by Mia Alvar
“I have problem with my feet, ma’am,” you told her. Broken English in a broken voice. You, Esmeralda, who’d never griped to an employer in your life—even when you stayed late and earned nothing extra.
“I suggest you get them checked, then. There are doctors just for feet, in the big city. Now that you have medical, you can. Not many cleaning jobs around that give you medical, are there, Esmeralda? That’s why there’s always applications on my desk.”
“Of course,” you said.
“I hope the doctor helps you, Esmeralda. But if you can’t continue due to problems with your feet, I need to know. You understand—don’t you?”
“Of course.”
She went on. Words like unacceptable. Like verbal warning.
So you checked yourself in to your own kind of rehab. That night, when John turned his chair to look at you, you headed for the window, far from him. The glass squeaked as you rubbed at fingerprints that weren’t there.
“Es?”
“My boss. She could have fired me,” you said. Your night reflection faced you, checkered by the squares of light from other offices.
“That’s my fault,” John said. “I should have woken you. It won’t happen again.”
“No.” A line from Annie, which the Ronson children loved, came back to you. Miss Hannigan putting her girls to work until the orphanage shone like the top of the Chrysler Building. It takes a cruel master to keep cities clean. “It can’t happen again.”
“Es—”
“You know already,” you said, “all the reasons we must stop.”
For many nights his eyes still followed you. To work, with your head down, while being looked at in this way, took more resolve than anything you’d ever given up for Lent. More will than your first graveyard shift. Your hands shook, as you pushed the vacuum down the corridor, and headaches almost split your skull in half. In time, though, he gave up. In three weeks you were back to nods. Hello and thank you. In another three weeks you were nothing but two workers, in one tower.
—
When the splintering happens—or the splinterings, a million pieces cracking into millions more—when the clouds come pouring through the street, you stare at them for longer than you should.
Your mouth and nostrils burn. A thousand knifepoints prick your skin. Something like sand rattles your hat. But you keep looking till the dust chalks up your eyes.
And then you close them.
The world grows quiet inside you, and outside time, slow as the center of a storm. You hear only your breath against the mask, the way John must have heard his on your dress, that night.
You clutch the shoes and papers to your chest like things you love. As if they’re what you came to save. The bodies running past you, left and right, are a commotion you’re not part of. You’re prepared to let the monster swallow you.
And now you know why saints crave suffering, invite all kinds of pain so they can feel in some small way what Christ, whom they love, felt.
The flood had risen to your neck when you carried Pepe out of the house. So many of the trees had fallen. Those that hadn’t yet were bowing to the ground as if to tell the wind, You win. You sat the baby on your shoulders and marched forward as the water reached your chin.
And then you heard the fibers come apart. Mahentoy, that old giant you had scaled to canvass for your father, started breaking at its base, and just missed you before falling like judgment’s sword. It cleaved your home in half, where, not a minute earlier, you’d found Pepe. You ducked and ran, underwater, for both your lives.
Now two arms grab you by the ribs, knocking your breath out. You are yanked back into time and through the ash on someone else’s feet, your own dangling. You cough, either from his grip around your lungs or from the soot that’s gathered in them. Your hearing’s back. And now it’s clear this roar is bigger than those typhoon sounds from home. The breaking trees; the thunder in the sky; the helicopter’s gun-like patter as it dipped to drop food sacks beside the rescue tent you reached with Pepe, by some miracle; the wave that rose fifty feet high and almost ate your hometown—those are smaller, even taken all together, than this roar, this day.
Your rescuer slams you into an iron fence. His badge is on your shoulder blade, his back a shield against the hail.
The world grows dark. You wonder if you’ve fainted, but you’re fine. You’re conscious. Night has, in fact, descended on this morning.
“Come on,” the voice over your shoulder says. His hand and flashlight lead you down a set of stairs. He has you stand against a wall. Something like a cloud climbs up your windpipe. When the flashlight shines into your face, you think your eyeballs might ignite.
After Pepe crashed his motorcycle, he woke up remembering some Good Samaritan who’d held his head in her lap and pulled the bits of gravel from his face. She left him when the ambulance arrived. My angel, Pepe said, my ghost. He could not forget her voice or her fingertips.
“You’ll be all right down here.” With that, your savior’s flashlight, and the portion of his black sleeve you can see, are gone.
You know you’re not alone. The coughs and sobs and choking sounds of others echo off the station walls. They find your hands and lead you up the platform in the dark.
—
“He’s gone,” your mother said.
The rehab farm had released Pepe with a certificate and a kit of wood-carving tools. You’d bought him an apartment in the city, two hours from the plantation. But Pepe never showed to get his key. The rehab priest discovered money missing from his vault. Weeks later Pepe called your mother from Manila.
“He went to see about a business venture there,” your mother said, “with friends.”
“And you allowed it?” you said. “Don’t you know what business venture means with Pepe?”
“He said replacement parts for small electronics. You don’t think it sounds legit?”
“Do you?”
Your mother isn’t half as dumb as she pretends. “You think I could have stopped him?” she said. “You wouldn’t think so, not if you’d been here these years. He was a child when you last saw him. He might weigh next to nothing now, but there’s no making him do anything.”
That week, the lies you’d told the supervisor came true. Your feet clanged with such misery at work, you might as well have been stepping on glass. The bleach and toilet paper felt like bricks you had to push uphill. Even friends at church noticed a limp. That nurse you knew told you to toss your Keds for clogs that got her through her double shifts. You did. They didn’t help.
John waited by his door that Tuesday night. “You’ve looked so tired,” he said. “Can I help?”
You stepped back, fearing he might reach for you.
“I know I’m not supposed to care,” he said, steering you to the sofa. “Or act on caring, anyway. You don’t have to tell me why you’re sad, either. I have an idea, though: you rest here. I’ll clean the office.”
You almost laughed. “I don’t think so.” And yet the leather felt so cool against your back. Your eyelids sank watching him take the handles of your cart.
Twelve minutes later, you woke with your feet up. John had finished at the window. He stared at the buildings.
“No one builds castles or cathedrals anymore,” he said. “I read that skyscrapers are how cities show off, in our time.”
The next night he was standing by the door again. The next night you removed your shoes. Each time, you fell asleep and woke to John dusting his cabinets or replacing his trash. These naps never lasted more than twenty minutes, but calmed you more than your own bed at night. You lay there—Esmeralda, daughter of the dirt, born to toil in God’s name till your hands or heart gave out—reclining like an infant or a queen, a hundred levels aboveground. Priests had promised you this kind of peace in heaven.
You shall feast on the fruits of your labor, and your works shall follow you.
One of those nights you dreamed about your work. The office floor
had thickened into soil, and you were pulling the cleaning cart behind you by your teeth. As the cart grew heavier, you turned and saw Pepe, dropping his woodwork and tools and motorcycle and replacement parts for small electronics into your garbage bag. Your heart rejoiced: you hadn’t seen Pepe in years, and here he was. Visiting you! How did he find you? Still, it dawned on you in this dream that you had to keep walking and could not stop. And Pepe could not follow, only wave good-bye and shrink behind you as you carted his burdens away. You woke in tears, sitting straight up and swiveling your legs as if you’d just remembered an appointment. John was on his knees, dusting the table by the sofa. His gloved hands caught your stockinged feet before they hit the floor.
“Are you all right, Es?”
You shook your head. “I have a problem with my feet.”
He nodded. He didn’t speak, only pressed his thumbs along your instep. You were silent too, letting the sore bones and stiff muscles speak for you. You looked up at the cratered ceiling tiles and closed your eyes. His forehead touched your knees, bone against flat bone.
“I missed you,” he said afterward—his suit, your uniform, stretched across the table like ghost bodies.
Months after he’d disappeared, Pepe turned up again at the rehab farm. Relapse, said the once-addicted priest, is just part of the process. His rule for returning men was three strikes and you’re out.
—
Emerging from the darkness underground a few blocks north, you hobble to the river, coughing clouds of dust. On the grass a rescue worker tears a white sheet from a gurney into strips. Red tears rain down his face. You think again of saints. You collapse to your knees, a park bench for your prie-dieu.
You’ll catch your breath here, that’s all. Before you head back south. John’s tower stands, without its twin, still smoking in the distance. He’s still there. You’re sure of it.
Why shouldn’t you expect a miracle? You found Pepe, fine and floating in his cradle, didn’t you? What could have killed him didn’t, because you were there.
But Pepe was a child, and without sin, some voice reminds you. God’s book does not mince words about what happens to a man who does what John has done, what a woman like you deserves.
Is today a judgment, then?
God doesn’t say.
And so you offer what you would have offered on the day you were prepared to find your brother dead.
Take me.
You’ll walk into this river, wash away your sins. And if he lives, you’ll see to it yourself that he lives right. You’ll walk into this river and you won’t come out.
You know that bargains aren’t prayers. This kind of pagan trade isn’t what Jesus meant by sacrifice. Today, though, you’ll try anything.
And when you hear the second rumbling, you don’t run. When smoke, the second night in one bright hour, again snuffs out the morning, you kneel and wait, elbows on the slats, hands clasped at your brow, stubborn as a statue while the glass and dust and paper coat the town.
You’ve come this far. Why wouldn’t you go back for him? You came into this world with few advantages, but faith is wealth, and you, Esmeralda, are rich with it.
—
For one whole year you both avoided the word love.
For one whole year you never talked about the future.
What you discussed, what kept you listening to each other all those hours in his office, was the past.
“I almost didn’t stay here in this city,” you told John.
“Get out of here,” he said. By then you knew what this expression meant.
You were playing the game that lovers play, when lovers can’t believe their luck. What if John had worked for that firm and not this one? What if the cleaning company had sent you to a midtown building? You never would have met. And farther back in time, and farther: what if John became a fireman or cop, like his brothers? What if you never left the Philippines?
“It’s true,” you said. “Mrs. Guzman, the one who brought me, couldn’t keep me. She said she didn’t know that living in this city was so hard. She bought me a plane ticket and called up a family she knew in Manila.”
You told John about shopping for souvenirs at the airport. The T-shirts: so expensive. Snow globes you shook to watch the salt-shaped crumbs fall on the mini-skyline. People on the farm would ask about the snow—what would you tell them? That you hadn’t stayed long enough to see it? You looked at yellow-taxi postcards, bright red apple magnets. People would ask about the skyscrapers. Had you ever climbed to the top of one? What would you say?
“I kept thinking of this rhyme that day,” you said to John. “The Guzman kids liked it.”
Because John’s head was in your lap, your hand combing his white hair, you sang it.
If I were a spoon as high as the sky,
I’d scoop up the clouds that go slip-sliding by.
I’d take them inside and give them to Cook
to see if they taste just as good as they look.
“I never learned that one.” John smiled. “How would the sky taste, do you think? If we got close enough?”
“Soft but crunchy,” you said. (You had wondered too.) “And good for breakfast; just a little makes you full.”
You told him somehow you weren’t finished with the city. Something kept you here. The city wasn’t done with you.
“It’s brave, what you decided,” John said. “When you think about it.”
“But I wasn’t thinking, not at all.” You laughed. “Is it brave, or crazy? If I was thinking, I’d go home. I had no job. I had no place to live.”
The job that brought you to him, to this building, was still eighteen years away that day. There would be lucky accidents and Doris and a change of laws and many other rooms to tidy in between. But as it happened, when you backtracked through the gate, and spent some of your last bills on a taxi back into the city, on a crisp, clear day like this one, you came very close to him and didn’t know it. You just didn’t know exactly where to go.
As far as towers went, you hadn’t even been in this land long enough to know the difference between tall and high.
“I want to see the highest building in this town,” you told the driver.
So he brought you here.
Old Girl
Dad
The old girl’s husband—fifty-one years old, the 165-pound champion (as he likes to put it) of a triple-bypass surgery—tells her on March 1, 1983: “I had an idea, Mommy.”
Mommy is what the old girl’s husband calls her. And idea is a generous word for whim or flight of fancy, the kind of ill-considered impulse he’ll have often and won’t quit till he’s pulled it off (he almost always does, if barely) or failed (more rarely, but with flying colors). Not scheme or plan—God knows the old girl’s husband can’t be bothered with anything like a plan.
“It just came to me,” he says. “I thought I’d run the marathon this year!” As if the race has been, in previous years, an option he just didn’t exercise. Such glee in his voice. As if of course the old girl will see it as he does. The best idea in the history of ideas.
Right now they live in Chestnut Hill, in Newton, Massachusetts. So when her husband says “the marathon” he means the marathon: Boston, mother of all. Not counting Greece, of course—original but defunct. Not with his colleagues, either—men his age or older, with wives and kids and coronary issues of their own—but with his students. Young, fit Kennedys-in-training—with, the old girl guesses, egos to match or trump her husband’s. They run it every year, they told him during office hours, which the old girl’s husband holds not in an office but at the Bow and Arrow Pub, in Harvard Square. How had he lived on Commonwealth Avenue for two years and never caught the bug, they asked, on Patriots’ Day? They must have talked about Pheidippides, poor messenger, croaking at Athens, just before (the old girl imagines) her husband slammed his pint down on the sticky bar declaring, “Goddamn it, count me in.”
What kind of race has the old girl’s husband ev
er run, in his life? The electoral kind. The skills that once won him those races—the glad-handing, the tippling with rice farmers in the north and the fasting with Muslim pineapple canners in the south, the all-nighters, the stump speeches, the bouncing of babies while flirting with their mothers—would hardly get him through this one. Athletes turned in early, didn’t they? They didn’t smoke or drink, avoided fatty foods. And never mind the hours of training, the miles of preparation—never her husband’s strong suit. The old girl’s husband thinks of preparation as a kind of joke. The hero, in his myths about himself, is always slightly unprepared for his adventures. She’s known this since they met. They were both nine years old. He told her he’d snuck into a grade five classroom and stayed. I don’t really know fractions, but no one said no. The old girl can already hear (six weeks from now—too soon, by any measure) his loud, braggy revisions: “I didn’t even own a pair of decent rubber shoes!” And just before that, who will stand at the abandoned finish line, while the street sweepers check their watches? Who’ll hold the water or the smelling salts, wiping the sweat or vomit, tending to him like a nurse except a nurse gets paid, picking up the pieces, in a word, when all his grandstanding comes back to bite him?
The old girl, that’s who.
“Dad,” the old girl says—Dad is what the old girl calls her husband—“that’s about twenty-six miles, I think.” She knows. Twenty-six point two, to be exact. But delivery matters, in this marriage. Impossible, insane, or even not a good idea would just cause a digging-in of heels and land her in the camp of killjoys and naysayers, never a chorus he heeds. I think, perhaps, or Is it possible that are the better notes to strike.
“Twenty-six?” the old girl’s husband says, with his trademark puffery. “Is that all?”
Assumption
She only ever spent a year in the Manila convent school whose students called themselves old girls, but that was long enough for her to see herself as an Old Girl always. Her husband, who escorted old girl after old girl to debuts and dances in his youth, hated the term. You sound like mares the farmer doesn’t have the heart to shoot. Some old girls agreed. Ines Arroyo, on all fours in the locker room, neighed while Margarita Lopez spanked her rump through the red plaid pleats. Giddyap, old girl!