Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Girlie, who shared a room with her, told us Baby’s scent was Opium by Yves Saint Laurent. The bottle, with its red lid and bamboo-leaf pattern, sat on Baby’s window ledge, along with her mirror and makeup and assorted relics of her father: an anchor pin, an eagle patch, a fading snapshot of a freckled sailor in T-shirt and canvas cap. Here, before this little shrine, was where she liked to pluck her eyebrows and glue on her fingernails. “It’s like the gulf between Bahrain and Saudi,” said Girlie, of the four-foot space between her side of the room and Baby’s. On her window ledge, Girlie liked to pray the rosary, keep a Bible open to the day’s scripture, and write home to her mother in Pangasinan.

Her flatmates never saw Baby pray, day or night. And because she slept till noon on Fridays, Baby never joined us at Our Lady of the Pillar, the island’s only Catholic church. “Friday’s when she gets her hair done,” Missy said, during coffee hour. The Pillar was the other place we gathered every weekend, like clockwork. We had our babies baptized there, by Indian priests, in banana-silk gowns we’d ordered from Manila. We forced our teens to sit through Bible Study, ignoring their fake colds or periods and complaints. In this adopted Muslim country, we worshiped with a vengeance. We fanned our sweating faces with the service bulletins through the scorching open-air Masses. What was a little desert heat, we figured, next to the fires that consumed Joan of Arc, the hair shirt under Saint Cecilia’s wedding gown, the martyrdom of Agnes?

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Every Thursday party ended like this: after the horse races and food and Minus One, our husbands drove the helpers home. “Door-to-door service!” the housemaid Minnie called it. It was the least we could do for the men and women who didn’t own cars and rode the public bus to work on weekdays. And they couldn’t thank us enough. “That’s one less Pakistani next to me this week,” said Dolly, holding her nose. They praised our professional men for stooping to such a menial favor. “Engineer na, chauffeur pa, ” said Pinkie.

Only Baby never thanked us. She seemed to take each ride as her birthright, her long legs striding to claim the passenger seat before any of her flatmates could.

One Thursday, after Flor Bautista stepped out of the living room, Baby began to laugh. Her low and rusty cackle startled us. We’d never seen her so much as crack a smile before. And there was something foul in it, a vulgar quality that made us drop our eyes into our laps. We crossed our legs, as if this would restore the room to decency. Then she stood up, bracelets and earrings jangling, and laughed her way to the bathroom.

We turned to the katulong, who dropped their eyes too. “It’s the silliest thing,” her flatmate Tiny finally confessed. We could still hear Baby cackling through the bathroom door. “When Fidel Bautista drove us home last Thursday, Baby claimed that he had… stared at her.” Tiny tucked her chin to show us “where,” mortified.

Who, in recent time, could we accuse of staring at our breasts? The babies, three-four years ago, before we’d weaned them onto solid food?

“Poor Fidel,” said Pinkie. “All he did was open the car door.”

“Baby said something like ‘Wanna take a picture?’ ” Missy added. “I never saw a brown man turn so red before.”

At this time Flor came back from the kitchen, and we changed the subject.

That night, as an experiment, we put Baby in Pirmin Ocampo’s car. And when he came home, Pirmin swore: never again.

“What’s the matter?” joked Lourdes Ocampo. “Couldn’t you keep up with her English?”

But Pirmin didn’t laugh. During the ride, he said, Girlie had mentioned a faulty light switch in the bedroom she and Baby shared. Pirmin, an electrical engineer, offered to take a look. “ You wanna come to my room ?” Baby said, her first words to him all night. Before Pirmin knew what was happening, Baby wagged her finger at him and cackled. Bad boy, Pirmin Ocampo! Very bad boy! Pirmin’s voice cracked in the retelling. “So much for trying to help!” he wailed to his wife.

Next we gave the job to Rosario Ledesma’s husband. And like clockwork, another accusation came the following Thursday, this time out of Baby’s own mouth. “That one — so fast with the hands!” she said, jerking her chin after Vic Ledesma. He’d hurried past her into the gambling den. The charge appeared to tickle rather than offend her. We sat and waited, through her wretched laughter, for specifics. But “If you’re gonna touch, touch ” was all she added. “Don’t pretend you want a cigarette.”

Rosario later cornered Vic Ledesma, who winced. “I didn’t want to waste your time with something so absurd,” he said. “We were in the car, and I reached over to the glove box for a smoke. Right then was when she crossed her legs. So naturally, my hand brushed her knee by accident! And she started howling like I made a dirty joke.”

The thought of Fidel Bautista, Pirmin Ocampo, and Vic Ledesma as lusty wolves was enough to make us choke on our adobo. We’d met our husbands in high school, in college, at our first jobs. “Before his balls had fully dropped,” as Rita Espiritu put it. They’d waited for us, more or less patiently, when we were virgins who imagined sex as the great typhoon that would destroy our grades, our futures, and our reputations. They studied business and engineering so they’d never have to work the soil or serve a master. Our mothers’ sad, hard lives had taught us just how much a man’s good looks and silky voice were worth. Our fathers never wore a suit or wedding ring between them. “Mine chased skirts instead of looking for a job,” said Paz Evora. “Mine drank away what he could win at jueteng, ” said Fe Zaldivar. “Mine was a dog,” said Vilma Bustamante, “who couldn’t learn how to sit or stay.”

Now we had something better than lovers. We had companions. Providers. Sex with these men hadn’t ended, but it was quiet, civil, and grown-up, a world away from dirt floors or one-room tenements. “No ‘Lullaby of the Straw Mat’ for my kids,” said Rita Espiritu. “I fell asleep hearing all my brothers and sisters being conceived.” Now, even as the babies played outside and the teens turned up their Walkmans, even with the carpets underneath us and the air conditioners above, we locked the master bedroom doors and pursed our lips together so no one would hear us shout. Our husbands apologized for their receding hairlines, their potbellies, the sweat and petrol odors that lingered on their skin. Let me shower first. We hoped to hide our stretch marks and cesarean scars. Hang on and I’ll close the light. Dentures, for the teeth that rotted in our early twenties, floated in cups on our nightstands. Rico Salonga talked to Luz as he would to his mother. Are you tired? Feeling up to it? Dulce deLumen steered Nestor like a hospital patient. Careful not to aggravate your back.

Once in a while we did see flashes of lust, like signals from a far planet. Ver Bustamante couldn’t keep his hands off Vilma when she wore the abaya a student had given her. Searching for me in all that fabric drove him crazy. Paz Evora’s husband was roughest in bed on days he’d argued with his Arab boss. Let’s pray Alfonso gets this promotion, or I’ll be sore all week. But mostly they were tender if not inventive lovers. And if they sometimes took us before we were ready, if they sometimes shrank from us before we felt a thing, if they fell asleep faster than we could get started, we remembered their long hours and hard days, the work that gave us beds and private rooms in the first place.