Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a better hostess,” I said. It dawned on me that I would have driven Minnie home before, back when I wasn’t working for her boss myself.

“You’re busy,” Minnie said. “It’s all right. It’s a good woman who works when she doesn’t even have to.”

—

I was mesmerized by Minnie’s story of the Italian cashiers, their intimate but fierce rebellion. The quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening a blade. I began to imagine all the soft, subtle weapons a worker might employ. Avoiding all eye contact, perhaps, even while saying yes to an order; completing one’s duties very slowly, as if moving underwater. I paid closer attention: to the man wrapping my fish in brown paper at the Central Market; to the waiter who took my order and Ed’s at a restaurant near the Diplomat Hotel. It bothered me to think our life was built upon their backs, that even Ed’s crew at the pipeline must have wished for his downfall at some point or another. My instinct, my muscle memory, stood with and for the little guy, still. If the Minnies of the world felt wronged, I was on their side; I’d never owned a skin cream made of caviar in my life.

In college, with my fellow campus troublemakers, I lived by the gospel of solidarity. When the university’s expansion threatened to tear down the shacks and displace the residents of a slum outside the campus walls, we slept under tin scraps outside the chancellor’s office in protest. When yet another city newspaper was taken over by the government, its writers sacked and replaced by puppets, we tied black gags around our mouths. When former Senator Aquino was gunned down at the Manila airport, we wore shirts spattered with red paint and carried signs that said, WE ARE ALL NINOY. Now, with Minnie’s friends plotting revolt, however silent, I caught the fever again. After all, I’d thought of her when I took the job under false pretenses; I’d given Mrs. Mansour undue hope with Minnie’s grievances in mind. To act out on the job itself was just the natural next step. How far could I go, for the workers’ sake?

I stopped preparing lessons while Aroush napped or consulting my old textbooks. I began to spend that time dusting the shelves, or chopping the vegetables for dinner, or catching up on other housework. When I ran out of chores I watched TV or read my paperbacks, legs stretched along the sofa. I left toys on the floor after Aroush and I had handled them, stopped structuring our afternoons. When housework, books, and even TV bored me, I napped beside her.

My lies grew. At the end of each day, when Mrs. Mansour came, I overstated Aroush’s every twitch and reflex, claiming successes that were unlikely. Mrs. Mansour rewarded these tales more handsomely every day. It was her custom to travel to London on weekends to shop for beautiful things; these trips now yielded loot for me and Ed as well. Her gifts fell into the category Mrs. Mansour called desireful: boxes of dark chocolate truffles; silk scarves; perfumes with such luxuriant names as Joy, Obsession, Poison; eye shadow kits with brushes the size of matchsticks. She herself had no use for the perfume, she said; she had been blending her own for years, a formula handed down from her mother and grandmother. She would hand it down to Aroush as well, when the time came.

I passed these gifts along to Minnie. (I wanted her to use them, to dress up for karaoke night at the Gulf Hotel, or even go on a date with Mrs. Mansour’s Filipino chauffeur. But she too passed them on, to her sisters and nieces in Manila, or to raffles that the church held for charity.) These fancy things, I told myself, were like the riches Robin Hood would redirect to those who worked harder or had less than he. I didn’t deserve them, but someone did.

Aloud, Ed mocked the gifts that Mrs. Mansour left for him. “Just what I always needed,” he said, smirking at a diamond-encrusted tie clip; or “Time and money sold separately,” in response to a box of golf tees made of eighteen-karat gold. But later, through a halfway-open bathroom door, I would see him model the watch or the shirt studs, changing the angle of his arm and chest in the mirror. One morning, when he thought I was asleep, he quietly transferred the contents of his cracked vinyl wallet to a monogrammed money clip, and his keys to a brushed-platinum key ring, both from Mrs. Mansour.

—

One day Aroush made a small, unprecedented sound, distinct from her usual grunts and moans. I was watering an ivy plant near the living room window and polishing its leaves with a soft cloth.

“Haa,” it sounded like, but gentler than a laugh. A sigh.

“Aroush?” I said. I knelt beside her and looked into her eyes. Perhaps I had misheard the sound of one leaf brushing against another, or the spray of the bottle in my hand, or my own breath, as a whisper out of her.

The furrow in her brow smoothed over when I bent down. Her eyes thinned to crescents, with delicate folds around them. I could see each of her widely spaced teeth.

A smile. It went away, but I had seen it.

I felt as shocked as if she’d spoken a full sentence or stood and walked around the room. It was the closest thing to a miracle I had ever witnessed, and I’d done nothing to cause or earn it. Quickly I placed a chair on either side of her head, tying a length of string between them. With more string I hung a rattle, a soft block, and a squeaky toy from the line. I took her wrist and batted the block with her hand. Its inner chimes jingled as it swung and then slowed to a stop.

“Haa,” Aroush sighed again, looking — it seemed, for a moment — directly at the block, and smiling again.

I lay down beside her and looked up. I shook the string and took in the swinging toys, their jangling sounds, all the colors and textures, at her level. “Good girl,” I said. I kissed the soft, downy zone where her temple became her hairline.

The breakthrough energized me. When I fed Aroush her formula and puréed pears, I became determined to teach her to suck. Instead of placing spoonfuls near her throat, as Mrs. Mansour did for easy swallowing, I left them on the middle of her tongue or on the corners of her mouth. Aroush furrowed her brow, made a gagging noise. I dipped a pacifier into the mush and held it to her lower lip. Her mouth stayed open, her tongue slack. Eventually she cried, smelling the food but lacking the skill to obtain it. I relented, feeding her the rest of the meal as she was used to.

For once I didn’t feel I was completely lying when Mrs. Mansour arrived. “We had a grand day,” I told her. I threw words like developmental and affective into my report. But Aroush’s sigh and smile I kept to myself. To hear Mrs. Mansour say, “Today smiling, tomorrow Shakespeare,” or something like that, would have diminished our private milestone in a way I couldn’t bear.

That night I dreamed that Aroush was my child. Under a great black cloak I carried her against my body, clutching her henna-patterned hands in mine, and when she sighed or smiled only I knew it. I woke up suddenly and shook my husband’s shoulder. “Ed,” I whispered, “wake up.”

His head sprang from the pillow.

“What if I wanted a child?” I said. A ridiculous thing to ask a sleeping man in the middle of the night, and I knew it.

Naturally, he was disoriented. “Child?”

“Yes. A child.”

“But you don’t.”

“What if I do? What if I changed my mind?” It was an impulse, a cheat, a conversation I could later disown. In the morning I could easily convince him I had been talking in my sleep or that he had been dreaming.

“Sally, whatever you want,” he slurred, “you’ve got.” I wondered: was that a yes, his drowsy answer, or a no? Did he mean that I could have anything I wanted, or that I already had it? With a grunt, he turned his face back to the pillow and embraced me so tightly as to bury my face in his armpit and squash my mouth under his shoulder, ending the questions and conversation altogether. Where do you think you’re going? he used to demand, playfully, in those early days of our courtship, every time I rose from the bed or left his side. Then he would reel me back into his arms. And so it seemed now: as though he’d sensed me moving away from him, and knew even in sleep to grip me closer.