3
3
In elementary, a bevy of well-to-do girls spent recess time in their own fantasy world of Barbies, Polly-Pockets, and push-button pencil cases.
Into the classroom, her hair neatly held by two butterfly hairclips shimmering in a novelty impossible to overlook, a classmate would strut her way through the door labeled Our Lady of Lourdes, later followed by another girl pulling her pink trolley bag, then another girl with a lunch box festooned with a Belle or Jasmine or Cinderella engraving, ostentatiously cleaved with other princess stickers.
On rare occasions, it took ten minutes for the next teacher to arrive due to a duty call from somewhere else. During this, a pupil like Mae Anne Udárbe was given the honor and the colored chalk to stand by the blackboard-which was green to begin with-to watch the class like a hawk and scribble a column of names introduced by the heading: noisy/standing. Making a list of pasaway was a flattering disposition. Being a prospective teacher’s pet was one thing. But playing god on the board was another, not to mention, a shot at creativity: She would draw the famous interval of tildes and circles, ~ o ~ o ~ o ~, serving as the border for the list. After the job was done, that childish graffiti would be guarded by an intrepidly capitalized PLS. SAVE for all to see.
At times, a mischievous Remo Pili-undaunted by his name on the list-would just keep on talking. Now that I’m older, I suspect that he kept chatting or having fun with his circle of bad boys because he just didn’t subscribe to the idea that it was misbehavior for mice to play while the cat was away; it just meant being himself. Remo Pili must have thought, there are worse things-the noisy list was just another manner of wasting the minutes away. Perhaps he simply couldn’t care less about the stick figures like llll-llll-llll-lll that encapsulated the extent of his wickedness, and thus the teacher’s impression of him. Needless to say, the written sticks spelled the fortune of Remo Pili’s legs under the scourge of an actual stick, the pain of which, Mr. Velasco ensured, took minutes to die away. Then another student, Elizabeth, would share in Mae Anne Udárbe’s little office with another poker-faced way of bringing out her automatic, transparent, and pink pencil case. At the push of a star- or heart-shaped button, these would automatically open up to reveal magic pencils and Hello Kitty pens appended to straps that matched their color. Now Elizabeth was ready to copy the noisy list on a sheet of paper for submission to the teacher. To pupils like her, such a shallow task meant some stretch of august authority borrowed from the teacher’s greater authority-the subjective judgement of reward, crime and punishment for the entire class except for the few favored ones.
Nonetheless, I always admired Remo Pili: at least he wanted to have fun and he did. He knew what he wanted, and he had it.
I must note, however, how certain pupils would assume a blank face with no interpretable expression as they engaged in their fifteen minutes of mock office. This poker-face never failed to captivate my attention. I interested myself in observing the pupil’s predictable reaction at the acclaim for, say, throwing the trash can: "Very good si Joanes!" Though that heart of his floated in the seven seas of self-importance, Joanes still assumed that poker-face as some sign of humility. It was an unspoken rule: you don’t smile when being lauded by your class adviser for fear of being labeled "pangas!" in Ilocano or mayabang in Tagalog, the latter dialect used by the more elitist students mostly from Vigan, who used Tagalog the way English was used by the sosyál in Manila.
Moreover, who could forget the golden days of Jackstone? They throw pieces of, say, five plastic asterisks on the floor. They toss a rubber ball in the air and before it reaches the floor they quickly pick up a single asterisk. Toss the ball one more time and you pick the next asterisk; a few more tosses and you should have picked all five. That’s just the first round. The next rounds would require you to pick up two asterisks per toss, then three, then four, then all five of them PER toss! On the next rounds, they added hand movements from banging your palms to the floor to clapping while the rubber ball was still suspended in the air so that one could collect the asterisks, clap, bang or even bake just in time to catch the ball when it falls.
They may not have known it, but it was this competition that pitted the third-grade girls against each other during recess time, free at last from the torments of memorizing the provinces and their capitals in all seventeen regions of the Philippines.
The same was true during lunchtime. The Jackstone girls perspired on the floor and the boys were on the quadrangle playing girik, a chasing game that was more feculently athletic than recreational.
While everyone else was being ordinary, smelled of sweat and childhood, there I was: seated on my wooden armchair, fanning myself with Constancia Tolentino’s abaníco. Alone, I would enjoy a bully-free moment of tranquility in my corner, chewing ham, hotdog or cheese croissant stored in one of the pink Topperware containers that Marissa Ujano collected. Otherwise, I would bring out my notebook with Sleeping Beauty on the cover and draw the Disney princess I fancied.
As a child, drawing my fantasies in my solitary corner was more comforting than the company of dugyót girik and Jackstone players, aside from the fact that I was disillusioned by my low Jackstone proficiency. I found drawing worthier of my time than the fruitless attempts of searching for friends who won’t tease me because I wanted to play with girls, who I preferred to be with than other boys, whether masculine or otherwise. I looked for nicer children for friendships that could last, at least until the incoming summer. If there was any success, the friendship was short-lived because our batch would still be reshuffled by the next school year.
The thought of it saddened me. But to divert my attention I just listened to Miss Ayunon’s lecture between living and nonliving things, or to Miss Etrata’s brisk summary about the mystery of the Holy Trinity, using herself as an example, "I could be a mother, a daughter, and an aunt-all in the same time." I just took notes… quite laboriously though since I was in 2nd grade and still was a stranger to cursive writing. Otherwise, I would sketch women with long hair and crowns and blooming gowns.