by Mia Alvar
At this time Flor came back from the kitchen, and we changed the subject.
That night, as an experiment, we put Baby in Pirmin Ocampo’s car. And when he came home, Pirmin swore: never again.
“What’s the matter?” joked Lourdes Ocampo. “Couldn’t you keep up with her English?”
But Pirmin didn’t laugh. During the ride, he said, Girlie had mentioned a faulty light switch in the bedroom she and Baby shared. Pirmin, an electrical engineer, offered to take a look. “You wanna come to my room?” Baby said, her first words to him all night. Before Pirmin knew what was happening, Baby wagged her finger at him and cackled. Bad boy, Pirmin Ocampo! Very bad boy! Pirmin’s voice cracked in the retelling. “So much for trying to help!” he wailed to his wife.
Next we gave the job to Rosario Ledesma’s husband. And like clockwork, another accusation came the following Thursday, this time out of Baby’s own mouth. “That one—so fast with the hands!” she said, jerking her chin after Vic Ledesma. He’d hurried past her into the gambling den. The charge appeared to tickle rather than offend her. We sat and waited, through her wretched laughter, for specifics. But “If you’re gonna touch, touch” was all she added. “Don’t pretend you want a cigarette.”
Rosario later cornered Vic Ledesma, who winced. “I didn’t want to waste your time with something so absurd,” he said. “We were in the car, and I reached over to the glove box for a smoke. Right then was when she crossed her legs. So naturally, my hand brushed her knee by accident! And she started howling like I made a dirty joke.”
The thought of Fidel Bautista, Pirmin Ocampo, and Vic Ledesma as lusty wolves was enough to make us choke on our adobo. We’d met our husbands in high school, in college, at our first jobs. “Before his balls had fully dropped,” as Rita Espiritu put it. They’d waited for us, more or less patiently, when we were virgins who imagined sex as the great typhoon that would destroy our grades, our futures, and our reputations. They studied business and engineering so they’d never have to work the soil or serve a master. Our mothers’ sad, hard lives had taught us just how much a man’s good looks and silky voice were worth. Our fathers never wore a suit or wedding ring between them. “Mine chased skirts instead of looking for a job,” said Paz Evora. “Mine drank away what he could win at jueteng,” said Fe Zaldivar. “Mine was a dog,” said Vilma Bustamante, “who couldn’t learn how to sit or stay.”
Now we had something better than lovers. We had companions. Providers. Sex with these men hadn’t ended, but it was quiet, civil, and grown-up, a world away from dirt floors or one-room tenements. “No ‘Lullaby of the Straw Mat’ for my kids,” said Rita Espiritu. “I fell asleep hearing all my brothers and sisters being conceived.” Now, even as the babies played outside and the teens turned up their Walkmans, even with the carpets underneath us and the air conditioners above, we locked the master bedroom doors and pursed our lips together so no one would hear us shout. Our husbands apologized for their receding hairlines, their potbellies, the sweat and petrol odors that lingered on their skin. Let me shower first. We hoped to hide our stretch marks and cesarean scars. Hang on and I’ll close the light. Dentures, for the teeth that rotted in our early twenties, floated in cups on our nightstands. Rico Salonga talked to Luz as he would to his mother. Are you tired? Feeling up to it? Dulce deLumen steered Nestor like a hospital patient. Careful not to aggravate your back.
Once in a while we did see flashes of lust, like signals from a far planet. Ver Bustamante couldn’t keep his hands off Vilma when she wore the abaya a student had given her. Searching for me in all that fabric drove him crazy. Paz Evora’s husband was roughest in bed on days he’d argued with his Arab boss. Let’s pray Alfonso gets this promotion, or I’ll be sore all week. But mostly they were tender if not inventive lovers. And if they sometimes took us before we were ready, if they sometimes shrank from us before we felt a thing, if they fell asleep faster than we could get started, we remembered their long hours and hard days, the work that gave us beds and private rooms in the first place.
“So he’s a gentleman,” we told Flor Bautista, imagining Fidel’s bifocals and bald pate as he circled his car to open Baby’s door. “Would you expect any less of him? It’s just wasted on her.”
“Only she would take Pirmin’s help as a proposition,” we told Lourdes Ocampo.
“Can you blame Vic,” we asked Rosario Ledesma, “for needing to relieve some stress around that woman?”
Our husbands found themselves in a pickle then. On the one hand we still insisted on their duty as gentlemen. “Cuckoo or not,” Rowena said to Domingo Cruz, “I can’t put her on a bus while all the other helpers get a ride.” On the other hand, any man who drove Baby home risked more than just her allegations. Even the least jealous wife among us couldn’t resist questioning her designated driver afterward.
“Did Baby flirt with you on the ride to Adliya?” Fe asked Jose Zaldivar.
“Do you find Baby beautiful?” Paz asked Alfonso Evora.
“Would you consider it,” Vilma asked Ver Bustamante, “in a different life?”
Bringing Home Baby, as our husbands called it, became the final penalty for the man who scored lowest at the races.
—
November brought us cooler days, and we started to gather outdoors. Our children dove for coins in the neighborhood swimming pools. Our teens bobbed like buoys in the waters off the public beach. We couldn’t turn Baby away from these parties any more than we could send her home on a public bus afterward. We decided to get used to her, the way a village grows to tolerate its fool. “Here comes Baby,” we’d say, at the late-arriving clink of bracelets and gust of Opium. “You know Baby,” we’d say, when her long, painted talons waved away our food. We chalked up any tales of driver-side lechery to Baby just being Baby again. In any case, we’d get a break from her soon enough. By early December we’d booked our plane tickets home to the Philippines.
We liked to spend Christmas and New Year’s in Manila, keeping the children out of school for two extra weeks to make the trip worthwhile. Our husbands joined us for part of this, but the helpers, of course, stayed on-island all year long. Before the holiday, we gathered at Fe Zaldivar’s house to collect the letters, gifts, and envelopes of cash they wanted to send home.
“And you, Baby?” asked Rowena Cruz. “Anything we can deliver to your family?”
Baby was sitting near the door, tapping her fingernails against her cheek. Without leaning forward, she scanned the denim vests, the tennis shoes, the designer logos the katulong had steam-ironed onto cheap clothes: Members Only, Benetton, a Lacoste crocodile facing left.
“Thanks-no,” she said.
“Strange,” said Rosario Ledesma, as we cooked up the year’s last fiesta in the kitchen, “to travel so far and have no thought of your loved ones back home.”
“Maybe she has no loved ones back home,” Rowena Cruz allowed.
“But everyone needs help back home,” snapped Luz Salonga. “You could be an orphan or an only child and still do better by the Philippines than blowing all your pay on jewelry and press-on nails.”
“Still,” said Vilma Bustamante, “it’s not as if I’m dying to deliver packages to go-go bars.”
We agreed we’d have to draw straws for any mission to Olongapo City.
In exchange for our courier services, the helpers would check on our husbands while we were gone. If they felt inspired to brew some nilaga, dust some shelves, or even do a little laundry when they stopped by, so much the better. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, we rode bumpy buses from Manila and swaying boats to outer islands. We arrived at tin shacks, where Totoy’s mother or Tiny’s brother spoke to us in dialects we didn’t know. Our brains, grasping for what foreign words we had in store, could only give us shukran and inshallah—phrase-book Arabic that didn’t serve us here.
—
The holiday melted away; it always did. We returned in January, some of us with our mothers in tow. We gave them guest bedrooms, allowance
s, rides to the mall. And one by one, before the Feast of the Conversion, they wanted to go home. “Your sister’s sick,” said Dulce deLumen’s mother. “Your brother lost another job,” said Paz Evora’s. Someone in the Philippines always needed them more than we did. I see you’re doing just fine on your own. Bahrain’s empty streets spooked them; the air con gave them goose bumps.
And so our Thursday parties resumed. We re-created the hams and rice cakes we’d eaten over Christmas and added new cassettes to our Minus One collections. Our husbands reopened their gambling dens. The babies destroyed the last of their new board games and stuffed animals. The teens discovered compact discs and shut themselves up in their rooms to play Depeche Mode and the Beastie Boys on repeat. Amid all our hostessing and gathering, we didn’t notice, right away, who was missing. We heard it from the helpers first.
“Baby’s found a place of her own,” announced her former roommate, Girlie.
“She drives herself to work now,” Dolly added, “instead of taking the bus.”
Later that week, at a traffic light, Lourdes Ocampo stopped and saw a black Saab to her left. Sunlight glanced off its windows, and a pair of dark glasses hid the driver’s eyes. But there was no mistaking the orange hair, said Lourdes, or the long pale fingers on the steering wheel.
No one knew where the money came from. Baby didn’t seem to be scrimping in other areas. Flor Bautista saw her buy a Persian rug in Adliya, while Vilma Bustamante spotted her leaving a pricey hair salon downtown. At the Suq, Rita Espiritu came across Baby trying on the nose chains and slave bracelets we’d refused to let our daughters wear.
“She must be moonlighting, then?” said Rowena Cruz, our constant Pollyanna. “Before her night shift at the bank? Maybe she’s been cleaning houses, or watching someone’s kids for extra cash.”
Whatever its source, Baby did not come explain her new windfall to us. She avoided our parties in February—even after her former flatmates accosted her at the time clock, even after Luz Salonga approached her in the parking lot outside Jawad’s Cold Store. She may as well have donned a niqab for all we saw and understood of her new life.
By March, we’d all come to the same conclusion.
“What a disgrace,” said Luz Salonga.
“I suppose that cleaning offices on its own,” said Dulce deLumen, “can’t keep you in jewelry and perfume for long.”
“She joined the family business after all,” said Rita Espiritu, who didn’t mean the U.S. Navy.
Perhaps a Bahraini banker had eyed her shape while she vacuumed his office one night. Perhaps a British investor had copped a feel in the elevator. Perhaps Baby herself, her feet and shoulders aching more than usual one day, had wondered if this country of pearls and oil and gold, white yachts and ice-cold shopping complexes, might offer richer rewards for other exertions. In any case, something nudged her back into her mother’s line of work, the seedy industry that claimed so many girls back home. We’d wanted to believe this island didn’t deal in all of that, but our husbands called us naïve. “What do you think the lobby of the Two Seas Hotel is for?” they said. “Those girls aren’t wearing housemaid uniforms.”
“Imagine,” said Fe Zaldivar, “coming all the way to the Middle East to do what she could’ve done in Olongapo.”
“It’s one thing to do it there,” said Rosario Ledesma. “People lump us all together here.” This was true, and mostly worked in our favor. Now and then the sheikh himself declared his love for Filipinos, our cheerful, hardworking, and obedient tribe. And sometimes Bahraini women mistook us for their maids while shopping. That’ll teach me to dress better, we’d joke, when the helpers couldn’t hear.
Come March, Baby had stopped going to work.
“Her time card’s missing from the rack,” said Girlie. A new Bangladeshi girl took over Baby’s floors. We stopped seeing her in the Suq or at Jawad’s. At most we’d find her in traffic, driving her black Saab behind dark glasses, like a film star who wished to elude the public.
“Where did we go wrong?” said Flor Bautista, as if she’d lost control of her own child. And we did feel that responsible for Baby. Back when we lived in Manila, our own country cousins had come to work for us as maids or yaya, supporting their children while they helped raise ours, hoping to climb into the middle class within a generation or two. If our rising tide lifted all boats, what did Baby’s descent mean for us? If she could fall so fast from “maintenance” work to “hospitality,” just how far up did we live from the slop sink and the soil?
—
By spring Bongbong the gardener had proposed to Dolly the janitress, the happy coda to a match we’d orchestrated in September. We saw our chance to rescue Baby, if we acted fast. We bought barong Tagalogs for Bongbong and his groomsmen, a stiff piña gown for Dolly, bouquets and lavender dresses for the bridesmaids. Dolly chose her flatmates for attendants: Girlie, Tiny, Missy, Pinkie, and, at our urging, the woman who’d briefly lived and worked with them—Baby. What better showcase than a wedding, of the life that honest, decent work created? Didn’t every girl, no matter how loose or eccentric, want the gown and cake in the end? We defied Baby to hear Mendelssohn’s march or see the gold rings on their satin pillow and continue on her wayward path.
Of course, Baby said “Thanks-no” to the lavender dress. She didn’t respond as a regular guest either. But we refused to give up. The next time Lourdes Ocampo saw the black Saab in traffic, she followed Baby home. As it turned out, “home” for Baby was not some run-down workers’ village, but a small white bungalow near our own compound. Not far from the Evoras and deLumens—no former katulong we knew lived there.
“She got out wearing a black abaya,” said Lourdes, who’d idled her engine nearby. “Of all things.”
To see her new Muslim garb for ourselves—and really just to get poor Dolly her RSVP, we swore—we started following Baby too. Rosario Ledesma saw the abaya, but noted that Baby stopped short of covering her orange hair. “When she gathered up the hem to walk,” said Rosario, “I could still see the high heels underneath.” Dulce deLumen went so far as to knock on Baby’s door, but the shades were drawn, and Baby didn’t answer.
“She’s found favor with an Arab,” Lourdes concluded.
No one had a better theory. Baby had receded from us, a hidden harem of one. What Rita Espiritu called her “family business” didn’t explain the abaya, after all. It was true we’d never seen anyone, least of all an Arab, with her, but Lourdes countered that a man who could afford such a mistress could afford to keep her in a second home. “If you were his wife,” she said, “could you stand to have Baby around?”
This new hypothesis troubled us more than the first. If losing Baby to her mother’s profession made us nervous, as if one of our children had joined a bad crowd, losing Baby to a world of mosques and abayas and possible polygamy set off a more desperate alarm, as if one of our children had woken with a fever and was speaking in tongues. Without friends or her job at the Gulf Bank, what defense would Baby have against her new local benefactor? A few of our husbands’ embassy ties could help, if only she’d let them.
But Dolly’s wedding day arrived without any word from Baby. As Luz Salonga played the organ, we listened for high heels along the nave. As Father Almeida swung incense around the altar, we waited for the smell of Opium to pierce the smoke. As Dolly and Bongbong knelt, accepting a silk cord and pouch of coins from their sponsors, we still saw no sign of Baby. Soon the priest was blessing man and wife. Dolly turned, giggling at her new last name. “What a shame she isn’t seeing this,” said Rowena Cruz.
We turned to watch Dolly and Bongbong recess past the pews. Before them, the church doors swung open, and the afternoon sun brightened the dim narthex, as if God Himself were easing and illuminating their path.
But it wasn’t God at all. It was Baby who’d opened the doors and entered, wearing the black abaya we’d all seen or heard about by now. She turned sideways to nod at the newlyweds as they exited. And that was how she sho
wed us.
Her shape had changed. The once slim, flat waistline had “popped,” as they say, tenting the black crepe out in front of her.
We looked to the altar, but Father Almeida had gone into the sacristy. We turned to our husbands, who only dropped their heads. Some of our teenagers trained the video cameras on her. We covered our babies’ eyes. “Take them to the car now,” we said, and the men complied.
We filed out of the pews and circled her shyly, as if we were the maids and she the bride. Lourdes Ocampo guessed her to be six months along. But who could say for sure? Her proportions had never matched ours.
“I think she is farther gone than that,” said Luz Salonga.
Lourdes addressed her first. “We had no idea, Baby.” An admission of failure, from a woman we’d always relied on for the scoop.
“I suppose congratulations are in order,” said Dulce deLumen.
“If we can help in any way…” Rowena Cruz began.
That word help did relax us. We knew how to help an expectant mother. “Come to the reception, Baby,” said Paz Evora. “We’ve cooked enough at my place to feed an army! And we love to do it. Anytime we can feed you or the little one, just say the word.”
“Don’t dream of buying any toys or clothes,” said Fe Zaldivar. “We’ve got more in boxes than our babies can use. Brand-new.”
“The teens would love to babysit,” said Vilma Bustamante, whether or not she believed this.
In the dim church, our words seemed to get through to Baby, or at least spook her. A hint of fear, like a trapped animal’s, flashed in her eyes. This encouraged us. We gathered up the nerve to start offering the kind of help she truly needed.
“We’ll throw another party,” Luz Salonga said, stepping forward, “when the child is baptized. The child will be baptized, Baby? Here in our church?”
“And attend Sunday school with our babies?” said Lourdes Ocampo.
“Of course you’ll be her first teacher,” said Fe Zaldivar. “Children look to their mothers above all. My first pregnancy, I took the opportunity to…examine my life. It wasn’t just my life anymore—do you know what I mean, Baby?”