Summit Books

by Tweet Sering

Publication Date: April 2004
Price: P150.00
Available at your favorite magazine stands

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EXCERPT

Say you're a woman shopping for ripe mangoes, the sort of woman who likes to buy her fruits in the neighborhood grocery store instead of an outdoor fruit stand. So today you are at a grocery store shopping for ripe mangoes.

"You want some, Hil?" my mom asked, holding the bottom slice of a mango out to me.

I shook my head. "No, thanks."

Let's assume you're a woman of normal/average intelligence; you know what ripe mangoes looked like. You pick what looks to you to be the best ones - smooth, firm, yellow - and expect them to be juicy and delicious.

I watched my mom spoon the fleshy yellow fruit.

Then you go home and slice one only to find a good part of the insides rotten. But since you are a patient woman, you think, that's fine, you can just eat the good parts, suffer the bad parts a little and the next day get better ones - at the same store because look, it's so near where you live. How convenient is that?

"Are you sure you don't want?" she asked me, offering her spoon.

"I'm sure, mom," I said patiently.

The next day you try having a good mix of smooth and a-bit-bruised mangoes just to make sure. But this yields the same results - there's always something wrong with them.

"Are you, OK, Hil?" my mom asked, concerned.

"I'm fine," I said, reassuring her with a smile.

They are not the mangoes that you want. So far, since going to that grocery, you still haven't sat down to enjoy ripe, juicy, delicious mangoes.

"Hmm! Sarap!" That was my mom.

What do you do?

A) Go back to the same grocery, buy the mangoes hoping against hope that they be good this time, and when they aren't, complain and bitch about it to friends as you eat them anyway (telling yourself that, at least, you have mangoes; 'yung iba nga dyan wala, eh).

B) Tell the grocer that you will no longer buy mangoes from his store unless he enforces strict quality control and sells only the best.

C) Look for the best mangoes, even if it means driving past the nearby grocery and traveling all the way across town to get to them.

I could hear my mom start her daily lamentation about my dad. But by now I was already half-deaf to her. This was a very recent self-preservation strategy I had developed to keep from snapping under the combined weight of my angst and my mom's anxiety.

Pinoy men are like mangoes in a grocery store with low quality control standards, and where the shoppers are happy to take just take any mango. The rotten product is not one person's fault - it's a conspiracy, a joint effort of both grocer and shopper.

We Pinays are shoppers in that grocery store. We are dissatisfied with our mangoes and yet we bite into one, swallow a chunk with a grimace, and then go back for more. We complain about the sub-standard men in our lives - how they womanize, gamble, drink too much, abuse us both physically and verbally, disrespect us - and yet we're still with them. We don't go up the grocer and say, "Sir, the mangoes in your store are rotten. Tomorrow, when I buy your mangoes - despite the two occasions they have disappointed me - I want them to be juicy and delicious. Otherwise, I will look elsewhere and never set foot on this store again," and then make good our word... .

Pinoy men, I concluded as I rose from my chair, are emotional underachievers because we don't exact high standards from them. They are brats because we spoil them. They give so little and take a lot because we give a lot and take so little.

I kicked the door of my room open.

They are weak mama's boys who drink all night with their buddies and won't speak to you when they're having a bad day because we wait with hot coffee, ready to remove their shoes, when they come home drunk.

I growled as I removed my clothes and threw them down on the floor.

They are disrespectful pricks who raise their voices at us in public because we just stand there and take it.

I turned on the shower and cooled my head. Aaaahhhh....

Why not, as an experiment, try barring the door and changing the lock? (Or better yet, shove an application for annulment form under the door, highlighting the reasons your relationship qualifies for one?) Why not, when he ups his voice level just a notch above normal, scurry towards the nearest security guard and tell him that the man yelling from the opposite end of the street was trying to extort money from you. Finish with a nervous, "Taga-Mental yata, boss."

The question was, I thought as I toweled off, why even suffer all that aggravation for a Noyps? Why even try to make him better? Why not, I thought as I vigorously brushed my teeth, just walk into the grocery, dump your bag of uneaten mangoes on the counter and give the owner the finger before you walk out, without a word. In fact, I thought, slipping into my jeans, why show up there at all? Why not just march straight to the other side of town, where the mangoes have been getting rave reviews?

I pulled on a gray cotton top, slipped my feet into my kitten heels and slammed my bedroom door as I went out.