calamansi juice

Today I realized that a Leo/Gemini combination is volatile. I don’t trust Leos. My best friend growing up was my sister, sixteen years my senior, born on August 3rd. But when I was eleven she left my life, and the next time I saw her she was married with a child. When she picked me up from the airport in Manila she looked at me with weary (and wary) eyes. We were strangers. And we had lost whatever bond we held dear years before. I was in awe of her, and scared of her. And she had no time to explain to me, little foreigner in my own native country, that you didn’t drink calamansi juice without diluting it in water, and adding sugar. So I poured calamansi concentrate into my glass, and drank it quietly, the tart, potent juice burning my throat and making my ears red. I dared not say anything, a mix of embarrassment and pride lodging in my chest and keeping my tongue silent. She stared at me, the strange, odd, quiet person that I had become, someone that didn’t belong in the suburbs of Manila. But I was neither here nor there. I no more belonged in that little house in a gated community south of Manila than in the rough and tumble neighborhood of Richmond Hill, Queens, where I lived in a detached one-family house with my parents and the rest of my siblings who hadn’t left all that America had to offer to return to the Philippines to be with their boyfriend because he had been unsuccessful coming to New York, making a half-hearted attempt to join my sister in the new world but getting only as far as Toronto, Canada, which was a twenty-hour car ride from NYC and besides my sister couldn’t cross the border with her tourist visa.

The one year that she lived in New York, Leah set out on her own, leaving the family roost to settle with three or four roommates in an apartment in Jersey City, across the river from New York. We would visit her on certain weekends, and as I ate the sweet Filipino-style spaghetti that one of her roommates had prepared, I couldn’t help staring at her two Pinay friends, the two “tomboys” who shared a bedroom, and a bed. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. My sister had her own bedroom. She was alone, her boyfriend many miles away, on the other side of the world.

Scenic parking lot in Wilmington, Delaware

In our first year in America we visited my cousin in Delaware. My family couldn’t get social security cards in New York because of our passports. Jojo thought that it would be easier to apply for social security numbers in Delaware. It’s not like Delawareans had ever even heard of the Philippines, or were aware of the fact that if you only had a tourist visa you had any business applying for a social security number. Or some such nonsense.

He had a cool little one-bedroom apartment, fit for a bachelor, and two brown leather beanie bags. My sister, a skinny little bird with Audrey Hepburn eyes and a swan’s neck, and I were sent by my mother food-shopping at what appeared to be the one and only supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware. We found ourselves, incongruously, in the cat food aisle where there were twenty different brands of cat food (in the Philippines there were only pieces of leftover fish for the cat (my dad used to say pesa (which was a certain style of cooking fish from my mom’s side of the family) was food fit only for cats, he refused to eat it, besides he only ever ate pandesal and chicken or pork adobo, once when he was a kid he gorged on twenty in one sitting, he just couldn’t stop himself.)) A guy, faceless to me, he could have been twenty, or thirty, or forty, came up to us and asked my sister plainly, “Will you marry me?”

My sister looked at him, a smile beginning to form at one corner of her mouth. It made her even more striking. The guy was helpless. Hapless. Hooked, line and sinker. “If you say yes I will take care of you forever.” He stared at her, scrutinizing my sister’s face for a sign. Her smile was polite, knowing, apathetic. She tugged at my hand and we headed for the supermarket exit. He followed us, this feckless man. “I’m serious.” Leah said nothing. We continued toward the parking lot. The poor fellow’s heart sank, and he wisely stayed behind. “You’re beautiful!” he shouted in our general direction. I turned around one last time to look at him, this sorry man. Leah tugged. “Let’s go.”