In the Country (24 page)

The old girl's husband is in luck. He knows someone. A colleague at the K School, who's run the marathon the past five years, has to travel to Berlin this April. “He says his number's mine on the condition that I run a seven-minute mile.” The old girl's husband laughs. “Better start calling me Tim Brown, just in case.” As if that's all the training it takes.

Drive

In Chestnut Hill, the old girl's husband has a recurring nightmare. He shoots upright, glazed with sweat.
I dreamed I'd been hit.
He grabs his chest, panting.

He never dreamed this in Manila, or in Concepcion, or anywhere they've lived—just here, in their master bedroom in the house on Commonwealth.

The first time, the old girl worried that it was his heart. A real-life chest pain, manifesting in his dreams as a bullet. Assassination, for the old girl's husband, was once a sort of pet obsession. He'd bring it up even as a small-town mayor. Girls who never grew up around congressmen and senators might find this morbid and death-wishy, but the old girl remembers how her father, uncles, and grandfathers all had the same casual bravado about the topic. As if everyone who was
any
one had to be ready for that. Back then, she did not really think it possible for her husband to die that way. He seemed too full of himself, not serious enough. His bulletproof vest, the armored car in which he rode through the sleepy streets of Concepcion, struck her as excess, like an alarm system on a toy house.

But in Boston, it's a drunk driver he dreams of. “Some college frat boy, coming from a party,” he says, looking terrified.

“Since when do frat boys scare you?” The old girl brings him a face towel and a glass of water. At Ateneo, he was an Upsilon Sigma Phi brother himself.

But the old girl understands. The banality of dying in a car, because of someone's carelessness, is what terrifies her husband. Oblivion. Obscurity. That he should meet his end because somebody failed to think of him, rather than thinking too much of him. “Did they ask after me?” he wanted to know, throughout his years in prison. “Does anyone remember my name?”

“You've read too much Filipino history,” the old girl tells him now. A steady diet of priests on garrotes, of patriots falling to Spanish Guardia Civil rifles, has warped him. Between the two times he cheated death—sentenced to a firing squad in Manila; then furloughed to Dallas for emergency heart surgery—there's no question which one he'd pick. “You've got to mix it up a bit,” she tells him. “Go look at Kit's U.S. history book. Those heroes died of old age. Some weren't even heroes till old age, if I remember right.”

Newlyweds

Speaking of omens, in Manila, at the wedding, they released a dove from its gold cage. It thought better of flying away, alighting on the old girl's head instead. “
Loko mo,
that's a good sign,” said her father, as the old girl tried to shoo it off, grateful to have a veil and gloves on. “It means power, victory.”

“Just like we thought,” her mother said. “The groom's going to be President one day.”

“It landed on the bride's head,” a niece said. “Doesn't that mean
she
'll be President?”

Everyone laughed, and no one harder than the old girl herself—the quiet, simple bride who'd just dropped out of law school for her MRS degree.

“So it did,” said the priest. “But
she
and
he
are one now.”

He was the old girl's first, and only.

Something about their wedding night recalled their first meeting, at nine years old. He kept exclaiming, “Wowowie!” or “Yehey!” in bed, as if her body was the county fair, and he a child delighted to find so many wonders in one place. Thank God. What would the old girl have done with a suave or more serious lover?

She has never worried about other women. If she had to guess, she thinks there may have been flings, enough to keep up with his Congress buddies, the way men smoke cigars at baptisms or drink Johnnie Black because
men do.
But never a real love affair. He seems too restless, too easily distracted, to maintain a mistress. Pity the half-dressed nymph who tries to stroke his shoulders, coax him back to bed while he's glued to Ted Koppel's
Nightline
.

Campaigning

Wives she has known exact all kinds of things from their politician husbands in exchange for another year, another term, one more campaign. Cars, swimming pools, a house. A vacation, another baby, no more babies. And the holy grail of Congressbride or Senate-wife concessions: the promise that this campaign will be the last.
Where is the mountaintop, and why does it keep moving?
they wonder.
When can we rest a little, pitch a tent, enjoy the view?
Those questions, thinks the old girl, only give a brand-new Congressbride “high blood.” The sooner she can learn that, for her husband, the climb
is
the mountaintop, the campaign nearly as sweet as the office itself, the easier her life will be.
By
idea
he means
decision, she told a young, naïve Congressbride once.
He's not asking for your opinion but your help.

Follow-through is not these men's problem. Their problem is forethought.

But not, it should be said, fore
talk.
While the other marathoners eat, sleep, and breathe the marathon, the old girl's husband is busy
talking
the marathon. “The men's field is deep this year,” he tells the kids at dinner, as if he's followed a shallower men's field for years. “You've got Greg, for instance, wanting to redeem himself from the disaster of 'eighty-one…” Greg and Bill and Budd and Tom and Benji—as if he's known these guys for years, as if they're friends. And who knows? If he meets them, someday, they might be.

He can talk, the old girl's husband—
susmariosep,
how he can talk! Give him an audience—of one or one million, passive or ill-tempered or smitten or skeptical, it doesn't matter—he'll go all day. The old girl sometimes tunes out during his daily speechifying—runs through grocery lists, the children's schedules, a convent-school memory here, a question for her weekly phone call with her mother there—and when she tunes back in, contrite over what seems a longer-than-respectful span of time for a wife not to listen to her husband, he won't have even noticed; the old girl's husband will
still be talking.

After she turns off the TV and sends Kit to bed, the old girl smells McDonald's grease from the study. He must have convinced Bitbit or Ben to take him to the drive-thru after dinner. Through the rustle of wax paper she can hear her husband on the phone.

“I'll wear the flag,” he says. “Either Bitbit will sew a cape out of it for me, or else I'll find blue shoes, red socks, a yellow headband. What I'm asking is, beyond the photo, isn't there a number twenty-six somewhere in our history that I can use? Some patriot that Spain locked up for twenty-six years? Twenty-six POWs tortured by the Japanese? Twenty-six international human-rights protocols violated since 1972? A symbol would be nice, beyond
He ran the marathon.
The more recent the better. Find that for me, would you?”

Bitbit

Bitbit, her eldest daughter, is twenty-seven. Bitbit's beau proposed to her before the family left Manila. Now, in Boston, more than eight thousand miles from him, she's wearing her mother's engagement ring. Her sisters have thrown
Brides
magazine and Emily Post's
Etiquette
and the Tiffany Blue Book at her. They've dragged Bitbit to Newbury Street to try on gowns. But Bitbit doesn't care for all that. She only wants to stay home, flipping through her parents' wedding album.

She shadows her mother everywhere, as she has from the beginning.
Little Mommy,
her father calls her sometimes. Everyone else has called her this Tagalog word for “hand-carried belongings” since she was small, always at the old girl's side and in her image. Privately, the old girl also named her for the way their hearts seemed to sync up (she could swear she felt it), toward the end of that D.C. honeymoon, a comforting call-and-response between her full-grown throb and her daughter's tiny, growing pulse:
Beat-beat. Beat-beat. Beat-beat.

Gear

He didn't pick an easy season to start running. March in New England: blizzards one day, sun-starved coeds airing out their eyelet dresses and sandals in the slush the next. The old girl passes them along Massachusetts Avenue on her way to buy her husband the proper clothes. She doesn't know what's proper, but she knows it can't be Ateneo Blue Eagles shorts over long underwear. It never occurs to the old girl's husband that people might laugh at him, which must be the secret of people who are never laughed at for long.

Not wanting judgment from someone like the BAA receptionist, the old girl spies on what the other customers—all of them men—are buying and grabs the same for her man: knit cap, gloves, muffler, tracksuit with stripes down the legs and across the chest—and then a second pair of gloves, to replace the ones her husband will surely lose.

“Women's is this way,” says the salesclerk, at her shoulder, startling her.

I'm here for my husband,
she's said, in other contexts.
He's the politician.
But he's not “the runner” yet; in fact he's only slightly more a runner than the old girl is. So she lets the clerk show her a corner table, with a few leggings and sweatshirts, braided headbands and neon wristbands, fanned across its surface. A sports bra stretched across a headless mannequin like taupe armor. “Know what size you are?” The old girl looks around before whispering, “Medium,” but no one in the store cares. “And are you satisfied with your current pair of running shoes?” The old girl's not sure if this clerk really believes she is a runner, or pretends to believe that to sell more. But she doesn't correct her. There are no women's sneakers, only a pair of gray New Balances she buys in both her husband's size and hers (men's minus two, the clerk suggests). And then she buys the children some.

Ringing her up, the clerk asks, “Have you read the Bible yet?” Out from under the register comes a book entitled—rather hippie-dippily, the old girl thinks—
Running & Being.
“It'll change your whole way of training.”

On her way back to the station, she sees runners everywhere. Have there always been so many? She notes what they're wearing, wondering how soon she might have to go back to buy him a hooded sweatshirt, a pair of sweatpants, a lanyard for his keys. She starts to read
Running & Being
on the T. Scanning the chapter titles—a few she would expect, like “Training” and “Racing,” and airy-fairier ones like “Living,” “Discovering”—she flips to the one, ironically four chapters in—called “Beginning.”
Can tomorrow be the first day of the rest of our life?
What if the other passengers think, between this book and the bags at her feet, that
she
is the runner; that she'll shed this trench coat and these rain boots when she gets home, baring her neon spandex like some secret fitness superhero?
Let them,
she finds herself thinking. She doesn't mind.

Parlor Talk

It is not exactly true that—as the old girl has written the family back home—she has no servants in Newton. There's a maid. One maid, Tweety, shared by five different Manilachusetts families. The old girl has her Tuesdays. On Sundays, Tweety goes to Chinatown to fulfill all five families' requests for
patis
and mung bean noodles in one trip.

It took some getting used to, having no one but the old girl and Bitbit to cook and clean in Tweety's absence. There were years on Times Street when she had one
yaya
per child. They slept in the old girl's house, knew the old girl's rules and preferences.
Right hand
doesn't begin to cover it. With them the old girl felt multiarmed like an Indian deity, invincible.

One thing no maid ever did—in Chestnut Hill, or Concepcion, or Manila—was serve the old girl's husband and his guests in the parlor. That, everyone knows, is a job for the wife. High-born and well-schooled though she may be, only the old girl can pass through, a ghost carrying a tray. Rice cakes, if it's Manila;
pan de sal
or buttery pastries and
pitsi-pitsi.
Or something savory, like squid balls on bamboo sticks. In Boston, pretzels or club crackers, nuts, crudités, and cheese. The old girl knows which congressman and which professor has a taste for what.

She never expects more of him than how her own father behaved around her mother, reaching for the biscuit or the cup without a glance in her direction. And most men follow his lead.

But some have been jumpy, suspicious of her. The Huk captains her husband had over in Tarlac were tense and wary, never out of their fatigues. They held their coffee cups in their laps without sipping. Didn't touch the food, eternally afraid of betrayal.

And in America, some men feel guilty enough to take her presence on themselves. Not in some weighty way, just long enough to log that she's been seen. Something along the lines of
You'd better figure out your stance on that, buddy, or She won't vote for you.
They cock their heads at the old girl, lightening the mood, some cupping hands beside their mouths to feign a secret from her. It seemed gallant, at first—the old girl's husband is a lot of things, but rarely that—until she understood the joke. That a woman, a wife, could have serious political opinions at all. As if the old girl would ever
not
vote for her own husband, they seem to be implying. One of the Akitas could walk into the parlor, sniffing for crumbs, and they'd make the same joke.
Better figure it out, buddy,
or
Yoshi here will never vote for you.

Fuel

Over the years, the old girl and her husband's dialogue about food has (as he gently puts it himself, when his political opinion—or even, once, his party—changes) “evolved.”