Send Stamps, Please

"Yeah . . . we'll see."

The Sampaguita Club.

If she found my views on working girls objectionable, then why did she invite me? Or was it that things had suddenly changed?

She went back onto the dance floor. I held my hand out to Bloom, who gave it a brief shake. His grip was limp and cold. He never took his eyes off the girls on the stage.

"I didn't see you at the club last night."

"I'm sorry to hear it."
"That's too bad, " she said, as if she really meant it.

"Care for a drink?"
She shook her head. "Thanks, but I don't drink. I'm not sure how I'd react if I did, so I don't."

"Never mind," she said.

"Really?" she said, and let out something close to a sigh, as if that might not be the answer she was hoping for. Perhaps she didn't care one way or another about the time.

The club was more crowded than I'd imagined.

She looked up with an unreadable expression.

We couldn't sit together.

Sometimes you just need to let them unload their feelings," she said, not unkindly.

Phattaya Beach - The Oarswoman

Each day she sat on the rickety transport, working the oar.

She reached down the neck of her blouse and brought up a rosary. "I am catholic," she said.

"Are the girls easy?" she asked.

"Why do you go with them?" She placed her palm on my knee.

The wind wafted up toward me, swelling, spraying like gentle buckshot into the bare skin of my arms.

Yokosuka High RIse

WHy not?
'Cause I'm tired." That wasn't the reason, but I couldn't think of any other way to explain it.

Her name was Dolores and I met her at the bowling alley. She was married, her husband underway. We talked a little.

We took the elevator up to her apartment.

There on the nightstand was a photograph of a young sailor. "Is that your husband?"

She didn't say anything. She reached over and turned the photograph around without saying anything.

We layed in bed, quiet, listening to the thrum of crickets outside the window.

"Go ahead," she said. "It's what you want, right?"

I shook my head. "I like being with you."

"Really?"

The next afternoon a phone call for me. It was her. "Hey," I said. "How are you?"

"I've been thinking about you all day."

National City

I was in San Diego for two weeks of training. Spinks, whom I'd served with during the first two years of my tour, was stationed at nearby 32nd Street. I called him and we went out to National City to drink and dance and maybe, well, just maybe . . .

I had the benefit of understanding her language.


In Tagalog, she told her friend, "I'm taking him home. I'm so lonely."

Her friend said, "I'm lonely, too. But I don't like his friend."

She reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. She smiled.

The waitress presented the bill and she looked at me. Standing behind her, Spinks shook his head. I said to the girl, "Ready to go?"

She looked at me. "The bill?"

I shrugged. "I don't have any money."



Her eyes misted while the waitress stood waiting. She stammered and stared away from me to the waitress. Slowly, she removed her wristwatch. "Please," she said. "Can I leave this for a day or two? I promise to come back with the money."

Spinks said, "You girls came here to eat without money?" He reached down and grabbed a french fry, dragged it through a puddle of catsup and brought it to his lips. "That's crazy."

Later, back at the nightclub where we'd met the two women, we sat drinking. They were there, too. Two sailors were buying them drinks. I looked at the floor the table legs sat on.

I listened to the music.

She stared past her friend and grimaced. Then she averted her eyes.

Ivy

Ivy had a pretty face, a sweet personality, the keys to the barracks. But, unfortunately, despite her being affable and cordial, because my friends had marked her as fat, I had to keep my distance.

But I didn't want to.

Old Vendor on a Jeepney

The old woman looked up from her money, alarmed.

Shambled around looking like a Bowery bum.

I looked carefully around the jeepney and glanced outside. It was the same old view of a neon lit town I remembered well.

The wind from the open window gently rustled the brims of old people's hats and the scarves around their necks.

They can wait outdoors

The room emptied.

An electric fan, oscillating with a jittery whir, nudging the stale air from one side of the room to the other

rheumy-eyed

Everything in the room had dried up, had long ago lost its color and smell. Time alone had stood still.

"Sometimes it doesn't feel like my own body anymore."

SOme words were exchanged. Then a man wearing a sleeveless t-shirt came out of the room carrying a young child. He walked past me, his face lowered. The child continued to sleep with its head rested on the man's shoulder.

There was no electricity, and the only water available came out of a trickling, rust-caked tap that had to be pumped by hand. And it was frigid, which on hot days, was probably a good thing.

The door opened onto a small front room, religious pictures filled the walls, statuettes filled the one table pushed against the wall.

In the far corner of the room sat a low table.

In one corner of the room sat a low table.

She asked me for money.

Back Home

It was almost noon back in California when a young woman entered the nightclub carrying a baby. She wandered between the tables, searching in vain for something or someone, turning her head this way and that as she scanned the dim establishment.

Black Market

emerged hobbling from a cave-like entrance

ancient, wobbling toward us.

A few extra bucks? A cartoon of cigarettes, American of course. Some chocolate. Some canned peaches. A little American liquor.

Butterfly

Butterfly was the word most commonly hurled by a whore during a dispute between her and her sailors.

"Have you ever been in love?"
I shook my head. I hadn't found a woman I'd consider being in love. But really, love had come my way a dozen times. Real love. Love that, given the chance, could last forever.

Shore Patrol

How you're affected by the actions of your shore patrol partner, but don't have the balls to say or do anything.

Often having to mediate disputes between sailors over their whore.

The women took to calling me SP. Short Peter?

We walked back mostly in silence.

BY the end of the night I had trouble feeling my feet.

Symbiont

***

Symbiont

I am fourteen and today I stopped loving Marie Osmond. My new love is Patricia Hearst. I love Patricia so much that I can't get myself up off the carpet, where I've been sprawled out on my belly for most of the afternoon, watching photographs of the kidnapped heiress flash across the television screen. Along with the details of Patricia's privileged life, the newsman gives histories of the terrorist organization – The Symbionese Liberation Army – that snatched her.

My father calls me. He's in the dining room and he wants me to please get up and check on my mother in her bedroom. Today is my mother's birthday. She is thirty years old. All morning my father has been over the stove in the kitchen. He's been cooking Filipino foods that smell wonderful. Also in the kitchen are my younger brothers and sisters, gathered there making a fuss about who gets to do what.

I push myself up off the floor, but before heading to my mother's bedroom, I walk over to the bookshelf and grab the dictionary. I flip through the pages, search for the word Symbionese. It doesn't exist. The closest thing is Symbiosis, which means unlike organisms coexisting harmoniously for mutual benefit.

After replacing the dictionary on the shelf, I go down the hall to my mother's bedroom. I open the door and find her sitting on the edge of her bed. She glances up at me and smiles. Then she pats the mattress with a palm, indicating I should come sit beside her. I know my mother's been on the telephone trying to get a hold of my biological father, who was an American serviceman stationed in the Philippines when they got married. She needs his birth certificate to prove my American citizenship.

While next to my mother on the edge of her bed, I keep picturing poor Patricia Hearst. I try and understand what's been happening to her. Ever since she was kidnapped, broadcasts have been pouring out of the television and radio. Right now she's probably cooped up somewhere in some uncomfortable closet, guarded by a bunch of crazy terrorist. Alone. Afraid.

My mother holds the telephone in her left hand, a ballpoint pen in her right. A spiral notebook bounces above her knees. While she waits for someone to pick up on the other end of the line, she plays with the pen, clicking the ball again and again.

In the past month she's tried to call my biological father in Alabama a dozen times. But always, after whoever answers the telephone hears my mother's clipped Filipino accent, they slam the receiver down.

This afternoon it is dark and cloudy outdoors. You can hear the rain battering the window. You can hear the wind sigh as it knocks the leafless branches of a small maple tree against the glass. In the dim light of the bedroom, my mother's face looks very pale.

I look down a minute at my damp and trembling hands. Closing my eyes, I think about Patricia Hearst's sad face in the photographs shown on TV. She is not as pretty as Marie Osmond, and I don't know if she can sing. Why did they take Patricia? She must be so alone right now, so afraid.

Symbiosis, I think, what a strange word. I weave my hands together in my lap and wait for my mother to start talking on the phone.

Finally, my mother's back straightens. She clears her throat and speaks softly into the receiver, saying, “Please don't hang up. Please. Joe's son needs to speak with you.” After a moment she places the telephone in my hands and nods.

I have never talked to them before. I never had any desire to. Not really. Nervous and frightened, I try to give the receiver back to my mother. But she pleads with her eyes. I raise the phone to my ear and hear someone breathing on the other end.

In a small voice, I say, “Hello.”

The reply comes by way of a man's voice, heavy with a southern drawl. He says, “Who is this?”

Because my mouth is so dry, I have a difficult time answering right away. I glance at my mother and try to shove the telephone back into her hands. But she shakes her head and folds her arms across her chest. She bites her lower lip, the pen in her hand clicks, clicks, clicks.

"Who is this?" the man on the end of the line says again.

I reply, “Bobby.”

"Who?"

I clear my throat. "Bobby."

He's upset, annoyed. I can tell he hates me. I'm glad I'm far away from him, in California, where I live with my mother, my stepfather, and my brothers and sisters. Although my siblings are pesky sometimes, I can't imagine not having them around.

While I wait for the man on the line to speak, I picture Marie Osmond on the cover of last month's Tiger Beat. She has lots of brothers, but she is the only girl. That makes her different. Like me. Different.

I wish my mother never told me about her first marriage. I don't like knowing my biological father disappeared when my mother was seven months pregnant. He left the Philippines and though promising otherwise, he never came back. My mother had to go through the pregnancy, the labor, and the delivery alone. It wasn't until just before I was born that she finally got news from my biological father. An official letter from Alabama. An annulment signed by a judge and stamped by the courts saying the marriage between my mother and my biological father never really existed.

That quick. That easy.

Finally, the man on the phone says something. But his accent is so thick I don't catch it. “Excuse me?” I say.

Suddenly, there is some commotion and a woman comes on the line. In an abrupt, angry tone she says, “What is it you folks want?”

I let her words sink in. You folks. You folks. You folks.

Then I clear my throat again and repeat what my mother and I had rehearsed so many times before. “This is Bobby,” I say. “Are you my grandmother Roberta? I was named after you.”

For a few moments the woman keeps quiet. She just breathes. Breathes. Breathes. Finally she spurts out, “Why can't you people leave Joe be?”

You people?

In the early months of her pregnancy she used to receive packages from Alabama. Blankets. Toys. Baby clothes. They were for the beloved bride and future mother. The beloved grandchild. Because no one was sure if I was going to be born a boy or a girl, the new clothes were both blue and pink. My mother got things, too. Shampoo. Jewelry. Makeup. Books.

You people?

"You folks'll do anything to ruin Joe's life, won't you?"

Ruin Joe's life?

My eyes sting. Something is caught in my throat, making it impossible to reply. I shake my head and drop the phone in my mother's lap. Reluctantly, she picks the telephone up and raises it to her ear. She says, “I'm sorry to bother you. Really, I am . . . but we're having a problem proving Bobby is an American citizen. We need a notarized copy of Joe's birth certificate.”

Although I can hear the woman's muffled voice spilling out of the receiver, I can't make her words out. My mother nods and say, “Yes, of course I have the annulment, but the American embassy won't move forward without Joe's birth certificate.” After a pause, my mother frowns and says, “Of course we're not trying to make trouble for him and his family. What do you think of me? I'm also happily married and I also have other children."

She lowers her head and doodles on a page in the notebook on her lap. While she does this she gives the woman on the other end of the line our California address, which is over two thousand miles from Alabama. She nods and says, “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

After a minute of silence, my mother says, "Okay." Then she tries to hand me the telephone. “Your grandmother wants to speak to you.”

I shake my head and draw my hands away, but the frustrated expression on my mother's face tells me I had better take the phone.

“Hello,” I say.

On the end of the line the woman says very flatly, “I hope you're old enough to understand we have nothing against you. Alabama wouldn't have been a good place for you people.” After a pause, she adds, “I hope you get that.”

You people? Symbiosis: unlike organisms coexisting harmoniously for mutual benefit.

“Hello. Did you hear me?”

I don't answer and the line goes dead.

I stare at my mother and hand the phone back to her. She raises it and when she realizes no one is there, she replaces it in its cradle. For a moment she looks lost, far away. Then she touches my arm and says, “What did your grandmother say?”

I look at my hands and do not answer. I look across to the mirror above my mother's dresser and do not recognize the boy who gazes back. He is pale, his features clearly Caucasian. Before today, the boy in the mirror sometimes struggled with his identity. He was white, his family wasn't. And how many times had that left him confused?

Symbiosis. In some ways Patricia Hearst has become a Symbiont. In some ways Marie Osmond has always been a Symbiont. Me?

When my reflection in the mirror begins blinking tears back, I close my eyes. In the faint bedroom light, I feel my mother's comforting arm travel across my back. Her strong hand tightly cups my shoulder.

My mother says. “Are they going to send the birth certificate?”

Keeping my eyes shut, I shrug. “She said we shouldn't bother them anymore.”

For a long time we sit silently at the edge of my mother's bed. Finally she pulls me close. “Come on,” she says. “Let's go have some of my birthday cake before your brothers and sisters finish it off.”

She lets go my shoulder, gets up from the bed and sighs. “Thirty,” she says. “I can't believe I'm thirty.”

In the dining room my brothers and sisters are feasting on cake and ice cream. My stepfather stands at the head of the table, arranging wrapped gifts for my mother. Neither my father nor my mother say anything. They just exchange a long disappointed glance.

My brothers and sisters begin singing, "Happy Birthday to you."

I chime in. After we finish the song, we all clap our hands and stomp our feet.

Shrugging, smiling, my mother says, “Come on everybody. It's Mommy's birthday. Let's celebrate.”

***

It is nearly two months later, May, that I go to answer a knock at the front door. My mother is already there. The postman is standing on the porch in front of her, waiting for my mother to finish signing for a large Manila envelope. When she finishes she hands the postman back his pen and shuts the door. She turns to me, smiling, and shows me the Alabama return address in the corner of the Manila envelope. I follow her into the kitchen, where she rips the envelope open. There is no letter inside the envelope. No photographs. Only a neatly folded birth certificate that bears a raised stamp. My mother gives it to me and for a few minutes I hold it in my hands and study the typewritten information that fills the spaces. Before now, I never knew my biological father's middle name, his religion, the year of his birth, or even the Alabama county where he was born.

I give the certificate back to my mother and head quietly to my bedroom, leaving her standing alone in the kitchen.

Lying in my bed, I wonder if I'm supposed to feel this way. Alone. Afraid. Like Patricia Hearst must have felt while being held against her will by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Although I don't love Patricia anymore, I still think about her. She's changed, though. Not long ago she helped rob a bank. She called herself Tania, and she was photographed toting a gun. She had on a long black coat and a beret.

Seemingly, Patricia Hearst had given up one culture and embraced another.

Last night six members of her new gang were killed in Los Angeles.

Another person I still think about is Marie Osmond. But truthfully, I'm in love with Susan Dey now. She plays Laurie on the Partridge Family.

My bedroom door opens. I sit up in bed. My stepfather crosses the carpet and when he sits down on the edge of my mattress the bed springs creak. He runs his big fingers through my hair and says, "Why you looking sad?"

I shrug.

“You know I'm your father, right. I'll always be your father.”

I nod. Then I smile.

Grinning, my father pops my shoulder with his meaty palm. "That's what I want to see," he says. Then he laughs. I laugh, too. I wrap my arms around my father's big arms. He draws me close and as I peer over his shoulder I notice my mother and brothers and sisters standing in the doorway.

My mother says, "Who wants to go to Straw Hat for some pizza."

My younger brothers and sisters clap and cheer and shout. They scatter to grab their coats and shoes.

I ask my father if we can stop by the store so I can buy a magazine, maybe one that has Susan Dey on the cover.

My father, in that very even tone of his, says, "You bet. Now come on, sport. Hop out of bed."

Pale Horses and Old Churches

Subbed to 'The Collagist' on 10/6/09 -- Rejected
Subbed to 'Tayo Magazine' on 06/16/10

***

Pale Horses and Old Churches

Simbahan
a short story by Robert Aquino Dollesin

During the Grandfather‘s service the boy shuffled his feet and studied the grief-stretched faces of everyone around him. Standing next to his mother, he felt no emotion. Nothing. Not the slightest sense of bereavement.

Once the slings had been hoisted, the boy's mother took his hand and they fell in line with the others to file past the Grandfather’s grave.

He stood a moment at the edge and struggled to catch a final glimpse of the brown casket before it disappeared beneath a sea of white petals. He opened his hand and released the rose he’d been holding.

The procession trudged past long rows of skyward-spiking headstones. The boy, looking over his shoulder, marveled at the way the moss-covered pathway sprung back to form after being trampled.

A rumble from above brought his face upward. An American jet was crossing the rust-colored sky. The boy raised a thumb into the air in front of him and blotted the airplane out. It was something he’d learned from his cousins. But no matter how far he held his thumb from his eyes, he couldn’t hide the white contrail left in the plane’s wake.

He was twelve, almost thirteen, and whenever one of the planes from the nearby Air Base flew overhead, the boy imagined himself in the cockpit. He pictured himself now, peering down through the window at the procession below. From high above it resembled a long dark serpent, writhing toward the graveyard exit.

A fleet of vehicles crowded the rutted road outside the cemetery. Jeeps and sedans, horse-drawn carriages, motorbikes with sidecars.

The boy climbed aboard the carriage his mother had hired to haul them from the services to the Grandfather’s celebration.

His mother slid onto the wooden bench next to him. She said, “We call this vehicle a kalesa.”

He ignored her. What did it matter if it was called a buggy or carriage or kalesa?

“Kalesa,” she said again. He remained quiet. Even though his mother’s eyes were screened behind dark glasses, the boy knew his silence grated her. She often reminded him that he needed to take more seriously her efforts to teach him the language and customs of her native country.

But why should he bother? Neither the decision, nor the desire to divorce his father and return to his mother’s homeland had been his. It had been hers. Completely hers. He could hardly stand, much less understand the people of this country. He felt not the slightest inkling to be a part of their culture. Moreover, why should he bond with people who gave him wide berth and kept him at a distance simply because he was different?

Fanning herself with the Grandfather’s funeral program, the boy’s mother gestured with her chin to the kalesa driver and said, “The coachman we call a kutsero.”

The boy glanced away. The gritty morning breeze struck his face. On the opposite side of the heat shimmer, the cemetery workers labored to fill the Grandfather's grave. Kalesa. Kutsero. Kutsero. Kalesa. Who cared?

In her gutteral tone, the boy’s mother gave the kutsero directions to the Grandfather’s house.

When the old driver stooped for his reins, the torn brim of his straw hat threw dappled shadows down the back of his neck and across the whole of his steeply sloped shoulders. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and pulled back hard on the ropes until they were taut in his hands.

Those hands. The boy paid close attention to them. The gnarled fingers. The blackened knuckles.

“Mano,” the driver shouted to his horse. “Mano. Mano.” But the horse did not spring forward. The old man clicked his tongue again. The horse swung its lowered head side to side and swished its tail, slicing through the cloud of flies behind it.

The kutsero then reached down and took up a bamboo switch resting at his feet. He brought the switch up and snapped it forward.

The crack against the horse’s flank startled both the boy and his mother.

The boy’s mother said, “Was that really necessary?”

Grinning over his shoulder, the kutsero replied, “The more stubborn they are, the more severe a shock they need.” He turned back to the horse and raised his lash again.

“Don’t!” cried the boy’s mother.

But the second blow had been delivered. This time the horse raised its head, rolled its lips back and whinnied. And then the kalesa’s big wooden wheels began to turn in the dust.

The boy watched his mother shake her head in frustration the same way she shook her head earlier in the chapel when she’d asked him to show respect by kissing the Grandfather's cold, motionless hand. He protested, but she insisted.

Gray scarves of clouds drifted above. The boy recalled the Grandfather’s hands; the trenching folds of pale skin, the same sterile odor of freshly washed clothes drying on a line, and the way the Grandfather's fingers burned stiff against his lips.

And now, with the cemetery rolling past, the boy asked himself why those hands had never reached out to touch him, to gently knead his shoulders, or to playfully rake his scalp.

The morning breeze and the kalesa’s gentle sway lulled the boy. He closed his eyes and focused on the rhythmic clip-clop cadence of the horse’s hooves striking the dusty pavement.

The last time he visited the Grandfather's home he was bothered by the cruel jokes his cousins shared. Each time the Grandfather kissed one of them, they soured their face. They scrubbed at their damp cheek with the ball of their palm. Later they complained about the way the Grandfather’s grizzled chin rasped sharp against their skin.

It was during those moments, while he stood listening to his cousins laugh in the courtyard, that the boy told himself if the Grandfather had nuzzled him, he would not have made such remarks. Never. He would not have wriggled free of the Grandfather’s grip and raced out the door onto the sun-scorched courtyard. He would not have moaned about the way the Grandfather’s old-man-odor clung to his clothes and skin.

His mother nudged him. He opened his eyes. Ahead, smoke from burning garbage was eating up the sky. In the distance, bells from twin belfries rolled plangent and empty through the sultry morning air.

The boy’s mother reached up and pushed her dark glasses onto the top of her head. She touched her son’s arm, gently. “Bakit?,” she asked. “Bakit umiyak ka?”

“I’m not crying,” he said. He looked down at his hands resting folded in his lap.

His mother’s arm slid across his back. Without raising his head, he said, “ Did he hate me because my father was white?”

She did not respond right away. When she finally did, she said, “He didn’t hate you. He was protecting himself from the day he’d lose you to another world the way he lost me.”

The boy felt his throat constrict. He heard church bells tumble through the air and he looked past the kutsero, past the pale horse that pulled the kalesa, to a great cathedral looming ahead.

He raised his trembling thumb and tried to hide the old and weathered Spanish structure from his frame of view. It was much too large.

As the kalesa drew alongside the spear-tipped rails of the high iron fence, the boy could feel the walls of the church leaning close. For an instant the sky cleared and everything surrounding the boy was dusted in gold. He swung his head around. Brilliant colors streamed from the stained glass windows. Unlike the American plane he'd earlier watched soaring overhead, the church did not shrink and fade.

He heard his mother‘s voice: “Simbahan.” He turned to face her. She reached out and thumbed the corners of his eyes and said, “In the Philippines we call a church a simbahan.”

“Simbahan,” he repeated. “Simbahan.” He kept his gaze on his mother‘s face. “In the Philippines we call a church a simbahan.”

Regarding My Birth

Submitted to Anderbo on 10/10/09 -- Rejected on 10/11/09
Note: Sorry to say, we will not be using this submitted work, and do wish you the best of luck with it elsewhere.

Regarding My Birth

When she was just a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in the Philippines, my mother worked behind the counter of one of the Grandfather's kiosks, serving beverages to American servicemen. Of the many young men who sought her attentions, it was a quiet young man from Alabama who won her over. Ignoring The Grandfather's warnings, my mother and her American boyfriend eloped to Manila.

From those family members who supported my mother's decision to elope came word that her father -- The Grandfather -- had publicly disowned her. Supporters of the local church and business communities, both of which The Grandfather was a prominent and active member of, were told that my mother was no longer a part of his family.

"Disowned," he told everyone. "Disowned for bringing shame to the family by marrying an American."

Through those lonely and difficult beginnings, my mother and her new husband set up house in a tiny apartment near Clark Air Force Base, where he worked as a military policeman. On the few occasions she ventured away from the base, my mother avoided passing near one her father's many kiosks, which were scattered throughout town.

Often, though, she wished she could return home. At least to visit. She longed for the company of her family. On Sunday mornings she would throw open the apartment windows and listen for the plangent sound of tumbling church bells. She missed her brothers and sisters, how on Sundays in particular, they all gathered around the dinner table, laughing and sharing stories.

Evenings when he came home from the Air Force Base, her new husband frequently found her in tears. Holding her close, the American told her he knew how painful it was not to be able to visit her family. It was like that with him, too. Thank God, he said, they were not truly alone. They had one another.

Three months after the courthouse wedding, my mother gave her husband the wonderful news. She was pregnant. Of course, he was thrilled. With my mother standing at his side, he telephoned his family in America. They were also thrilled.

Every week packages arrived from America, bursting with goods: maternity clothing, baby items, canned American foods.

According to my mother, the pregnancy had helped her overcome the hurdles of loneliness that marriage to a foreigner had brought.

During her sixth month of pregnancy, though, her husband, with his commitment to the military nearing completion, received an ultimatum -- reenlist in the Air Force or transfer back to the states, where subsequently he would be processed out of the military. Knowing that the conflict in Vietnam was blossoming, my mother and her husband both decided it best that he return to civilian life.

But what she didn't know was that her husband would have to go first, leaving her alone to give birth to their child. Before he left, arrangements for support and future travel were handled, promises made.

At the terminal in Manila the young couple said their goodbyes. My mother could not know that as she stood watching her husband board the airplane, she would never see him again.

In the immediate weeks following his departure, alone now in her apartment, my mother thrived on the arrival of the postman, who almost every day handed her an envelope filled with a letter full of money, promises, words of longing and love.

In her replies, my mother often asked when he would return to the Philippines for her. "Soon," he always wrote. "Very soon."

Soon stretched to one month, then another, until just two weeks before the baby was due, my mother responded to a knock on the door and discovered the postman standing out on the porch, holding a registered letter that required a signature.

After smiling brightly, thanking the postman, she tore the envelope open and slid out an official looking document that bore a raised seal.

In the kitchen she sat and read the document. What in the world, she wondered after reading the perplexing letter, is an annulment?

She hurried next door to show the letter to a neighbor girl who had also married an American. There she found out what an annulment was. With her hands shaking she returned to her apartment and once again read the document that destroyed her life.

Closing her eyes, my mother leaned back against the wall and slid down to the floor. How was something like this allowed to happen? How could a stroke of a pen in a faraway place so simply bring something to an end? More important, how could he, her husband, after all they'd shared, after all he'd promised, after all she'd given him -- so easily discard their marriage like some piece of garbage?

Apparently her father had been right when he warned her before she eloped that once her American husband returned to the States, his loneliness and longing would subside and he would forget her.

Now my heartbroken mother, churning with feelings of having been used and betrayed, was more alone than ever. Newly sixteen, pregnant, penniless, disowned by her father, and abandoned by her husband. There was nothing left for her to do. So she pulled the kitchen drawer open and removed the sharpest knife she owned. She carried it into the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat, and considered the unthinkable.

Something happened, though, at the instant she held the tip of the blade against her throat. Inside her the baby stirred. Realizing she couldn't take the unborn child's life, my mother released her grip on the knife. She collapsed onto the bathroom floor and burst into sobs.

For four days she remained alone in her apartment, lying in bed, not eating, contemplating the hard realities of her future.

She would be a young woman in the Philippines with an American child. Forcing herself to picture the many young women who worked in her father's kiosks, she accepted the fact that in order to support her child, she would most probably end up resorting to the most shameful trade in the world.

But before any of that could happen, she would have to deal with an issue demanding more urgent attention.

Her marriage having been annulled meant that she would no longer be allowed to give birth to her baby at the American military hospital. So, in a state of either pride, or fear, or shame, instead of seeking forgiveness and help from her family, my mother fled to Manila, where, until she bore her child, she would live with a friend she'd attended Holy Angel Academy with.

On the night the pains began my mother's friend rushed from the apartment to search out the midwife. Two hours later, with the contractions coming closer, the friend returned to the apartment and told my mother the midwife could not be located.

She helped my mother dress and together they boarded a jeepney. The driver rushed them to the nearest hospital. Inside, even with the pains doubling my mother over, she was regretfully informed that without money up front to pay for the procedure, the hospital would not admit her.

Unless . . .

In a small cold room in the hospital's basement that smelled of alcohol, on a bed that was very hard, and under lights that were very bright, my mother labored for fourteen hours.

During the entire time, people bustled through the room; came and went, came and went. Every few minutes the curtain surrounding her bed would be pulled aside and a new group of visitors would file in, surround the bed and, observing intently, the strange visitors would scribbl in their little spiral notebooks and whisper among one another.

When the baby was finally delivered the doctor in charge of the procedure snatched him up before my mother could see or touch him. He swept across the room with the newborn.

Exhausted and humiliated, my mother buried her face in her pillow and cried. She could no longer bear to look directly into the leering faces of all the first year students from a nearby medical college who had been invited to observe their first childbirth.

Prologue:
Hours after giving birth, The Grandfather arrived at the hospital. My mother returned home, forgiven. Several months later she returned to work the counter of one of the Grandfather's kiosk. She met a Filipino-American man, whom she married. Despite my distinctly Caucasian features, my stepfather never treated me as other than his own. As for my mother's first husband -- my biological father, -- all the way up until his passing several years ago, even after I'd come to America, he neither contacted me nor acknowledged me.