Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“So he’s a gentleman,” we told Flor Bautista, imagining Fidel’s bifocals and bald pate as he circled his car to open Baby’s door. “Would you expect any less of him? It’s just wasted on her. ”

“Only she would take Pirmin’s help as a proposition,” we told Lourdes Ocampo.

“Can you blame Vic,” we asked Rosario Ledesma, “for needing to relieve some stress around that woman?”

Our husbands found themselves in a pickle then. On the one hand we still insisted on their duty as gentlemen. “Cuckoo or not,” Rowena said to Domingo Cruz, “I can’t put her on a bus while all the other helpers get a ride.” On the other hand, any man who drove Baby home risked more than just her allegations. Even the least jealous wife among us couldn’t resist questioning her designated driver afterward.

“Did Baby flirt with you on the ride to Adliya?” Fe asked Jose Zaldivar.

“Do you find Baby beautiful?” Paz asked Alfonso Evora.

“Would you consider it,” Vilma asked Ver Bustamante, “in a different life?”

Bringing Home Baby, as our husbands called it, became the final penalty for the man who scored lowest at the races.

—

November brought us cooler days, and we started to gather outdoors. Our children dove for coins in the neighborhood swimming pools. Our teens bobbed like buoys in the waters off the public beach. We couldn’t turn Baby away from these parties any more than we could send her home on a public bus afterward. We decided to get used to her, the way a village grows to tolerate its fool. “Here comes Baby,” we’d say, at the late-arriving clink of bracelets and gust of Opium. “You know Baby,” we’d say, when her long, painted talons waved away our food. We chalked up any tales of driver-side lechery to Baby just being Baby again. In any case, we’d get a break from her soon enough. By early December we’d booked our plane tickets home to the Philippines.

We liked to spend Christmas and New Year’s in Manila, keeping the children out of school for two extra weeks to make the trip worthwhile. Our husbands joined us for part of this, but the helpers, of course, stayed on-island all year long. Before the holiday, we gathered at Fe Zaldivar’s house to collect the letters, gifts, and envelopes of cash they wanted to send home.

“And you, Baby?” asked Rowena Cruz. “Anything we can deliver to your family?”

Baby was sitting near the door, tapping her fingernails against her cheek. Without leaning forward, she scanned the denim vests, the tennis shoes, the designer logos the katulong had steam-ironed onto cheap clothes: Members Only, Benetton, a Lacoste crocodile facing left.

“Thanks-no,” she said.

“Strange,” said Rosario Ledesma, as we cooked up the year’s last fiesta in the kitchen, “to travel so far and have no thought of your loved ones back home.”

“Maybe she has no loved ones back home,” Rowena Cruz allowed.

“But everyone needs help back home,” snapped Luz Salonga. “You could be an orphan or an only child and still do better by the Philippines than blowing all your pay on jewelry and press-on nails.”

“Still,” said Vilma Bustamante, “it’s not as if I’m dying to deliver packages to go-go bars.”

We agreed we’d have to draw straws for any mission to Olongapo City.

In exchange for our courier services, the helpers would check on our husbands while we were gone. If they felt inspired to brew some nilaga, dust some shelves, or even do a little laundry when they stopped by, so much the better. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, we rode bumpy buses from Manila and swaying boats to outer islands. We arrived at tin shacks, where Totoy’s mother or Tiny’s brother spoke to us in dialects we didn’t know. Our brains, grasping for what foreign words we had in store, could only give us shukran and inshallah —phrase-book Arabic that didn’t serve us here.

—

The holiday melted away; it always did. We returned in January, some of us with our mothers in tow. We gave them guest bedrooms, allowances, rides to the mall. And one by one, before the Feast of the Conversion, they wanted to go home. “Your sister’s sick,” said Dulce deLumen’s mother. “Your brother lost another job,” said Paz Evora’s. Someone in the Philippines always needed them more than we did. I see you’re doing just fine on your own. Bahrain’s empty streets spooked them; the air con gave them goose bumps.

And so our Thursday parties resumed. We re-created the hams and rice cakes we’d eaten over Christmas and added new cassettes to our Minus One collections. Our husbands reopened their gambling dens. The babies destroyed the last of their new board games and stuffed animals. The teens discovered compact discs and shut themselves up in their rooms to play Depeche Mode and the Beastie Boys on repeat. Amid all our hostessing and gathering, we didn’t notice, right away, who was missing. We heard it from the helpers first.

“Baby’s found a place of her own,” announced her former roommate, Girlie.

“She drives herself to work now,” Dolly added, “instead of taking the bus.”

Later that week, at a traffic light, Lourdes Ocampo stopped and saw a black Saab to her left. Sunlight glanced off its windows, and a pair of dark glasses hid the driver’s eyes. But there was no mistaking the orange hair, said Lourdes, or the long pale fingers on the steering wheel.

No one knew where the money came from. Baby didn’t seem to be scrimping in other areas. Flor Bautista saw her buy a Persian rug in Adliya, while Vilma Bustamante spotted her leaving a pricey hair salon downtown. At the Suq, Rita Espiritu came across Baby trying on the nose chains and slave bracelets we’d refused to let our daughters wear.

“She must be moonlighting, then?” said Rowena Cruz, our constant Pollyanna. “Before her night shift at the bank? Maybe she’s been cleaning houses, or watching someone’s kids for extra cash.”

Whatever its source, Baby did not come explain her new windfall to us. She avoided our parties in February — even after her former flatmates accosted her at the time clock, even after Luz Salonga approached her in the parking lot outside Jawad’s Cold Store. She may as well have donned a niqab for all we saw and understood of her new life.

By March, we’d all come to the same conclusion.

“What a disgrace,” said Luz Salonga.

“I suppose that cleaning offices on its own,” said Dulce deLumen, “can’t keep you in jewelry and perfume for long.”

“She joined the family business after all,” said Rita Espiritu, who didn’t mean the U.S. Navy.

Perhaps a Bahraini banker had eyed her shape while she vacuumed his office one night. Perhaps a British investor had copped a feel in the elevator. Perhaps Baby herself, her feet and shoulders aching more than usual one day, had wondered if this country of pearls and oil and gold, white yachts and ice-cold shopping complexes, might offer richer rewards for other exertions. In any case, something nudged her back into her mother’s line of work, the seedy industry that claimed so many girls back home. We’d wanted to believe this island didn’t deal in all of that, but our husbands called us naïve. “What do you think the lobby of the Two Seas Hotel is for?” they said. “Those girls aren’t wearing housemaid uniforms.”

“Imagine,” said Fe Zaldivar, “coming all the way to the Middle East to do what she could’ve done in Olongapo.”

“It’s one thing to do it there, ” said Rosario Ledesma. “People lump us all together here.” This was true, and mostly worked in our favor. Now and then the sheikh himself declared his love for Filipinos, our cheerful, hardworking, and obedient tribe. And sometimes Bahraini women mistook us for their maids while shopping. That’ll teach me to dress better, we’d joke, when the helpers couldn’t hear.