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| Rocky Times |
| November 7, 2007 |
The crew was dipping the fruits good only for local consumption in vats of foul-smelling chemicals to ripen them quickly, sweating under rubber aprons and gloves. It was late in the afternoon, the end of a long shift. The boss was in the comfort room and the videoke parlor next door was starting to sing. “Shake it to the right, shake it to the left/ Point to the east and point to the west/ Shake it, shake it baby!” The girl’s untied her apron and danced right in front of her favorite boy. The long day’s work fell from her in an instant—flew from her twirling body. “Shake it, shake it baby!” She could hardly believe what she was doing. Her hair and hips swung wildly. The boss would be back soon so she put her apron back on, going back to dipping the mangoes after the song ended as if nothing was happening. Something had happened. A recent convert to Jehovah’s Witnesses sat between the girl and her boy. When the girl sat back down, her hair brushed the religious boy’s cheek and nostrils, spreading its scent through him. His family had come down from their mountain homeland with the rest of their tribe only a year ago. “You are acting the harlot,” the Witness told the girl, “like Jezebel.” She would pay for not dancing for him. The boy she had danced for barely looked up as he continued working. “You don’t have to make such a big deal about it, y’know,” he answered the Witness. “If the boss comes back while we’re messing around, we all get fired. I need this job. My family needs this job. If I lose it, I’m not the only one who suffers.” “That’s a good point, friend,” the first boy said. “Now shut up.” The Witness picked up the vat of ripening fluid, and poured it over the head of the girl’s favorite. “What is happening here!?” The boss had returned from the comfort room unnoticed. “Nothing, sir.” The Witness looked guiltily from the dripping boy to the empty pail in his hands. “Some of the others were fooling around, and I wanted them to stop. It says to ‘obey the powers that be’ in the book of Romans so…” “Oh please! You are the one who dumped the bucket on his head. I saw that and I ‘do not bear false witness’ as your good book says somewhere else. So the powers that be are telling you that you’re fired.” “You can’t do that!” “Wanna bet? I just did.” The boss looked at the rest of his workers. “I don’t know what else is going on here, but we only have half an hour left in the day, so try to stay out of trouble. And you,” he pointed to the wet boy. “Wash those chemicals off before you turn soft in the head as a ripe mango yourself.” |
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| Untouchable. That’s how the girl felt since yesterday.
The boy was just a mango worker, part of the crew that picked the fruit off the trees at harvest. Their branches reminded her of the thin, bent fingers of her lola, grandmother Consuela. She remembered the first moment she truly saw him. The boy had brought that old hand up to his smooth forehead in the Filipino gesture of respect to elders, gave grandmother a small basket of unripe mangoes—and granddaughter a look from underneath long eyelashes. Smoke from burning leaves gave him a halo scampering up the mango trunk, sunrays divided by long green leaves before bathing his graceful body. She tried to remember the lesson from science class about quantum physics—that light could be either waves or particles depending on the observer. Her teacher told the class that this fact meant there was no objective truth. It all depended on who was watching and when. There was another experiment going on beyond the teacher’s science and the girl measured it with unwrinkled, long fingers on her wrist. Her heart was twenty beats a minute over normal. She heard the teacher’s voice inside her head. “The nature of sexual attraction comes from physiological changes as hormones, chemicals and social training interact to produce what we call ‘love.’” Then why, dear teacher, was this reaction happening now and not tomorrow? Why this boy and not the dozens of others she knew, just as handsome, young and strong? What was she to do about these waves and particles assaulting her unprotected heart? Her family sleeping together in one bed in their one-room nipa hut often searched for missing pillows in the middle of the night. They would be found surrounding the girl, who built a castle with them around her hidden body. That’s where she went with her delicious new secret—into a soft fortress. Only one would be allowed to follow her inside, once he knew for sure she waited for him. School was out for a month so, with her parents’ permission, she joined the fruit-pickers following the harvest. It took only two days to for mangoes to fall off the list of the girl’s favorite fruits. They were picked unripe and hard, to prevent spoiling, before being shipped to Japan and China. Any mango fights were serious business, even for Filipinos untrained in throwing baseballs. The girl threw the first pitch. |
| Untouchable |
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