some mistakes last forever
During the winter quarter of my senior year, I had the opportunity to take the class, ASAM141: Asian American Creative Writing. For the main assignment, were tasked with writing a short fiction story that can be reworked and workshopped by others in the class. This is a story I’ve been wanting to tell for a long time, and I hope that it’s as interesting to read as it was for me to write!
Marie wondered if the scientists at NASA were close to figuring out how to time travel.
She was aware of the thin sheets and mildly dilapidated mattress that supported her back while she stared at the dancing splotches of purple and blue behind her tightly shut eyelids. They reminded her of picture books she’d seen in places like Barnes & Noble–nebulae and Milky Way stardust. In the event that warping space, matter, and time became a service offered widely to the American public, she decided that she’d be the first to sign her name on the list. She wanted a second chance at life, and she couldn’t find it within herself to feel bad.
Why should I? Everyone I know makes mistakes, she reasoned.
And it was true! Marie remembered the first time she’d seen someone make a mistake.
She was seven, playing tag with her siblings. As the eldest, it was her duty to start the game by charging straight through fields and tall grass towards the edge of the canal. The big channel ran through their village and into the ocean, filled with muddy water that was constantly churning and bubbling.
Her brothers and sisters giggled and cried out from behind her, “Ate, hintayin mo ako! Wait for me!”
She moved swiftly along the precarious edge, bare feet balancing on ground and air as she looked over her shoulder and increased the distance of the pursuit. Marie threw herself into a thick cluster of bushes on the side of the channel, breathing hard and smiling to herself in anticipation of being found. She peered out through the cracks in the leaves and branches, hoping to see Jesi or Nans toppling through the grass with arms flailing, but her eyes locked onto a figure crouched behind the town’s church.
It was Sister Josephine, the nun who led Sunday school lessons for children during mass! She sat on a wooden box, hunched over with a hand cupping around her mouth. Marie shifted in the bush, trying to get a better look at what was happening until a stream of thick smoke spiraled from where Sister sat and answered the question for her.
Smoking a cigar! Even the most holy can fall from grace.
From then on, Marie tuned in to the world around her and watched as everyone around her was tainted by missteps, miscalculations, misdemeanors.
She didn’t watch in disgust, or disdain; she watched in awe, in disbelief and amazement, as the people she revered turned their lives upside down and landed back on their feet. There was always a remedy for every wrongdoing. It gave Marie immense comfort to know that somehow, things would always turn out fine.
Even Pa, her own father who protected their family and put food on their small table three times a day, made mistakes. He was the village repairman and a construction worker—well known and meticulous in his routine of fixing another caved in home, another broken fence, another plot of land day by day.
Marie noticed how much the townspeople loved him for reasons beyond his work; he was everyone’s favorite tito, pare, kuya, ading. During monsoon seasons, Marie would wake up and see Pa already watching the crying skies with a smile on his face. He would swing her onto his shoulders and run into the rain, the flooded streets sloshing under his feet as he galloped like a horse. Marie shrieked and held onto his head, her siblings splashing and jumping in the shallow puddles behind them. The ruckus attracted the neighborhood children and Pa led them on a trek through the rising water, thunder mixing with laughter.
Manongs and manangs would stop Marie on her way home from the store and give her baskets of food and produce to bring home, telling her to “thank your tatay for doing so good at his job, always.” Marie remembered town piyestas where she eagerly filled her stomach with leche flan, letting the sticky syrup trickle between her fingers as she quietly watched the younger women bat their eyes and leap at the chance to be swept across the dance floor by her father.
Yes, even Pa made mistakes. And Marie grew up watching in awe until he made a mistake that was too large to fix.
The day that Pa had stretched the walk from the dirt road to the front of their hut to ten minutes instead of five, she was nearly eleven. Ma had grabbed her and her siblings from where they played in the fields and forced them into the home, returning all of Marie’s questions with silence and punctuating her exit with a look that dared them to step outside.
Pa always returned by dark, but Ma had been waiting outside for an hour, gripping a walis tingting in her right hand and smoothing her left one over her protruding belly where Santo was still tucked away, safe from what was to come.
Marie watched curiously from a crevice in the poorly constructed window, peeling the cardboard back enough to see Pa walking up to her mother in surrender, arms extended and palms up with a bewildered expression on his face. Marie watched Ma from behind and heard her growl in outrage before throwing herself onto Pa, beating him with the handle of the broom in between howls.
“Salbaheng lalaki! You dirty, stupid man! Now, you’ll have two more children, and you won’t have to carry either one!”
Nearly three months later, Ma and Pa came home from the city hospital with Santo swaddled in a blanket. Pa walked Ma to the door, holding her gently from behind and beaming like the stray cats in the streets after they’d been fed. Marie noticed Ma’s worn and taut face as she walked to greet her parents on the porch before she realized there was another visitor.
A tall, slender lady stood behind both Ma and Pa, barely distinguishable from the shadows. Her face was masked by cloth as well, except for her eyes, which glinted in the night light. She was holding another baby, wrapped in the same blankets as Santo.
Marie blinked at the woman and slowly reverted her gaze back to her mother. The night sky darkened in a menacing way as she looked up at Pa, the only connection she could make between the two women.
“Dalawa, Ma? You had two?”
“Yes, Marie,” Ma replied, avoiding Pa’s eyes as she clutched Santo tightly to her chest and made her way into the house, “I had two.”
Marie made to follow her, but Pa motioned for her to come back. She reluctantly made her way to him, and he knelt to her level.
“You want to hold your brother?”
Marie glanced at the house briefly and thought of her mother inside with Santo, and within her, an unexpected chord of guilt was struck. Somehow, she felt as if maybe a mistake had been made.
But before she could protest, Pa reached out for the other baby, and the lady obliged silently. He slipped her a small envelope and flashed her one of his winning smiles, the one he used when Marie would bring back gifts from the townspeople, the same one that probably started this whole mess.
“Estará bien conmigo. Te prometo.”
The lady’s eyes crinkled, like she was smiling behind the cloth that shrouded her face. She was silent as she turned around and walked back towards the dirt road and out of sight.
Marie didn’t know what her father said. She didn’t know what language that was. She didn’t know Pa could speak any other language besides their own. That night, she seemed to know nothing.
Pa handed the sleeping infant to Marie and she stared at him, taking in the way the baby had a thick mass of black hair that contrasted his pale complexion. Marie thought he was beautiful, and even as she looked briefly back at the house and felt another round of stabbing guilt for her mother, she found herself smiling at the weight of him in her arms.
Was it really a mistake if something so wonderful came from it?
It didn’t stop there. When she was sixteen, Pa told them that he had news that would change their lives for the better. Marie imagined running water. Running water in their home? Imagine! She could already see the jealousy on her neighbors’ faces.
Instead, Pa sat her and her siblings down and told her about immigration—a mistake disguised as the American Dream, dressed in a top hat and holding out a plate piled high with cookout dishes and apple pie. The alternative was probable death.
Under the Marcoses and martial law, Marie and her family were among the faceless many who lived below the poverty line, unknown, unimportant, and unprotected by the corruption the country passed off as a government.
So, Marie followed her family far away from the fields of their province, across the ocean on a boat ride that cost Pa their land and their livelihood in exchange for their safe and undetected passage in the dead of night, and onto a San Francisco pier. The boat ride was tumultuous, long, and tiring, but somehow, high school was even worse.
Never before had Marie been more confused in her entire life.
What was a Barbie, and why did Angelina in her English class tell her that she should straighten and bleach her hair to look like one?
Marie found herself staring into shop beauty windows on Mission Street as she walked home from the bus stop after school, debating if she should whiten, lighten, or brighten her complexion. She’d shake her head in disbelief, rubbing the skin on her arms as if to reassure herself that it belonged there and chastising herself for any doubt that it didn’t.
She saw the way the girls in the bathroom gawked at her complexion like the Amerikanos that passed through the province occasionally on the back of a Jeepney, eyes bulging wide and cameras flashing relentlessly as they looked at the ipis that were large enough to block out the light of the sun as they flew through the air. Marie heard how their voices increased in volume and slowed dramatically when they asked her questions about herself and thought she couldn’t understand what they were saying. She had to laugh at the irony; did they know that English was a subject in Filipino schools, too?
Two years slipped through her fingers and she allowed them to in silence, getting by and doing just enough to stay off the radar of all the Angelina’s that roamed Balboa High. Just like the faraway fields she left behind, high school passed into background noise, too. During her senior year, Mrs. Waterstradt, the school counselor, helped her submit an application to San Francisco State University because, “they would love you over there, really!”
She knew nothing of college, but if there was one thing she’d learned since her last night in Leyte, it was that there was a method to the madness in America, a series of events that led to success. Marie would never call herself a good student, but her English had improved since coming to the U.S., and she had always been known to follow directions better than anyone else.
In the fall of 1986, Marie found herself studying Liberal Arts, the major she’d applied to after Mrs. Waterstradt told her it would be “just the right place for you”. Marie thought of the countless progress reports that she was sent home with, every box next to every subject filled out perfectly with C’s, and couldn’t disagree. She found herself learning about “racism” and “social movements”, reading books about sociology and history and how world leaders made decisions that ripped apart the foundations of society, only for humanity to simply carry on.
She sat on campus and people-watched in between lectures, looking at them from behind thick, wired frames while she ate a snack or reviewed her notes. Most annoyingly, she found herself floundering wildly in remedial math classes, designed to re-teach her basic algebra for the third time. The class often made her regret pursuing a degree at all.
Every night, she re-worked problems that were supposed to be perfectly suited for eighth graders, pushing her curls out of her eyes aggressively as she strained to stay awake and complete problem after problem. Until one day, when Professor Greene decided that Marie might benefit from the help of a tutor outside of normal office hours he held for students. She’d taken the recommendation without objection, signing her name on the list that hung on the board outside of the lecture hall: Educational Opportunity & Pathway Program Tutoring!
A week later, she met Noe.
She would never have looked in his direction had they crossed paths on the streets, or even in the library. He was a medical student at UCSF—older, safer, and more stable than any of the boys that were Marie’s age. She often found that they were too preoccupied with bar-hopping on Columbus and Broadway, spending money that Marie didn’t have in irresponsible ways that would get them no farther than she had been when she was living in the province.
But Noe wanted to be a doctor, and not just in general practice! He wanted to be a pathologist, the physician’s physician, the professional who solidified the diagnoses that determined if someone lived or died—an important job for a seemingly important man.
She first met him outside of the class where he was waiting to introduce himself to her. He held his hand out stiffly for her to take and she shook it once as he nodded his head in return.
“I’ve been assigned to help you,” he told her.
And she let him, if “help” was the word that described Noe’s tutoring. He wore his frustration on his face, scrunching it up in disgust as he led her through drills of inequalities and integers. He sighed exasperatedly, the hot air hitting her right shoulder throughout the duration of their sessions as she fumbled formulas and quadratic functions.
“Why would they admit you if you can’t even do algebra? It’s for kids.” The question made her flinch and her pencil deviated from its course briefly.
“I don’t know,” she replied, face heating with indignant anger as she prepared to deliver her answer. “Ask my high school counselor. I’ll find her in the phone book for you.”
He scoffed and twisted his lips in a sneer, and Marie couldn’t help but think about how different that face was from the one time that she’d caught a glimpse of him while she was walking on campus. He was outside of the Biology building with a few students bearing A+ lab reports and pleased expressions, all three of them gathered closely around him.
“Mr. Noe, this is the best grade I’ve ever gotten on a lab!” A boy that looked to be Marie’s age waved the cherished paper excitedly, and Noe’s face broke into a grin as he initiated a high five.
“You can do anything as long as you don’t doubt yourself,” Noe encouraged, patting the boy’s shoulder before the group began to walk away. Marie tried to think of a time when he had relayed any of the same sentiments to her during their tutoring and came up empty-handed.
This was their routine for weeks: a two hour study session at a coffee shop a few blocks away from her last class on Thursdays. At the end of the semester, Marie took a comprehensive final that was supposed to assess everything she’d learned and felt the panic rise in her chest as Professor Green handed it back to her face-down. She braced herself for the big, red letter etched into the space by her name that was inevitably circled multiple times and accompanied by a note that she should see him after class.
“Dios, if you didn’t pass, Marie, I swear…” she muttered to herself, fingering the corner of the paper in suspense and letting the empty threat hang in the air.
She picked up the paper and flipped it over, breath catching in her throat. A+, followed by a short note scrawled below: You did it!
After class, Noe was waiting in the hall, holding a bouquet of roses and two movie tickets for the AMC in Japantown, ending his time as her tutor and appointing himself a new role in her life. She could have shoved the bouquet back into his arms and stormed off, leaving him standing there stupidly to think about every time he had criticized her rudely. But, as she stared at his face, she remembered the A+ written on the paper in her backpack, and the excitement she’d felt for herself–all because he had been assigned to help her.
She took the flowers and traded him an address.
Noe picked her up from her parents’ house in an ’85 Mazda RX7 that left barely any space between the two of them, sliding into the low seat as Pa waved them off excitedly from the top of the stairs. Ma looked down at her through the window and put a tired hand up in acknowledgement, mouth resting in a melancholy smile, and Marie’s heart began to hammer in tandem with the sound of the shifting gears. Her mother’s face should have told her to run far and fast, but she stayed right where she was.
The longer they spent time together, the more she realized how different they were.
Noe loved fancy restaurants that served dishes with long, elaborate European names as if they both hadn’t grown up eating adobo, dinuguan, and lechon over three-day-old rice. He furrowed his brow in disapproval when Marie’s excitement would adorn her English roughly with the accent he had lost but she still retained. He gripped her wrist harshly in public when she’d stoop to pick up loose change on the sidewalks that fell out of her purse, scolding her for being a penny-pincher when all she could think of were her parents tucked away in the same squalid home they’d lived in since they arrived in America.
When she boiled water on top of the stove to make rice instead of using the plug-in cooker, he rolled his eyes and critiqued her lack of common sense.
“We have a rice cooker, you know,” he sighed in annoyance, “Why do you make things so hard for yourself when they don’t need to be?”
Marie grit her teeth hard, sure that the bottoms of the front two had chipped, and fumed inwardly. He’d probably chastise her for that, too.
“Because,” she replied, movements becoming jerky as she swirled the rice in a pot over the sink, cleaning it of its impurities, “This is how we do it back home.”
And Noe had nothing to say in reply, because what did he know about their home? Her home?
Regardless, she stayed. She often asked herself why, especially in moments like these. She swirled the thoughts around in her brain like washing rice, trying to clear the impurities and gain clarity.
Noe reinforced everything that she, and everyone else, knew about herself: she was stupid, and slow, and needed to stay silent. Maybe she loved that about him.
Marie thought of the two Noe’s that existed. She was familiar with the one that spat insults at her and fell asleep next to her after dinner with a scowl on his face, but she was intrigued by the one that smiled at students that revered him and his encouragement. She’d seen a smile like that before, so dazzling in the public eye that it made any wrongdoings, any misdemeanors fade away. She remembered a small envelope and a dark night, an exchange made to cover up a nine-year-old mistake that Marie now knew as Fernando, her half-brother.
Her childhood infatuations crept up on her and rooted her to Noe’s side. Did he make mistakes, too? A successful Filipino-American grad student on his way to professionalism, emphasis on American. Surely, he couldn’t ruin his life!
But Marie wanted him to.
Noe would often tell her that she’d never make anything of herself in this world. In her mind, a little voice echoed that he could be right, so she made a decision to ensure he was wrong.
Marie split herself open for him and let him crawl inside her body. She forced him to make a mistake. She wanted to know how Noe, who knew so much better than her and was entirely more rational, would land back on his feet.
She did not consider if she would be able to, as well.
Marie remembered Professor Greene’s eyes. They reminded her of brown paper bags, the kind she’d pack her lunch in before she’d race to his class. He would always smile at her warmly whenever she’d botch a problem, chuckling a reassuring, “You can always erase your work and start over if you make a mistake.”
He’d pick up her pencil and Marie sighed in relief as the graphite turned into specks that would end up on the floor, crushed under her foot and forgotten. All mistakes were forgivable, meant to be laughed at before the earth resumed its rotation.
But, after particularly grueling sessions with Noe, she’d cry on the walk home as she thought of all the problems that he’d berated her for. He made the wrong answers sound so final, like she’d never be able to correct herself. Her face would fill with heat and shame and both would dance across her neck while she choked the tears back.
Marie was crying now, as she opened her eyes and remembered her professor’s words, reality rushing to attack all five of her senses. She shifted her view of the white hospital walls to her lap, where she was holding a baby she wasn’t ready to be a mother to, thinking about NASA and math problems.
Noe looked at her from the doorway of the hospital room: one foot in, the other placed strategically out in the hallway.
The way he looked at her reminded Marie of the way he perused calculations to spot a flaw before determining an answer, a total.
How awful and pathetic, Marie thought, staring at the sleeping newborn that was swaddled in her lap, that I’m thinking of math class.
The baby shuffled in her sleep, and Marie’s lips tightened into a tight frown as she settled on a realization, guilt twisting with anger. America truly was a land filled with the endless opportunity to learn.
Noe had already left from the doorway, and Marie knew he was aimlessly roaming the hospital to get as far as possible from her. Their parents, clustered in the waiting room outside, were no doubt ecstatic to meet their granddaughter and pepper him with questions about her.
“I’m sorry, Professor Greene, but you were wrong,” she whispered as her tears began to pool fast and hot on her waterline, softly falling onto the blankets that warmed her daughter, “I made a mistake, and this one will last forever.”
