“Oh.”
Honorata looked down. She didn’t know why she had started talking about soccer. It was on her mind lately because there was a player in the news named Wohlmann, and the name made her jump. He wasn’t even American, though. It had nothing to do with James Wohlmann. Still.
“Anyway, what did you think of what he said? About joy?”
At Mass, the priest had said that Catholics should be joyful. He said that joy was the natural expression of faith, and that the parishioner who followed all the rules but didn’t feel joy was missing the point of a faithful life.
What Honorata thought was that the priest didn’t know that much about life. He’d never lived in another country, he’d never been with a woman. He didn’t have children, he didn’t even pay his own bills. She didn’t think she would say this to Virginia.
“I thought . . . I thought he wrote it very carefully.”
Virginia laughed. “Carefully!”
“What did you think?”
Virginia might think anything. She was very surprising. She’d worked in the office for years, and she was devout, but she could be irreverent. Honorata didn’t quite know what to think of her.
“I think he’s got his head up his ass. Telling people to be joyful. Like that’s something on tap.”
Honorata wasn’t sure what to say. It was very unusual, someone who worked in a church office and said “head up his ass.”
“Doesn’t it make sense, though?” she said. “That God would want us to be joyful?”
“Oh, what’s God got to do with it? We’re talking the Catholic church. Sex is joyful, but only if you’re married and ready to have eight more babies. If you’re one of God’s chosen ones, which means you’re also a man, then you can’t have sex at all. Where’s the joy in that?”
Honorata didn’t answer. She didn’t want to tell Virginia that when the priest was talking, she’d been thinking about how little he could know about her life. He looked at her and saw a little Filipina lady, something like her nanay, which was fine with Honorata—which was the way she preferred that he see her—but still, how could somebody who couldn’t tell the difference between Honorata and her nanay tell her how to feel?
“It’s very American,” she said at last.
“It’s American? That’s interesting. What do you mean?” Virginia leaned forward and waited for Honorata’s reply.
“I mean, telling someone what to feel. A feeling is . . . A feeling isn’t . . . I don’t think you can tell someone what to feel.”
“Exactly! Feelings aren’t on tap. Only a priest could come up with something like that.”
Honorata didn’t know what “on tap” meant, but she did know that Virginia was big on what priests didn’t know. She said it had something to do with her parents naming her Virginia, for the Virgin. Also, she believed the problems in the church came from ignoring women.
Molly asked why Virginia worked at the church if she thought it was such a mess. Honorata knew what Virginia would say. She’d heard it before. Virginia said that she was a true believer, and that she was quite sure God was happy to have her in the church, encouraging it from the inside.
Honorata thought about the other things the priest did not know about her.
He didn’t know about her village. He didn’t know what it was like to grow up as if one were part of the earth, the way that she and the other children were part of the green leaves and the rain and the sky. He didn’t know about the ladder she climbed into her home, or the way that home was dark and close and smelled of the rice stored under its thatched roof. What could the priest know about what it had meant for such a child, one who ran naked in rain or sun, and made the other children laugh by bobbing her head sideways like a tamsi, to move to Manila, with more people than even a teacher could count, with its tin-sided shanties, and human waste running down mud roads?
More than this, how could the priest know what Honorata felt about what had happened to her: about the men who had made the video, about the one who had violated her, about the way her uncle had watched that tape? What could he know about the months in Chicago and the fat American man in her bed every night? How she still felt about all of this, how the feelings came to her at night, how they made her want to scream, how she would never be sure of herself again, of who she was, of what she might do. Could the priest imagine that the little girl who had lived in that village—who was herself—seemed almost otherworldly to her? Even with a daughter of her own to help her remember, a sturdy American child, Honorata could not quite summon up what it was like to have once been that little girl in a green world.
Still, with everything the priest could not know, she didn’t like the way Virginia talked about him. He was a kind man, the priest. He had been kind to her, and he was kind to the people who came to the door, looking for help, and to the people in the parish, so many of whom were old and had no one to look out for them. That was one thing about America. A lot of old people were left all alone.
Americans went bonkers if a child was left alone, but if you worked at the church, then you knew that all sorts of old people—just as helpless as a child, some of them—were alone. And nobody seemed to care too much about that. But the priest did. And actually, Virginia did too. She was as kind as the priest.
Last week, Honorata and Nanay had attended a program at Malaya’s preschool. It was the first program of the year. And since it was Malaya’s first year of preschool, Honorata had not known what to expect. She dressed her daughter in a gold satin dress with a white lace neck, which Malaya kept pulling at; before the night was out, the lace was torn, and Malaya was saying “That feels better, that feels way better!” to anyone who looked at her. Nanay said she could fix the lace.
The room where Malaya had preschool was filled with so many toys and so many bits of colored paper hanging from the ceiling and plastered to the walls and piled on the teacher’s desk that it had made Honorata feel dizzy. She wouldn’t be able to think calmly in such a room. When they arrived, Malaya wanted to play with her friends on the jungle gym. Honorata made her stay and greet the teacher, but Miss Julie said, “Oh, let her play. That’s what all the kids are doing.” So Malaya had run outside, and Honorata had seen her sliding and trying to hang from a bar and turning a somersault in the dirt with her underwear right in the air.