Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

—

I insisted on seeing the inside of the sari-sari store before lunch. “Corporate headquarters,” said my mother. She pulled aside the screen door that once led from the kitchen onto grass.

Once more, I felt like an ogre in a dollhouse. The vast and open yard of my childhood amounted now to just ten feet from the screen door to the wicket, and barely six across. Sacks of rice, tanks of soy sauce, and bricks of dry glass noodles, stacked against the walls, narrowed it even more. Candy in glass jars, each with its own metal scoop, sat in rows upon the shelves above. Reels of shampoo and detergent hung from the ceiling, dispensing Palmolive or Tide in single-use packets. I thought of the thin, sealed sleeves of Succorol, flanked by dental floss and blister-packed vitamins, in a side pocket of the toiletry bag lodged between my socks and shirts. A complete amateur’s attempt at smuggling, which nearly froze my heart nonetheless as I sent my luggage down the airport X-ray belt.

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. Sari-sari meant “assorted” or “sundry,” and so the store smelled: like a heady mix of bubble gum and vinegar, salt and soap, floor wax and cologne. My mother switched on a ceiling fan that hung between the fluorescent strip light and the wheels of Tide and Palmolive.

“We should get you another air conditioner,” I said. “There’s a lot that could melt or spoil in here.”

I walked to the far end of the store and ran my palm along the wooden counter. Receipts were impaled on a spike next to a calculator with a roll of printing tape. Behind the scratched Plexiglas wicket, my mother had placed a call bell and a RING FOR SERVICE sign. They’d opened the sari-sari five years back, after my father was fired from another job, this time for stealing a crate of Tanduay rum from the restaurant where he’d been waiting tables. “He isn’t built to work under someone,” my mother had said. “It’s just not his nature, answering to another man.” I said nothing, just sent the money they needed to start. The sari-sari gave her a loophole, at least, in his law against her working outside the house.

At the time I hadn’t minded so much about the money, which I never expected to see again. But I knew I’d miss the yard, my refuge in the years before I could stand up to my father. When he called my mother a dog or a whore or a foul little cunt who’d ruined his life, she sent me outside. When he seized her by the hair and asked, What did you say? What did you just say to me? she sent me outside. When he struck her face with the underside of our telephone until she wept and begged, first for forgiveness and then for mercy, she sent me outside, into the grass of the yard, where twigs from the acacia tree would have fallen overnight.

—

In the kitchen, my mother set the table for two. Then she planted a baby monitor at the third chair and tuned it to a grainy black-and-white broadcast of my father, snoring. “This thing saved me,” she said. “Now I can keep an eye on him while I work. Or while you and I sit and eat together.”

But she hardly sat or ate at all. Throughout lunch she alternated between serving him and serving me. She stood to answer a groan from the sickroom, then heaped my plate with fried rice and beef. She uncapped a bottle of San Miguel for me, then went to feed him a bowl of broth. I spent most of the meal alone with him: my father’s screen image and me, facing off across the table.

At this time three days earlier, I was in the hospital, taking inventory of the narcotics cabinet. As I unloaded the most recent shipment of Succorol, I found six more boxes than were counted on the packing slip, a surplus as unlikely as it was expensive. And immediately I imagined my mother, titrating morphine into his mouth by hand, as I re-counted the boxes and rechecked my number against the invoice. I thought of my mother running back and forth between the sari-sari and the sickroom, as I typed the lower figure into the inventory log. I thought of her, crying or praying after morphine had ceased to comfort him, as I wheeled the Pyxis in front of the surveillance camera and slipped a month’s supply of Succorol into the pockets of my lab coat.

“Bed or bath?” she asked, returning to the kitchen. A pail of water was filled and waiting for me in the bathroom; on the master bed, new sheets. Which did I want first? All that was missing was the sir.

The baby monitor groaned on the table. The call bell dinged in the store. My mother glanced from one to the other, torn.

“I’ve got the store,” I volunteered. “You take care of him.” Her eyebrows rose, but I said, “What is there to know? I saw price tags on your jars and a cashbox under the counter. I’ll print receipts from the calculator, if people want them.”

As it turned out, I was no help at all. My first customer wanted shampoo. I pulled too hard on the Palmolive, unspooling hundreds of packets to the floor. My mother had to climb a stepladder to reel them back in. Another customer asked for detergent. I ripped a packet of Tide down the middle, sending a flurry of blue-flecked snow everywhere. My mother swept up after me with a broom. The women barely spoke above a whisper, sometimes covering their mouths to hide bad teeth. “Ano?” I asked, over and over. The louder I asked, the softer they answered. The farther they retreated from the wicket, the closer I stooped to read their faces, feeling more like a bully than a shop clerk.

My father’s groans, on the other hand, I heard perfectly well. In her trips back and forth from the sari-sari to the sickroom, my mother moved the baby monitor to the freezer case, rushing from the store as soon as he called or stirred on-screen. While she was gone, a teenage girl asked me for Sarsi cola. Relieved to understand, I handed her a bottle from the freezer. She giggled, staring, and said something else behind her hands. “…plastik” was all I heard. Remembering the jar of plastic straws on the counter and the bottle opener underneath, I uncapped the bottle and added a straw. She giggled and shook her head, asking again for “plastik.” I wondered if she meant a plastic shopping bag and searched the store, finding one crumpled on a shelf. Now she was giggling too hard to speak. I felt as confused as in my earliest days as a clinical pharmacy resident in New York — a beginner desperate to impress my superiors, bungling even the basics.

When my mother returned, she spoke to the girl and poured the Sarsi cola into a plastic sleeve, thin as a layer of onionskin. She stored the bottle in a crate that would go back to the factory. How had I forgotten? I’d drunk sodas from plastic sleeves up until the age of twenty-five. And yet the liquid bag I handed over made me think not of my childhood but of some dark, alien version of the waste pouches and IV fluids I’d see at the hospital.

“Relax, anak. ” Dragging a stool to the center of the store, my mother invited me to sit under the ceiling fan. “You’re sweating.” She handed me a mango Popsicle from the freezer case. The jaw-cramping sweetness of each bite felt vaguely humiliating as I sat and watched her work.

Unlike me, she had no trouble hearing her customers. No sooner had a face appeared at the wicket than she was reaching for the shoe polish or cooking oil. Her right hand could pop open a bottle cap while her left tore a foil packet from the shampoo reel. To the voice of a young boy, so small I couldn’t see him through the wicket, she sold three sheets, for ten centavos apiece, of the grainy, wide-ruled paper on which I’d learned to spell in grade school. It was a way of shopping I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next.