My boardmates, when they like to compliment me, always tell
me I don’t look my age. To be 49 and to be around them in an all-girls student
dormitory, they must think me freakish. Or
maybe what makes me uniquely freakish is that I’m pronouncedly lesbian and I have an organization backing me
up, too. So if there’s someone there who thinks I’m some kind of a perv espying
on their young lives, their problem. But no. That’s dirty thinking. Most don’t
care, really; the few who display some interest in my life and in what I do do
forget about ages and sometimes ask: You have someone in Jolo? Because how come
I do not show the least interest in the pretty girls in the dorm. It surprises
me. Like, Ha?
Because most days I feel like a shriveled old woman, a
carton character straight out of Dickens, picking malunggay leaves from the
roadside fence for the fish broth I like so much, chasing after the taho
vendor, using up cans and cans of Alpine evaporated milk boiling egg, boiling
water for a mealie, usually Quaker’s oats dipped in hot milk. The whole point
is, I don’t eat what they eat, and don’t watch what they watch. The soaps on
TV, for instance, and the advice columns on the radio. At 49 going on 50 who
needs advice who needs anyone?
Yesterday Norma took me to dinner and bought copies of my
Roadmap and talking about her daughter approaching mid-30s and looking every
ounce it, she asked, Are you 40 now? She
looked genuinely surprised. Really? You will turn 50??? You look good!!!
I wanted to tell her she should have seen me last month, how
toned I was, when I was doing weights daily, and on a green diet every morning;
when I was going crazy with carpentry
work repairing the badly built bunkhouse I was renting at Baliwasan Chico, the
backyard teeming with greens, camote tops and malunggays and tomatoes growing I
felt like I could beat seven dykes in seven seconds, including Mherz. These
past weeks I have not been feeling tops, the caretaker’s husband cut down the lone
malunggay standing in the yard and the caretaker lied to me, saying someone
else, the neighbor, who actually planted it, cut it. Wives lie to your face and
they think they’re good for it I would like to slap them smack in the face.
I told Norma I am to
vacate the house I am staying in, that’s why I am hauling all my books to
Nico’s office where I hope they will be better kept. I did not tell her I
offended the girls for saying I want my black pail back, if it were a man I am
missing I would look for another man to go with it, but it’s a pail, I need it
everyday, so the house full of mean girls turned cold on me. Not that I cannot
live with the meanness and the cold, I don’t mind that. It’s the economic costs
of coldness that beat me. On top of cutting the malunggay tree, I lost my only
pair of dyke pants courtesy of my nephew the school drop-out who left school
because there was no one to speak to there, he said, not even his teachers. I
felt most privileged he took to talking to me. Now I lost all the good shirts
he gave me and my Warren brief and my Triumph panty and someone turned my stove
on to exhaust the gas I just paid for and so goodbye good broth, goodbye Kitchen, goodbye Boarding
House it was just time to go.
So I started hauling the books to Nico’s office. Now Nico
warned Ryan and Germie might take a book or two home and as he was speaking
Germie was taking home my Mark Twains, which she did not really liked as much as she thought she would, and the Juaniyo Arcellana Sundial
poems. Because those are the terms Nico spelled out. Books are bound to be lost or be borrowed and not returned, and if a book got lost, there
should only be Germie or Ryan who stole them, no one else.
