by Mia Alvar
I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince.
I will support and defend the Constitution.
I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
Afterward, some students at a table outside the clerk’s door registered you, right then, to vote.
A couple, coming out of City Hall, asked you to photograph them. They weren’t young, but the white daisies that the bride clutched in her hand were. A few of them she’d plucked and pinned into her hair. The air had dust and August grit in it, but on that day to you it was confetti. Every pigeon in the park looked like a dove.
“Our witness had to get back to the office,” said the bride. “Will you celebrate with us?”
You’d barely answered when she took your hand. “I found our wedding party, hon!” she told the groom, and ran. Your other hand grabbed Doris’s. Cars honked, but in a friendly way, at the jaywalking four of you. “Congratulations,” people on the sidewalk slowed to say.
At a bar close to the water, the newlyweds ordered lemon pound cake—the icing’s white, they said with a shrug—and champagne.
“Which one of you’s the bride?” flirted the bartender, popping the cork.
“I am.” She pointed at herself. “But pour Esmeralda’s first. Today she’s an American.”
The golden fizz filled your glass to the lip. He poured the bride’s, then Doris’s, and then the groom’s. The newlyweds insisted he, the bartender, drink too.
“Cheers,” said Doris.
“To love,” said the groom, winking at his bride.
“Mabuhay,” said the bartender, winking at you. “Merlita taught me that. She cleans this place at night.”
It went, as they say, straight to your head: cold bubbles starbursting from your tongue and throat to your brain and your eyes, ringing the room with light.
“Now tell me it’s still ‘a piece of paper,’ ” said the bride to her groom. “Tell me you don’t feel different.”
“I do,” he said. “It feels like…solid ground, where there was water. Right?” He put an arm around her.
“Drink to that,” said Doris, so you did.
“And you,” the groom asked, “what will you do first, as a full-fledged Yankee?”
The bride: “Besides get drunk with three other Americans.”
“She’s looking for a real job,” Doris said.
“In an office,” you said.
You meant the kind of job you did get, nine weeks later, cleaning offices in a city building where thousands worked. But the husband said, “Trust me. It’s overrated.”
“I want to send a postcard home and write an arrow,” you said. “See that building? That’s where Esmeralda works.”
They drank to you.
The newlyweds stood halfway through the second bottle and settled the bill. “We need to relieve the babysitter,” they said. “But will you stay and finish this for us? Promise you will.”
“No need to ask me twice,” said Doris.
“All the best to you two,” said the bride. Her eyes glassed up with tears. She squeezed your hand, and Doris’s.
Doris swiveled her barstool to you. “You know they think we are a we, don’t you?”
You swiveled back to where the newlyweds had gone. You didn’t get it. Then you got it, blushed, and thought you ought to chase the bride and let her know the truth. But you’d drank more that afternoon than ever, couldn’t feel your feet to stand. You opened your mouth to protest, but all that came out was a hiccup.
Doris giggled. So did you; you couldn’t stop. You raised your glasses, clinked, and sipped again.
“Congratulations, Esmeralda,” Doris said. “Now you’ll get jury duty like the rest of us.” But she beamed with pride.
You hiccuped, laughed some more, and then you kissed her, on the lips, just long enough to smell the powdery perfume and see the feather-colored down along her cheek. You thought of angels. Thanks to Doris, you were here. She was wearing lipstick for the occasion, and when you turned back to the bar mirror, so were you. The kiss was brief and sweet and overpuckered, like the one between two Dutch boys in a Delft figurine you dusted once. A souvenir. It said, below the boys’ feet, AMSTERDAM.
“America!” you shouted at the mirror. That set you both off giggling again.
Today, seeing the park outside of City Hall get smaller from the ambulance, you think that when you see John next, you’ll tell him this story. You will insist on what that bride insisted on. Demand that you and he stop hiding, walk out into the sunlight and the traffic and the pigeons and the parks together. “I am good at oaths,” you will tell him. So help me God.
—
For weeks his smile, his chirpy greetings, shamed you. There she is! One day you’d had it. Maybe the piece of paper had turned you more American after all. Americans loved bringing secrets out. Discomfort didn’t kill them. One day you turned to him, hands on your hips.
“It’s wrong no matter what.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s wrong no matter what. No need to ask your cousin who’s a priest, because you know already.”
You had heard, in many houses, wives beg their husbands for the truth after seeing something they weren’t supposed to see. You must have sounded like them now, confronting him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said John. His eyes jumped sideways to the screen. The husbands in those houses gave themselves away like this, too.
“You made a vow; that means always.”
“Es,” said John, “I really have no clue what you are saying.” He stared at you.
You could have said, Oh never mind; or said something in broken English. You once wrote off a week’s pay from Helen Miller, because you couldn’t bear to shame her for her slipping mind. With your own money you replaced the Ronsons’ crystal tray, to keep their clumsy daughter out of trouble. And yet, something stopped you from protecting John.
“I saw my name on your computer.”
“You had no right to look there,” he said, sounding like those caught husbands again, “but I have nothing to hide. Please, be my guest.” He rolled his chair wheels back. “Show me what you saw.”
“I know it’s not there now.” You went to him, cloth and Windex still in hand. “I was here, doing my job.” You mimed dusting around his files and keyboard. “I moved this thing by accident.”
He didn’t deny it then.
“It’s wrong no matter what, John.”
He’d said your name so often. This, your first time saying his, felt like stepping off a high ledge without looking.
He placed his long fingers on the keyboard. “I know that,” he said. “I agree.”
“It’s wrong no matter what.” Your voice had lowered into someone else’s.
He looked so sad, so tortured by what he knew to be the right thing. Would Doris, Pepe, anyone you knew—even yourself, a day before—have ever guessed you’d be the one to touch him first? You remembered sitting in the church, years before, not knowing what came next but hoping for some kindness. You placed a hand on his shoulder. You felt a shaking from inside him—not a lot, not a “tremor,” but enough to make you think he needed more warmth, another hand, which you then placed on his other shoulder. You waited, then stepped forward. His hands descended on your hips. He dropped his forehead to the highest button on your dress, above your breasts—bone against flat bone. His short breaths blew the fabric back and forth.
And yes, if you’d stopped there, it might have been a hug, no more—an awkward hug, between two people, not quite friends. If either of you had moved any faster, any sooner, you’d have fled the scene, spooked like a horse. But John’s hand went so slowly from your hip, down to your knee, under your skirt. Any rougher and you might believe it all happened against your will. You looked through the window at squares of light in other buildings, tiny other people, tiny desks and chairs. His hand shifted against you, inches up and inches down, till
sounds came out of your throat. You leaned back, seeing pores in the foam ceiling tiles before you closed your eyes.
—
Next to the churchyard, where he parks, the driver of the ambulance stops you. “Hey wait.”
You almost run, prepared to force your way into the building before he can ask for your ID. He doesn’t. He just tosses you a hard hat and paper mask before he walks off, putting on his own.
You smell, right then, the burning. Sharper than all other fires you have known. You put the hat and mask on and keep walking. Flames crackle from a broken car window, its alarm whooping. You haven’t seen a car aflame since Manila in the early eighties, the riot town the Guzmans were escaping. Two nurses pass, a coughing man outstretched between them, his big arms hanging on their small shoulders. The cops and firefighters move so fast. You realize you’re searching for a pair of blue eyes, wondering if John’s brothers are here too, working, trying to find him. If this had happened late at night, would John search the faces of these nurses in blue? Their pale uniforms really do match yours. Only the skirt sets you apart. You couldn’t sit down on the curb, as one nurse does now in her blue scrub pants, and weep into your knees.
The worst typhoon your village ever saw began while you were in a tree. The tallest one on the plantation (Mahentoy, you called it, after the giant in a folktale) let you see as far as the bay on one side and the next village on the other. You were looking for your father. You didn’t know that he had hitched his way already to Manila, where the taxis needed drivers and cafés needed busboys regardless of the weather; or that you would not see him again. You thought there was still time to tell him that a Red Cross tent inland had food and water.
“Come down, Esme,” you heard your mother say. Pepe wasn’t with her.
You shimmied down. The water, when you landed, reached your knees.
“Where’s the baby?”
“Darna brought him to the tent this morning.”
But you’d already seen Darna, your neighbor, from high up in the tree, head inland with her children—three of them, all her own, and no more. Your mother trusted people who had never wished her well.
“All right.” You walked her to the flooded main road and put her on a rescue boat. Then you turned, the water thigh-high now, and ran back to the house.
“Esme!” your mother called. “You’ll drown.”
The wind whipped at your face; the water slowed your legs down like a dream of running. The house was far enough away you had a chance to look at it, still standing, and feel proud of your papa, whose own hands built it, while scraps of other houses were sailing through the storm. One tin sheet could have sliced you clear in half, but missed. Falling coconuts hit the water with louder splatters than their sound on soil. You ducked. And underwater, it was dark and quiet. You could move faster. You swam until your fingers touched the door.
You prayed for love, not just acceptance, of God’s will: even if that meant finding Pepe already bloated with floodwater. Farm girls saw their share of death, both animal and human: stillbirths, yellow fever, malnutrition. And who could blame God, anyway? Looking down on perfect Pepe, how could He not want him back in heaven for Himself?
Inside the house, the water nearly reached your ribs. And there you found him, floating in the wooden trough that had become his cradle. He cooed and gurgled, reaching for his toes. Not a scratch on him.
—
John was the closest you had ever come to an addiction. As a young girl, you never even longed for sweets. Each morning you sipped coffee next to Doris, but you never needed it. Smoking and drinking struck you as a man’s vices, and a waste of money besides. Gambling, too. But nights with John—the stars in your brain, the beggar that sex made of your body—gave you a taste of it, that life, those forces that held Pepe at their mercy.
You walked into the walls of houses you’d cleaned for years. You broke a vase that had belonged to Helen Miller’s mother. “Esmeralda! What’s with you?” said Mrs. Miller. She docked you for it, as if money could replace a priceless thing. I’m sorry, ma’am. You went into his office that same night. Watched his reflection grow taller behind you as you wiped the windows. As he trapped you in his arms and closed his mouth over your ear.
If this was anything like what Pepe had felt, you couldn’t blame him. You could understand almost everything your brother had done over the years, the lengths he went to for his appetites.
But Pepe, at this time, was trying to change. He’d checked himself into a rehab center in the north: the Farm, residents called it, which caused confusion for you and your mother on the phone, between discussing home and Pepe’s rehab. The men there lived like soldiers. Their commander was a former shabu addict, who’d found God in jail, was now a priest, and lived by the old proverb about idle hands. His soldiers rose at dawn, cleaned the grounds, made and mended their own clothes, and cooked food that they had grown or raised themselves. Only after chores and Mass and meetings could they spend one hour every evening on the one leisure activity allowed: wood carving. They learned to shape blocks of kamagong wood: first into planks, then into spheres. The men who mastered those would build the planks into a cross, the beads into a rosary. The veterans learned figures—Mary and the saints, and, finally, to put all previous skills together, a crucifix with Christ on it. Pepe sent his handiwork across the ocean to your nightstand drawer. The priest did not like to rank residents, but Pepe thought he noticed his quick mastery of figure after figure, saw him linger on his work for longer than he did on other men’s.
On the phone, in these months, Pepe spoke with all the fire, all the fever, of the new convert. He seemed to know what you were up to, in spirit if not form.
“Women your age forget what God expects of them,” he said. “Once they’re past childbearing and still not married, they stop guarding their virtue.”
He used words like fornication and adultery, words you hadn’t heard spoken this way since your days in the one-room parish schoolhouse. You almost felt his spittle through the phone line, landing on your sinful cheek. He said he had thought about becoming a priest.
Now you know you should have praised him more. Should have told him how much you looked forward to a crucifix made by his hands. But at that time you had your own urges to answer to. Sometimes you stopped listening, didn’t write him back. You fell asleep on the train home, too tired even to pray for him before bed.
You’re right, Pepe, you should have said.
In another time, another country, villagers would have stoned you to death.
—
You did not expect to see shoes in the street, high heels that women kicked off as they ran. You think of hallways inside dark apartments, shoes and neckties and discarded bras forming a trail into the bedroom, sounds of muffled laughter and unbuckling, people so distracted by excitement sometimes they forget to shut the door. In those apartments, you’ve been trained to help and be of use no matter what.
And so, along your way, you stoop and start collecting them. The shoes, computer parts, and paper. As if this wave of people walking toward you has just left the party: you are here to clean up after. This much you know how to do. Your left arm gathers what your right turns up: shoe, shoe, battered keyboard, paper, paper, paper. Where will you bring them, Esmeralda? The wastebasket on the corner? People might want them back. EARNINGS REPORT, one paper says—no doubt something important. Some of these shoes cost more than your rent. And some are not in bad condition. Nicked and dusty, perhaps a bit charred at the heels. You can restore them, bring them to the lost and found. Those nice men at reception held an umbrella for you for two days when you forgot it.
So much turns up that you unzip your tote to carry it. It’s possible that you look crazy, heading straight toward disaster, scavenging for scraps, but you don’t care. The heaps grow higher the closer you get. One shoe, a patent leather pump, gives you more trouble than the others. You pull harder, then drop it. It’s too hot. Your fingertips have swiped into the
dust a shiny band of leather that reflects your face. Something inside the shoe has weighed it down. Your eyes move, slowly as the cold blood in your veins, from the shank, over the slender, melted heel, to the ankle. A woman’s ankle, dressed in nylon panty hose like yours.
You cross yourself. Start digging through the rubble. You’ll bear any sight—a bone, a face—to close her lids for her, in case she left this world with her eyes open.
—
One night you fell asleep inside John’s office and woke up at two.
“Did I snore?”
“A little,” he said. “I’m sure I did too.”
In the basement, you didn’t know enough to skip the time clock, go straight home, pretend that punching out had slipped your mind. Someone like Pepe would have known. Instead, as you had done five nights a week for six months straight, you fed your time card to the clock and listened to it bite.
Thirteen days later, the supervisor’s call almost went to voice mail. You were coming back from the Laundromat with Doris’s clothes.
“I’m doing payroll and your card says two-thirteen,” the supervisor said. “Which means you either took too long to do your floors, or tried to steal time from the company. Which is it?”
She had a pretty accent. Stealing time, you thought: how strange, to imagine you could hold minutes in your hand and hide them in your pocket. Had Pepe thought of such a scheme yet? Time is money. People said that.
“Which is it, Esmeralda? Are you slow, or do you steal?”
You tried to think: which was the worse disgrace, in your profession? Neither one was true. You could turn the foulest six-stall ladies’ room into a lab, in minutes flat. You’d never lifted so much as a slice of bread from someone’s pantry.
“I can’t hear you, Esmeralda.”
By the age of twelve or thirteen, Pepe could spin great yarns of where he’d been and when. He hid things under the wooden floor slats. He sent lists of books and supplies he needed money for, long after he had stopped going to school.
Because you’d met this supervisor only once, barely remembered what she looked like—someone else had trained you—the woman you imagined on the other end had gold hair and green eyes. John’s wife, her time—you’d stolen that. Ashamed, you chose the other lie.