Angelica’s Daughters

Chapter 1

Tess lay in bed and ran her hands over the flat expanse of her stomach. She spread her long fingers, placed her open palm beneath her navel

and, as she had done nearly every night for the past two years, whispered a prayer and shut her eyes against the thick air of failure that filled the bedroom.

Beside her, Tonio stirred. A quiet groan and then he whispered, “You okay?”

Tess said nothing for a few minutes, wondering what would happen if she told him about the toddler she’d seen being pushed in his stroller that morning near the library. Just as Tess

passed by, the child—immensely fat, with a head of red curls—had reached out and grabbed her hand as if attempting to impart an urgent message. She bent over in greeting, and when he

smiled up at her, Tess knew. She just knew. She ran home, grabbed one of the dozen pregnancy tests out of the hallway linen closet, and shut herself up in the bathroom.

Twenty minutes later, though, her life was exactly as it had been an hour before, and she realized with a renewed bitterness that God was not sending her messages through the random gestures of

children and that she had been a fool to think so. No, I’m not okay, she wanted to tell Tonio. I haven’t been okay for months, and I don’t think anything will be okay

until we have a baby.

But like so many other things that she wanted to say to her husband, this confession remained unvoiced. They had been married eight years, and by now Tess understood that such a story would only

be met with exasperation by her leftbrained, engineer husband. “I’m fine,” she’d answered instead. She waited for Tonio to open his arms and gather her in close, but he had

already fallen back to sleep.

This most recent pregnancy test disaster happened just before Tess and Tonio were expected to arrive at a christening in San Francisco, a half hour drive away. She used to look forward to these

social occasions as a dependable source of laughter, gossip, and comfort food, but now they were nothing but a nuisance. This particular branch of the family— her father’s

side—lived their lives wide open to each other, and their inability to censor anything that came out of their mouths caused Tess pain. She and Tonio were met with a constant barrage of

questions about when they would start a family, tiresome jokes about “shooting blanks,” and reminders— as if she didn’t know!—that she was quickly getting old.

“Naku!” said one tita or another. “I had three already by the time I was your age!”

Recently, Tess had begun to look to Tonio to rescue her from these difficult moments. She needed, more than ever, to feel like part of a team, to feel their lives were truly bound together and

that nothing—not their non-existent baby, not the mechanical lovemaking they had resigned themselves to in their attempts to conceive, not the resentment they felt towards each other every

time Tess’ period arrived—could matter one bit when placed beside the eight years they had been married. But Tonio was rarely at her side at these functions. When she found him, he

would inevitably be outside, fifty yards away, smoking a cigarette and talking on his phone. It always took him a few minutes to notice her, and when he did, he held up a hand as if to say in a

minute, I’ll be there in a minute, and turned his back to her. The first few times it happened, Tess assumed there must be a problem at work, a pressing issue that had to be solved before

Monday. But it had been a few months now, and she realized she had been wrong all along: there was no problem at work.

And so she would swallow hard and return to this party or that, bearing the questions and intrusions with a tight smile. At these moments, Tess longed for the more restrained, even mysterious,

presence of her mother’s family. Lola Josefina, especially, had a calm about her that Tess found soothing. She missed her terribly now, and knew with certainty that Lola was the one person

who could help lead her out of the anger and sadness caused by the fact that she couldn’t find a way to do anything about what was happening, or not happening, in her life.

When Tess was a ponytailed girl in Manila sitting at the foot of Lola Josefina’s chair, she was treated to tales about budding romances between houseboys and young maids fresh from the

province; about schoolchildren caught spying on the secret lives of nuns; about the hardship of life during the war. And while she listened, fascinated, to all of these stories (often while sucking

absentmindedly on a li hing mui), it was the ones about Angelica she loved the most. She committed every detail to memory and believed every word. It seemed completely plausible, for example, that

not just one but several of Angelica’s suitors had entered the priesthood after her firm (though never cruel) rejections.

Tess and her family left Manila for Chicago when she was nine years old so that her father, an architect, could follow a job lead that never actually materialized. After a single winter in that

windiest of cities, they re-settled in California. It only took a few years before Tess, like her American counterparts, began to display a jaded personality and lost her tendency to believe in the

fantastical. By the time she became a teenager, the stories about Angelica seemed like fairytales Lola Josefina had invented to ward off the boredom of sweltering, rainy-season afternoons.

“She received hundreds of marriage proposals,” Lola had said, clucking her tongue. “And a botanist named a species of blood-red orchid after her when he caught sight of her

walking with a market basket hanging from the crook of her elbow.”

In college, Tess’ attitude towards her foremother depended entirely on the state of her personal life at any given moment. When in love (or what she believed to be love), she thought of

Angelica as an ideal romantic heroine. When distraught, she became annoyed at Angelica’s sway over the hearts and minds of everyone around her. Had some wealthy fool in Davao truly

commissioned ornate buildings to honor her beauty? Was there really a hospital wing filled with women who’d gone mad with jealousy at the sight of her?

There were long stretches of time in her life—at the beginning of her marriage, for example—when she had thought very little about Angelica. But now, with Tonio’s private phone

calls and frequent weekend disappearances, Angelica was as much on her mind, and in her imagination, as she had been all those years ago in Manila. Tess often spent evenings alone while Tonio was

God-knows-where, conjuring up an image of Angelica and trying to tease the facts from the maze of fiction surrounding the woman. But she could never be sure what was real, what could be depended

on. In the end, Tess thought, we choose to believe what we want to believe. Especially when what we want to believe in is love.