Drown in Yoghurt and Formaldehyde

(four)

Walking Tall

From the onset, I always seemed, to myself and to other people, an anomaly of nature. As a little girl, people would always remark on how tall I looked, a head above everyone else, complete with bouncing curls, like a live muppet dancing among the tiny children’s heads. In the one-class kindergarten of the subdivision, I was near the end of the line, second only to the gigantic girl who got held back two times. Everyday, four-year-old me would stand at the back, straining to hear the words of the recorded National Anthem but able to see above the line. I was a bobbing lollipop head, the perfect target for the terrifying teacher who made the kids who forgot the words to the anthem stay in the field to sing it again.

When I leapt onto first grade the year after, into a large school, I was ecstatic. People towered over me there. I remember them looming above me, all gangly and lanky. In class, I was still second to the last in the line but in that gigantic school, I was a diminutive being. I relished it. I could go around walking in the school halls, the quadrangle and on the playground without anyone remarking on how tall I was.

But I can’t say that my height had no bearing in playground politics. I was always one of the first to get picked for games, especially Sekyu Base. Maybe my peers thought that my long arms and legs could be an advantage. Never mind that I wheezed five minutes into the game and sometimes tripped over my so-called “team weapons.” Besides, when I ran, my arms flapped everywhere like torn branches, so they were pathetically easy appendages for members of the opposing team to tag. However, when I was “taken prisoner,” as the rules of the game dictated, I could stretch my body to ridiculous extents, my arms spread out so that one still touched the opponents’ base I was “imprisoned in” while the other was ready for a teammate to tag so I could get “free.”

Despite the playground perks, I was an awkward kid. Extremely so. The other girls around me were delicate and fragile, as though one strong breeze would knock them down and they would fall to the floor in smiling little fragments. They were tiny and petite like little China dolls whereas I imagined myself to be G.I. Jane in a skirt that was too short.

Outside of school, I had retained some of my novelty. I was the eldest in our generation on both my parents’ sides. I was the girl fawned over, flattered and doted on by the adults. “You’re so tall!” they always exclaimed, all the while shaking their heads in wonder. I have to admit that I often reveled in the spotlight, playing coy but standing straighter. Sometimes, though, the way they fussed about my height occasionally got on my nerves. It seemed that everyone had to be reminded that I was the tall Belen/Martinez child, which made it all the more awkward for me to get on with my childhood.

I couldn’t play with my cousins. It wasn’t the age gap between us younger kids, which I usually gave as a reason on why I stayed with the adults. This age gap, I see now, was imagined to an extent, since I was only a couple of years older than my cousins and my brothers. I remember having those phases in my childhood in which every year, every month, every day of my life mattered to me, just so I could brag about how old I was getting. But after all the coyness and the imagined age gap, I wanted to play with the cousins. But I couldn’t. It was just me. It was the height, the length of me. Put my brother over my other brother and they wouldn’t even skim my ears. I was a little girl by age but when I joined the gaggle of children—some of them were no more than toddlers—playing their Lego and their Barbie dolls and Polly Pockets, I looked like King Kong about to ravage a city.

Early on—that is, when my height was relatively normal for a kid—I had loved playing in those structures in fast food restaurants, which I think were meant to make parents crazy. Jungle Gyms, I think they were called. They always had a sign at the entrance that had a blazing red arrow near the top that says, “Only children below this line are allowed to enter the Playplace.” The arrow ended at my nose. I was already barefoot by then, my shoes already on the rack. I had to content myself with watching my brothers whiz past me, yelling like the madmen that they were.

And those pabitins in birthday parties. There was an unspoken Sasha ban, I think, since I only had to reach up, not even on tiptoe, to get that cooking set every girl wanted to have.

As I grew up and I learned more about my body from what I could sift through the gibberish taught to us in school. I dreaded puberty. Never mind the chemical imbalances, the acne and god, the hair. I was informed that I was going—no, it was standard procedure—to have a growth spurt. As if I haven’t been experiencing one the moment I was forcibly yanked from my mother’s unconscious body! And so the little China dolls grew into Disney princesses and I kept on being G.I. Jane, only now I wore jeans, since my father ranted on about skirts looking too scandalous on me. Weird things were already happening to my body: my feet were the size of paddles and bones were protruding from my hips. On my chest, there seemed to be mosquito bites that I would later learn where supposed to look like the round globules of fat that were already in full swing on my friends’ bodies. And still, I was going to get taller? Does God shake His head and snigger when He thinks of these injustices cast upon pubescent me?

Well, puberty not only brought on those changes (slowly, I would like to add, although to delve on that injustice would require another paper), it brought with them a dizzying awareness of the boys around me. Suddenly, they just seemed to pop up everywhere, looking all gussied up in their slick hair, shiny shoes and wearing their fathers’ pungent colognes. And it just did not help that every boy around my age had to look up to me while we were standing.

Life was grand.

During school programs where I was required to have a partner, either they were imported from an older level or I had to make do with the fact that I was to be the boy. In plays, I had to play the single mother or the dominatrix or the high maintenance corporate goddess. If I really had to play someone who had a love interest, they had to come from the older batches and I had to make sure that I was, for the most part, sitting down or in bed or kneeling on the floor. I was often told by the directors, “Just don’t stand up!”

Socially, I had my share of boys and most of them came a few inches from being shorter than me. Whenever I was together with one, it seemed to be the same as when I was onstage: I shouldn’t stand up often. Due to the shortage of tall males among the pitiful population of the species from where I came from, I didn’t have that much offers. Or prospects. When I daydreamed about, er, shorter boys, the absurdity and the awkwardness of the image made me speechless in adolescent embarrassment.

The horror of the dances and the balls and the parties and the cotillions. Imagine going out with a boy whose eyes were level with my neck when I teetered on heels. Imagine being walked home from school, HHWW—Holding Hands While Walking—and feeling like models for a mother and son pictorial.

I had to deal with it. Sometimes, I just didn’t think about it.

Time flew and crept by, as it often does. My peers alternated on calling me a future supermodel or an Amazon, depending on how their high school hormones reacted to me. Mostly, it was the latter, with gleeful exclamations of, “You look like a boy that looks like a girl! Cool!”

And then, before I knew it, college came around. I also stopped growing.

When I first landed in Ateneo, from my little town in Cavite, everyone around me seemed so... so… polished. I was ready for this, primed for it, exposed to it before by education inside and outside the classroom. But nothing compared to the real actualization of my preps and those you’ll-be-fine talks to myself: someone was always prettier, sexier, had the better smile, had the more bouncy hair. And (surprise-surprise!) someone—lots—were always taller. I was no longer an anomaly. Just one gangly girl who knew not what to do with her uncoordinated, stretched-on-a-torture-rack body.

It was in college that I developed what is called by a blockmate of mine as the Booger Complex. It’s especially rampant in schools like Ateneo, where beautiful girls come in crates. For example, Miss Flawless Skin floats by in her designer duds, her long silky straight hair a cloud around her, heart-stopping curves moving effortlessly, perfect and sealed in a 5’9” Barbie doll body. And there I was: Miss PMS Breakouts clomping by in my 3-for-100 shirt, mass of uncombed curls like a nest on my head, cardiac-arrest inducing curve-less body slinking like a rusty automaton, overflowing yet lacking in a 5’7.5” Betty Spaghetti incarnation. And always, always, I would feel like a piece of snot repeatedly smeared on the wall by a child throwing a tantrum.

Sadly, this happens many times on a daily basis.

I’ve learned to face it. I’ve always known that I—my height, I mean—wasn’t exceptional. Just unusual. Big difference, I told myself at the start.

There’s a saying that goes, “How come we never know what we’ve got until it’s gone?” Well, my height hadn’t gone. Just the novelty of it. And I was feeling out of sorts. What had defined me for such a long time wasn’t even applicable anymore. Sure, I found my height a hassle more times than I cared to count but at the back of my mind and at the deepest part of my self-esteem, I knew that this was what gave me an edge, made me different, made me stand out—literally, at most times.

Despite being told, many times, that I’m too hard on myself and that I am neurotic—usually both at the same time—I have to wake up and realize that I am still tall. Sure the mosquito bites that were my breasts at puberty had become like puffy pancakes—I will not go there—and sure my hips now look like the side of a warehouse—I will not go there either—but I still had my height. I can still intimidate, pretend I’m someone important, feel fantastic when I’m in heels, reach for the book at the top shelf without needing a ladder.

Sooner or later, I would have to get comfortable with my body. It seems pathetic that I haven’t yet done so. I would have to stand straighter now, lest I be lost in this sea of Castillian, Caucasian and Chinese beauties. And I don’t want that to happen. I may not know how to swim yet but I’ll be fighting the current with every ounce of sweat and every precious piece of profanity I have under my tiangge-bought belt.

Besides, all is not lost. I still have my share of head-turning, staring, pointing and yes, glaring. Recently, in the cafeteria, I fell in line beside a girl who, in stilettos, was inches taller than me. Sneaker-clad, I felt the beginnings of the Booger Complex tingling in my fingers. I glanced at her, meaning to smile—good-naturedly or prissily, it’s up to her—but then something stilled me. She was staring at me, bewilderedly, her eyes making a trail from my feet up to my head then down to my feet again, over and over, the same bafflement and then some menace creeping to her eyes. I could practically read her mind. “How dare this girl be as tall as me, barefoot?”

This was going to be fun.

Labels: Creative Nonfiction

posted by Sasha Martinez @ 9:15 AM 0 Comments

(three)

My mother insisted that she had been trying to wake me up for the better part of an hour. I told her she was lying.

“I felt you poke me once,” I pointed out, opening my eyes a little to look at her. “On my ass. How the hell am I supposed to wake up with that?” I turned on the lumpy bed, my back to her, and prayed fervently that she let me go back to sleep.

It was one of those ungodly Monday mornings and the sky was as I have never seen it in months: the evening’s fading bluish purples giving way to the more violent muddy orange of a morning. By all means, I should have been miles and miles away, soundly asleep on my hard dormitory bed, oblivious to the sunrise and the cold at dawn. Instead, I was two hours, a jeep ride and two trains away, still stuck in bed in Cavite.

By spite, I was sure, my mother turned her blow-dryer on and the sound, not unlike a broken blender trying to turn pebbles into dip, was enough to have me move as though I was rolling out of bed. But after a few obligatory rolls, I snuggled deeper into the thinning comforter.

Last night, or rather, some odd three hours ago, just as I had been drifting off into sweet sleep, Mom had poked me yet again, although I had pointedly tossed the same comforter over my face. Ignoring that, and my threat to hit her with the nearest blunt object, she had asked, “Asan yung relo mo?”

I lifted the comforter off my face and scowled in the darkness, trying to remember. “Nasa baba.”

“Baka maupuan.”

“Hindi, nasa dining table.”

“Baka makain.”

I had groaned, becoming more and more awake by the second. I had thrown a pillow at her and then curled into a tighter ball. “Inaantok ka lang. Leave me alone.”

She had probably still been sniggering when I finally drifted off.

With a click, the dryer fell silent. She poked me again, on the same spot. “Wake up, Sasha.” There it was. That “Mom Voice” that once in a while found a way to crawl into my mother’s speech.

I grumbled. But only for show. With one last, wistful burrow into the bed, I got out of it.

As I stood up, one foot landed on her latest James Lee Burke novel, which she had proudly told me she bought for only seventy bucks. (And twelve hours after the statement, she’d closed the paperback with an almost childlike impudence and said, “How dare he put this trash in his book! He has no idea what he’s saying. He didn’t research this!”) I nudged it aside.

I sat on the edge of the bed, my feet firmly planted on the itchy brown carpet. With more-than-sleepy eyes and a less-than-alive brain, I stared into the full-length mirror, in front of which, Mom had taken her usual spot, cross-legged on the floor.

My mother was in her slacks, her bra, and my father’s black socks. A string of pearls was around her neck and she was wearing the earrings I’d made for her a coupled of months before, when I still had time to get a life. They peeked from the short, spiky hair she’d manage dry quickly.

Even from where I was, I could see the droplets of water that clung to the soft skin at her back. Bored, I traced the bony knobs of her spine underneath that skin with my eyes.

“Sasha.”

“Five minutes.”

She was now dutifully applying her make-up for the day. With a too-careful grip, she made precise sweeps of rouge on the apples of her cheeks. The rims of her nearsighted eyes were yet to be lined with the eyeliner she had taken from my make-up kit and the thin strips of her long, straight lashes didn’t have mascara to curl and thicken them yet. Her lips, a bit too dark for her fair skin, were unpainted.

Those lips were now twisted into an exasperated curve. “Elisha. Well?”

“I’m waking up.” I closed my eyes. “Hindi pa tapos yung five minutes.”

“Next time you come here, leave on Sunday.”

There better not to be a next time like that, I thought. Yesterday, I’d come back home unannounced, in a weekend scrunched between deadlines galore, practically sobbing for proper food, a good night’s sleep on a bed with a serviceable mattress, cable television and intellectual argument. Warm human contact. Therapy.

I’d pushed open the swollen wooden door of my parents’ bedroom by sheer will, exhausted by the trip, the things I left behind, and the things still ahead of me. The four of them—my two younger brothers, my mom and my dad—were all in the bed, watching wrestling, playing cards. My mom had been holding the Burke novel in one hand, close to her face, while she ruffled my youngest brother’s John’s light brown hair once in a while.

My mom had looked up with a start when I entered, paused, then squinted. “Uy.”

“Hi, mommy.”

“Sasha?”

“Barely,” I’d said. I wanted to cry.

I then gave my dad a kiss on his unshaven cheek and took the bear hug he offered, then pinched my brothers’ cheeks, to their annoyance. My mother’s slender frame was getting out of bed. I wanted to hug her too, me the too-emotional, moody artist daughter but my mother had never been one for overt displays of affection. She’d most likely stiffen and stare at me as though I were the cat who’d done his business on the bed. But, then again, my mother liked to snuggle with the cat on what should have been clean sheets, much to my dad’s—our honorary laundry man’s—irritation.

“Do you want my pasta?” she’d asked me. “Tomatoes and shrimp? There’s sushi pa, I think, in the fridge. Jeff, may pipino pa kaya? Sasha, kakain ka? Kakain ka.”

I had mumbled something that must have passed for assent because she’d pushed past me and went down.

I had then promptly crashed on the spot she had vacated. Smells like mom, had been my last coherent thought. I had then been shaken awake by both my brothers a rough hour later.

I opened my eyes and saw that she was standing up and was pointing a blusher at me. She blinked a couple of times and I realized with a grimace that she’d probably put on her contacts while I was spaced out. (It never ceases to gross me out, that ritual.) “Ho-o-oy,” she said, drawing out the word, something she usually did when annoyed. “You’ll miss your first class.”

I tried focusing on her though I was barely able to keep my eyes open. Last night, although my mother had offered token resistance, the two of us had watched Armageddon on television, into the wee hours of the morning. I’d talked throughout the film, in an effort to stay awake. She’d shushed me a couple of times but at some points, like when Bruce Willis was bidding everyone goodbye, she’d talked louder than me. Dad had, once or twice, gone up from the living room I’ve banished him to with my presence, to tell us to shut up.

I opened my mouth at a yawn. Before my mother could throw the hairbrush at me—although I’m sure she’d miss, though we were two feet apart—I went downstairs and talked myself into beginning another week.

An hour later, the heels of my mother’s leather boots clicked and clacked all over our linoleum floor, with her gathering this book and that paper, work she’d left lying the night before with my arrival.

My father was in our dilapidated car, honking the horn.

With one foot out the door, narrowly missing a mound of cat poop, my mother turned to Joshua, who was as annoyed with having been woken up as I had been. He was up in bed, that lanky frame of his yet to be stretched to its towering length, taller than me now. She tossed an object wrapped in a plastic bag on the bed beside him, beside John’s sleeping form. Distractedly, she tells him, “O, eto, may cucumber. Alagaan mo sarili mo, okay?”

I paused on my way to our rusted gate and turned back towards her, an eyebrow raised, my lips twitching.

“What?” With a blank expression on her face, she pokes me out of the house, back into civilization.

Labels: Creative Nonfiction

posted by Sasha Martinez @ 9:14 AM 0 Comments