by Mia Alvar
Will laughed. “Don’t worry. This is my grandmother’s place—too shitty for anyone to haunt,” he said.
“No, it’s great.” I didn’t know what else to say. Two women materialized from a set of stairs near the back of the living room. They started clearing a round table where it seemed a feast had taken place, balled napkins and broken crab shells on the dishes. Everywhere I turned, expensive-looking objects mingled with crap, reminding me of a fashion editorial I once shot (“How to Mix Low & Luxe”), dressed in three-thousand-dollar coats and Payless shoes. Silk tapestries hung on the wall above dusty orange shag couches. A curio cabinet was empty except for a jade horse and branches of red coral. Jorge’s and Will’s friends were mismatched, too. Three of them looked young and put-together. I recognized at least one designer shirt. Two others seemed greasy, aging, toothless. We sat on the gritty, unclean floor. The coffee table, when I touched it, had the heft and coldness of real marble.
A friend of Will’s—one of the greasy, toothless guys—introduced himself as Piper. The reason for his nickname was a high melodic whistle, which he demonstrated. A gray mouse scurried out from under the curio cabinet to the middle of the floor. The mouse stood on its hind legs while rubbing its front paws together, as if to warm them. Then it returned to all fours and disappeared again under the cabinet. Everyone laughed, and I pretended to—even though I hated rodents, and the evil speed at which they darted out and disappeared.
It was a rodent that got me back to work, one day when I had started a new listen-delete-sleep cycle with my voice mail. “Why don’t you come into the office, Alice,” my booker was saying. “We need to talk about your career. Are you still in this, or are you out?” I was thinking maybe if I slept long enough, the decision would be made for me, when a mouse darted out from under my bed and disappeared between the white take-out cartons. I was up from the floor and standing on the windowsill faster than you could say “evil.” The next voice mail was about my credit card; I caught the main points, which were “past due,” and “collection agency.” I called my booker back. “In,” I said, when he picked up.
The games we played on Balete Drive passed like a dream, without any fixed rules or reason. We used buttons and shells as playing chips. A glass aquarium sat on the table, filled with coins—they kept calling it the betting pool, but no one kept track really of what went in or out. Sometimes coins were taken from the pool to use as bingo chips as well. One by one, the guests went home and the women went upstairs, until only Will, Jorge, and I remained in the living room.
“It’s a long drive back,” Jorge said. “Alice and I are pretty tired.” That was all he needed to say to his old friend. Will gave us some mothball-scented T-shirts to sleep in. At the kitchen sink Jorge and I cleaned our teeth with red toothpaste and our fingers. Rats had made a nest in a vent along the top of the kitchen wall, and I could hear them shrieking. “It’s an old house,” Jorge said quietly, as if defending it. He spat into the sink and splashed his face with water.
The lights went out.
“Brownout,” said Jorge. “Fuck.”
Without thinking I kissed him, my eyes not quite adjusted to the dark, not finding his mouth right away. Our tongues were sweet from the red toothpaste.
In an upstairs room, we took off our clothes slowly. Trying to keep quiet elongated everything. “I have a really long torso,” I said, and felt my body lengthening to prove it.
“Your torso’s fine,” he said.
I started babbling—“George. Can I call you George?”—not wanting to be silly but not wanting, either, to match his intensity or his seriousness. He shushed me with a thumb above my lip—the place where the scar would fall, on him.
I said, “It’s just that whore-hey, in English, sounds—”
He shushed me again, laughing a little. “I know what it sounds like.” We lay down, and he raised my legs up so my toes touched the wall.
—
In the middle of the night I woke to the whir of a ceiling fan. Electricity had come back to Balete Drive. I got up, found a bathroom at the end of the corridor, and reached for the string hanging from its naked bulb. In the light, I saw the bathroom had no boundaries. A faucet came out of the wall, with a plastic pail, cracked at the rim, under the spout. There was no sink or shower, only a drain in the floor. Two mirrors hung opposite one another: a square one above the toilet tank, and a round one on the back of the bathroom door. I bent down to lift the lid of the toilet seat.
I couldn’t sit on a toilet, in a double-mirrored bathroom, without remembering. The night Sabine died, we had gone to a party on Mercer Street, in a fancy apartment whose owner we didn’t know. It was a triplex, with spiral staircases and a white grand piano in the living room. Someone called me into a bathroom that had mirrored walls, a mirrored ceiling, and a mirrored floor, on which Sabine lay, unconscious. A fun-house bathroom. As I knelt to her, at least four other versions of me did the same. People assumed—and I did too, at first—that she had overdosed on something. That would have been typical, if a little eighties, of a model. But it was nothing so dramatic as that. I picked her up—how many times had one of us done that, when the other was drunk or sick or sad or just horsing around?—but this felt different, her skin already growing cold, her weight a stranger’s weight.
A burst aneurysm, the doctor told me, in the brain. Did I notice the warning signs, they asked: had she complained of blurry vision, feeling weak or numb? “No,” I told the doctor truthfully. I didn’t say we’d both set out that night to get as sloppy as we could, and even if I were to notice that her pupils had dilated or her speech was slurring, I’d have taken it as a sign that we were right on track. I didn’t mention that I’d been sitting in a ghost chair, laughing at a joke told by some guy I was considering sleeping with. Was she a regular cocaine user? Not unless we had money, I said, which wasn’t “regular.”
Essentially she’d had a stroke, which struck me so much as a thing that happened to old people that I thought, at her hospital bedside, Are we old? But it was possible, the doctor said, that she’d been born with this—an inch at most, a weakness on the wall of one of her brain arteries, a thin balloon that after years of growing happened to rupture that night.
It stunned me to lose the person I had known and lived with for a decade to something that was a secret from both of us. We had seen each other through colds and fevers, cleanses and crash diets, STD and pregnancy scares, bad drug trips of the kind some people thought killed her, the mole on her ankle that turned out to be nothing, once she bothered to have it checked out, a lump in my armpit that did have to be excised, as a precaution. She knew that more than one tequila shot made me miserable the next day; I knew that tap water and any less than five hours of sleep made her skin break out like a teenager’s. We’d seen more of each other’s bodies than of any body we had ever fucked, no question.
Not to mention we discussed our bodies, day in and night out: every bone and muscle, every gland and errant hair, was fair game. It’s possible that most girls bring these things up now and then with their close friends. But girls who live or die by their metabolisms, whose reactions to caffeine, herbs, or laxatives can mean the difference between shot-girl double shifts and a thousand dollars an hour just to sit there? We were scientific and exhaustive about it. Sabine would not have been amused that her body kept this information from her, after a lifetime spent studying it. But she wasn’t around to learn the news. I was the one blindsided. It made me wonder what secrets my body was hiding from me, when and where my own flesh would betray me after the years I’d spent getting to know it.
At Sabine’s viewing, someone said if she’d survived the stroke she would have never been the same. This way she got to die young, and be burned forever in our hearts and brains as beautiful. Someone else said, People don’t think beauty’s an accomplishment. Maybe they’re right, but close your eyes for just a moment and imagine this world without beautiful people in it. Is that a world you’d want to live
in?
For a while after her death I was convinced that every stiff neck or cramp, every nauseated feeling, every moment of forgetfulness, was a ruptured aneurysm. If I woke up and sunlight coming through the window felt too bright, I thought, Is this it? Am I dying? I still couldn’t accept I was alone, I guess—or that I’d always been alone and now I just knew it. No matter how close we had gotten, no matter how well I knew her, there was this fact of death that set Sabine apart from me forever. The trick her body pulled had made me frightened, frankly, of my own body. I wanted, even tried, to forget I had a body altogether.
When I flushed the toilet now, the water cycled in the bowl slowly and very loudly. The faucet, too, was loud. On the floor next to the plastic pail was a bar of soap, rough as pumice. I washed my hands as quickly as I could. I pushed open the bathroom door and stared again into the square mirror just before switching off the light. Then I heard a rustle in the corridor behind me. Afraid to see another rodent, I closed the toilet lid and sat on top, hugging my knees. My eyes adjusted enough to make out the jut of my cheekbones in the mirror, and a moving silhouette beyond my shoulder.
She was different from the woman I had seen outside the restaurant. This white lady was old. Her hair, long and wild against her shoulders, was the shade of ice. I stood and turned to approach her. At the sleeves and hem of her nightgown, I saw age spots all over her hands and feet. It seemed she had been tall—almost as tall as me, before old age hunched her spine. She was by herself, and not so brown as the women I had seen around the city. I wondered what she would do: turn and flee right then, or run just as I plucked a strand of her frost-white hair as proof? Or would she fade, right in front of me, into the darkness of the empty hallway?
I took another step forward. That was when she screamed and ran straight at me. She jumped my shoulders, and I fell back against the floor. Shouting things in gibberish, or maybe Tagalog, she clawed at me. There was the ringing metal scent of blood, and then I was looking at her liver-spotted fist up close. I didn’t see stars so much as lightning in my head, a nerve in my brain flashing brighter than the others.
A light came on from another door along the corridor. “Lola!” Jorge’s friend Will called from his room, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her from me. He talked in their language until she calmed down, then added in English, “Alice is our friend, it’s OK.” I touched my nose and looked at the blood on my fingertips. “God, Alice, I’m so sorry,” he said. “My lola lived through the war. She’s so old. I’m sorry.”
Lights were turning on one after another now; Will’s sister came from her room to see about the commotion as well. “Did we wake her?” Jorge asked about the baby. He didn’t know where to look or who to apologize to first. He went into the kitchen and came out with two wet washcloths, one filled with ice. “Where’d she nail you?” he asked. I reached for the part of my face that was still ringing. My cheekbone felt tight, like it was being pushed against, and my nose ached. Jorge dabbed at the blood under my nostrils with the washcloth and placed the bag of ice onto my cheek.
Everyone was quiet for a moment, and then Jorge said, “Alice, meet Will’s grandmother. Lola, meet Alice Anders.”
“There’s Manila for you,” Will said. “Everybody but their mother under the same roof.”
“Everybody and their mother,” I corrected.
“Exactly,” said Will. He whispered to his grandmother and guided her down the hall back to her room.
“She’s not all there,” Jorge said softly into my ear. “Anyone who doesn’t look familiar, she assumes is an intruder. You’re not the first.”
—
In the morning I woke inches away from Jorge’s scar. It was longer than I had thought, spanning the tip of his nose to his upper lip. I reached up to trace it with my finger, and he opened his eyes. “What is this from?” I whispered.
He drew away from me and sat up, covering his mouth.
“Sorry.”
“I had a cleft lip, when I was born.” He grinned the plastic kind of grin that twinkles, in a toothpaste ad. “GrinGivers International made my beam come true!”
“I did a thing for them once!” I cried.
He looked at me, incredulous. “You’re kind of an idiot,” he said, without laughter or forgiveness. He yawned, looking at a watch he’d taken off and set on the floor beside us. “We’re late for work.” Taking my chin between his fingers, he turned my face aside—a bit roughly, I felt. “I’ll tell them it’s my fault,” he said. “I’ll explain.”
Outside, a heavy white mist hung over Balete Drive. In daylight I saw that the tree branches reached so far up that they made arches over the street. The hanging vines thumped and swished over the windshield. Jorge hummed the Alice song while driving.
In the studio, they were furious. It hadn’t looked so bad to me the night before, just a redness in some patches of my face. Nothing a good makeup artist couldn’t fix. Now the skin was swelling below my eye. Jorge tried to explain, but what could he do? We were paid to look perfect.
“A lot of girls were up for this job,” said Carmen, massaging her temples.
It was the first time since I was eighteen that I’d been sent home with a cancellation fee.
Jorge was speaking rapid-fire Tagalog with a member of the crew when I approached him for the last time. A kind of morning-after shyness kicked in that I hadn’t felt earlier, and I handed him my comp card. “If you’re ever in New York,” I said, “we should hang out. Call my booker.” It felt less desperate than saying “Call me.” I had an image of him serenading me in the Lower East Side, at another karaoke bar I’d been to, and I liked it.
He glanced at the comp card and then at me, like a client at a go-see trying to remember who I was. I thought, I should have a new card made up. This old one had some tacky lingerie shots that I was no longer proud of, and my hair was longer now, with fewer highlights. I hadn’t taken measurements in over a year.
“I’ve never had to leave my country to find work,” he said, “but thanks.”
—
The front desk of the chapel-like hotel called me a cab. I was glad to see a regular sedan and not another stretch limousine roll into the driveway. Inside I wanted to relax, just let my mind grow blank and stare at the scattered bodies selling candy and cigarettes and garlands, but the driver was another talker.
“He doesn’t deserve you,” he said, looking at my bruised face in the mirror. “Walk away, is what I tell my daughters. A guy hurts you like that? Walk away.”
He had it wrong, but for a second I pitied myself. Tears came to my eyes.
“Bruises or no,” said the driver, “you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. But where have I seen you before?”
That made me laugh.
“American?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Vacation?”
“No,” I said. “Work.”
Of course he asked me what work, and I told him. “No kidding!” he said. “Where should I look for you?”
I said, “Liberty Denim.”
“That’s where I’ve seen you before!” he said. “My daughters will go crazy! Wait till I tell them. They won’t believe.”
I suppose he had seen me before, whoever the previous Liberty Denim girl had been, and would see me again, whichever girl they picked next. “I quit,” I said, deciding and believing it right then. “This Manila job was my last.”
“Quit? But you’re so young! Too young to retire.”
I figured I could lie about my age and keep on selling sticky drinks. I could lie about my experience and try to wait tables or tend bar. I wouldn’t eat or buy too much. Did the Czech or Argentine or Senegalese girl still need a place to live? Would my mother take me in, now that I’d repaid her failure with my own?
“You’ll miss it,” the driver said.
“Sure.” But I didn’t think so. At most, I’d miss hotel rooms: coming back to sleep in a clean slate every night, every morning my footprints va
cuumed out of the carpet.
It took two hours to make it through the midmorning traffic to the airport. The driver heaved my suitcase from his trunk. “If you don’t mind, miss,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble?” He made a little rectangle with his fingers.
“OK,” I said.
“For my girls. They’ll go crazy. But I need evidence, or they will not believe.”
“OK.” I wasn’t famous. People didn’t ask for photos often, but once in a while they did.
He rummaged in the glove compartment and came back with a disposable camera. I expected him to look into the viewfinder as I smiled. But he hugged me to his side and aimed the lens at arm’s length toward our faces, including himself in the frame. Of course! What kind of proof would I offer, on my own? Without him in it, the picture could be anyone’s, from anywhere.
I knew by heart how the angle would distort us: the driver’s face, closer to the curve of the lens, would look large and bloated, and I’d seem pale and sharp beside him. “One, two, three, cheese,” he said, and snapped the plastic button.
I’d been at this work for years. I could imagine almost anything and then become it, visually speaking. For this very last picture, I put aside the all-American sex-heat and became the white lady of Balete Drive, cold and not exactly there. I made like moonlight flooding the camera lens. I receded to a bright puddle and dissolved. Perfect. Right there. Here we go. By the time they touched my image—blurred it, altered me—there would be nothing left.
Shadow Families
Every weekend, in Bahrain in the 1980s, we took turns throwing a party. Luz Salonga hosted the first one that September of ’86, and as always, we crowded into her kitchen to help. Rowena Cruz soaked rice noodles at the sink. Dulce deLumen made spring roll skins from scratch, painting batter onto the pan with a brush. Rosario Ledesma threaded sweet pork onto thin bamboo sticks. Over the clatter of dishes and the crackle of oil and the smells of vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, and fermented fish settling on our clothes and skin, we laughed about children and gossiped about marriage, the noise as much a comfort to us as the food itself.