Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

I took another step forward. That was when she screamed and ran straight at me. She jumped my shoulders, and I fell back against the floor. Shouting things in gibberish, or maybe Tagalog, she clawed at me. There was the ringing metal scent of blood, and then I was looking at her liver-spotted fist up close. I didn’t see stars so much as lightning in my head, a nerve in my brain flashing brighter than the others.

A light came on from another door along the corridor. “Lola!” Jorge’s friend Will called from his room, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her from me. He talked in their language until she calmed down, then added in English, “Alice is our friend, it’s OK.” I touched my nose and looked at the blood on my fingertips. “God, Alice, I’m so sorry,” he said. “My lola lived through the war. She’s so old. I’m sorry.”

Lights were turning on one after another now; Will’s sister came from her room to see about the commotion as well. “Did we wake her?” Jorge asked about the baby. He didn’t know where to look or who to apologize to first. He went into the kitchen and came out with two wet washcloths, one filled with ice. “Where’d she nail you?” he asked. I reached for the part of my face that was still ringing. My cheekbone felt tight, like it was being pushed against, and my nose ached. Jorge dabbed at the blood under my nostrils with the washcloth and placed the bag of ice onto my cheek.

Everyone was quiet for a moment, and then Jorge said, “Alice, meet Will’s grandmother. Lola, meet Alice Anders.”

“There’s Manila for you,” Will said. “Everybody but their mother under the same roof.”

“Everybody and their mother,” I corrected.

“Exactly,” said Will. He whispered to his grandmother and guided her down the hall back to her room.

“She’s not all there,” Jorge said softly into my ear. “Anyone who doesn’t look familiar, she assumes is an intruder. You’re not the first.”

—

In the morning I woke inches away from Jorge’s scar. It was longer than I had thought, spanning the tip of his nose to his upper lip. I reached up to trace it with my finger, and he opened his eyes. “What is this from?” I whispered.

He drew away from me and sat up, covering his mouth.

“Sorry.”

“I had a cleft lip, when I was born.” He grinned the plastic kind of grin that twinkles, in a toothpaste ad. “GrinGivers International made my beam come true!”

“I did a thing for them once!” I cried.

He looked at me, incredulous. “You’re kind of an idiot,” he said, without laughter or forgiveness. He yawned, looking at a watch he’d taken off and set on the floor beside us. “We’re late for work.” Taking my chin between his fingers, he turned my face aside — a bit roughly, I felt. “I’ll tell them it’s my fault,” he said. “I’ll explain.”

Outside, a heavy white mist hung over Balete Drive. In daylight I saw that the tree branches reached so far up that they made arches over the street. The hanging vines thumped and swished over the windshield. Jorge hummed the Alice song while driving.

In the studio, they were furious. It hadn’t looked so bad to me the night before, just a redness in some patches of my face. Nothing a good makeup artist couldn’t fix. Now the skin was swelling below my eye. Jorge tried to explain, but what could he do? We were paid to look perfect.

“A lot of girls were up for this job,” said Carmen, massaging her temples.

It was the first time since I was eighteen that I’d been sent home with a cancellation fee.

Jorge was speaking rapid-fire Tagalog with a member of the crew when I approached him for the last time. A kind of morning-after shyness kicked in that I hadn’t felt earlier, and I handed him my comp card. “If you’re ever in New York,” I said, “we should hang out. Call my booker.” It felt less desperate than saying “Call me.” I had an image of him serenading me in the Lower East Side, at another karaoke bar I’d been to, and I liked it.

He glanced at the comp card and then at me, like a client at a go-see trying to remember who I was. I thought, I should have a new card made up. This old one had some tacky lingerie shots that I was no longer proud of, and my hair was longer now, with fewer highlights. I hadn’t taken measurements in over a year.

“I’ve never had to leave my country to find work,” he said, “but thanks.”

—

The front desk of the chapel-like hotel called me a cab. I was glad to see a regular sedan and not another stretch limousine roll into the driveway. Inside I wanted to relax, just let my mind grow blank and stare at the scattered bodies selling candy and cigarettes and garlands, but the driver was another talker.

“He doesn’t deserve you,” he said, looking at my bruised face in the mirror. “Walk away, is what I tell my daughters. A guy hurts you like that? Walk away.”

He had it wrong, but for a second I pitied myself. Tears came to my eyes.

“Bruises or no,” said the driver, “you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. But where have I seen you before?”

That made me laugh.

“American?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Vacation?”

“No,” I said. “Work.”

Of course he asked me what work, and I told him. “No kidding!” he said. “Where should I look for you?”

I said, “Liberty Denim.”

“ That ’s where I’ve seen you before!” he said. “My daughters will go crazy! Wait till I tell them. They won’t believe.”

I suppose he had seen me before, whoever the previous Liberty Denim girl had been, and would see me again, whichever girl they picked next. “I quit,” I said, deciding and believing it right then. “This Manila job was my last.”

“Quit? But you’re so young! Too young to retire.”

I figured I could lie about my age and keep on selling sticky drinks. I could lie about my experience and try to wait tables or tend bar. I wouldn’t eat or buy too much. Did the Czech or Argentine or Senegalese girl still need a place to live? Would my mother take me in, now that I’d repaid her failure with my own?

“You’ll miss it,” the driver said.

“Sure.” But I didn’t think so. At most, I’d miss hotel rooms: coming back to sleep in a clean slate every night, every morning my footprints vacuumed out of the carpet.

It took two hours to make it through the midmorning traffic to the airport. The driver heaved my suitcase from his trunk. “If you don’t mind, miss,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble?” He made a little rectangle with his fingers.

“OK,” I said.

“For my girls. They’ll go crazy. But I need evidence, or they will not believe.”

“OK.” I wasn’t famous. People didn’t ask for photos often, but once in a while they did.

He rummaged in the glove compartment and came back with a disposable camera. I expected him to look into the viewfinder as I smiled. But he hugged me to his side and aimed the lens at arm’s length toward our faces, including himself in the frame. Of course! What kind of proof would I offer, on my own? Without him in it, the picture could be anyone’s, from anywhere.

I knew by heart how the angle would distort us: the driver’s face, closer to the curve of the lens, would look large and bloated, and I’d seem pale and sharp beside him. “One, two, three, cheese,” he said, and snapped the plastic button.

I’d been at this work for years. I could imagine almost anything and then become it, visually speaking. For this very last picture, I put aside the all-American sex-heat and became the white lady of Balete Drive, cold and not exactly there. I made like moonlight flooding the camera lens. I receded to a bright puddle and dissolved. Perfect. Right there. Here we go. By the time they touched my image — blurred it, altered me — there would be nothing left.