Po

We thumb-wrestled beneath Strawberry Shortcake sheets, our hands finding each other’s in the darkened room, not knowing how to express ourselves to each other in a language other than laughter and touch.

My father’s sonorous voice thundered through the whisper-thin wall from the small wood-paneled living room where he escaped nightly, blaring Jean-Claude Van Damme action flicks and spaghetti westerns, unknowingly puncturing the womb of our private world.

“Go to bed, Jane! You’ve got school tomorrow! Come on, now!” And then, softening his pitch, “Mom, you too.”

We would giggle and hug each other tight.

At night, I’d inch backward until I felt the light weight of her back against mine—a small, steady reminder that someone was still there. Even in sleep, she hummed—soft and steady—it felt like protection, a prayer, a shield against the dark.

I was eleven and I had balked at the idea of sharing my bed with a strange woman I’d never met before. I didn’t know she’d be the best roommate I’d ever have.

*

“How long is she staying?” I asked, holding my mom’s smooth hand as she navigated us through the wide unfamiliar corridors of the Charleston International Airport.

“I don’t know. For a long time, let’s hope.”

Great.

While we waited at the gate, I kept looking past the tiny, bent bird of a woman being wheeled toward us. Then my mother dropped my hand and bowed to kiss the woman’s hollow cheek. I had never seen her kiss so softly before, with a reverence that made me wonder if she was afraid—maybe if she pressed too hard, she’d leave a bruise.

I wasn’t expecting her to be so small. Her black eyes, almost hidden beneath heavy lids, shone like two tiny dark moons. She reminded me of the baby brown thrasher that had fallen from its nest in the big oak tree. My father had carried it into the kitchen in a little cardboard box lined with Post and Courier pages so we could nurse it back to health.

“She’s your mom?” I whispered to my mother, still eying the stranger.

“Yes. Give your grandma a kiss, but be careful.” My mother nudged me forward.

You don’t even look alike, I thought. The color of my mother’s skin glowed pale, almost olive with soft golden undertones. The woman in the chair was dark brown. Moreno, I later learned. My mother had a smile that rivaled Marilyn Monroe and Julia Roberts. Her lips were wide and pillow-like and perfect, but she was embarrassed by their fullness. This woman’s mouth was a thin line that was on the edge of disappearing. Her lips seemed to be hiding inside her mouth.

I bent to hug her, feeling stabbed by small, sharp bones through her faded floral duster. I pressed my lips softly to her sunken cheek.

She barked something in a foreign tongue to my mother who laughed a whole new laugh in response.

“She says I haven’t taught you how to kiss like a true Filipina. Go on—give her a Pinoy kiss!”

So I bent down again and pressed my nose to her surprisingly soft and cool cheek and drew a long, deep inhalation. She smelled sweet and bitter like Johnson’s Baby Powder mixed with Vicks menthol lemon cough drops.

Her eyes began to glow and she tilted her head back to laugh. She reminded me of E.T., my favorite movie. It was a sound I had never heard before, this addicting cackle. I had made that happen—and I was hooked.

The color of her skin, the shape of her eyes, the strange music of her laughter—my grandmother was magic and mystery and carried with her a history of the islands where I was born but was still a place for which I had only borrowed memories. Every day I spent with her, my birthplace felt closer and more real than ever before.

Every night Po would sit up in bed and perform her prayers, sometimes for an hour or more if she couldn’t sleep or was homesick. She would rock back and forth, softly shaking our double bed, and suddenly the dark bedroom was a church and she was incanting something holy and precious. I felt at once that it was too private and yet I ought to pay careful attention. Her voice would take on a new character and she would speak-chant-sing her hopes, dreams, wishes and pleas for forgiveness and protection. I would occasionally grasp a name from these strange songs—one of grandma’s daughters or her only son, the grandchildren, the friends and neighbors that she had left behind. It was like a page from National Geographic come to life—the world I only knew from pictures suddenly breathing beside me in the dark. I could hardly breathe as I listened in fascination to this nightly performance, imagining what her words meant, what spells they were casting, what heartaches they were soothing.

On days she would take her bath, if my mother was too busy cooking, she would call me in to wash her back. “Jane! Eeeeh-Jane! Come here, Eeh-Jane! I am mandilu.”

I would be chatting on the old rotary telephone, watching television or studying and sometimes I would pretend not to hear her at first, but I could never fail to come. The first time I saw her seated on the wooden stool my father fashioned for her inside the bathtub with one of his large birdseed buckets filled with water and a small saucepan inside it, I was confused. I tried to empty the water from the bucket into the bath for her but she grew upset and kept thrusting a washcloth into my shy, reluctant hands.

“But, Po, you’re supposed to put the water in the tub and sit down in it,” I complained, exasperated. “Aren’t you cold sitting there?” She would toss her head back and her eyes would disappear as she laughed and laughed.

“Wash! Ho-whee!” she exclaimed, sighing loudly as if the laughter were a mile she had run. She sat there on the darkening stool in her huge thin white cotton underwear, soaking wet. Her heavy breasts fell low and flat against her stomach, nearly to her belly button. She had nursed eight children with those breasts. I tried not to stare. I tried not to think of the National Geographic spread on tribal women I’d once seen.

I scrubbed her back with the washcloth as she made sounds of joy and whispered words I did not understand. I didn’t know she had never had a bathtub so this is the way she was used to bathing. It was a comfort she returned to and it was also all that she knew.

I could always tell whether Po had her teeth in by the way she kissed me. She’d press so hard when she inhaled that I could literally feel the hard plastic dentures through both of our cheeks. If she wasn’t wearing them, chances were she had misplaced them, which she did often. We would notice her shuffling around the house in her slippers and housedress, lifting cushions and knick-knacks, laughing softly to herself but then growing more and more upset. She often hid her teeth wadded up in paper napkins or knotted in cotton handkerchiefs and would forget where she had set them down.

Once, we found them in the trash already by the curb. We had spent close to an hour digging meticulously through pancit and spaghetti noodles, bacon grease, coffee grinds, stale bread and bits of salad, dental floss and countless crumbled up papers to find the balled-up Bounty paper towel square containing my grandma’s teeth.

Her reaction each time they were found was priceless—it was exactly how you would imagine the poorest person in the world being told they had just won the lottery. Overwhelmed with excitement, she would pop them right into her mouth and kiss you if you had found them, her tears and laughter bathing you, the no-longer-missing teeth nearly knocking you out.

After school, I would find Po on the chocolate-and-cream-colored crushed-velvet sofa by the front window, waiting, watching for me. I’d drop my heavy Eastpak on the floor by the door and kneel in front of her, place my head in her lap and encircle her growing waist with my arms. A year in South Carolina with us had plumped her up immensely. She went from a shadow of a person to a swollen fruit.

“Puckwan atchan,” I’d whisper and she’d giggle. It was a rhyme I’d made up to tease her. She loved to eat watermelon and I couldn’t resist the way the Filipino word for it rhymed with the word for stomach. The first time I said puckwan atchan she laughed heartily and her large belly shook and when I pointed it out to her, she cackled so hard that she was out of breath. Making her laugh felt like something I was born to do.

Years later, when I smell Vicks VapoRub or hear someone laugh until they wheeze, I think of her—how I used to rub it into her feet before bed, how she made faith sound like song and love like laughter. I still whisper puckwan atchan sometimes, just to see if she’ll laugh again from somewhere I can’t see.

Now, when I laugh too loud, my mother hushes me the same way she once hushed Po—but I can’t help it. The sound escapes me like a memory—like the warmth that used to bloom between us when our backs touched in sleep—a tiny echo from the islands, from the small woman who prayed and sang and laughed her way into me.

Even now, I sometimes wake to her voice, low and musical, rolling through my dreams like tidewater. I don’t understand the words, but I know their meaning. They are the sound of love learning to stay.

*

In loving memory of Maria Bacani