I remember once when I was young, I had gone for a car ride with my father. It was something we did when he would come home; he would need to go out and buy a new razor or want to look at some fishing poles. He wouldn't say anything to me, but there was a mutual agreement between us that I could "tag along". And the car ride itself was no different. Not a word would be spoken and it had become a silence that I would grow accustomed to. Neither of us knew what to say, really; we were strangers more than anything. And why I had ever agreed to sit in the car with him time after time, just to say nothing, I'll never know, but on we went.
For some reason, it was this particular ride that I had begun to question the presence of my father. He made it a habit to disappear for long periods of time when I was a child. My mother told me he was "traveling" or "entertaining a client", but eventually, anything she said sounded something like "he doesn't want to be around." But where was he going? How bored could he be? Maybe he really was traveling the world. Or maybe it was just something I wasn't meant to understand just yet. I pondered this as I sat beside him, watching his feet dance around the pedals as he changed gears.
And as I questioned his existence in the outside world, I pondered my existence within his. He would never really look at me. It seemed I was just another piece of the house, a piece of the room to be minded, but never really noticed. I had wondered if could tell that I had grown taller since the last time I saw him, or if he could see that my hair was a little bit longer. I wondered if he knew what grade I was in or that I had finally lost that tooth that had been hanging on for so long. It seemed to me that he lacked any sort of observation skills when it came to anyone else but himself and it bothered me like nothing else. It bothered me not to be noticed by him.
I was bothered and we found ourselves at a red light and it was then that I heard him speak to me for the first time since he had finally come home. I was startled for a moment because most of the time, he would never speak directly to me, not until I was older. He had always spoken to me through my mother. "Have her do this", "tell her this", "remind her and ask her this". He would badger my mother in their native tongue, knowing full well that I could understand him as plain as day. But this time, he spoke to me, and I flinched. It went unnoticed.
"You see that woman over there?" he said, nodding his head towards an arm hanging out of the car to our right. "You see her? Look at her hands. She's got such perfect hands. Daliring kandila."
I watched as those hands flicked the embers off the cigarette that dangled from it's fingers.
"When I was a boy, back in the Philippines, there was a woman that lived next door to your Nanay. She had the most beautiful hands. They were always manicured, always clean, always painted pink; never any other color but pink. And she would wear these gold rings with giant gems on them and she would smoke in her rocking chair while she watched the kids walk home from school. Your Tito and I used to get cigarettes from her after school. We always stared at her hands. 'Daliring kandila', we would say."
"Fingers like candles." I replied.
After that, he became silent again. And as I sat there in the quiet once more, replaying the story in my head, I looked at the woman with the beautiful hands. She flicked her cigarette and I watched the embers fall. I thought about my father and what he had told me, and a part of me changed. The part of me that hated my father, the part of me that I hadn't discovered quite yet, suddenly seemed to believe that underneath his absence, underneath the idea of him, that there was a real human being there. He wasn't just some question anymore; he was an actual person, with memories and things he wanted to remember.
But it was that realization, the sudden epiphany of his humanity, that made me hate him more. It made me hate everything he did and everything he didn't do. It made my invisibility to him hurt all the more and I had felt more transparent than ever in that moment. If he could notice the woman with the candle fingers, why couldn't he notice me? What could I have done to be so forgettable, even when I sat right beside him? It took the presence another woman for him to talk to me, to notice me, to remember me. What did that mean about my existence? What was it about that other woman, an entire car away, that made her stand out?
I looked at the woman with the beautiful hands. She flicked her cigarette once more and I watched the embers fall again.
The light turned green. My father drove onward. Eventually, we were window to window with the woman and I turned my head to face her. To glare at her. To memorize and remember everything about her so that maybe one day I could be her.
I looked at the woman with the beautiful hands and she looked back at me.
Her nails were pink.
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