Welcome to Envy Park

by Mina V. Esguerra

  Which unexpectedly led me to spend the rest of my programmed walk watching him lift his endurance weights with my workout music as the soundtrack.

  It was very sexy.

  You know why you're doing this, Moira. It's because you're in limbo.

  This meaning checking out—no—watching neighbor guy as he exercised.

  You have a plan, but it's short-term. Expiration date June. Suddenly anything is a possibility.

  Also, when was the last time you were even kissed? You probably don't remember. Ethan probably isn't even that good-looking, but your hormones are making you lower your standards.

  No, that wasn't it. Matilda was third-party confirmation that 9th Floor was a hottie.

  Why are you letting Roxie affect you? You never follow her advice. You don't need to do anything with this guy. He's just a neighbor, you'll be friends, you'll eventually get a Real Job, and you'll be on your way.

  Right, I told myself, enjoying my own workout pep talk very much. This stage of my life, it should be simple. Go out. Make friends. Make some money.

  Ethan was asking me a question.

  "What?" I said, pulling out my earbuds.

  "Do you want to go get dinner?" he said. "Maybe in an hour?"

  I didn't overthink it. "Yes," I answered. "Yes, let's do that."

  Keep things simple. Make friends.

  As it turned out, it would take me one week to find out exactly how great of a kisser Ethan Lorenzo was.

  -///-

  "It's coffee cotton candy."

  "No way. I'm having that right now. How much is it?"

  "I'll get it for you."

  "Thank you. I just cancelled out my treadmill workout, didn't I?"

  "Then you do it again tomorrow. No big deal. You were saying about your neighbor?"

  "Yeah, right. No, I mean, I just met her once. Filipina who lived in the flat two doors down from me. I saw her in the lift sometimes, but then one day she just knocked and when I opened the door, she was there with her seven-year-old daughter. Could I watch her, she asked, because she had to attend to an emergency and she had no one else to turn to. I was shocked for a second, but I agreed to do it. And then I said, 'I'm Moira by the way,' and she was in such a rush that she didn't even tell me the kid's name. She came back later that night, and was so thankful, but that was it. We didn't really become friends after."

  "What was the emergency?"

  "She never told me."

  "That's strange."

  "Didn't trust me enough to tell me the details, but still managed to leave her child with me. I could have been crazy!"

  "You don't look crazy."

  "Thanks but the crazy ones never do. It made me think about why someone would do that. Why trust that blindly? And it's because you're in a rush, it's an emergency, and you have no choice—what do you do? And this woman just put her faith in me, because of a vague notion that we were from the same place and would value the same things. It's almost illogical. If you were thinking clearly, you wouldn't do that. I don't think I would."

  "She chose to trust you."

  "Yes, she did."

  "And she was right to."

  "Yes, she was."

  "And because you were trustworthy indeed, you encouraged her to be just as trusting next time around, and maybe she won't be as lucky."

  "You mean I made it worse by being nice to her?"

  "Think about it. If you were a jerk and turned her away, she would have learned that she shouldn't just leave her kid with strangers."

  "Yes, but I would have been a jerk."

  "It's good that you aren't."

  "Are you telling me I should have been a jerk? Because the consequence of going down that path isn't pretty. I wouldn't be talking to you now, eating this fancy cotton candy, if I was the kind of person who taught lessons like that."

  "I'm glad you aren't. It's funny that you say 'lift' and 'flat.'"

  "Did I? I kind of revert to it when I talk about being there. It's the word they use! But it took me a while to get used to it. I kept thinking they meant shoes."

  "We'd be using it too, if we'd been under the British longer."

  "Maybe neighborhood bakeries would be serving scones. Scones or pandesal?"

  "And we'd be driving the same messed-up way but on the wrong side of the road."

  "It would be chaos."

  "No different from today then. Just flipped over."

  "So that's settled then," I said, smiling as I popped the last clump of the unsurprisingly addictive coffee cotton candy in my mouth. "British Philippines. Exactly the same, but with different words, and scones."

  Chapter 5

  Beside the small stall that served experimental desserts was an old-school Italian food place, and the next day, my former officemates were there to have dinner with me. A semi-impromptu thing.

  I kept in touch with them, sure, but I was doing the bare minimum in terms of keeping friendships. On some of my holiday visits to Manila I skipped meeting them entirely, and I didn't feel bad about it. They were nice people and all, but because they all still worked at the same place, conversations gravitated toward the same things all over again. It was great when it was dish I wanted to hear; not so when it was nitpicking over some little thing that happened at work.

  To Roxie, I had described my friendship with them as being locked in a time capsule. If I wanted to relive my life and thoughts from five years ago, all I needed to do was hang out with them. There was nostalgia in it, but also a reminder that I had changed.

  I said yes to this sudden dinner because they had been hounding me about it for weeks, and they offered to actually come to NV Park, and I had run out of excuses.

  "Okay, and Arabella's coming along with us okay, bye!"

  Arabella. As in my former boss, Arabella. Somewhat of a mentor figure to me, except I couldn't give her that much credit because my career was currently nonexistent, and I did leave the job before I could get a promotion or a substantial increase. She and I were okay. I didn't have any enemies. But hanging out with her was increasingly becoming icky.

  "So how many guys did you sleep with while over there, Moira?" was her second question, after "how are you."

  No joke, I pretended to choke on a spaghetti noodle. Just to give myself time to think. Arabella wasn't like this before. But as time went on—as she neared forty, maybe—she was getting more and more like this. Whatever this was.

  The ex-boyfriend's name was George, Australian with Filipino parents. He was Aussie in many ways and Pinoy in others, and the balance was what probably made him most attractive to me. Like me, he was someone and somewhere without quite being it. Except he had more than two decades of a head start. So it might be wrong of me to be calling him my boyfriend. Truth was, he was a guy I had dinner with, and did stuff with, for about a year, but I never felt that he loved me, and I was pretty sure he was seeing other people.

  So one day I just said, no I wasn't going to do stuff with him anymore, and he started going out with new assistant manager Tamsin. I was the new girl too, when we started. He was the type who did that.

  "What have you been hearing?" I said, laughing it off. "Don't trust any of these gossips."

  "So did you go out with foreigners? Like, Americans, British guys? Or were they mostly Filipinos?"

  After I freed myself from the George delusion, I dated. Participated in "cultural exchanges" as Roxie and I liked to say. But it wasn't easy to be suddenly promiscuous when your flatmate was your mom's friend's daughter. Not that she was a snitch, but it was weird. I was acutely aware for example that every time her boyfriend visited they would probably want to do stuff and didn't want them to feel like I was in the way. (That weekend I bought huge headphones and a bunch of movies to watch.) Surely she thought the same about me.

  The four other people at the table didn't even notice how strange this was, which made me wonder if I was the one going crazy. In fact, they continued having their own conversation, about what VP so-a
nd-so did at the annual meeting blah blah blah, while I was left to fend for myself.

  "No, I didn't go out with anybody," I lied, just to close the book on it.

  "You're lying."

  "Nobody liked me over there."

  "You're lying. How could they not? You’ve got that...look going for you."

  "What look?" I was curious about this.

  Arabella was really going there. "Educated Filipina."

  She meant it as a compliment, so I didn’t dare think about what she considered an insult. Best to move on. "Thank you, but no."

  "Nobody, the entire time? Five years? Didn't you have a boyfriend or something?"

  I was too deep into this by now. "Where did you hear that? There was nobody. I was living with a very religious girl and she made me promise not to bring anyone home."

  "But that's what their apartments are for!"

  "Guys have flatmates, too."

  The flats weren't huge. You'd run into each other eventually, like on the way to get a glass of water, and all the money spent on headphones and movies would have been for nothing because you'd have to politely nod and acknowledge the casual visitor wearing skimpy shorts.

  Over the years it became more like normal, but I never got comfortable knowing that much about another couple (when they fought, made up, broke up, hooked up) through sounds overheard.

  So when the opportunity to buy a unit at NV Park came up, I got a one-bedroom. Not going to be sharing.

  "Hotels? Motels?"

  "Too expensive."

  "Oh dear." Arabella looked over at the others just to check if they were as shocked as she was, but they were still in their own world. But she looked so sorry for me. "Is that why you came back? Did you give up on finding a man there?"

  Arabella, by the way, was eight years older than I was, and also unattached. Her last serious relationship had ended even before I met her at work. She was a workaholic, but I refused to believe that she had absolutely nobody the whole time. Not the way she kept obsessing about my dating life.

  Or maybe it was an indicator that she indeed didn't. Have anybody.

  "I should introduce you to someone," Arabella was saying, her nails clicking noisily as she browsed her smartphone contacts list. "I mean, you've been back for a month right? Are you free Saturday?"

  "No I'm not, Arabella, but thank you."

  "What's your next job?"

  "Nothing, right now."

  "Are you sure? Because a new division opened up this year. I could recommend you for it. You should consider it. You're not getting any younger."

  I sipped some water and swallowed what I really wanted to say. "How are you? Who are you seeing now?" I went, sweetly.

  "How can I see anybody when I’m leaving at ten every night? This job is going to kill me."

  I smiled and tried to recall how this conversation went. She was complaining about the hours she put in, for as long as I'd known her. I had come to see this as a dance. She stepped forward (I hate my job I work so hard), I stepped back (you should take a break you deserve it), she stepped forward again (but I can't not right now), chachacha.

  "Weren't you promoted lately? Can't you start delegating or something?"

  Chachacha.

  Arabella loved her job. She loved how it gave her an environment to be superior to other people. She loved being right, and being a mentor, and showing people the ropes. She liked being the last to leave, and complaining about it early the next day. But she didn't want to admit it, so she made a show out of hanging out with the underlings, trying to be part of their/our lives.

  It was precisely this environment that showed me that my future was Arabella, if I stayed at that workplace any longer, and no I didn't want to be getting older and living vicariously through her "kids."

  But I was never, ever going to tell her that.

  So throughout dinner I kept up the dance. Chachacha.

  -///-

  ARABELLA

  I. CAREER AND FINANCES

  + Stable career (if a little boring and possibly dead-end)

  - Can’t afford NV Park

  II. FAMILY AND FRIENDSHIPS

  ? In touch with family, but not in best terms

  - Friends are actually officemates who don’t want to offend their boss by saying she can’t come along

  III. LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS

  - None recently

  - Living vicariously through Moira and who knows who else

  IV. PERSONAL FULFILLMENT

  - No time for travel

  - Supposedly, no time for hobbies

  -///-

  Okay, to be fair, it wasn't just Arabella. It was like my decision to move years ago also involved me putting a sign over my head that said "Project Your Regrets Onto Me." I tried to remove these people from my life, but at least one would remain, anywhere. The person who would say I was wrong for staying/going, that I should be going/staying, that I couldn't stay/go for the rest of my life, that I should decide to go/stay now before it was too late.

  These people just couldn't be happy for someone who was enjoying herself.

  And yet I had to remain polite, so when I encountered these people, I went into "no comment" mode, or close to it. I lied.

  My jaw was numb from all the lies, by the end of dinner.

  Arabella didn't let up the interrogation about my life and future plans, so I just kept saying things to close the topic. But she kept coming back.

  They weren't major lies; mostly just me saying "nothing" when there actually was a "something." Except the "something" was going to lead to more questions, so I just didn't say it. The lies weren't going to hurt her, and I convinced myself that she deserved them for being so nosy about my business.

  I had a plan, all right? I didn't need to share it with everyone. And the lack of sharing didn't give anyone the right to make one for me.

  Maybe I shouldn't have told people I was staying longer this time.

  When I started walking back to my building, it was near midnight, and being annoyed at Arabella's questions gave me excess energy. So I went to the gym.

  And Ethan was there.

  Only the two of us were apparently crazy enough to use the facilities at that hour, but I wasn't complaining. I waved hello but skipped the small talk and went straight for the treadmill.

  Maybe a more ambitious run this time. I set it for a course that would simulate a jog up three hills in thirty minutes. And then I started running.

  My heart was beating fast and hopefully in a healthy way as I made it up the first "hill," and I felt great. No, not great—I felt pumped.

  Because I might actually have been angry, a little.

  What made Arabella think we had that kind of friendship? I was nothing but professional when we worked together, never even talked to her about the guys I liked or the dates I went on. Never asked her for work advice, even; the day she found out I was leaving the company was the day I handed her my resignation letter.

  You don't have the right to project your regrets onto me.

  I ran on adrenaline for the rest of my workout.

  "...want to grab something?" Ethan was saying.

  "What?" I was breathless as I neared the end of my run, but I felt wonderful. I could have taken on another hill. I was ready to do stuff. "A drink please? Yes."

  Chapter 6

  "It looks complicated."

  "Stop—it's not complicated. It's exactly like making a sandwich."

  "There are too many things here."

  "It's called ‘Duck Two Ways.’ You're just having it the one way."

  "It's good duck."

  "Wait, stop. Here, take mine."

  "No thanks."

  "Please. I'll just make another. Which will just take two seconds because it's easy."

  "It's good."

  "Did you dip it in the sauce?"

  "No. Which one, this one?"

  "You did it wrong again. Here, have another. Dip."

  "You're bossy."<
br />
  "My flatmate and I foodtripped a lot. I don't like it when I eat with people who never try anything. Is it good now?"

  "Yes, ma'am, it's better with the sauce, thank you."

  "So you're seriously at the gym every night?"

  "It's the first time I'm staying in a place with a free gym. But this is a new thing for me."

  "Are you usually there so late?"

  "No, but had to work late tonight."

  "Doing what?"

  "Had a call with the London office."

  "What do you do exactly?"

  "I'm a project consultant."

  "Which we know means nothing, really. I was a 'consultant' for years too."

  "It's really managing projects."

  "Hah, I was almost a 'project manager' too, maybe if I stayed in my job here longer. But I had dinner with my former boss and she seems to be stuck doing the same thing, so now I know that it doesn't mean anything either."

  "Well we're in tech and software, so it's usually about that. But it's not always the same project, because the client could be, I don't know, a burger restaurant today, a hospital tomorrow. Have to be flexible."

  "I know. It kind of feels that way if you move to another country to work."

  "Like how?"

  "I don't know if anyone else thought that, but I felt... I felt I had to become anything they needed me to be. I just needed to make rent, and the condo payments, and it didn't matter what job I had. And then I had to change jobs because it looked like I wasn't going to last long in my first employer, and I was literally looking at every job posting. I had no standards. Pretty much anything that allowed me to stay in the country, I was willing to consider."

  "So that sounds like my career, exactly. But only because my work needed me to be whatever people wanted me to be at the time."

  "How long have you been at it?"

  "More than five years now."

  "Do you feel as aimless as I do?"

  "Hah. I guess."

  "It didn't have to be like this, you know. I could have made the same choices, like my friend Roxie, and I'd probably have a job title and a staff and people who would be calling me 'ma'am.'"