The thought of Bob Barker, that pale host totemic to so many budget-minded Filipinos, has suddenly soothed her. She says one of the only Filipino words I understand, the word my mother used to finish every loud and happy conversation with a friend far away. "You want to watch Price Is Right, Mamang?" I ask. I see her passport, ID, and money on her dresser. Then, angry and looking toward my uncle, "Everything is missing! ID, passport, money." He stares at the stock shots of Amsterdam. Uncle Bartolo has been a perfume salesman, vacuum-vendor, ballroom-dance partner.
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In the Netherlands, citizens receive preventative health care free of charge! She reaches in front of her, both hands groping the empty air, and, finding the walls, guides herself back to the room. I see that her walk-formerly upright, the deportment of a doña-has slowed to a stagger. There is a rerun of an evening news feature on the Netherlands. Uncle Bartolo does not reply to my grandmother now in any language. I sometimes wonder if that's one reason my mother never taught me Filipino: to spare me the torturous matriarchal reprimands. During post-World War II Philippines, she beat her children with long aluminum strips, smoked through marathon mah-jong tournaments, and yelled if her kids asked for food, school supplies, hugs. She has a different relationship with my relatives when speaking Filipino, a language she uses with adept relish until one of her children uses it back at her. It's good you're taking her to visit your mom in California." "I don't want her in a home," my uncle says. Mamang was once a woman protective of her appearance, tying elaborate silk scarves around her neck and perfecting her eyeliner. She wears a rumpled yellow sweatsuit she's skinny as a cigarette. My grandmother sits at the table with us, peeling a banana with deliberation. He freezes before he feels safe to move again. Uncle Bartolo gasps and moves his palm to a sharp pain in his back.
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It's 2008, I'm twenty-three, and Uncle Bartolo is still tall and lean in his forties, his hair black and full over his youthful face. As I read the steady resignation of his movements, I know not to ask. I don't know what happened to the waitress. I didn't know then about the wife and five sons Uncle Bartolo had left behind in the Philippines, and the dollars he sent to support them over the decades. His white American girlfriend, a casino waitress, laughed and mussed his hair. He's the brother my mother and my aunts are always scolding and protecting, because of his displacement and his sins.įifteen years ago, when I met him during a family trip to Nevada, Uncle Bartolo smiled and sat poolside, his tanned arms over his head.
On the morning I accompany my demented grandmother on a bus from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, my Uncle Bartolo makes pancakes in his kitchen.