Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

And so we welcomed them, every Thursday, to eat and sing with us. When they arrived, in jeans and T-shirts our teens had outgrown, we all but hoisted them onto our shoulders. We lifted their feet onto Moroccan poufs or camel-saddle ottomans. We refused the housemaids’ help in our sweltering kitchens. We sent the bachelors to watch TV and swig Black Label with our husbands.

Sometimes we tried to match the helpers up. We seated Dolly, a janitress, next to Bongbong, a gardener. “Doesn’t Dolly sing like a bird?” we said, or “Have you heard Bongbong impersonate his amo ?” We found them pen pals in Manila, snapping photographs and drafting letters for them. We owed them a chance at the life we enjoyed. At night we sent them home with leftovers. “The children would rather eat machboos anyway,” we insisted. Before bed, we prayed for them. The helpers came from farming provinces, like our fathers. They spoke Tagalog with country accents, like our mothers. Our parents too had fled droughts and typhoons in their youth, hoping for steady servant work in Manila. Helping these helpers, who’d traveled even farther, felt like home.

—

In October we met Baby, the island’s newest katulong. She’d come to clean offices at the Gulf Bank, and moved in with five other women who worked there too. When her flatmates brought Baby along to our next party, we expected someone just like them: another sweet, humble church mouse, who’d somehow strike us as child and granny all at once.

We guessed wrong. Before we ever saw Baby, we heard the click of her high heels on the deLumens’ doorstep. And before we said hello, we smelled her perfume, a striking mix of cinnamon and roses.

She was taller than her flatmates, taller than us, taller than most of our husbands and even some of our teenagers, whom we’d raised on fresh vegetables and fortified milk. Her heels added more height still. She had the fair skin and narrow nose we’d all tried for as young girls in Manila, before we understood that creams and clothespins wouldn’t help. Her hair, the improbable color of Sunkist soda, followed the slant of her jaw, longest at the chin and shortest at the nape, with bangs that stood in front like stiff feathers.

“Pasok!” we cried, but Baby wasn’t waiting for permission. She peered past us to the living room, as if entering a shop instead of a home. By the time we said “Kumusta?” her long legs had made it halfway down the corridor. We hadn’t known that shoes like hers existed, with their translucent heels and straps: from a distance she appeared to walk on air, with just the balls of her bare feet. When at last she turned to us, we felt like saleswomen who’d kept her from browsing the shelves in peace.

“Hi,” Baby said in English. Her voice was low and rough, as if the pipes had rusted.

Dulce deLumen invited her to the buffet table. “Thanks-no,” she said in English. There was a gap, wide enough to fit a skeleton key, between her two front teeth. These jutted so far out she couldn’t close her lips without pouting.

Did she have a rough journey? we asked in Tagalog. Baby shook her head. “When I’m on the plane, I sleep the whole hours,” she said, again in English.

Was she finding Bahrain too hot? “Not so,” she said.

What did she think of her new employer? “She’s OK also.” (Although we knew from her flatmates that their boss at the Gulf Bank was a man.)

All very common errors, for someone in the helper class. Why wouldn’t Baby just relax and speak Tagalog? “She says she forgot it already,” said her flatmate Girlie. How this could have happened to someone who’d just arrived on the island, none of us knew.

“She’ll come around,” said Fe Zaldivar. We too had landed vowing to stick to English — to impress others, to practice, to avoid embarrassing our children. Although the teens still found plenty to ridicule in our accents, nuns in convent school had at least taught us to pronounce our f ’s and v ’s correctly, to know our verb tenses and distinguish genders, to translate naman differently depending on the context. But at these parties we spoke Tagalog even to the babies, who barely understood it, for the same reason we served pancit and not shawarma. Between Arab bosses and Indian subordinates, British traffic laws and American television, we craved familiar flavors and the sound of a language we knew well.

Why would she refuse our food? we wondered, glancing at Baby from the buffet. One look at her bony arms and tiny waist told us she had no need to “reduce.” She sat on an armchair in the corner, drumming her knee with dagger-shaped fingernails.

“No amount of ‘English’ can disguise a voice like that,” said Lourdes Ocampo.

“Or hide such teeth,” agreed Rosario Ledesma.

“She opened her mouth,” said Rita Espiritu, “and suddenly I was back at the Quiapo wet market, haggling with the tindera over milkfish.”

“Maybe that’s why she tries not to say too much?” said Rowena Cruz, who had a soft heart and a breathless angel’s voice. “Maybe she’s ashamed of those roots.”

So we tried harder. We filled a plate for Baby in case she changed her mind. We tried to forge some bonds at our expense.

“Baby, I’d kill for skin like yours,” said Paz Evora, pointing at the rough brown patches on her own cheeks. “These were supposed to fade after I gave birth, but never did. I blame this climate.”

“What a beautiful color,” said Vilma Bustamante, gazing at Baby’s hair while fingering her own split ends. “Is it hard work, to keep a cut like that? It’s all I can do to pluck my grays out once a month.” Baby had to bleach it first, the flatmates told us later, before coating the hair with orange.

“Just like Cinderella’s,” said Fe Zaldivar, pointing her cracked, unpolished toes at Baby’s shoes. “I can’t last an hour on anything higher than two inches. Just say the word if yours start hurting, I’ve got spare tsinelas here somewhere.”

During the Minus One hour we seated Dodong, a gas station attendant, next to Baby. But when he offered her the microphone, she shook her head and waved it off, her bangles clinking wrist to elbow like ice cubes in a cocktail glass. No one could get anywhere with her. Even Lourdes Ocampo, our gold-medal gossip, struggled for the single tidbit Baby gave us of her life that day: that she came from Olongapo City, on Subic Bay, some seventy miles northwest of Manila.

—

Over the next few weeks the Gulf Bank janitresses — Dolly, Girlie, Tiny, Missy, and Pinkie — drew us a portrait of their vain, eccentric new flatmate. “Our very own Madame Marcos,” they called her, someone we couldn’t imagine scrubbing a toilet or pushing a mop. Baby never cooked, they said. But her beauty regimen often disappeared such staples from the kitchen as eggs, sugar, milk, and mayonnaise, which she whipped into plasters that hardened on her face and stunk up the flat. She soaked her lace panties by hand, their bright dyes staining the bathroom sink. She took long bubble baths that left the tub with a frothy residue, like the inside of a drained milk shake glass. At night, she colonized the living room, following exercise videos at the very hour her flatmates hoped to catch Dallas.

Baby’s father, we learned, was an American seaman who’d been stationed at Subic during the Korean War. Her mother had worked as a hospitality girl outside the navy base. (We whispered these occupational euphemisms, curling our fingers in quotation marks: “hostess,” “hospitality girl,” “guest relations officer.” ) As a child, Baby did meet her father on one or two of his liberties in Olongapo. “But once the war was over,” said Dolly, “he went home to his wife and kids in America. New Jersey, I think it was.” Isn’t that the way? we all said. Baby’s origins put an American twist on a story we’d all heard before. As children in the Philippines, we hardly knew a family that didn’t have its second, secret, “shadow” family. Husbands left the provinces for Manila, wives left the Philippines for the Middle East, and all that parting from loved ones to provide for them got lonely. Years ago, Paz Evora had received phone calls from her father’s pregnant mistress. Vilma Bustamante met a shadow nephew, fully grown, at her own brother’s funeral. Lourdes Ocampo even began as a shadow daughter, though of course she didn’t advertise it.