I sometimes wish there was more to Mary.
I was sitting with Berkis, on the checkered blue linoleum mat that, had my wishes been granted, should have no business being laid there. But I wasn’t there when someone went shopping. What I hate about giving people purchasing power no matter how little: they will buy what they want for you and not what you want for the world of them. Two hand-woven mats, I had insisted, twice or thrice over, no plastic mats, no plastic chairs, and no plastic tables. Mhang was at the other end of the line; I had a full half-hour lecture, both our bills charged to office expense, a conversation which I now recall, she kept on interrupting, or not interrupting, but kept on talking into, because, each time that she broke in she was really on another planet on another tropics, like the fish that flew in from the window and the cat that caught it and released it into the sea, like there was sea under the house, and the sepsis existed only inside my head. Wheredoyouthrow the old linoleum but into the window the garbage is piling up under the houses the heaps of plastics upon heaps of plastics clogging the waterways itwasdifferentdecades agobefore the onslaught of the cellophane when everything you deposit intothesea gets eaten bythesea doesn’tkillthesea--
But tonight was no night to be doing lectures. I had lost the verve, and the nerve; all the misunderstandings, the misapprehensions of the past week, maybe of months upon months, and now here was Berkis lounging, making little commentaries about the repairs the purchases while Mary sat by, playing card games in the computer.
“The linoleum is nice, Shei.”
“Plastic.”
“It’s nice.”
“We had a fight over it.”
“Who?”
“Mhang and I. Siyasammal niyu in dagat, you choke the sea.”
Berkis fell silent, then blurted an alibi. Mary’s eyes went up, stared at me, three, four seconds maybe, then went back to the game at the computer.
For of course it was seawater under the house, not septic tank like I thought it was, and you never know what fattened the fish, but when someone says it’s a miracle that brought the fish flying in through the window over the roof of a neighbour’s house and that it portends good luck, then you have to believe in good luck. And I do. Like I believe everything I see in Jolo. All the magic and all the reality to it. Like all of Mary’s stories.
About how his father razed their house down, for instance, just because he wanted to, on a spur of a moment. He had it poured with gasoline, the day he got drunk and his wife Mary’s mother wouldn’t stop yakking even as he was beating her. If you don’t stop I will burn this house down, he had warned, and off he went to get a liter of gasoline, and Mary, he jumped out of the window into the sea.
Like the night they were arrested for disorderly behaviour and were threatened with jail, the three other dykes, Sara and Thads and El, promising the cops that yes yes maybe they will start behaving now, huun huun maraih mahinang na kami babai, we will conduct ourselves like girls now, just so the cops would let them go home and not be dumped among the inmates. But when they turned to Mary all Mary said was, Nah dih, bihaini na aku, no, I’m already like this, can’t be a sissy now, and the cops, apparently impressed, told him to choose a cell he could fit into and sure enough he chose one he thought he could inhabit, yari na in kaku, this one, this one will do for me.
Most days, I have no arguments against their lives. I just miss my deck back in Davao, the air-conditioned offices, the clean air, except that the new room I very recently moved into now also hangs right above a roadside canal, a detail I missed when looking, and it stinks in the evening, so that now it’s like I have not really left Jolo. In Davao of course there are no fishes flying in through the window, no Marys, no magics, no much reality either. I keep on telling myself just to not think and to not argue against anyone or anything I know, that I only have poetic license, they have shaman powers. The crazy old chick Mhang, for instance, no matter how badly she spells. Bottle women for battered women, Jesus Try for Jesus O. Christ, can one have magic power when one doesn’t have word power? How does she conjure the spirits, do they answer to wrong spellings wrong pronunciations wrong names wrong calls?
I have my fits of jealousy, of course. Like that day I commandeered Mary to write a letter, and the net wouldn’t connect, I almost bashed Mary’s numb skull with the red netbook. Of course, you don’t call Mary numbskull to his face, she will smash your face and break your skull. I was so annoyed because he was not even reading the letter in his mailbox, he had his right hand on the keyboard and his left hand on the phone texting all his girlfriends announcing that he was at Pluto Restaurant trying to get a connection to email a letter to a Melikan in Canada who wanted very much to see him and he cannot get through because of poor internet connection in the fucking island. I had hissed at his face. What-are-you-a-robot-you-want-me-to-dictate-to-you-word-for- word-what-you-are-to-write-what-am-I-your-babysitter-your-secretary-your-doting-mother? He blanked out, then logged out on me. Pulled Mhang’s chair close to his side like Mhang was his favourite girlfriend favourite nanny favourite auntie favourite English teacher. We walked home divided, the mails all unsent, he and Mhang arms intertwined, I tarrying behind, thinking of taking the boat to Zamboanga, if only there was money. In the evening I had smashed Mhang’s phone against the floor.
That next day and the day after next Mary did not appear for work. And Mhang informed me. “He said to me that I should not be afraid of you, that why, am I afraid of you? I shouldn’t be.”
“Ya. Like all you have to do is ask him and he would shoot me.”
“We wouldn’t do that.”
“You never know what anyone can do around here. That wasn’t the first time he wanted me mauled.”
But Mary he does know how to make it up and now, three times a week he files a complaint to Mhang, Mapasu tuud in u, tiluun kita patandawan hambuuk adlaw ini. So hot-tempered indeed she’s gonna throw me into the window one of these days.
I had cut him and flung his hand away for daring to dislodge my Bob Dylan tape, which I was playing in the cassette, the morning I got mad at Aisa for misconstructing me. Dih kami magsulut ha hangka bay magpatay kami. We cannot live under one roof we will end up killing each other.
I was to accompany Aisa to school having convinced her she should get more of high school, but before we left the house she had said something that sent me bonkers. “Kah Sherfa, please be kind to my teacher.”
It was ten o’ clock and there was no water I hadn’t even bathed and Mary was still sleeping sprawled like a royal rug on the linoleum upstairs sans pillow sans blanket. I left Aisa at the doorway and went up stomping, raising hell for all the world to hear.
“So I was unkind to your teacher what did I do what??? The only unkind thing I did at your rotten school was to ask you to pick up the plastic trash you dropped at our feet and I would have picked it up myself had you let me and now I am unkind to your teacher even before I could meet her because some educated jerk there looked at me and I didn’t smile up to thank him??? Why, should I have kissed his ass unzipped his pants???? Should I have made him coffee and talked about the goddamn rascals infesting his classroom lining up the hallway whatwhatwhat????!!!"
She went home stricken, the five hundred enrollment money stuck inside her pocket, strips of bandaids patching her forehead. Just days back she was mauled by a gang of lesbians, a fag and a boy. None of her friends helped, they just looked on, she reported. And Mary, when told, just shrugged. “We get mauled all the time. What did she do? Must have provoked it.” And as though that wasn’t enough he blamed Aisa, too, for provoking me. “Dupang kaw isab, if you weren’t stupid, why did you have to tell Kah Sherfa how she should conduct herself? Why didn’t you just go to school with her straight!?!"
“Like it was Aisa’s fault.”
“So it was my fault, Mhang?”
Mhang has a way of demolishing your one-year lecture on lesbianism with a prayer or an analysis, her own take at conflict mediation. “Hatia niyu na ba. Maas budjang ba. Maraih simud ha u niya in saytan piyaig ku ha u hi Mherz.” Be patient with her, old maid, you know. Maybe the devil I exorcised from Mary's head moved residence into her head.”
They didn’t bother to get lesbian labor to do the roof, could not bother themselves with it now that the money has been sent. A month back the house was given up for condemned, decrepit, the roof leaked nobody was renting it. Now the owner her sister was screaming like it was prize property. “I will not have those tomboys doing the roof!!! If you want to practice carpentry do it somewhere else not on my property!!!” They readied the camera, just the same, and took some shots of Ridz holding the hammer. For funding agency purposes. I was furious. “The fucking FA does not give a fuck about that!!! You just fucking grow some spine around here and fucking do something without the damn camera and without those damn FAs congratulating you, you fucking understand that???!!!”
They dispersed confused. Someone was squealing, reporting to Kah Sherfa every move every thought they make. At the end of the day the carpenter got the pay, and Mary, for hauling the five sheets of galvanized iron on his head from the roadside to the house and frightened Ridz with his panting Ridz thought he was going to have an asthma attack, was not paid.
Now that's lesbian labor I say. But nobody takes heed about what crazy old tomboys say about Mary.
So one sunny day before departure time, after Aisa had been enrolled and after the letter had been abandoned for unsent, Mary squatted by askance, while Bob Dylan ripped the air yelling and howling about being stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.
Well, Shakespeare, he's in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells,
Speaking to this French girl,
Who says she knows me well
“Favourite song mo?"
