jesus, sometimes, I just don’t know anymore what’s going on.
barely three minutes into our pan-pacific conversation and mama’s voice starts to crackle over the phone, the way voices of tired novenaria women hired to pray all nine days of a funeral wake back in our island would start to grate on the fourth or fifth night.
oh, last week, a woman in Cebu gave birth to a giant catfish. I tell her I saw it on my satellite tv beaming lurid news from back home. and then I assure her it wasn't a fish but an immature fetus. a catfish, imagine that.
then she rambles on about our neighbor whose son just got back from japan. you can not believe this. ricky now has breasts. a former basketball teammate of mine, ricky went to japan and worked as what civil servants in manila label as a professional cultural entertainer.
an incoming call beeps and I know it is him. I tell ma to hold on and quickly switch line to promise him we are still on tonight for that pedro almodovar movie and that I will get back to him as soon as ma gets dizzy from talking her head out. I realize I was talking to him in whispers.
so who was that? your girlfriend? I ask her if she received the $500 I sent her last month. yes, thank you, she say matter-of-factly. you are not getting younger, you know that. when are you getting married?
I tell her it's hard to know people here in the states. so, get this girl's number. she lives in washington. isn't that close to new york? call her.
I tell her I need to go now because I have to do overtime work at the hospital. you never do double time, but anyway, go.
I just wish that before I go, she then goes into a very calculated pause, one I am very familiar already and have learned to ignore, I can see you settled in and it's nice for an old woman around here to have pictures in her purse of her american born grandson, you know.
I tell her I have to go. you promise me you will marry? I tell her again I have got to go. she say okay, okay.
as I speed dial his number immediately after mama hangs up, I twiddle the slick phone cord in my free hand and keep on hearing mama's voice like that of a fishwife hollering catfish, catfish.