“Hi, Mrs. Martinez. Can Ellen come out and play?” I heard my best friend Sarah say through the screened door in the kitchen just as I sat down at the piano in the living room.
“Oh, hey, Sarah! I’ll be right there --”
“I’m sorry, Sarah, but Ellen has to practice her piano,” Mom said.
I rushed to the kitchen. “Mom, can’t I practice later?”
Mom set down the spoon she was using to feed my baby sister Shell, who was pinned into a high chair and splattered with mashed avocado. She looked at me. “Ellen, I will not tolerate one more whine out of you. I am not going to waste money on piano lessons just because you’re being a brat.”
“Then can I quit piano lessons?”
Mom sighed. “Stop asking stupid questions. I better hear you on the piano for at least an hour.” She gave me a look.
I understood that look. It always reminded me that my Mom was once a teacher in the poor, bad part of Manila, Philippines, before she married my pa and became an American. “Sorry, Sarah. Where’ll you be later on?”
Sarah shrugged, her blond pigtails brushing her sun-burnt shoulders. “I dunno. Maybe at Kim’s.”
“Okay. See you later.”
I saw Sarah kick up the stand, straddle her red bike, and push off, riding down the gravel driveway then onto the sticky asphalt road in front of my house, a one-story, three bedroom/one bath duplex that looked just like all the other military houses of my neighborhood in Lockwood Terrace on Naval Station, Guam. I turned away from the screen and glared at my mom, who was too busy with Shell to notice me.
I trudged back to the living room and threw myself onto the piano bench. Gleaming keys like ultra-white teeth interspersed with the obsidian fangs of a volcano lay before me. I slammed my hands against those teeth and let my fingers go wherever they wanted to go. BANG BANG BANG --
“Not so loud!” my mom yelled from the kitchen.
“Okay, okay.” Jeez, she wanted me to practice but wouldn’t let me do it the way I wanted... And it wasn’t as if Mom really wanted me to take piano lessons. It was Pa’s idea, after all, his money, his signature on the purchasing slip for a Baldwin piano when a white delivery truck with “PEROTE POINT MUSIC” in shiny black letters in its sides pulled up to the curb at our house one day. I didn’t know who the piano was for since nobody in the house knew how to play, but I had assumed that Mom knew about it -- that is, until she returned from Grandma Tes’ house, got one look at the brown upright, which the delivery guy and Pa left in the middle of the kitchen, and screamed, “I said it was too EXPENSIVE!”
Pa replied, “I bought it on base, I got a good deal, and you keep saying that the house needs more furniture.” Mom had countered with, “So you go it on base! It’s still too expensive, and a piano isn’t furniture, it’s a piano!” Mom kept yelling while Pa pushed the piano from the kitchen to the dining room, which was easy since the piano was on rollers and both the kitchen and the dining room had tile floors. But when Pa started to move the Baldwin next to the bar, Mom stopped complaining and said crossly, “Not there! In the living room, across from the sofa.”
Pa smiled. “See, your mom did want a piano!” he said to me as he pushed the Baldwin onto the green shag living room carpet.
“No, I didn’t!” my mother insisted as she moved an indoor tree out of the way. “It’s still too expensive.” But she still went to the hall closet and returned with a much-used rag and a bottle of lemon oil.
When Mom ran the pungent, soaked rag over the dark wood of the piano, as if anointing it to its role in the house, erasing the scuffs and the smudgy fingerprints, I knew that the piano would stay.
Then from underneath the piano bench came the decree. “Ellen will have to take piano lessons,” my mom said.
“Hey, wait a minute --”
“Of course,” Pa interrupted. “She’s smart. She’ll be able to pick it up really quick.”
“But I don’t want to take piano lessons!”
Mom stood and set the rag on the bench. “Ellen, you’re being selfish. Can’t you see that your Pa bought you a piano?”
“Be a good girl, Ellen, and do what your mom says,” Pa added.
And that was that. You didn’t contradict your parents if one of them called you selfish and another told you to be good. You just didn’t. Not in my family. Obedience meant respect.
The piano stayed. I began lessons with Mrs. Edith Finch, the neighborhood teacher, shortly before my father went overseas again, this time on the supply ship, the U.S.S. Proteus. Among his admonitions to “do good in school” and “help your mom” was “when I get back, you play a song for me, okay?”
Like a good daughter, I had replied, “Okay, Pa.”
A month of weekly piano lessons hadn’t changed my mind about disliking piano lessons. Every Friday I’d go to Mrs. Finch’s house and endure sitting at a black Steinway, the keyboard too wide for my little fingers to reach all the keys and the bench too high for my eight-year-old legs to reach the pedals. Mrs. Finch, a fat white woman with blue hair, loomed next to me, waiting for me to make mistakes for an hour.
“No, Ellen, that’s C, not G. Remember, Every Good Boy Does Fine,” Mrs. Finch reminded me, spouting out the mnemonic device that was supposed to help me learn these notes. F-A-C-E. Great Big Dogs Fight Animals. All Cars Eat Gas.
What Was The Point? The notes still looked like squiggly ants on the page, and Mrs. Finch’s fat, fingernail-painted hands still moved my stubby, nail-bitten fingers from one key to another in each lesson.
But that was at least only once a week, for an hour. Practicing was worse. Practicing was hell, a Tantalus kind of hell because the Guamanian sun shone through the living room windows and Gab-Gab Beach was only a mile away. Of course, all the beaches were only a few miles away since Guam was an hourglass-shaped speck of an island, only thirty miles long and four miles wide at its narrowest, peeping out of the huge Pacific Ocean, invitingly warm with the sun. But I couldn’t dwell too much on that stuff because Mom would check on me, making sure that I was practicing instead of daydreaming about the yellow sand, the blood warm water, and the smells of hibiscus and sea salt mingling in the air.
“I can’t hear you!” yelled a voice from the kitchen.
“Okay, okay!” Sigh. My fingers played what I knew -- major C scale, which was my warm-up. CDEFGABC. Thumb, forefinger, middle finger, thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie. I looked at my sheet music, saw a mess of dots roving up and down the staff lines, and sighed. Okay, what’s this note? D. And this? A. And this? Oh, D again. D-A-D. Sounds stupid. This is worse than school work. One by one I identified notes and hunt-and-pecked them out on the keyboard. And what I was hunting and pecking sounded more like a school bus backing up than a piano creating beautiful music.
I looked at the wall clock and despaired. Fifty minutes had already passed, and I still had a second page of ants to pin down, identify, and feed to the ultra-white keys. I didn’t even touch the black keys because I hadn’t learned about them yet -- but if it was this hard with the white keys, then I didn’t want to learn the black ones! I closed my songbook without finishing my assignment because all the ants started to look the same to me, so What Was The Point?
I listened for my mom in the kitchen, but I didn’t hear her. Probably in the backyard garden with Shell. I slid off the hard wooden bench, stretched my aching back, and slunk to the kitchen. The back door was open, and I could see Mom tending to the long and skinny Japanese eggplants. She was singing a made-up tune to herself -- “La-la-la” -- in her clear voice while Shell babbled on her back, swaddled in what looked like an ugly backpack to me.
“Baa, baa, baa, baa,” Shell greeted me as I stepped outside. The garden filled all of the tiny backyard with string beans, cherry tomatoes, bok choy, squash, bitter melon, garlic, pinkie-sized peppers, spinach, and those eggplants, all of which Mom used in cooking or in bartering with other military wives for things that she didn’t grow, such as avocado and star apples.
Mom was cutting back straggly eggplant leaves in the trellis and was straightening out the eggplants entangled in the vines. Those close to being ripe -- those were a nice, deep purple and over half a ruler’s length -- she cut off the vine with heavy scissors and put them in a large paper bag at her feet. Mom performed this action as if she had done it all of her life. But I knew in our albums that she had lived in Manila, the crowded, Hollywood ( as in ritzy, neon Western ) capitol of the Philippines, before she married my pa, who joined the U.S Navy so that he could become an American and make money. I knew that my mom spent her last years in the Philippines in the city and that she only started gardening when she and Pa moved to the States, where there was room for things like a backyard garden.
“I’m done practicing,” I said. “Can I go to Kim’s house now?”
“Already?” She paused in her harvest and humming and glanced at her watch. “Well, it’s too late now; it’s almost five. Go make rice for dinner.”
“But you said that I can go after I practiced!”
“I said no such thing. Stop whining and go cook rice. Make seven cups.”
“Why so much?” I pouted, my arms lashed across my chest.
“Because your piano teacher asked for some eggplant in exchange for coconut meat, and she’s coming by later and will probably like something to eat,” Mom replied.
“Mrs. Finch? Here?” The thought of my piano teacher invading my home was like the idea of a warden checking up on a parolee. Was Mom going to make me play something for her? Was she going to have an impromptu piano lesson? But it’s only Wednesday!
“Ellen, did you hear me? Go cook rice!” Snip. Rattle of paper bag.
I trudged from the backyard and into the kitchen. What did Mrs. Finch know about piano, anyways? “Keep your fingers curled over the keys, not flat. Don’t look at your fingers, look at the music sheet,” she would say. Well, how could I curl my fingers if I couldn’t reach the keys without making them flat? And how was I not supposed to make mistakes if I couldn’t look at my fingers?
I plopped in front of the plastic rice dispenser, which was as tall as I was, slid the cup selector to three cups per dole, and pushed down on the release latch to dispense three cups of raw, white rice into the catch tray. Barely a handful of grains fell into the tray.
“Mom, we’re out of rice!”
“Totally out?” she yelled back, not even bothering to stop her gardening.
“Not even a cup. You need to buy rice.”
Even from inside the house I heard Mom sigh. “Ellen, you’re a big girl. Just get three dollars from my purse, go to the Seven Day Store, and get a ten-pound bag of rice.”
“But you said that it’s too late for me to go bike-riding!”
I heard Mom snip off another eggplant for Mrs. Finch. “Ellen, I said that it’s too late for you to go and play because it’s close to dinner. Since we’re out of rice and I’m too busy right now, would you please help me and get some rice? But if you want to be a brat and starve, fine by me.”
“Baa, baa, baa, baa,” I heard Shell babble.
“Yes, Shelley, your sister is being bad.” Snip, rattle of paper bag. “Ellen, do it now. And don’t forget your military ID.”
“Aye, aye, Captain, sir,” I grumbled, scrambling from the floor and then rummaging through my mom’s purse. Wallet, three dollars, ID, front door, bike, road. I saw the Seven Day Store just at the other end of the street, bright and green and open seven days a week but not 24 hours a day, like convenience stores stateside. I didn’t see why Mom couldn’t stop getting eggplant and just get rice herself since the store was nearby. It was unfair.
The door went “beep beep beep” when I opened it -- push not pull. The air in the store was cooler than the outside, and at first it chilled my skin until I got used to it. Sarah once told me that the Seven Day Store was laid out just like a Seven-Eleven stateside, but I hadn’t been stateside for a while -- at least three years -- even though I was born in California. Everything was gleaming white, tan linoleum, green paint, metal shelving. A long counter on my right with glistening hot dogs rolling under heat lamps and with coffeemakers, three small aisles of stuff on my left, and a bank of refrigerators and freezers in the back. A comic book rack was in front of me, where Sarah, red and peeling, and Kim, brown and not-peeling because she was half Hawaiian, was reading.
Sarah looked up from her comic when the door went “beep beep beep” and said, “Hey, Ellen, finished your practicing? Kim’s folks gonna have a barbecue at Gab-Gab.”
“My dad and uncles are even gonna roast a pig,” Kim added. “Somebody’s birthday. Wanna come?”
I opened my mouth to say yes, but then a vision of my mom gathering long eggplants while my sister went “baa baa” for “bad” popped into my head. “I can’t,” I said, stomping to the aisle next to the magazine rack where all the starches were and picking up a canvas bag of cheap rice. “My piano teacher’s coming over for dinner, and I have to cook rice.”
“Jeez, Ellen, you just finished practicing,” Sarah said. “Can’t you get away from piano junk today?”
“No.” I heaved the rice onto the counter of the cashier, who rang it up. Beep beep. Three dollars. Beep. “My mom won’t let me.” I dug out the three crumpled bills and my ID card from my shorts’ pocket and plunked them down on the counter.
“Why?” Sarah asked.
I shrugged as I stuffed the receipt and my ID into my pocket and took the rice from the counter.
“Well, why’re you taking piano lessons, anyway?”
“Cause my mom wants me to learn piano.”
“Why?”
“I dunno, maybe she wants to show off in front of company.”
“Are you any good?”
I grimaced. “No, all I can do are scales and stupid baby songs like ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ and ‘Chopsticks.’ It’s so boring!”
“Why don’t you quit if it’s so boring?” Kim asked.
“Cause my mom won’t let me.”
“Well,” Kim replied, “did you ever tell your teacher that you wanted to quit?”
“No. My mom’d get mad if she found out.”
“Oh, who cares what your mom thinks?” Sarah said. “Look, who’s taking piano here, you or your mom? Your piano teacher’s gonna be at your house, right? Tell her you wanna quit. That way both Mrs. What’s-her-name and your mom will know that you’re serious. Simple!”
“Well...”
Beep beep beep. Sarah, Kim, and I automatically glanced at the store entrance, and I nearly dropped the bag of rice on my feet. Yellow flip-flops; billowing, technicolor mu-mu; fat, sun-browned arms and old-lady hair that looked even bluer under the fluorescent light.
“Why, hello, Ellen!” Mrs. Finch greeted as the glass door closed behind her with a slow hiss. “I was just thinking about you.”
“You were?” I glanced behind me for support, but Sarah and Kim had put up Hello Kitty and Peanuts and were putting distance between me and them.
“See you later,” they said in unison as they walked out, leaving me alone with my piano teacher.
Mrs. Finch lumbered past me, her flip-flops slapping against the tile floor, and got a pop music magazine and a bottle of “Dusty Ash Brown” hair-color treatment, most likely to cover up her blue. “I saw your bike out front,” she said as she dug into her purse for her military ID, an orange dependent one just like mine, but my Navy dependency status was “daughter” while hers was “widow”. “You’re not going to ride back to your house with that bag of rice, are you?”
“It’s not too heavy. I’ve done it before.” Even though I’d complain to Mom that I was too small to get rice, I really wasn’t. It was just a matter of balancing the bag on your lap with one arm while steering with the other. “Um, well, I gotta go --”
“Wait a minute.” Mrs. Finch paid for her stuff and joined me at the door. “I’m going to your house right now to drop of some coconut. Why don’t I give you a lift?”
“Well -- what about my bike?”
“Oh, I have plenty of room in my old Jeep.”
“But, um...” It didn’t seem polite to refuse Mrs. Finch’s offer, but it didn’t seem fair to accept either considering that I hated piano lessons.
Mrs. Finch could see that I was stalling. “What’s the matter, Ellen?”
“Well, um...” I shifted my weight from one foot to another as the rice bag felt heavier and heavier in my arms. “Mrs. Finch... does anyone ever tell you they want to quit piano?” I stopped fidgeting and set the bag on top of my feet. There.
“Why, yes, Ellen. Why do you ask?” Mrs. Finch sounded slightly amused, and I didn’t know whether that irritated me or not.
“Well, um... Is that okay with you? I mean, do you let ‘em?”
“If they really want to stop, of course I let them. I can’t teach those who don’t want to learn.” Mrs. Finch smiled. “Why do you ask?”
“Um...” I wish Sarah and Kim hadn’t left me alone!
“Do you want to quit, Ellen?”
I let out a loud, relieved sigh. I didn’t have to say the “q” word. Quit. “Well... Kinda.”
“There’s no ‘kinda,’ Ellen. Do you really want to quit?”
I glanced down at the bag and then raised my eyes to Mrs. Finch. She didn’t look mad. She didn’t even look surprised. Did she know all along? “Yes, Mrs. Finch... But not because you’re mean of anything like that,” I added, and I meant it. Piano lessons and practice were awful, but Mrs. Finch was pretty nice. She’d always offer me home-made coconut candy, thick, brown, and sticky-sweet before and after each lesson, and she wouldn’t yell at me when I messed up during the lesson, which was often. “I mean, I’m not really good; I make a lot of mistakes.”
“You’ve only had five sessions, Ellen; of course you’re going to make plenty of mistakes.”
“Yeah, but... I mean, it wasn’t even my idea to take piano; it was my mom’s.”
“And did you ask your mom why she wanted you to take piano lessons?”
“Well, no, but I figure it’s because my pa bought the piano before he went overseas, and nobody knew how to play.”
“But that’s no reason, Ellen. Your mom could’ve taken piano lessons, but she chose for you to take them instead.”
“No, she wouldn’t.”
“What?”
“My mom wouldn’t have taken piano lessons.”
“And why are you so sure? I’ve given lessons to adults before.”
“Yeah, but...” I almost said, “Yeah, but those adults were probably white” but I didn’t because I didn’t know why I was so sure. All I knew was that I had never seen my mom or any of my Aunties and Uncles play the piano. It was always their kids: “Come here, Oliver, show your Auntie what you learned today” or “Jackie, go play that song you were practicing for your Grandma, she wants to hear.” It was like they were saving up cultural things like piano for their kids instead of themselves. I didn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense to me. Were they afraid to learn, to make mistakes? Were they just too busy? But I saw on TV lots of adults playing all sorts of instruments, and Mrs. Finch herself just said she taught adults. So what did that mean for all the Filipino parents that I knew, parents who bought pianos for their kids, never for themselves? “I think... it’s a Filipino mom thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean...” I let out a big huff of exasperation. How could I explain when I didn’t even know the explanation? “I just don’t like piano lessons, Mrs. Finch!”
I had forgotten that we were still in the Seven Day Store, but I quickly remembered when I saw the cashier and a few customers glance disapprovingly at me for my loudness.
Mrs. Finch looked at me, as if she had expected me to say something else, as if she knew something that I didn’t know. But what could my piano teacher know? Yes, she was old, as old as Grandma Tes, and perhaps she knew Grandma Tes too, even if Mrs. Finch was white, because Guam was that small an island and everybody was either military or connected with the military, and there were so many Filipinos in the military on Guam. Mrs. Finch’s Jeep was from World War II, and she seemed to have been in Guam since then, watching the U.S. Naval base grow, watching the steady growth of Filipino men enter the U.S. military so that they and their wives and kids could become Americans, one post-World War II promise which the U.S. actually kept. Perhaps she did know what I meant when I said, “It’s a Filipino mom thing,” did know the motivation of these Filipino parents like my mom when it came to their children, because Mrs. Finch was that old and had been on Guam that long, seeing the military families transfer in and transfer out. Maybe she knew more about being Filipino than did I. And who was I? Only an eight-year-old kid and so much an American military brat that I barely knew Tagalog, my parents’ native tongue, and barely knew my parents’ culture. What right did I have to say “It’s a Filipino mom thing” when I didn’t even understand my own mom?
Such thoughts had never come to me before until Mrs. Finch looked at me. It was like she sent those thoughts through her eyes, which seemed happy and sad at the same time. I dropped my eyes onto the white canvas bag of rice, resting on top of my flat, brown feet, and I hoisted it up to my chest and smelled the good musty starchiness. I was already a little late getting back home, and I had rice to wash for dinner.
Beep beep beep. Mrs. Finch opened the glass door and said, “Let’s go, Ellen.”
Mrs. Finch helped me put my red, banana-seat bike into the back of her Jeep. The ride was quick -- it was only three minutes from my house to the Seven Dayy Store by car -- and, thankfully, quiet. I didn’t want Mrs. Finch to ask me questions I couldn’t answer.
We went down the sticky asphalt road flanked on both sides with the white-washed rows of identical military houses that looked like the white keys of a piano. Mrs. Finch eased the Jeep next to the curb in front at, and I got out, lugging the rice, while Mrs. Finch lifted out my bike. As we walked to the house, I heard my mom in the kitchen, still singing her made-up song above the sound of running water.
“Mom, Mrs. Finch is here,” I announced, shouldering open the screen door.
Mom looked up from her washing of the vegetables, and turned off the faucet. “Oh, Edith, I wasn’t expecting you so soon. I’m still rinsing your eggplants, and I haven’t even started dinner yet.” She turned sharply to me as I was putting the rice away in the dispenser. “Ellen, take out the pork chops from the fridge.”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Grace.” Mrs. Finch set my bike against the house under the mailbox. “I can only stay a few minutes, anyway. And what were you singing just a moment ago? You have a beautiful voice!”
Mom laughed and flicked back a strand of hair with a wet hand. “Ha ha, I sound like a frog. And it’s only a kundiman, a little love-song, I learned when I was little.”
Oh. So it wasn’t made-up.
“Is there sheet music for it?”
“For La Paloma? I’m sure there is; I heard it on Manila radio once -- oh!” Mom turned again to me. “You can play La Paloma for your pa when he comes back home. It’s his favorite song. Edith, can you teach it to Ellen if you find the sheet music?”
I could feel Mrs. Finch’s eyes on my back as I measured out the rice and squirmed a little under her gaze. “Well, Grace, it’s up Ellen whether she wants to learn.”
“What do you mean?” Even without looking, I knew Mom frowned.
I knew Mrs. Finch was waiting for me to tell Mom, but I couldn’t bring myself to say, “I want to quit.” Simple words, but they stuck in my throat like starch dust stuck to rice grains, at which I continued to stare studiously as I measured the rice, cup by cup. After an uncomfortable, cowardly silence, Mrs. Finch said the words for me: “Ellen says she wants to quit piano.”
The only things I heard for a second were buzzing flies as they bumped against the screen and Shell babbling in her play pen in the living room. Buzz babble buzz babble. Then --
“Hmph. Well, if that’s what she wants, that’s what she wants.” Mom turned the faucet back on. “I’ll have your eggplants ready in a minute.”
“I’ll go get your coconut; it’s in the Jeep.”
I heard the hiss and slam of the door as I re-measured the rice because I put too much the first time. At the second measure, I stood with the rice pot and paused, waiting for my mother to finish her work at the sink.
“Um, Mom, I need to get some water --”
“How come I had to hear from your teacher you wanted to quit piano, ha? How come you didn’t come to me, your mother, before you went to your teacher?” Mom said all this without stopping her washing, rinsing the vegetables under the running water and setting them aside on a dish towel to dry.
“Because... because you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Listen! I listen to you! What kind of talk is that?” Mom stopped the faucet again and faced me. “Give me the rice.” I handed her the ricepot, which she put in the sink. “Okay, you tell me what you told your teacher but didn’t tell me. Why do you want to quit?”
I squirmed again. “Because... because I don’t care for the piano.”
“You don’t care for the piano? Do you know how much money your pa paid for that piano? Do you know how much money I spend on your lessons, lessons that other parents can’t even afford for their children? What kind of selfish thing is this -- you don’t care? You haven’t even learned your lessons yet!”
Again, selfish. That must’ve been my mother’s favorite word. Well, if she wants selfish... “Me selfish! I didn’t even WANT lessons; you said I had to take them! I didn’t WANT the piano; Pa said he got it for you! Selfish! You’re selfish!”
I saw Mom’s mouth close to a small, round O as she shook, and I was sure that she was about to pinch me -- you know, that painful twisting pinch on the arm which rips out hair -- for being such a selfish daughter. But Mrs. Finch came in with a plastic bag of husked coconut, and Mom could only shake her head and sigh.
“Here’s the coconut, Grace. Where do you want me to put them?”
Mom smiled tightly. “The table’s fine. Oh, and, I’m sorry, Edith, but Ellen won’t be taking piano lessons any more.”
“Did she tell you why?”
“Because she says she doesn’t care.”
“Well, that’s a reason.”
“A reason? What reason is that? It’s a selfish reason -- no reason at all.” Mom brought the vegetables on a dishtowel to the table, and she brought an additional towel to pat-dry. Both women sat down before the table to dry the vegetables and to talk comfortably, and I went to the sink to begin washing rice.
“Ellen? Selfish? She seems like a responsible little girl to me.” Mrs. Finch indicated my rice-cooking form.
“Ack, chores. When I tell her too, she does them. Only then. And she is selfish for refusing me and her pa’s gift of the piano. What kind of daughter would refuse a gift like that? She’s spoiled.”
I winced under my mother’s words but continued to wash the rice. Spoiled? Me? If anyone was spoiled, it was Sarah, not me. Sarah who didn’t have to get rice and other stuff when she preferred to play. Who didn’t have to help cook dinner and help clean up, like wiping off the table and sweeping the floor with a short-handled broom so as to get all the dirt out of the nooks and crannies. Who didn’t have to wear stuff from the flea market because we sometimes couldn’t afford to go to the Navy Exchange, which was pretty cheap, anyway. Who didn’t have to hear from her dad, “You be a help to your mom, I’m counting on you.” Who didn’t have to make good grades in school or else be yelled at. Who was spoiled? Not me.
“Now, Grace, you know Ellen’s not spoiled.”
“Hmph. She’s starting to be like her friend, Sarah. Always outside, playing. Doesn’t her mother need her? And Ellen has it easy, her life. When I was her age, I didn’t have all this.”
“All this?”
“A nice American house with furniture and air-conditioning. A car. Shoes on my feet. More than one dress. A school to go to. Ellen has more than I did when I was her age! I was in the rice paddies of La Union in north Luzon, in the hills. Working in the mud with a carabao while my family lived in a little nipa hut.”
“How’d you get from the rice paddies to Manila?”
“Oh, I had older brothers, older sisters. When they got old enough, they moved out. Some worked the land, but the oldest ones went to school so that they could get a good job and help to send money back to the family. Until then, my family worked hard to put them through school so that they could finish and help out. It was hard.” My mom paused and said a little louder, “No one in my family was selfish.”
I stiffened but continued to rinse the rice for a third time and listened. My mom rarely talked about her early life, and so a lot of details were new to me, probably because I never asked.
“My eldest sister Elena went to National University in Manila in the nursing program because nursing was a definite job. You can go anywhere in the world and be a nurse and get paid well.”
“So you came to Manila for the first time when you went to college?”
“Oh, no, I came to Manila for the first time when I was eight and my eldest brother Rex brought me along when he accompanied Elena to the university for the first time. Oh, Manila was BIG, so loud with dance clubs, radios playing jazz and swing and rock, and Jeepneys which followed no rules. Crowded with traffic, buildings, and people, all kinds of people, from tribal Igorats to European tourists. And no trees, no grass. The only green was the green of American GIs, and they seemed scary -- tall and loud and too-white, like pigs. Excuse me, Edith.”
Edith laughed. “You’re right -- they are tall and loud and white as pigs, and I married one of them! But go on. What’d you see in Manila?”
Mom rubbed her forehead. “It was a long time ago, and there was so much to see, it’s all a grey-brown blur, like the Manila pollution. All that smoke! It’s worse than the tobacco factory that I used to work in when my family was running out of land and there wasn’t enough land for everyone to farm. But I do remember hearing the piano for the first time in Manila.”
“You didn’t hear the piano before?”
“Of course I didn’t. Who could afford a piano where I lived? All the music I heard growing up was in here --” she pointed to her throat “or in a guitar, if you had a little money. But piano? Let me tell you what my brother said to me when I asked if my family could get a piano: ‘Are you crazy? These are for rich Americans and rich Filipinos -- only the rich play piano, not poor Filipinas in rice paddies. Don’t be foolish. And who will pay for such excess? Don’t be selfish, Grace.’”
“Were you being selfish, Grace?” asked Mrs. Finch.
“I was a child. I didn’t feel selfish.” Mom paused, and she turned around to look at me, who was looking at her. “I didn’t feel selfish because I didn’t know any better. But then I came to know. To know that wanting to play piano was foolish in a land where most people can’t afford to send their children to school. To know that the most important thing was to make money for your family, which meant leaving the Philippines, to be an American. And because I was a girl, that meant to marry an American GI.” My mother shook her head. “But before all that, I didn’t know because I was a child and no one told me that my desires were selfish. No, when I wished to play the piano I didn’t feel I was being selfish, I was just being a child.” She turned back to her vegetables. “Just like a child who doesn’t know why the piano is for her... who wishes not to play... isn’t selfish either.”
I shrugged and turned back to the ricepot. I filled the water line to seven for seven cups and placed the pot in the rice cooker to steam for thirty minutes.
“So, what are you going to do with the piano, now that Ellen’s decided not to play?” asked Mrs. Finch.
Mom shrugged. “I don’t know. Return it when Ray comes home. Maybe keep it for Shelley when she gets old enough and if she wants to.”
“What about you? Don’t you want to know how to play? You’re not a poor Filipina in the rice paddies -- you’re an American citizen. And you do have a piano. It’s your childhood wish fulfilled!”
Mom started laughing. “No no! I’m a wife and mother now, and learning to play piano is a child’s desire. Now that I’ve grown up, I only want my children to have what I didn’t have and to appreciate their good fortune. That is MY desire as a wife and mother.”
“Mom.”
It was the first time I had spoken since I had accused my mother for being selfish, and she sounded surprised to hear my voice. “Yes, Ellen?”
“Well, I did promise Pa I’ll play something for him when he gets back, so -- if I learn enough to play La Paloma and play it for him, can I quit piano afterwards? Is that okay?”
Mom looked down at the table and patted dry the last bit of vegetable. “That’s okay. Edith, you must stay for dinner. Ellen, did you get the pork chops from out of the fridge?”
“Oh, no, I can do that,” Mrs. Finch said, rising from the table. “I can make my famous pork chops!”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
When my mother and piano teacher rose to start dinner, I went into the living room. I sat before the brown upright, its wood so glossy that my face shone, looking confused. Why did I say I would quit after I played La Paloma to my pa when he came home when my mom had already accepted that I wanted to quit now? Because this piano was for me, and it would be selfish of me to refuse my mother’s wish. But the wish was selfish, too, because my mother wanted me to play for her, for her as an eight-year-old Filipina among the muddy rice paddies of La Union, and my mother realized that. I saw it in her eyes as she realized that I wasn’t she as she was, a poor Filipina. I was a Filipino-American. And those dreams in the Philippines were not my dreams, here in Guam, U.S.A. But what my dreams were, I didn’t know, which was why I compromised. Because even though my mother’s dreams weren’t my own, I felt that whatever mine were to become, a little bit of them would come from my mother, so that my dreams would be like a hybrid, all mixed-up and new.
So I owed it to her, as a daughter. At least until Pa came home.
I moved the bench closer to the piano and sat down. I lifted the heavy keyboard cover, which always threatened to slam down on careless fingers, and played “Chopsticks” for my dreams.
© 1996 Rufel F. Ramos