38 Trainee
"This is my friend," Buddy said to Pinky, nodding at me. "He wrote a book! Go on, angel, give him a kiss."
She was too shy to kiss me. Looking at her unmarked face, I saw someone who seemed to be entering the world for the first time, and uninterested in it, perhaps even repelled by it. I saw what Buddy meant by "angel": inexperienced, childlike, innocent, just beginning to learn the coarse language of life.
Her posture, the way she hunched her shoulders, was like that of a trapped bird, one captured in the wild and still fluttering with fear, her heart pounding like mad. Her smallness made her seem even younger than twenty-three. She wore a T-shirt, and her blue jeans showed her narrow hips and spindly legs. If a woman is a woman for the alluring way she stands, the opposite of a coquette is an adolescent boy. Wearing a baseball cap, she looked like a Little Leaguer.
"Funny thing," Buddy told me. "She was in the dining room alone this morning. She bumped into the table and the flower vase shook a little. I was in the downstairs john. I heard her say 'Sorry.' To an empty room. Is that beautiful or what?"
Her face told nothing except her age. Her smile was trusting. She was glad to be married. She held Buddy's hand the way one of his children
might have, staying in his shadow like a triumphant pet, as an angel sometimes seems to be.
"Isn't she a sweetheart?"
I knew nothing about her at the time. I wanted to know everything. I did not succeed at that, but in time I learned enough. It was a lesson in faces.
Uncle Tony, her mother's brother, the man who had brought her to the hotel room and, in front of Buddy, said, "You won't need this, Pinky," as he unpinned her Trainee badge, had been her protector. Her father was a factory worker in Manila. Pinky lived with her mother and Uncle Tony and a brother and sister in a small hut on a crowded slope of huts, San Antonio, outside Cebu City. Uncle Tony was her first lover.
She had been twelve at the time. She was relieved when she saw it was her uncle kneeling next to her that night. She had feared it might be a stranger. "It's Uncle Tony," he whispered. Her mother was away, working at one of the tourist hotels. He did not wake the others. He kissed her, putting his sour tongue in her mouth. He slipped his hand between her legs and poked his finger into her. She lay bewildered, counting, to calm herself, wanting him to stop.
A pair of shoes in white tissue paper was propped on the table the next day.
Her mother had just returned from her shift. She said, "Say thank you. Give Uncle Tony a kiss. It's a lovely present."
She kissed Uncle Tony. The next time was two weeks later, on her mother's night-shift week. He had given her a pair of pink panties when he came home from the bar. He told her to wear them. That night when the children were asleep he turned the lights out and said, "Take them off." When she hesitated, he said crossly, "Who gave them to you?"
In the darkness he put his mouth on her and used his finger again. The rawness there reminded her of the pain she had felt the first time, which she had never felt before.
"Now you can put them on. They were a present, you know."
After that, whenever her mother was working the night shift, Uncle Tony came to her mat on the floor.
Hold this, he said.
She could hardly get her fingers around the warm thickening thing that reminded her of her small brother's arm.
Tighter.
His smothering mouth was on hers, his tongue tasting of adobo and beer. Her mind went blank. She was counting again, not to any particular number. She knew that in a few minutes it would be over and he would leave her. Yet it never ended when she wanted it to.
Nearly always there were presents — underwear, once a blouse, another time a dress, but candy was the usual thing.
"Give Uncle Tony a kiss," her mother said.
"She don't like her Uncle Tony," Uncle Tony said.
"I love you, Uncle Tony," Pinky said.
She was afraid until she understood that when she kissed him, he would not harm her.
At school the envious girls teased her whenever she wore something new. Seeing her new shoes, the girls were cruel. That year some of them came to school holding a Walkman, with earphones. She waited until the night-shift week and told Uncle Tony she wanted one. He seemed glad to be asked. He came to her mat the next night and knelt and said, "Open your mouth." And she did, almost choking as he said, "Make noises." She had her Walkman.
The old man Bong-Bong in the hut next door watched her all the time. She had turned thirteen. Bong-Bong was a landlord. The way he eyed her convinced her that he knew her secret and made her afraid.
"Come here, Pinky."
She did not move.
"If you don't come here I'll tell your mother."
Tell her what? There was so much to tell. She went into BongBong's feeling tiny, because his hut was so much bigger than her mother's, and it had different smells. Bong-Bong took her on his lap. He arranged her hands, placing them where Uncle Tony had placed them, as though he had seen everything.
"You know all about this. Kneel down."
Her fear had been that he would hurt her. But not at all, and she was glad and grateful, and he was quicker than Uncle Tony. He gave her money and made her promise that she would visit him again.
In time, Bong-Bong's presents added up to a thickness of pesos, which she saved and hid. How could she explain where the money had come from?
She dropped out of school. "I want to work." She said she had a job, but each day she went into Cebu City, where she met other girls, who looked like schoolgirls. They were thirteen and fourteen and some were older. They used a particular shaded portico one of the girls had found.
The girls had friends who were men like Uncle Tony and Bong-Bong — no worse. Pinky went with the men.
The secret lay in saying yes. If a man threatened her, she did not run or hide, but instead went closer to the man. There was even a smell she recognized. And when she touched the men she was safe; they would not hurt her after that. They held her tightly, defended her, sometimes gave her money. This was in cars and in the rooms of the abandoned building
beyond the portico. The closer you went, the safer you were. She felt confident enough now to spend the money on clothes. She bought a pair of orange vinyl hot pants and high heels.
Pinky's mother was now with her father in Manila. Pinky looked after her little brother and sister. Uncle Tony still touched her in the dark now and then. He lay on top of her, too, as the other men did. She wondered why she was not pregnant, and then one month she knew she was. One of the girls gave her the name of a man who said he was a doctor. He locked his door and lay on top of her and said, "Sometimes this works." Then he opened her legs and put them in a clamp and used a piece of glittering metal that might have been a knife. It hurt. She bled.
"That will be five hundred pesos."
She did not have the money, and she was angry with herself for having spent the money on clothes. The doctor said that he knew where she could earn the money, as a dancer.
"I can't dance," Pinky said.
"They will teach you."
He took her to a club in Cebu City and said, "This is Mama." Mama gave her a room and food. "This is worth two thousand pesos," Mama said. "But you will earn it very fast."
Mama was kind. Pinky danced naked, wearing a dog collar and platform shoes, and afterward she sat with the men in darkened booths.
She knew all the rest. The men were Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, even Americans.
"You can't dance, but they like you," Mama said.
At noon when the girls woke up, they had a meal together, like a family, at one table, Mama at the head of it. "What is this adobo?" Pinky asked. It was made from a cat. Even on her hungriest days at San Antonio she had not eaten a cat.