A Song in the Daylight (76 page)

The bitterness that flowed from the black end to their thirty-five-year union never dried out, which is another reason I couldn’t visit my mother too often, because it hurt me to look at her. Dad died soon after and we never got an answer to our question that, like rhetorical cyanide, remains in my mother’s heart and in mine: what was so completely missing in him that he couldn’t see, blinding him to the scales on which all of us were outweighed by one pretty stranger twenty years younger?

I thought that a scruffy boy from the wrong side of Maui who extended his hand to me made me blind. But what if I, too, like my father, was always blind, and just didn’t know it?

Larissa blinked, came out of it, smiled blankly at Father Emilio. “Come on,” he said cheerfully. “You do theater, we do Jesus. Let’s muddle through the Nativity play together. It’ll be like the blind leading the blind.”

“Uh, okay.” Larissa glanced away from him, trying to shake off her reverie. “Does Shakespeare do nativity?”

The priest laughed. “You tell me, Larissa.
You’re
the drama expert.”

“May I use your phone, Father? I’m going to try…try to call Kai one more time today.” Morning, evening—why didn’t he
ever
answer the phone? Though in Kai’s defense, the rectory was closed after compline, at 8:30 and that was 11:00 p.m. in Pooncarie, so perhaps they were out drinking. She didn’t know. The phone just rang and rang.

Nalini wanted to be one of the Wise Men. But you’re not a boy, Nalini. I can be anything I want, said Nalini. Why can’t I be a Wise Man? I want to bring myrrh.

“How about if before you bring myrrh, you and I go to the market and get us some fabric so we can make costumes? We need cloaks for the Shepherds, and robes for the Wise Men, and a dress for Mary. We need ornamental rope to use for belts, and silk or satin scarves to tie on heads. Plus we’ll need some thick paper and paints, because we’ve got to make crowns.”

“For Jesus?” Nalini squealed, jumping up and down.

“No, not for Jesus. For the Wise Men. Jesus is not a king.”

“Of course He is,” said Nalini, puzzled. “He’s the King of kings.”

“I meant,” Larissa corrected herself, “he’s just a baby inside the manger.”

“Yes! We should get Him a halo. And Mary too. And Joseph.”

“Joseph needs a halo?” Larissa didn’t know if she was going to be up to this.

Nalini laughed. “You’re so funny. You’re joking, right?”

“Yeah. Sure I am. Well, if we get gold foil, we can make some halos.”

They made sheep and goats out of cardboard. The orphans painted them in rainbow colors. They shaped an angel out of white clay. Father Emilio suggested they build a cave. They got wood, and nails and hammered boards together. They ripped grass out and when it dried, they had hay. They got Christmas lights and hung them around the wooden structure so it lit up like a Christmas tree. The afternoon rehearsals morphed into morning rehearsals, and evening rehearsals. All the children who could walk and talk wanted to participate, all thirty of them. Larissa made it happen. The Narrator, Joseph, Mary, King Herod, three Wise Men, three Shepherds, and twenty angels dressed in white sheets with silver halos. Jesus was played by Benji, a severely cleft-palated three-month-old, born without any left limbs, who lay in the manger through the rehearsals.

Larissa stood by the door to the common room watching them. So simple to teach them, yet so hard for them to learn. First, to teach them to be someone else, to be other people.

Perhaps if she had been other people, she could’ve remained more of herself. Perhaps had she been given alternate lives to play on the stage, she could’ve come home and lived in a place with the tall oaks and the view and the cold windows. Perhaps she could’ve continued to touch with her hands the faces she loved while during the day walking out into the cold and ascending three steps, four, to the wooden platform in a darkened theater, standing on it, and lifting her gaze to the rafters, the way Nalini, standing in daylight, lifted her gaze to Father Emilio as she learned the words that were hard to remember, memorized the cues that were hard to keep.

Nalini is quite something. She wants everyone’s lines, not just her own. She wants to live many lives, not just her own, not even her one part as Magi Number Three. “
Myrrh is mine: its bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering gloom—sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone-cold tomb
.”

The little girl loves to sing that and bellows with all her might, but then her little hands go up, and her black eyes sparkle as she mouths, then whispers along to the words of the Narrator too!
Glorious now behold Him arise!

Nalini, pipe down, beckons Larissa, standing across the room from Father Emilio, while Sister Martina, excellent on the piano, plays “We Three Kings,” and the children sing, and uncontained Nalini jumps up and down. “How am I doing, Larissa? How am I doing?” Though she is not the Prophet, she speaks with the prophets, as Larissa rolls her eyes, yet with pride, with desperate tenderness at the child’s vulnerability. She wants to promise her, swear to her that she will never leave her, that she will never be the one again to break that bond.

Except Larissa is not the one Nalini longs for. All the vows
in the world can’t bring Che back to look after the beloved child that stands in the light of the ancient adobe room and announces with the Prophets, “
Look! The redeemed of the Lord shall return, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!
How am I doing, Larissa?”

4
Happiness

“I
watch you,” Father Emilio said to her in September. “You’ve been with us over two months, and I still don’t understand or know how I can help you.”

“What do you mean? I’m fine.” Larissa was in the kitchen, in the afternoon. She had just finished kneading the dough for
pandesal
and was taking a tea break. The tea was good in the Philippines. She hadn’t been much of a tea drinker before. But here they got their tea from somewhere aromatic. China Oolong? Green? It was soothing and fine.

“You’re not fine. You’re a gloomy Gus. Look at you.”

Well, who wouldn’t be gloomy? In two months she had received one letter from Kai. One! You want to talk about memorize? She memorized that letter. It wasn’t hard to do, the letter being so short and all. Sixteen lines. Including the Dear Larissa.

Dear Larissa,

I miss you too. I’m not a great letter writer, and I’m sorry about that, but I think about you all the time, think about the good times we had. Billy and I are working from sunrise to sundown. The stables are coming along nice.
Almost done, remarkably. You’d like them very much, and the horses are doing well. Billy is an awesome wrangler and all-around great guy. We have big plans, Billy and I. I want to tell you about them when I see you. When will that be? Not soon enough. When are you coming back? I wish you could call me sometime. I love your letters, it’s like you’re right here with me. Though not quite. Please keep writing. I really look forward to receiving them. Nalini sounds like a great kid. Your friend Che would be happy to know you’re keeping an eye on her. I’m going to go now, but I’ll write again soon, and I think about you every day.

Love,

Kai

“There’s nothing you can do,” Larissa said to Father Emilio. “You can’t fix this. You can’t fix anything.”
Love, Kai?
That’s what she got? She had written him thirty, forty letters, and this is what came from him? She sat and stared out the window. It was pouring rain, water like a tidal wave was washing away the hopscotch course, the chalk outlines of momentary joy. The grass was sodden with standing pools. After the children would wake up from their afternoon nap, the greatest fun of their day would be to run around barefoot in those shallow ponds full of lilies.

“Larissa, look around you,” Father said. “Sixty girls and boys in our Christ the Redeemer orphanage are growing up without mothers and fathers. Some of them are disabled, some of them are blind, can’t walk, have heart valve problems, cleft palates. One died last week from dengue fever. I know she was already sick and small, but still. Despite this, they manage. Nalini, too. They skip rope, play cards, invent games out of rocks, they hide and go seek. They’ve been transformed by your play rehearsals. You should hear them in their beds, in the morning, in the yard. It’s all they talk about. Every day they do this:
find cheer despite the seeming misery of it. Why do you sit there and cry over your own sorrows? Even while you bake bread, cook sweet rice pudding, cut up fruit for
halo-halo
, make costumes for Mary and the Wise Men, I see you lead a joyless existence; why?”

“I don’t know how
they
do what they do,” Larissa replied. “I don’t understand them at all.”

“You should feel a sense of sacred awe toward all mystifying things you don’t understand,” said Father Emilio. “The mystery of life is legion, that’s why we continually pray for guidance and comfort.” He nodded coolly. “You would do better not to view them with the scorn I hear in your voice.”

“There’s no scorn, Father. But they’re children! I’m hardly going to take an example from them. They don’t have to live with what I have to live with. No pain, no regret, nothing.”

“No pain, no regret, really?” Father Emilio said so quietly. He folded his hands in front of him.

“I mean, they’re not waking up every day saying they would do anything,
anything
, to live their life over.”

Father Emilio watched her. “No, they probably don’t do that, though I can assure you they wake up in the dead of night from all manner of other unimaginable things. But is that what
you
do?” he asked. “You wake up every day and say to yourself that you would do anything to live your life over?”

“Yes,” Larissa said to him—and meant it. All she wanted was to live
it
over. To get up every morning with joy, see, once there was joy! and run toward her day, toward that one hour when she was in bliss on Albright Circle. One hour a day to feel young, to have love. Father Emilio wanted her to find it? She
had
found it. And now look.

“Larissa, please. Don’t be keeled over like this, choking on your guilt and despair. Learn to live with the choices you made. Would you like Sister Margarita to teach you how to make
macapuno
?” It was a thick coconut dessert delicacy.

“Not today. Look what’s happening to me,” she said. “Love is vanishing. Yet it’s the only thing left.”

He stood up. “I must go attend to my other duties,” he said coldly. “But, Larissa, love is not vanishing. It’s everywhere you look, every single place on this earth. You can’t get away from it. And everywhere love is, God is. And God is not where love is not. Open your eyes, and cast your glance on something other than yourself. And if you can’t do that yet, then look inside your heart. When were you happiest? When did you feel most fulfilled? What place do your memories take you to? Go there, and see if you can find a way to keep yourself.”

After college and before she hooked up permanently with Jared, who was off looking for himself while being a tour guide in the Himalayas, Larissa spent the summer as one of the performers in Great Swamp Revue, a traveling band of improv actors, who rode in one bus from town to town in New Jersey and lower upstate New York, performing in local theaters, up north to Woodstock and west to Allentown. Ron Palais, their road manager, booked thirteen Saturday night gigs and seven Sunday matinees. There were eight in their theater group. Evelyn was one of them. So was Ezra.

It was the happiest summer of her life.

They lived in cheap motels and slept on the bus on the way to the next gig, they showered sporadically, read constantly, talked and smoked incessantly, recited tragedy and comedy under the pulsing beat of the Clash and the Ramones. They did not want to be sedated, they felt and saw and heard everything like they were on ecstasy. After each performance they went out drinking, continuing to rehearse, to riff off each other, to sing.
Did you stand by me? No, not at all
. They danced and paired up with unlikely partners. Larissa stopped wearing
makeup and a bra. Evelyn performed Job on stage, the whole thing by herself in a soliloquy. Larissa had been blown away, but their manager told Evelyn not to do it anymore. “People aren’t going to get it, Ev,” Ron told the disappointed and incredulous woman. “The whole suffering thing. Nobody wants to suffer.” Ezra said he agreed: suffering was for chumps. “No point in suffering for its own sake. It’s self-pitying, self-indulgent, and stupid.” He smoked three cigarettes in the time it took him to utter those few sentences. “Do you know why we suffer? So that the works of God can be made manifest in us. That’s Job. Ev, can you convey that in a five-minute speech to families on a Sunday afternoon after church?”

Ezra was teasing her, but Evelyn didn’t give up; she persisted despite Ron’s orders, despite Ezra, who must have been a little bit in love with her also. Who wouldn’t be? Larissa herself was a little bit in love with Evelyn, and while Ezra and Larissa were in bed, their eyes became moistened with the image of Evelyn’s lovely mouth incanting,
I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came
.

During this Renaissance Fair summer of her life, when Larissa’s hair was cropped like a boy’s and her face plain of makeup, she had joy every day and knew it, was cramped and didn’t care, had few comforts, no money, was always broke, and didn’t care. She lived not understanding why she was living and even less why eventually she had to die, and didn’t care. Every night she got up on stage trying to imitate the inimitable Evelyn reciting long-suffering Job, with her own fruitful efforts from
Romeo and Juliet
, and Prospero’s speeches.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on…

Larissa knew it was fleeting even then, but fully believed it would come again, in another form, to be happy like that, so
alive
! packed up on a bus, all her life’s belongings in a duffel bag under her feet, hung over from the night before, rootlessly drifting from town to town, singing
karaoke in the smoke-filled bars.
Did you stand by me? No, not at all
.