by Angie Abdou
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she remembers they are nearly the same height. “I’m sorry things are
loud in there, LiLi, and it’s getting late. Shane thought it would work
well—to pay you overtime and have you serve for the celebration.
But it’s weird. I know it is.” Vero takes a plate from LiLi and wipes
in slow steady circles. “You’re not a servant. You care for our children.
That is your job.”
“That’s okay,” LiLi doesn’t look up from her soapy suds. “I know
it’s not Canadian way. But I was called servant in Hong Kong all time.
My job not that different here. It’s okay.”
They work next to each other without speaking for several minutes
before LiLi raises her face to Vero’s. “You no need to help me, Vero.
You like maybe to visit with your friends.”
Those are not my friends, she wants to say. Shane’s party. Shane’s
brother.
Adele and Vince took up CrossFit as a New Year’s resolution. Her
body is tight and hard. And beautiful. Well aware of her own beauty,
Adele wears as little clothing as possible, her muscled arms and
shoulders and back on display for all. Vero is tired of Adele’s beauty.
“I like to visit with you right now.” Vero hears herself falling into
her annoying habit of adopting LiLi’s syntax. She tries again. “When’s
your birthday, LiLi? Remind me. We’ll have a family celebration.”
Vero reaches for another dish, dripping in LiLi’s hands. There’s a cake
on the side table. LiLi made it this afternoon, carrot cake with cream
cheese icing, Shane’s favourite. A wax 4 and a wax 3 are speared into
the top, waiting to be lit on fire.
Adele calls from the dining room—“The party’s in here, Professor
Nanton!”—but Vero doesn’t answer.
“I’m not a professor,” she says to LiLi. “She’s copying Vince. He
says that. To be mean.” She expects LiLi to ask why “professor” is a
mean thing to call her, but LiLi asks nothing.
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“My day of birth is in August. But we don’t do birthday like this.”
“No cake and candles? No celebration and wine?” A rhythmic
splashing fills the pauses between their questions, soothing compared
to clanking cutlery in other room.
“Oh, no,” LiLi laughs, and then covers her mouth. “No. Not like
this.”
Vero waits for LiLi to explain how they celebrate in the Philippines,
but she says nothing. She focuses on her task as if she’s forgotten Vero
is even there.
“How does your family mark a birthday then, LiLi?”
“Oh, we take whatever we having for dinner. Maybe, you know,
chicken,” LiLi searches for the words. “And when we kill it—” Her
brow furrows. “When we butcher it.” She holds up her hands and
snaps like she’s breaking a twig. “We spill some blood on the ground.
Like that.” She sprinkles imaginary blood on the kitchen floor. “Then
we say some words for the birthday person. For special birthday, the
family and friends—sometimes the whole village—have a party.
Maybe cake and games for children. Maybe singing for adults. That’s
how.”
In the other room, they’ve broken into a rowdy chorus of Happy
Birthday to Shane. They’ll want the cake now, but still Vero lingers.
LiLi scrubs hard at a big pot, rice brown and burned to the bottom.
Vero’s shirt cuffs are wet, and she pushes her sleeves up to her
elbow. She holds the counter with both hands. She needs either to
drink more or to go to bed.
Adele’s voice bursts into the kitchen again. “You sure you want to
be leaving me alone in here with these two gorgeous men, Vero?” The
words are so loud that it seems Adele has entered the room and yelled
the question in Vero’s ear.
Vero folds her tea towel neatly, hangs it over the oven door handle.
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“You should join us for cake, LiLi. I’ll get the candles. It looks deli-
cious. Thank you. For it.”
LiLi scrubs hard, her gaze directed at the water. “I hear your conver-
sation. A while ago now. On the baby monitor.”
Vero feels a hard twitch deep in her wrist, imagines the pulse break-
ing through her thin skin. She says nothing. LiLi must interpret
silence as lack of comprehension because she clarifies. “What you said
about…me…in bikini…jealous.” LiLi lets the pot sink into the suds
and meets Vero’s eyes. “Madam Poon in Hong Kong is like that. She
yells at me all day. They are jealous. The employer there think their
husbands look at us. We are younger. Some think Filipina women very
pretty.” LiLi drops her eyes back to the water, tucks a loose piece of
dark hair behind her ear.
She is pretty.
“But different in Canada. You don’t think that. I hope not.”
“I’m sorry, LiLi.” Vero holds two fingers against the inside of her
own wrist, pushing the rogue pulse back into its place. “I didn’t mean
for you to hear that conversation. I barely remember it. I was…I’d been
drinking. Too much.” Vero doesn’t know why she says that. It’s not true.
“Yes, I thought maybe that. I never wear a bikini.”
“It’s an ugly habit. Drinking. Do you drink, LiLi?”
“No. In the Philippines women don’t drink so much like here.” Again,
LiLi speaks in the present tense, as if she still lives there. “Maybe just
my father drink. Men like the beer in my home.”
Adele calls again. “If I have to come in there and get you myself,
Professor Vee, it’s not going to be pretty. This wine is not going to
drink itself.” Professor. It is Vince’s insult. Adele uses it with no under-
standing of the complexity of its meaning, the layers of the insult, its
assessment of Vero’s failed life. Adele, thinks Vero, is the conquered using
the language of the conqueror.
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“I’m coming! Give me a minute!” Vero’s voice sounds breathy, fraz-
zled, like she’s been caught in her bedroom with a lover. Just a second,
honey, I’ll be right down— zip, zip, button, button.
“There’s so much I don’t know about the Philippines. About your
life. Maybe you can tell me more.” Vero touches LiLi’s shoulder
lightly, and steps away, toward the party. “Some other time, when
Ma’am Adele is not waiting.” Vero winks on the “Ma’am” and has
her best moment of the evening when she sees LiLi press her lips
together to stop herself from laughing.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
Vero’s life now fills up in the way that only obsession can fill it.
Bikram yoga, that’s her new thing. In the wake of losing her morn-
ing runs with Joss, she spends her time in a 105-degree Fahrenheit
room with forty-percent
humidity, pushing her perspiration-stung
eyeballs toward her slippery wet shins, her nose nearly lowered to the
greying carpet soaked with years’ worth of human sweat. This is not
the yoga of Vero’s youth—Cheryl and her circle of women meeting
somber-faced every morning before sun-up as if they could save the
world through deep breathing and hydration, wearing gauchos and
bandanas and chanting in the living room, drinking an ocean’s worth
of chamomile tea after each practice. No, Bikram is something else
entirely, and it belongs to Vero.
“Oh, Vee, you don’t want to do Bikram. Really. You have too much
heat. You carry it in your abdomen, your chest.” The earnest tone of
Cheryl’s entreaty grated against Vero’s eardrum, and she held the
phone away from her head until she could barely make out Cheryl’s
next sentence. “You have high metabolism. Like me. You need some-
thing cool and slow. Too much heat will just make you aggressive and
bitchy.”
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“Actually, Mom, I like it. The Bikram yoga. Quite a lot.”
With the increased time and energy to focus on work that LiLi
provides, Vero has come to realize that the engineers don’t care if
she fixes their punctuation. They don’t even care if she fixes any of
their other errors. They have no idea what the manuals look like once
they’re translated to Arabic: why should they care if they’re perfect
in English?
“We need you here full-time for the next while,” says Edward. “A
whole slew of government inspections coming up.” He suggests that
Vero bring National Geographic magazines to read during the down-
times. It’s what the last editor did. “We need you around. For the
regulations. The signing-off. But our guys know the machines. Make
yourself look busy. Be there when we need your autograph.” He even
shows her how to slide a National Geographic under manual pages so
nobody will notice if they walk by her cubicle. “I’ve done it now and
then myself, Vero Baby!”
Vero’s work does not matter one bit. What the engineers are after
is her signature. So she gives it to them.
No changes required
—V.N.
She swirls the vowels so they’re barely legible, the way Cheryl taught
her when she got her first chequebook at sixteen. “If you have a sig-
nature that can be copied, you’re just asking for forgery and fraud.”
According to Cheryl, Vero “just asked” for a lot of things. As an adult,
Vero understands this as the primary message of her upbringing:
Don’t trust anyone.
If Edward wants to tour her around the floor, pointing out the
newest features on the latest tanks, she lets him. In a booming voice,
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he instructs her on the minute but significant differences between
feature models. She lets the words pass through her. Swiss Mowag, US
Stryker, Canadian Leopard 2A4, Vero Baby. She’s numb to his curses,
his sexist exclamations, his commentary on the “Eee-rabs” and their
aversion to “cunts.” She pretends she’s watching a television show, the
volume low, while she directs her thoughts to inner, invisible con-
cerns. She wonders, for example, how long it has been since LiLi has
had sex.
Shane has told her to stay out of LiLi’s private life. “We meddle in
LiLi’s life enough. Let’s leave sex out of it.”
“But sex is a metaphor,” Vero argues. “LiLi’s sex life—or lack
thereof—is a way to think about her personal sacrifice, desire, agency,
bodily identity.”
Shane finds it laughable when Vero talks like this. “A metaphor,”
he smiles. He and Joss—the scientists—have this in common. “Quit
talking like an English major,” they like to say in unison. Ian joins in
too when he is there. They all gang up on her. The scientists.
“Vero,” Shane says this time, with only the slightest trace of
patience, “sex is not a metaphor.”
That’s what Vero thinks about as Edward explains the design flaws
on the new anti-tank. “Soldiers have to be quick when they release
this bugger or the fucker here will swing right back and cut off their
goddamn heads.” Sex and metaphor.
Yoga has taught her this detachment.
She’s getting quite good at it.
After her meetings with Edward, she rewards herself with an
organic rooibos low-fat soy latte, but always drinks two cups of water
for every one cup of diuretic. “The major cause of depression is a lack
of water attacking the liver and disabling the body,” the head instruc-
tor, a man named Roger, told them before the last Bikram class, his
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face so stony that Vero was able to take him seriously despite his pink
Lycra shorts. “Dehydration is deadly. Drink water.” He jumped with
both feet up onto the instructor’s block, his knees nearly pounding
into his face. “Before class and after class, drink. But not during class.
During class, you drink only when I say.”
In early May, the snow melts for the fourth time that spring, and
the ground finally dries. Vero drinks water in long, deliberate swal-
lows, sitting on the grassy hill in the backyard. She and LiLi watch
the kids play in the new warmth. In the spring sun, LiLi’s face opens
like a blooming flower. In the winter, her skin was sallow with a faint
line of acne just under her cheekbones. Now her full cheeks blush
pink, her coffee-brown skin complementing her white smile. She
holds her bare arms out in front of her, open to the sun’s caress. “Ah,”
she smiles. “Yes.”
She’s not built for this harsh climate, Vero thinks. She will be happier
now, with winter done. “Last week, I met a man I know from the
Philippines,” Vero tells her.
Vero doesn’t know what makes her tell LiLi about her encounter
with the man at the coffee shop or why she lies and says it only hap-
pened last week. Maybe it is the new openness in LiLi’s face, maybe
the warmth on her own arms. “Lito,” she continues, “who came here
to work in a restaurant. He told me he had to leave his wife and
children at home.” She doesn’t tell Ligaya about the crack in his voice
or how quickly he regained his composure and took her order with
a smile. “I asked him if he missed his country,” Vero says putting
a hand on LiLi’s knee. She means it at as a gesture of kindness, of
understanding, but LiLi stiffens under her touch, and Vero pulls her
hand away. The neighbour revs up his lawnmower. He wears an over-
sized yellow ball cap propped high on his head and aviator sunglasses.
He pulls off his shirt, tucks it into the back of his shorts, and starts
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pushing. He’s young, maybe twenty-three, and cute. Vero wonders if
LiLi will turn to watch him. The scents of fresh gra
ss and gasoline fill
the air, but LiLi does not turn to it. “He said, ‘Every day. I miss my
Philippines every single day.’” He’d sighed when he said it, as if he
released actual physical pain with the admission. There was a hint of
gratitude in his eyes, as if he believed that Vero, a stranger, could carry
some of that pain for a while. She’d heard similar sounds come from
her own body in the Bikram classes.
Vero says no more to LiLi about her exchange with Lito. She waits,
applying the pressure of silence to force a response from LiLi, some
confession that might release the pain Vero imagines beneath each
of LiLi’s movements. I too miss my home. Vero wants to hear it aloud.
Maybe she thinks the admission will be an invitation to help, to com-
fort. Vero tries to imagine what LiLi was like in Hong Kong, pictures
her in the streets chattering away to her Filipina friends. Vero’s stom-
ach does a familiar clumsy flip when she thinks that perhaps it is the
“land of opportunity” that has silenced LiLi. The possibility that a
multidimensional LiLi, who Vero searches for, has not yet found her
way here—that possibility frightens Vero.
Eliot bounds toward them like a St. Bernard puppy, his oversized
feet getting in his own way. “JJ-Bean and I used to live in Mommy’s
tummy. We told stories in there.” He flops himself across LiLi’s out-
stretched legs and pulls her arm across his face to shade his eyes. Vero
clasps her hands in her own empty lap as LiLi giggles and throws a
handful of grass in Eliot’s moppy hair. “Jah, jah, jah,” she says, imi-
tating Eliot’s odd German inflection, “You tell me this story so many
times before, my Eliot.” There’s a dimple deep in LiLi’s right cheek,
one Vero rarely sees when they are alone. The boys touch something
in LiLi that Vero cannot.
“The doctor cut Mommy open,” Eliot continues, brushing the grass
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out of his hair and scrunching his nose against the tickle of it on his
face, “and took me out of her belly in a surbery.”
“Surgery,” Vero says, grabbing his sneakered toe and squeezing.
“Jah. Right. A sur-jer-y. I didn’t want to come out by myself. I even
tried, but I couldn’t. The doctor had to come get me. But Jamal, he
came flying out of Mommy’s penis so fast he almost hit the wall, so