by Mia Alvar
Soon our teenagers came downstairs, whining of boredom. We lent them the car keys and sent them off to the shopping mall for an hour or two. They returned with rented Betamax tapes and watched them upstairs: episodes of Top of the Pops, movies that the Ministry of Culture had cleaned up beforehand. (There was no lobster dinner in Flashdance, so far as our teens knew; no montage of oily limbs in leotards.) Flor Bautista’s son Rommel had hair on his chin already; Fe Zaldivar’s daughter Mary was starting to fill out her blouses. We felt we could do worse than raise them on this small Islamic desert island, where some women veiled from head to toe, where cleavage and crotches were blurry bands on-screen.
Meanwhile the babies, as we’d forever call our younger children, tore through the house with their dolls and robots, trucks and ponies. Our “Catholic accidents,” Rita Espiritu liked to say—she was the vulgar one. We’d given birth to them here on the island, in our late thirties and early forties. The teens, who acted more like junior aunts and uncles to them than older siblings, had helped us name them: Jason and Vanessa, Stephanie and Bruce, names they’d accuse us of mispronouncing almost as soon as they could speak. Our babies learned math from Irish nuns and played soccer with Bahraini children and changed their accents at will. “Watch her bob that head from side to side like a Bumbai,” said Paz Evora of her daughter Ashley, whose best friends at school were Indians. At noon and sundown, when the muezzin’s voice piped from the mosques, our babies ran to the windows. Allahu akbar! they sang, as if they knew what it meant.
As for our husbands, they retreated to a room where smoking was allowed and, implicitly, women and children were not. They turned on the television and spread the Sports pages of the Manama Times between them. A horse track in Riffa held races every week, but gambling there was haraam, of course. And so our husbands made their secret bets indoors, on the same notepads where we wrote the grocery lists. Now and then a great male chorus erupted from the den, hooting at wins, groaning at losses, ribbing one another for bad calls. They waxed authoritative about odds and breeds, trifectas and photo finishes. For speed and grace, said Domingo Cruz, no horse could match the white Arabian stallion whose genetics had not changed in four thousand years. Efren Espiritu talked up the sleeper potential of mixed breeds, which combined their parents’ best traits and evolved out of their worst. This was our husbands’ surging, primal release from the neckties and briefcases and paper-stacked desks that bound them through the week. The wagers, the beer, and the sizzling pork bits they ate with their fingers broke just about every law sacred to their Arab superiors. Men who’d seemed pummeled into defeat by the office, us wives, “bills to pay and mouths to feed,” relatives back home in the Philippines who took them for millionaires; men from whom we looked away in embarrassment on weeknights, when they sat on the sofa picking trouser-sock lint from between their toes; these same men became brash and young again, every Thursday afternoon in their improvised gambling dens.
In the evening we came together to eat and to sing into the Minus One, a double-cassette stereo system that let us dial down a song’s vocal track and step in for Tony Bennett or Stevie Wonder. Holding printed lyric booklets (this was before karaoke gave us words on a screen), we crooned into the microphone: “Feelings,” “My Way,” “Three Times a Lady.” Sometimes Vilma Bustamante’s husband changed the lyrics to suit the occasion and Xeroxed them for all to follow. “Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)” became “Manama (Is Good Enough for Me),” to welcome a family who’d just arrived on the island. “I Made It Through the Rain” became “I Made It Through Bahrain,” for a family on its way elsewhere.
Outside the walls of Luz Salonga’s house, beyond the fence around her yard, past her street and the gate to our compound, lay the oil fields and refinery that employed most of our husbands. We lived and worked in Bahrain at the pleasure of a people who mystified us. Everything we knew about the Arabs one day could be voided by what we learned the next. Luz Salonga, the most religious one of us, admired their devotion. “I see them kneeling by the highway at all times of day,” she said, “while I can barely sell the kids on bedtime prayers.” But the Arabs that Fe Zaldivar knew worshiped only sports cars and gold jewelry, mansions and shopping trips to London. To Dulce deLumen, who worked in an emergency room, Arab meant incompetent and backward. “The best of their doctors couldn’t heal a paper cut,” she said. But Rosario Ledesma didn’t think a country could get this rich, and have all of Asia at its feet, without some special brand of intelligence. Every morning Vilma Bustamante passed their marble palaces in Saar. Every afternoon Paz Evora drove by crumbling concrete villages in A’ali. It didn’t matter that our own community had its kings and hobos, geniuses and fools, heathens and believers; this didn’t keep us from wanting a more perfect knowledge of our hosts, a clearer definition. We’d arrived on their island like the itinerant father in the fairy tale about a beauty and a beast, our houses fully furnished by some unseen master. Would he reveal himself to be a prince or monster? We decided early to behave ourselves rather than find out. In their shops and on their streets, we wore hems no higher than the knee, sleeves no shorter than the elbow, necklines that would please a nun. We lived like villagers at the foot of a volcano, hoping never to offend the gods who governed our harvest and our wealth.
—
We were the lucky ones, and we knew it. Flor Bautista, a nurse, delivered babies at the state hospital. Vilma Bustamante taught English at a girls’ school. Paz Evora was a social worker, Lourdes Ocampo an accountant. The rest of us, despite the advanced degrees we’d collected and the résumés we’d built back home, spent our days baking cakes and hanging curtains now, carpooling and grocery shopping, even reading Harlequins or watching soaps while our diplomas gathered dust in file drawers. We’d married engineers, doctors, diplomats, and executives, who earned enough these days to keep us at home.
Other women had come from our country to clean floors or mind rich people’s children. Other men had come from our country to pump gas or bus tables, drive cabs or repair the pipeline to Saudi Arabia. These katulong—“helpers,” as we called them—were often younger but always aging faster than we were, their skin leathering from the desert sun, their spines hunching over brooms and basins, their lungs fried by bleach and petroleum vapors. They lived not with spouses or children but with each other, five or six katulong to a flat. Or else they lived with employers, who kept their passports and work contracts under lock and key. These shy and sunburned servants couldn’t host us in their homes if they wanted to.
And so we welcomed them, every Thursday, to eat and sing with us. When they arrived, in jeans and T-shirts our teens had outgrown, we all but hoisted them onto our shoulders. We lifted their feet onto Moroccan poufs or camel-saddle ottomans. We refused the housemaids’ help in our sweltering kitchens. We sent the bachelors to watch TV and swig Black Label with our husbands.
Sometimes we tried to match the helpers up. We seated Dolly, a janitress, next to Bongbong, a gardener. “Doesn’t Dolly sing like a bird?” we said, or “Have you heard Bongbong impersonate his amo?” We found them pen pals in Manila, snapping photographs and drafting letters for them. We owed them a chance at the life we enjoyed. At night we sent them home with leftovers. “The children would rather eat machboos anyway,” we insisted. Before bed, we prayed for them. The helpers came from farming provinces, like our fathers. They spoke Tagalog with country accents, like our mothers. Our parents too had fled droughts and typhoons in their youth, hoping for steady servant work in Manila. Helping these helpers, who’d traveled even farther, felt like home.
—
In October we met Baby, the island’s newest katulong. She’d come to clean offices at the Gulf Bank, and moved in with five other women who worked there too. When her flatmates brought Baby along to our next party, we expected someone just like them: another sweet, humble church mouse, who’d somehow strike us as child and granny all at once.
We guessed wrong. Before we ever saw Baby, we heard the cl
ick of her high heels on the deLumens’ doorstep. And before we said hello, we smelled her perfume, a striking mix of cinnamon and roses.
She was taller than her flatmates, taller than us, taller than most of our husbands and even some of our teenagers, whom we’d raised on fresh vegetables and fortified milk. Her heels added more height still. She had the fair skin and narrow nose we’d all tried for as young girls in Manila, before we understood that creams and clothespins wouldn’t help. Her hair, the improbable color of Sunkist soda, followed the slant of her jaw, longest at the chin and shortest at the nape, with bangs that stood in front like stiff feathers.
“Pasok!” we cried, but Baby wasn’t waiting for permission. She peered past us to the living room, as if entering a shop instead of a home. By the time we said “Kumusta?” her long legs had made it halfway down the corridor. We hadn’t known that shoes like hers existed, with their translucent heels and straps: from a distance she appeared to walk on air, with just the balls of her bare feet. When at last she turned to us, we felt like saleswomen who’d kept her from browsing the shelves in peace.
“Hi,” Baby said in English. Her voice was low and rough, as if the pipes had rusted.
Dulce deLumen invited her to the buffet table. “Thanks-no,” she said in English. There was a gap, wide enough to fit a skeleton key, between her two front teeth. These jutted so far out she couldn’t close her lips without pouting.
Did she have a rough journey? we asked in Tagalog. Baby shook her head. “When I’m on the plane, I sleep the whole hours,” she said, again in English.
Was she finding Bahrain too hot? “Not so,” she said.
What did she think of her new employer? “She’s OK also.” (Although we knew from her flatmates that their boss at the Gulf Bank was a man.)
All very common errors, for someone in the helper class. Why wouldn’t Baby just relax and speak Tagalog? “She says she forgot it already,” said her flatmate Girlie. How this could have happened to someone who’d just arrived on the island, none of us knew.
“She’ll come around,” said Fe Zaldivar. We too had landed vowing to stick to English—to impress others, to practice, to avoid embarrassing our children. Although the teens still found plenty to ridicule in our accents, nuns in convent school had at least taught us to pronounce our f’s and v’s correctly, to know our verb tenses and distinguish genders, to translate naman differently depending on the context. But at these parties we spoke Tagalog even to the babies, who barely understood it, for the same reason we served pancit and not shawarma. Between Arab bosses and Indian subordinates, British traffic laws and American television, we craved familiar flavors and the sound of a language we knew well.
Why would she refuse our food? we wondered, glancing at Baby from the buffet. One look at her bony arms and tiny waist told us she had no need to “reduce.” She sat on an armchair in the corner, drumming her knee with dagger-shaped fingernails.
“No amount of ‘English’ can disguise a voice like that,” said Lourdes Ocampo.
“Or hide such teeth,” agreed Rosario Ledesma.
“She opened her mouth,” said Rita Espiritu, “and suddenly I was back at the Quiapo wet market, haggling with the tindera over milkfish.”
“Maybe that’s why she tries not to say too much?” said Rowena Cruz, who had a soft heart and a breathless angel’s voice. “Maybe she’s ashamed of those roots.”
So we tried harder. We filled a plate for Baby in case she changed her mind. We tried to forge some bonds at our expense.
“Baby, I’d kill for skin like yours,” said Paz Evora, pointing at the rough brown patches on her own cheeks. “These were supposed to fade after I gave birth, but never did. I blame this climate.”
“What a beautiful color,” said Vilma Bustamante, gazing at Baby’s hair while fingering her own split ends. “Is it hard work, to keep a cut like that? It’s all I can do to pluck my grays out once a month.” Baby had to bleach it first, the flatmates told us later, before coating the hair with orange.
“Just like Cinderella’s,” said Fe Zaldivar, pointing her cracked, unpolished toes at Baby’s shoes. “I can’t last an hour on anything higher than two inches. Just say the word if yours start hurting, I’ve got spare tsinelas here somewhere.”
During the Minus One hour we seated Dodong, a gas station attendant, next to Baby. But when he offered her the microphone, she shook her head and waved it off, her bangles clinking wrist to elbow like ice cubes in a cocktail glass. No one could get anywhere with her. Even Lourdes Ocampo, our gold-medal gossip, struggled for the single tidbit Baby gave us of her life that day: that she came from Olongapo City, on Subic Bay, some seventy miles northwest of Manila.
—
Over the next few weeks the Gulf Bank janitresses—Dolly, Girlie, Tiny, Missy, and Pinkie—drew us a portrait of their vain, eccentric new flatmate. “Our very own Madame Marcos,” they called her, someone we couldn’t imagine scrubbing a toilet or pushing a mop. Baby never cooked, they said. But her beauty regimen often disappeared such staples from the kitchen as eggs, sugar, milk, and mayonnaise, which she whipped into plasters that hardened on her face and stunk up the flat. She soaked her lace panties by hand, their bright dyes staining the bathroom sink. She took long bubble baths that left the tub with a frothy residue, like the inside of a drained milk shake glass. At night, she colonized the living room, following exercise videos at the very hour her flatmates hoped to catch Dallas.
Baby’s father, we learned, was an American seaman who’d been stationed at Subic during the Korean War. Her mother had worked as a hospitality girl outside the navy base. (We whispered these occupational euphemisms, curling our fingers in quotation marks: “hostess,” “hospitality girl,” “guest relations officer.”) As a child, Baby did meet her father on one or two of his liberties in Olongapo. “But once the war was over,” said Dolly, “he went home to his wife and kids in America. New Jersey, I think it was.” Isn’t that the way? we all said. Baby’s origins put an American twist on a story we’d all heard before. As children in the Philippines, we hardly knew a family that didn’t have its second, secret, “shadow” family. Husbands left the provinces for Manila, wives left the Philippines for the Middle East, and all that parting from loved ones to provide for them got lonely. Years ago, Paz Evora had received phone calls from her father’s pregnant mistress. Vilma Bustamante met a shadow nephew, fully grown, at her own brother’s funeral. Lourdes Ocampo even began as a shadow daughter, though of course she didn’t advertise it.
Girlie, who shared a room with her, told us Baby’s scent was Opium by Yves Saint Laurent. The bottle, with its red lid and bamboo-leaf pattern, sat on Baby’s window ledge, along with her mirror and makeup and assorted relics of her father: an anchor pin, an eagle patch, a fading snapshot of a freckled sailor in T-shirt and canvas cap. Here, before this little shrine, was where she liked to pluck her eyebrows and glue on her fingernails. “It’s like the gulf between Bahrain and Saudi,” said Girlie, of the four-foot space between her side of the room and Baby’s. On her window ledge, Girlie liked to pray the rosary, keep a Bible open to the day’s scripture, and write home to her mother in Pangasinan.
Her flatmates never saw Baby pray, day or night. And because she slept till noon on Fridays, Baby never joined us at Our Lady of the Pillar, the island’s only Catholic church. “Friday’s when she gets her hair done,” Missy said, during coffee hour. The Pillar was the other place we gathered every weekend, like clockwork. We had our babies baptized there, by Indian priests, in banana-silk gowns we’d ordered from Manila. We forced our teens to sit through Bible Study, ignoring their fake colds or periods and complaints. In this adopted Muslim country, we worshiped with a vengeance. We fanned our sweating faces with the service bulletins through the scorching open-air Masses. What was a little desert heat, we figured, next to the fires that consumed Joan of Arc, the hair shirt under Saint Cecilia’s wedding gown, the martyrdom of Agnes?
—
Every Thur
sday party ended like this: after the horse races and food and Minus One, our husbands drove the helpers home. “Door-to-door service!” the housemaid Minnie called it. It was the least we could do for the men and women who didn’t own cars and rode the public bus to work on weekdays. And they couldn’t thank us enough. “That’s one less Pakistani next to me this week,” said Dolly, holding her nose. They praised our professional men for stooping to such a menial favor. “Engineer na, chauffeur pa,” said Pinkie.
Only Baby never thanked us. She seemed to take each ride as her birthright, her long legs striding to claim the passenger seat before any of her flatmates could.
One Thursday, after Flor Bautista stepped out of the living room, Baby began to laugh. Her low and rusty cackle startled us. We’d never seen her so much as crack a smile before. And there was something foul in it, a vulgar quality that made us drop our eyes into our laps. We crossed our legs, as if this would restore the room to decency. Then she stood up, bracelets and earrings jangling, and laughed her way to the bathroom.
We turned to the katulong, who dropped their eyes too. “It’s the silliest thing,” her flatmate Tiny finally confessed. We could still hear Baby cackling through the bathroom door. “When Fidel Bautista drove us home last Thursday, Baby claimed that he had…stared at her.” Tiny tucked her chin to show us “where,” mortified.
Who, in recent time, could we accuse of staring at our breasts? The babies, three-four years ago, before we’d weaned them onto solid food?
“Poor Fidel,” said Pinkie. “All he did was open the car door.”
“Baby said something like ‘Wanna take a picture?’ ” Missy added. “I never saw a brown man turn so red before.”