her car, sprays it down, soaps it again. Then I see a family sitting in folding lawn chairs in a line along the sidewalk, their faces toward the sky. I have never had to
meet
a person before—back home, everyone knew everyone—and now is the time for someone to say
Welcome
or
How are you?
But by the end of the day no one says hello, not even us.

I
hate my house. Too many walls make too many rooms, the hallway is long and dark as a tunnel. Nothing scared me back home, and I always knew where we were: you could hear a person breathe in the next room, and the floor shook when someone ascended the bamboo stairs. Now, brownish-orange carpet mutes our footsteps; I never know when a person is coming or going, who's here and who's gone.

And even our bedroom doors have locks, which we never had before. But my mother fears someone could enter the house through our bedroom windows while she's alone and cooking in the kitchen, so she makes my father reverse the bedroom doorknobs; that way, she can prevent anyone who tries to break in through our rooms from entering the rest of the house. “But I want my lock
inside
my room,” Isa says, and when my father asks why, she says, “Privacy.”

“And what would you be doing in there,” my father says, “that you need to lock us out?” Before Isa can answer, he is kneeling on the floor, unscrewing the knob.

Strangers come each day with heavy cardboard boxes on dollies—a refrigerator one morning, a kitchen table the next. When my father breaks down the box for our new oven, I drag it to the garage and build it again, turn it on its side, and wedge it between the washing machine and the wall. I crawl in, close the flaps. I fit perfectly. Minutes pass and I decide that I'm hiding, so I wait to be found, for someone to call out,
Where are you? Where did he go?
But no one searches, even as the afternoon fades and the garage darkens.

Then someone comes. It's Isa. She has a suitcase in each hand, like she's running away. But they're empty, and she drops them to the ground like trash, pushes them against the wall with her foot. Then she paces from one end of the garage to the other, never seeing me, and stops at the driver's side window of our new, blue Impala. She stares at her reflection and sighs, then rests her forehead against the glass, clasps her hands together below her chin.

When I pray, I pray for us: my parents, Isa, Darwin, and me. Who knows what my sister prays for? When she's finished, she writes something on the window with her finger, looks it over, and hurries back inside. I wait two seconds so I won't be seen, crawl out of the box, and run to the car window, expecting a message from Isa. But all I see is her name, in fancy cursive letters, underlined twice.

I write my name over hers. I do it again and again, until all the dust is gone. Then I crawl back into my box, thinking how funny that Isa never knew I was here, that I still am.

F
inally, we start school. The morning of our first day, Darwin and I are sitting at the kitchen table, eating instant champorado from a packet, a thing I've always hated: rice boiled in chocolate has never made sense to me, and when I say, “We should have left this back there,” Darwin socks me in the arm, tells me to not say things like that in front of our mother. I'm about to jab him in the head with my spoon when suddenly Isa appears in the kitchen, and the sight of her dazzles me: her eyelids are as blue as our toothpaste, her cheeks so pink I think rose petals have melted into her skin. I want to tell her,
You are beautiful!
and I'm about to, but Darwin says, “You look like a hooker,” and when my mother turns from the sink and looks at Isa, I know that trouble is ahead.

She puts her hand on Isa's cheek, wipes off makeup, then rubs it between her fingers as if it were a strange kind of dust. “It's my first day,” Isa says, but my mother takes her apron to Isa's face. “What will people say about you, when they see you like this? Would you do this back home?” She asks more questions, tells Isa that just because we're in Lemoore doesn't mean she can look like any girl on the street, and she's wiping makeup from Isa's face the whole time, until nothing is left. When my mother is done, she steps backwards, leans against the sink. “Go to school,” she tells us. She doesn't walk us to the door. She doesn't say goodbye.

We walk out of the house, down the driveway, and out of the cul-de-sac. The sun fades as the fog ahead thickens, and our windbreakers don't keep us warm. “Walk faster,” Darwin says, blowing on his hands and rubbing them together. We lose him a block later—his school is in another direction—and when he leaves, he just shrugs and says bye, his teeth still chattering. Isa and I go on, holding hands even more tightly now.

Kids crowd the front steps of my school. Isa leads us through the building, down a hallway to my classroom. The door is barely open. We go in. We find rows of empty desks, blank chalkboards, and no teacher in sight. “Maybe we shouldn't be here.”

“No,” Isa says, double-checking the room number, “this is right.” She bends down to fix my collar, promises that everything about this day will be fine, then looks at the clock above the chalkboard beside the American flag. I look too, thinking about the distance between Lemoore and San Quinez, how here it's today and there it's tomorrow, but the arms of the clock don't move, not at all. I don't know how to tell time, but I understand that Isa is late and not ready for today. Her windbreaker looks like a plastic trash bag on her body, her face is smeary and gray.

The bell rings. Isa leaves. Kids come running in and around me to their desks, and finally the teacher appears with a stickpin between her fingers. “Wear this,” she tells me, pinning a name tag shaped like an apple onto my shirt, then leads me to the front of the class. She stands behind me with her hands tight on my shoulders, telling everyone how far I have traveled, and how lucky we are to be together. Then I tell them what my father told us all to say on our first day: “I am very happy to be here.” Two girls giggle and won't stop, and when the teacher asks what's so funny, one says that I said
bery
instead of
very
. So I repeat myself, and now I hear it too.
Bery
.
Bery
. Back home, my English was perfect; here, I can't get it right. I don't speak the rest of the day.

After school, I watch a janitor sweep the hallway while I wait for Isa outside my classroom. When she arrives, she says nothing, doesn't even ask me how I am, or how my day has been. “Let's go home” is all she says, then turns, exits the school. She stays ahead of me the entire way, her legs so long and fast that I can't keep up, and when I almost do, I catch glimpses of her face, her teary forward stare.
Why do you cry, Isa?
I want to ask.
Did they laugh at you, too?
But before I can get a question out, I fall behind again. Half a block separates us by the time we reach our street, and when I'm finally home, Isa is already in her room, door closed and the radio blaring. In the living room, Darwin is lying on the floor in front of the TV, and in the kitchen my mother is staring at a boiling pot, her arms folded over her chest. When I tell them I'm home, they barely nod. So I go back to the garage and crawl into the box, practicing the word
very
over and over until evening, and time for us to eat.

The next day is not much different. All through class I'm silent, and I spend recess lining up pebbles along the bottom of the playground fence. What saves me from tears is knowing that the school day will end, and that Isa will come for me.

Some better days are ahead. Like those afternoons when Isa picks me up wearing school-spirit chains around her neck, or the time she wandered into a picture on the front page of the school newspaper. Once, I even catch her writing
Isa, Class of '75
on the palm of her hand, as if she has always been and will always be a part of them. But when school is over, the autograph pages in her yearbook are empty and white. No one wished her a happy summer, or good luck for the following year. And though her name is listed in the index, my sister is nowhere in the book.

E
arly June. Summer vacation, and the days drag. Isa is always lying on her bed listening to the radio, and the thump of Darwin's basketball is like the ticking of a slow-moving clock. I spend my time by the living room window, watching kids bicycle and roller-skate by, chasing each other down with water pistols. Once, two kids walking a wolf-faced dog stop in front of our house, and just as I'm about to wave, they shout,
“Vietnamese people eat dogs!”
so I yell back,
“We're not Vietnamese people!”
then shut the window and draw the curtains.

Then something happens: one night at dinner, Isa announces that she's been hired as a cashier at Lanes, the diner inside the Naval Station bowling alley. “It's summertime,” she says, “maybe I should work.” My mother says no, but my father says (quietly, like he's embarrassed), “We need the money,” and he allows Isa to take the job on one condition: Darwin and I must accompany her each day, and stay with her until my father comes for us in the evening. “A girl shouldn't be out there alone,” he says. But Isa insists she'll be fine on her own, that nothing is dangerous in Lemoore. “Please let me have this,” she says. When no one answers, she goes to the window above the sink, slides it open. “Tell me what's out there. Tell me what to be afraid of.” She looks like she might cry.

My father tells Isa to take her seat and finish her dinner. Isa sits, arms folded across her chest. I put my hand on Isa's to comfort her, but now I'm wondering: When did she go to the bowling alley? Did she tell me she was leaving, but somehow I forgot?

“Let
go,
” Isa says to me.

The morning Isa starts her job, I find her in the bathroom, trying on her uniform, a mustard-colored bowling shirt with matching slacks, and orange shoes that fail to give her the height she'd hoped for. She checks herself in the mirror, moving her shoulders forward, then back, shifting her waist to the right, to the left. “What do you think,” she asks me. “Do I look like Cheryl Tiegs?”