by Mia Alvar
“That’s a pity.” I took my mother’s arm and headed for the next kiosk.
“Twenty-five hundred with banner,” the vendor shouted after us.
I walked on, to keep him guessing for a few paces, before doubling us back. I couldn’t have cared less about the cost of flowers. I simply wanted every peddler in the city to know he didn’t stand a chance against me.
None of the things I wished to say to my father were printable, so I took my mother’s suggestion: REST IN PEACE, YOUR LOVING FAMILY. We strolled the avenue waiting for our banner. “Don’t let anyone try that on the sari-sari,” I said.
“I don’t think anyone could,” she said. “You still haggle like the best of them.”
“What choice do I have? They can read balikbayan written on my forehead.”
“Ah, no—it’s too long to fit there.” Her words hung in the air a moment before I realized I should smile. Ten years before, I had arrived in New York with ideas of what I’d miss most about my mother: her cooking, her voice, the smell of rice and detergent in her skin and hair. I did not expect to miss her humor, the small wisecracks that escaped her mouth sometimes, often from behind her fingers, hard to hear.
When we returned for the flowers, my mother reached out as if to carry them. I waved her away as I paid. “This thing is nearly twice your size.”
“You underestimate me,” she said, pretending to flex her muscles.
—
After the memorial service, my uncles offered to stay with the body overnight. The last of our relatives were expected in the morning. We would bury my father in the afternoon.
Back in Mabini Heights, my old bedroom was mine again. The air conditioner seemed louder now that I was alone in the room, but I slept easily. I dreamed of winter in New York, walking alone in snow, pulling my collar up against the cold.
I woke in a sweat again. The AC had stopped. I turned the dial, but the vents stayed silent. I flipped the wall switch and got no light.
A brownout. My first since returning to Manila.
Moonlight from the window told me only a few hours had passed. A muffled sound, like crying, came through the wall. I stood, ready to console my mother on the sofa or at the kitchen table. But the living room was empty, the kitchen dark. The only light I saw flickered weakly from the sari-sari. Approaching the screen door, I saw a candle burning on the counter. Was she keeping vigil? Praying? I squinted in the shadows.
She certainly wasn’t crying. In fact, she was laughing—a strange, sleepy laugh that dominoed through the sari-sari. She reached along the counter and picked up a white square. Succorol. I watched her slide it through the wicket. Then she was repeating my instructions, in my accent.
“This isn’t Tylenol, if you know what I mean.” She drawled the words, like a cowboy trying to speak Tagalog, as if I’d lived in Texas, not New York, for the past ten years. She reached toward the wicket and came back with a fistful of cash.
I turned from the screen to the darkness, as if a film projector behind me had faltered. Her laughter followed me through the living room as I tripped against the furniture and nearly missed the sickroom doorway in the dark. I opened the drawer where we’d stored the yellow box. Six Succorol patches left, of the thirty I’d brought. Five days had passed since I’d arrived, four since I’d given them to her.
My skin itched with the humidity. I grabbed the fan beside my father’s bed and flapped it at myself, then felt ridiculous and snapped it shut. Nothing about my mother—not her voice, soft as a lullaby, when I could hear it; not her hands, drying themselves on her lap; not her posture, a constant curtsy—squared with the woman in the sari-sari. I had to erase that strange laughter from my mind, the tongue that wet her thumb before it counted out the money.
Returning to the dresser, I fingered the box of Succorol. Would the world end if I indulged this once, crossed another boundary, broke one more rule?
I glanced again over my shoulder before peeling a patch from its backing. I pressed it to my chest as if saluting a flag or anthem. My heart raced under my hand. In the distance, my mother’s laughter rose and fell. But nothing changed as I lay back on the cot. It seemed as if the years of virtue had made a fortress of me, a barricade that human appetites and weakness couldn’t breach.
Then my bones began to melt. Things happened too quickly, at first, to feel good. The rosary, the notebook, and the fan, unfolding pleat by pleat, rose from the chair and hovered over my father’s bed. The doors swayed. I gripped the edges of the cot, feeling control slip from me inch by inch. Only when the melting reached my fingers, loosening their hold, did I begin to enjoy it. Patches flew out of the box and lined up like a filmstrip in the air, each one a panel with a picture in it, and from there every square inside the house became a screen: song lyrics in the baby monitor; my father’s face in the green computer. Even the windows and the wicket came alive with scenes of bida, kontrabida, and the woman they both claimed. My body sailed up and out of the room like a streamer: through the corridor, the kitchen, the sari-sari. Walls and ceilings yielded to me as they would to a ghost. I heard my mother laughing and my father singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” the sounds and words escaping through the roof into the stars.
—
I woke the next morning to find my bedsheets balled on the sickroom floor, the Succorol patch still on my chest. Tearing it off, I wondered if my mother had checked in on me and seen it. In the bathroom I tried to soap off the patch’s square footprint, but the adhesive was stubborn. I needed a washcloth to work at the residue.
Rubbing away the evidence, I looked down. As if I’d never seen my own hand before. I stretched my arm out and stared at the white cloth, wrapped around my fingers like a mitten. A bandage.
I rushed from the sink to the doorway of the sickroom, thinking back to the night he died. Here was where the moonlight had shone over the bed. Here was the step I took before seeing them. Here was where she gasped, stopping me in my tracks, and bent to hide his body. My mind shuffled through the kinds of scenes you saw in those trashy Tagalog melodramas: on-screen villains, polishing their guns and planting their poisons; my mother, not ministering to him as she had when I was four years old, but instead waiting for me to fall asleep, kneeling at my father’s bedside, removing his shirt and applying a patch to his chest. I pictured her adding another patch and then another, a week’s worth, her fingertips blanching his skin briefly at each point of pressure. I could see her laying an ear to his chest. After midnight, when his breath and heartbeat stopped, she must have peeled off the patches, soaked the washcloth, and tackled the sticky residue just as I opened the door for some cold air.
Now I opened the candy box and counted again: five. Only three should have gone to my father on my second, third, and fourth days home; one to me. I’d seen my mother sell one. Of the other twenty that were missing, how many had she sold? Had she sold some in the nights before as well, while I slept? How many would it take to finish off a dying man?
I must have known a drug so powerful could end his life. So what? Didn’t I want him gone, hadn’t I always? My mother was better off.
But at what cost? I had to ask myself. If she had killed him, I had handed her the weapon. If I’d kept track, a closer eye on the supply, I might have caught it all sooner. What kind of pharmacist lets days go by without taking inventory? Someone incompetent as well as criminal. Like him, in other words.
—
In spite of what I’d told the staff, my father did not have a vast global fan club traveling to see him. No need to drag the wake on for days, as other Filipino families might for more beloved men: we would bury him later that second day. At the cemetery, a block of earth had been hollowed out for the grave. My aunts cooled themselves with lace fans, or brochures they’d lifted from the funeral parlor and folded into pleats. A priest read from his small black Bible. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. In this kind of heat the valley of the shadow of death sounded inviting.
My cousins’ chil
dren broke flowers from the bouquet set on the coffin. Before the lid was closed and locked for good, I looked for the last time at my father’s face, under its sheet of viewing glass. The mortician had not only restored the color but buoyed up the flesh itself, faking fullness in the hollows and droop. I could almost imagine that face moving again, the mouth stretching backward to spit. Nearby a headstone waited, even simpler than the banner on his flowers: ESTEBAN SANDOVAL, SR. 1935−1998. SON · BROTHER · HUSBAND · FATHER. My head ached, and my mouth felt dry; there was a grit behind my eyelids I couldn’t blink away.
Now, at his grave, my mother wept into her white handkerchief. She still looked frail, the woman who cleared platters and pulled out chairs, who knelt at my father’s feet and mopped up after him. Her tears affected me the way they always had. I swore to stop them; I’d do anything. I reached for her, then froze—afraid, for the first time in all my years consoling her, that I might cry myself. For years there’d been no question of how much she leaned on me, like any mother on her overseas son. It never dawned on me how much I’d leaned on her: to play her part, stick to the script. Her saintliness was an idea I loved more than I had ever hated him. I put my arms around her, making vow after silent vow. I’d never cut corners again, no matter what the value, who the victim; I would never violate any code, professional or otherwise. I would take her with me to New York. I would never leave her again. I’d bury the patches somewhere no one would find them, so long as she could always remain the mother I knew, not some stranger laughing in the dark.
My uncles turned a crank to lower their brother into the ground. They picked up shovels and began to bury him scoop by scoop. My mother passed her fan to me, then her handkerchief. It felt damp in my palm, the cloth worn thin and soft from all its time in the wash. She stepped forward to join her in-laws, struggling with the shovel’s weight.
A smell of grass and earth took me back to the yard that once existed in Mabini Heights, and I half-expected an acacia tree to appear beside me, or my mother’s voice to call me to dinner through the kitchen screen. I remembered how I used to climb that tree and sling a branch onto my shoulder, aiming sniper-style at the place in the house where my father might be standing. Another time I stabbed a fallen twig into the grass and twisted it, imagining his blood. But I’d fought tooth and nail to rise above that yard. Even in return for all the harm he’d done my mother, to harm him, to be capable of harm to him, was to honor what was in my blood. His blood. I trained myself into his opposite: competent, restrained. The hero in an old Tagalog movie did not win by stooping to revenge; there was a pristine, fundamental goodness in his soul that radiated out to crush the villain. Character and destiny—I believed in all of that, I guess.
My mother raised her foot and staked the spade into the ground. She heaved the dirt into the plot and made a noise, almost a grunt. You don’t know my strength! Through all the melodramas that my family and I had seen over the years, in which the bida and the kontrabida crossed their swords over a woman, I never guessed that she might be the one to watch.
The Miracle Worker
When Mrs. Mansour first came to the house, I thought she was alone. Naturally I could see only her face; the rest of her had been draped in the traditional black. But there was something modern about her right away, even ignoring the fact that she had arrived without a husband. She wore sunglasses—Chanel, I saw, as she approached—and deep red lipstick.
“Mrs. Sally Riva?” she said, removing the sunglasses.
I nodded. Only my birth certificate had ever called me Salvacion. I reached out to shake her henna-tipped hand, but Mrs. Mansour leaned in further, to kiss me on both cheeks. She smelled pleasantly of tangerine and something stronger, perhaps a spice. Once the outer gate had shut, she parted her jilbab to reveal a gold-embroidered bodice and a little daughter. “Here is Aroush,” said Mrs. Mansour. The child had been anchored on her hip and concealed by her clothes all along. Mrs. Mansour shifted Aroush’s face to show me.
I was stunned. Back home in the Philippines I had been trained to work with all manner of “special” children. But I had never seen any child quite like the five-year-old Aroush. Her head swelled out dramatically at the forehead and crown, like a lightbulb. Faint brown smudges the size of thumbprints dotted her face. Along the left side of her neck grew a pebbly mass of tumors.
“Aroush, this lady is a teacher. Hello, Teacher.” Mrs. Mansour held Aroush’s hennaed hand and made it wave. Through the rust-colored designs on her skin I could see more of the pebbly tumors.
I led them from the gate down a tile path to the house itself. A year had passed since my husband, Ed, and I had moved from the Philippines to Bahrain, and still I thought of these three stories as “the” house—not “our” house, certainly not “my.” Expatriate families like ours were well provided for: a car, a travel allowance, the promise of schooling if we were ever to have a child. Strangest of these provisions, to me, was the house. Too large for two people, it was outfitted with luxuries I never would have chosen: gold leather upholstery, curtains embroidered with camels and date trees, shelves and tables with brass frames and glass surfaces. Plush red carpeting covered every inch of floor except the bathrooms and the kitchen. We wanted for nothing, and none of it was ours.
Having grown up poor and Catholic, with the Beatitudes and tales of the first Filipino workers overseas swirling all around me, I still got nervous at the sight of luxury; I couldn’t tell the difference between wealth and obscene, ill-gotten displays of it. In college, before Ed, I had dated a boy who railed against the president for exporting labor to the Middle East. To the editor of the Metro Manila Herald, he wrote about “the hidden cost of remittances” and said a peasant was a peasant was a peasant, whether on the rice fields or the oil fields, and that at least the Filipino rice farmer could come home every day and see his family. I thought of that old boyfriend sometimes, when I looked around my home at the life the oil fields had given us. Certainly we lived more like foremen than like farmers.
Mrs. Mansour stopped at a full-length mirror in the foyer. “Look here, little woman,” she said to Aroush. She lifted the girl’s chin and draped the edge of her jilbab around the grotesque little face, so that two veiled heads were facing the mirror. “Who is that?” said Mrs. Mansour. Aroush grunted. I could see this was an established call-and-response between them, one of the few rituals in which a child like Aroush could be expected to react.
In the living room Mrs. Mansour spoke of the cool weather that day, which to me was not cool but merely less hot than usual, and of how much she adored people from my country, most of her household help being Filipino as well. Clearly we would circle for hours around the real purpose of her visit, unless I addressed it myself.
“Mrs. Mansour,” I said, “let me begin by telling you that I unfortunately don’t speak any Arabic.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Mansour. My friend Minnie had already informed her. But the language barrier, it turned out, did not disqualify me. Mrs. Mansour preferred it this way—for, unbelievably, she wanted Aroush to grow up bilingual. Bilingue was how she put it: Mrs. Mansour herself had learned French as a schoolgirl in Beirut. She supported Aroush’s head against her chest as she spoke. With a clutched handkerchief, she caught a dribble of saliva from Aroush’s mouth before it could land on their clothing.
I asked what else she expected out of Aroush’s education.
“Mrs. Sally,” she replied, “you know of the deaf-blind Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan?”
Aroush grunted.
“Teacher, you must be Annie Sullivan for my Aroush!”
I had been warned in advance about Mrs. Mansour’s illusions. My friend Minnie worked as a maid for the Mansour family. “The child can’t hold its own head up,” Minnie had said, “but Madame believes it will grow up to write poetry or cure cancer someday.” My friend had sucked her teeth, shook her head. “That must be something, no? To be so rich you think you can buy reality?”
&nbs
p; “I’ll need to know more about your daughter’s history,” I said.
Aroush had been born at full term, the third of the Mansours’ children and the only girl. At first the only trait to mark her as unusual was a largish head. The thumbprints did not appear until she was a year old, the skin growths some months later. The Mansours began keeping Aroush indoors, out of public view. “Often people do not love difference,” said Mrs. Mansour. She, on the other hand, surprised herself by how much she cherished Aroush’s limitations at first. Aroush was the pliant and portable child every young girl imagined when she played at motherhood: you could dress Aroush and position Aroush and tote Aroush around like a doll. She provided no resistance—a welcome quality, said Mrs. Mansour, after years spent raising boys.
But by the time she turned two, Aroush had yet to grab on to things, roll to her side, sit up, raise her head, make sounds other than grunting or crying, or hit any of the milestones that had come naturally to Mrs. Mansour’s sons. Thrusting her tongue by reflex allowed milk and soft foods to fall into her throat and be swallowed, but she had never mastered even an elementary sucking. The Mansours traveled to London, where a battery of tests pointed to a rare, profoundly unlucky combination of cerebral palsy and von Recklinghausen’s disease. Her mental age would never advance beyond infancy. Language, of the conventional spoken variety at least, was not in the cards.
“So they said.” Mrs. Mansour shrugged. She took Aroush’s hand in hers and gazed fondly at the henna.
In any other place, with any other parent, this might have been the time to discuss “realistic expectations.” But I was here in Bahrain, with Mrs. Mansour. I thought of Minnie, who cleaned the Mansours’ house in Saar six days a week. I thought of my husband, working on the pipeline to Saudi Arabia all afternoon in the desert heat. Mrs. Mansour’s hopes put me in a position to mend an injury, correct an imbalance. I took a deep breath, then fed her all the bright teacherly clichés I could muster. I talked of needs and environment and response. “Education,” I said, “comes from the Latin ducere, ‘to lead’; and e-, ‘out of.’ ‘To lead out of,’ ” I said. With my hands I made an ushering gesture.