Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

We were entering a classroom in the Awali neighborhood school, which allowed us to give a memorial service there when the country’s only Catholic church, owing to the way the girl had died, would not. It was a kindergarten classroom, with an alphabet scroll above its blackboard and artwork pinned to a clothesline. More Filipinos crowded into it than the girl, twenty years old, had probably known intimately in her lifetime. The union leaders handed each of us a white taper candle, and we passed a flame along until the whole room flickered. Minnie and I glanced at the Xeroxed program and joined in the opening song, a show tune about rainbows. Since none of us had known the girl, the union leaders took it upon themselves to stand and eulogize her, giving us tidbits from the cassettes and posters and other belongings found in the room that she had occupied for less than a month. She was born in Tarlac. An older brother had gone to Hong Kong for work some years before she herself left home. “She loved all American movies,” read one of the union leaders from an index card, “and even saved her ticket stub from the time she saw Blind Date at the Royal Theater.”

The sob was out of my throat before I could swallow it. I dropped the program into Minnie’s lap and gave her my candle, then covered my face with both hands and wept like a child. Unable to stop, I stood and rushed down the aisle between rows of Filipinos staring from their tiny chairs, thinking, most likely, that the dead girl and I had been close.

I walked past the doors of other classrooms, trying to find my breath. The school building formed a horseshoe around a grassy playground. I sat down on a swing and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Faintly, I could hear the classroom congregation shuffling to stand and sing another song.

Minnie followed a few moments later and sat on the swing next to mine. We swung together in that slight, noncommittal way, our feet on the ground. She turned herself around, twisting the chains over each other, then lifted her feet to spin them untwisted. “I know how you feel,” she said gently. “I think everybody in there is feeling it. Will I die alone, with no one to mourn me but a bunch of strangers in a classroom? Will anybody even remember who I was? ”

I dried my eyes and murmured some agreement. In fact, I had not been thinking of that at all. In my mind I was seeing only Aroush’s tumored hands, the droop of her head. “Can you imagine,” I said to Minnie, “if you had to go on living after your life had stopped? If, at a certain age, that was it — the best you’d ever do — the most you’d ever accomplish?”

“I can,” said Minnie. I knew she was thinking still of the girl who died. “I was eighteen when I came here. I’m forty now. I’ve never done much besides clean rich Arabs’ houses.” Minnie turned to look toward the parking lot, so that even years later I would wonder if I’d heard correctly what came next. “I’ll probably die in uniform”—she sighed regretfully—“with a dustrag in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaning fluid in the other.”

I squinted, then squeezed my eyes shut. I shook my head. Small, deferential Minnie, who’d backed out of a peaceful strike: she could not be capable of it. I coughed, thinking I might choke, my eyes burning. At the same time, my vision seemed sharper, clearer than before.

Minnie wasn’t dead to me after that; in fact what she became was more alive than ever, revealed to me in new textures and colors. I had underestimated her: what looked like a lifetime of toil and taking orders had contained subversions no one, until now, had seen. She’d been silently striking all along; she didn’t need my protection. What arrogance, to think I should take up her cause, even the score. I was no smarter than a child, who didn’t understand nuances. She was not my mother. (And God only knew, of course, what little mutinies my own mother had waged, in secret: the better life she’d planned for me could not have been enough to get her through her own, every day.)

I had to believe that my friend had suffered, that humiliations I could barely imagine drove her to cruelty. You’ve been through a lot, I could say, but the child isn’t the one who put you through it. Of course Aroush would be the one to pay the price; Aroush, the only one less powerful than Minnie, the only one who couldn’t punish Minnie back. Aroush, who’d done nothing to deserve punishment.

I did not, in that Awali playground, tell Minnie that her suffering was not Aroush’s fault, or that her rich employer was a human being too. I drove her home, and then myself. At dinner, I did not tell Ed to spare me his pronouncements about the Bumbai and Arabo . Their theories had had years to harden; my love for Aroush and sympathy toward Mrs. Mansour couldn’t topple them in one day. All I knew to do, and had to do immediately, was right my own mistake.

—

I invited Mrs. Mansour to spend an afternoon with Aroush and me by the small kidney-shaped pool in our compound. “Parents’ Day,” I said. The kindergarten classroom, with its finger paintings and bulletin boards, had made me nostalgic for a “real” school. A glimpse into our days together would prepare Mrs. Mansour nicely for the truth. If she could see her daughter’s actual education with her own eyes, she would find joy in Aroush as she was, aim for humbler milestones, no less miraculous for being within reach.

Mrs. Mansour had dressed Aroush in a ruffled pink bathing suit and waterproof swim diaper. “Thank you for bringing us here,” she said, when I unlocked the gate to the swimming pool. “This is quite a nice vacation.”

She was being polite. Surely there was nothing the Astroturf and cement walls had over the boutiques of Bond Street. I eased Aroush’s arms into a pair of orange water wings and brought her car seat to the edge of the pool so that her feet touched the surface. Her toenails were painted a dark beet color. I splashed her right foot into the water, then her left, causing her to smile and shiver.

Mrs. Mansour removed her sunglasses and applauded. I took Aroush from her car seat and submerged her to the waist, supporting her against my chest. We faced Mrs. Mansour. I cradled her against one arm and flicked water from my fingers onto her neck and face. She blinked and smiled again. Holding her that close, and smelling the particular warmth of her scalp, I almost lost my nerve, tempted to keep the truth, and the real Aroush, to myself.

“Teacher,” Mrs. Mansour called, “when first I see you, I know you are the right one for Aroush. From looking at you — so independent, so able —I know you are a modern woman.”

I bowed my head. Again my eyes hurt as if they’d been blinded and gained total clarity all at once. The sun winked in a million facets off the water. I could hear every slight movement that Aroush and I made through it.

“This is how I will like my girl to be. Alive in the world. I would like that she understand business, understand computers, understand politics.”

The locks at Aroush’s hairline had begun to curl from moisture, and I had to speak.

“Mrs. Mansour,” I said, “I’m afraid I have not been completely forthright with you.”

“Forth right?” she said casually, settling back into her chair.

“Honest,” I said. “About your daughter. You know, Mrs. Mansour, that Aroush will never understand business, don’t you? That she’ll never understand computers, or politics?” A cheat, to ask this way, to suggest that Mrs. Mansour knew the truth despite my lie. So I added, with as much grave certainty as my voice could muster, “She’ll always be close to how you see her now.”

“Now you are doctor, as well as Teacher,” she said, her red lips barely moving to say it. She seemed to freeze in the chair, a statue on a throne, her eyes cold as they locked with mine.