The Talk

Shes probably doing it right now! the girl I was with said. No, I dont think so. My sisters not that kind of girl. Thats what you think. While youre here, shes got the house to herself, and shes probably got her boyfriend there, and theyre doing it! No, no, she wouldnt do that, I said trying not to show my condence breaking inside as my mind wandered to my apartment, to the gripping fear that her boyfriend would be doing what boyfriends all over the world were doing, trying to get dudes younger sisters to prove their love in, as Extremes song would have it, More than Words. Im going home. I need to go home. What do you mean youre going home? I didnt know what I meant. I wasnt sure. I wanted to go home because I was sure that when I got there Id nd my sister watching anime, or chatting on Facebook, or sleeping, or eating cookies or something. Because thats what shes usually doing when I come home. But there was that nagging fear, oh that fear, that something was amiss, and I did not know if I wanted to walk in on it or not, but I knew that I had to get home. This, of course, was a new thing to me. Why would I leave a girl that Im out with? Going out with a girl was a rare enough thing, and though she had been pretty brutal with that talk about my sister, wed gotten along before that.

Or, well, she was pretty enough for me to overlook that bit about my sister. But then I had to get home. And I did nd my sister, at home, asleep. The fear and the paranoia nothing. At least for now it was nothing. But then what about next time? What about the next time that I was out? Next time I was catching a late movie? Or at a party? And she would be left alone. This, like many aspects of parenthood, was something that I was thoroughly unprepared for. Its not like my mom had The Talk with me. But after telling friends about my fears of leaving my sister at home alone, they told me that it was time that I had The Talk with her. The Big Talk. I wondered how this was to be done. My own instruction in the opposite sex happened when I was in the fth grade. It happened out of school, of course, because even though I was in Sex Ed classes, all we got were pictures of ovaries and fallopian tubes, and when youre a kid whos getting his rst pimples those things dont make any sense to you at all. Suddenly, I was noticing the busty female managers who walked my favorite WWF wrestlers to the ring, and when I watched Return of the Jedi Slave Leias outt was catching my eye more and more. I was over at my best friends house. We would always hang out after school, playing football, street hockey, and video games, or just staying over at his house watching cartoons. His parents were divorced and both gave him more leeway than I was given in my conservative home that was packed often with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.

So one day in class he asks, Have you ever seen a Playboy? Not wanting to look dumb, I pretended, Yeah, its like, one of those guys right? Thats like, really good at sports? No, its the greatest thing in the world. What is it? Ill show you later. I spent the whole day waiting to nd what the greatest thing in the world was. We waited at the carpool lane until his mom pulled up and we headed to his house. We went to his room. Then he handed me a roll of tissue, shoved me into the bathroom, and said, You have around ten minutes until my mom starts looking for you and shell think its weird that youre taking a long time in the bathroom. The Playboys are in the cabinet beneath the sink. I didnt know what I was supposed to do with the tissue (Id nd out soon enough, of course) so I set it aside and opened up the drawer. And indeed, to this pimply, chubby kid whod hardly ever talked to the girls in his class, the Playboys were the greatest thing ever. They explained a lot, way more than the diagrams in Sex Ed class, than the scenes in R-rated movies that I could hear but couldnt see because my moms hands would be covering my eyes, more than, well, any other efforts taken before. In retrospect, with the number of failed relationships and awkward situations Ive found myself in with the opposite sex, a better, more proper introduction to the other sex may have done me worlds better, but hey, I got what I got.

And this is why I thought that my sister deserved The Talk. She needed to be told whats what, and how things are, and how things go, and uh, where things go, and why they shouldnt be going there just yet. A couple of months before all of this, she had come to my room and asked if we could talk. Now if you dont know it yet, anything that is prefaced with the four words, We need to talk is bad news. If it were good news, people would tell you right away. So when someone starts with those four words, prepare yourself. She asked me if she could have a boyfriend. I thought back to the rst time that I thought I was in love (a foolish high school thing, but oh how painful it is when youre an adolescent and you think things mean so much and youve been trained by Hollywood and TV shows to believe that your high school love will be your love forever) and I thought that ever since that rst inkling of what I thought was love, I had been in stages of this cycle of love, courtship, relationship, pain, loss, recovery, dating, and wash and rinse and repeat. I had started in high school and I was nearing thirty and I was still stuck in the cycle. And I thought, theres just so much pain. So much happiness, yes, but then all of this pain and sadness and I wanted to spare my sister from all of it. I wanted her to stay as she was, to protect her from all the hurt that the ups and downs of love came with. I told her, please dont enter the world of relationships yet. Watch your cartoons and play with your stuffed toys and stay after school to practice your hip-hop dancing. Do these things while you still can and avoid the world of love

and relationships as long as you can, because once youre in it, youll always be contending with it. I felt my voice breaking, had to stop the tears from coming to my eyes as I pleaded for her to stay as she was. And she was quiet. I realized that she wasnt asking my permission. And then I just kind of misted up and dug my face into a pillow, saying I was sleepy. As she was leaving, I gave the standard older brother line, If he hurts you, Im going to kill him. In the following months Id ask her about the boyfriend, and we would plan to have a dinner out so he could be introduced properly. But it never crossed my mind that she might be fooling around with him. I know that sounds like a big smacking pile of naivet, but its hard to think of my younger sister, just sixteen, who still looks like shes in the fourth grade, even thinking of exploring her sexuality. I know it might sound hypocritical, as I went to a strip bar for the rst time when I was only fteen. But as my friends say when I show them pictures of her, Baby pa yan, bakit may boyfriend na? I wondered if it would be best to deter her from doing anything. If it would do any good to say, dont have sex. Or would I be better off giving her a box of condoms and saying, if you plan on doing anything, then have safe sex at least? My mother never did any of these things for me. She instead resorted to religion in attempts to stop me from going on and doing things with women. It wasnt that she sat down and talked to me about god. No, it was something

different and a little crazy altogether, and at the same time something that I think only my mom could ever do. One night I brought a girl home. I was still an undergraduate then and still living with my parents. I checked the house, saw that everyone else was asleep and the girl and I snuck up to my room. I ipped the light on, took a good look at her, and then launched my tongue into her mouth, her hands wrapping around my neck, one of my hands pulling her to me, the other working away at her bra. After what I ascertained as an appropriate amount of making out time, I lay her down on the bed and got up to turn the lights off. I icked the switch. And there it was. My mother, ever devout and loving, and hoping that her children would follow suit in their commitment to the faith (as well as probably hoping to deter me from anything that I wouldnt want to be doing that Jesus could see) had hung up a new crucix in my room. This would have been easily ignorable. If it werent glow in the dark. So there was the cross on which the body of Jesus was mounted, hanging in my room. Of the parts of the crucix, the only glow-in-the-dark element is the body of Jesus. So with the lights off it looks like he is oating in the air. It was, for a few seconds, quite frightening. The girl I was with was similarly shocked. Of course the power of Christ has its limitations. I jumped up and turned the light on, turning the luminous green presence hanging on the wall back into a normal crucix. I took it off the wall, apologized to Jesus for what I was about

to do, then stepped outside the door and threw the crucix into the laundry hamper. Then I locked the door, smiled to the girl, ipped the light off, and dove into bed. After that incident, all that my mother would ever say to me about the topic was, Anak, may tiwala naman ako sayo. Alam mo naman ang tama at mali. Which sort of served as my mother giving me carte blanche and absolving me of any guilt I might feel. As long as I could reason logically and prove to my mother that I knew what I was doing, Id be alright. Then again this laissez faire attitude was something that I felt I could not do with my sister. I had seen enough sitcoms to know that The Talk is an essential aspect of ones adolescence, and it had to be done properly. But then I couldnt sit down and talk about penises and vaginas with my little sister. That would have just been weird. Besides, in the last few months Id heard the term vajayjay way too many times, and I thought that I might use that so I wouldnt have to say vagina, and I think that among other things, saying vajayjay is something that has the potential to make other people lose their respect for you. I did what I always do when I cant express myself. I ltered it through pop culture. Now this has its own awkwardness. In much the same way that its weird to watch a sex scene in a movie with your parents, I get the same weird feeling when I watch a sex scene with my sister around. Its sort of something Id rather be enjoying on my own, and at the same time I get the feeling that I

should be covering her eyes. Yet it was a choice that I had to make: Do I watch something with her that addresses these issues, or do I sit down and have a probably more awkward talk about it. I knew just the movie. Juno. And since one of her favorite shows was Glee, and its Madonna episode addressed questions of when to lose ones virginity, I thought we could watch that again too. I loaded these up into the drive. Then I called her into my room and told her that I wanted us to watch some things together. After watching both works, I sat her down over dinner. And I asked, O alam mo na? Oo naman, kuya. Gets mo? Ayaw mo naman maging tulad ni Juno? Oo, ayaw ko rin maging tulad ni Quinn. Wag ka magalala. I trust you, I said, and it didnt seem like there was anything more to say after that.