Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

That Friday our little ones marched up the church aisle to receive their First Communion. As the priest made the Sign of the Cross over their veils and barong Tagalog s, Rowena Cruz’s army of truth seekers learned that they had stormed Baby’s house a few hours too late.

“She’s out of your hair now,” whispered Rita Espiritu from her pew. “She won’t bother anyone here again.”

For Rita — along with Flor, Lourdes, Paz, and Rosario — had remembered that the Arabs had their own solution to the Baby problem. And — for her own good, for our suffering friends and the very sanity of our beloved circle — they’d deployed it. A British obstetrician, one of Flor Bautista’s colleagues, had accompanied them a few days earlier to visit Baby. I’ve seen women in your predicament give birth in handcuffs, warned the doctor, just before they went to jail. Baby was advised to catch the next plane to Manila. This is Bahrain, Lourdes Ocampo reminded her, not Olongapo City. Even the so-called playground of the Gulf had no room for an unwed mother. You’re in enough trouble as it is, Flor Bautista said. Without a job, Baby had already jeopardized her status on the island once over. “Repatriation,” said Rosario Ledesma peacefully. It’s got a nicer ring to it than “prison,” don’t you think? Money was quickly pooled for a plane ticket. At the consulate, Efren Espiritu managed to smooth over the snag of Baby’s expired work visa.

Those of us just learning of this mission stared, with jaws ajar, as our First Communicants filed back from the altar. We should have known the only law that could contain her was the one that ruled us all. And we did start to feel better, as our friends predicted. Knowing Baby had left the island balmed our hearts, unclenched our muscles. That this all happened during Ramadan renewed our awe and obligation toward our hosts. “The Arabs are fasting,” we reminded the children when the Mass was over. “Show them your respect.” They crouched into the footwells of our cars to crunch their Jordan almonds and chocolate eggs in secret.

We never did find out who had betrayed his wife with Baby. Or if indeed she’d faked the scandal, just to watch us squirm. In any case, our husbands went to work the next day and the next, loosening their ties at night and dumping their briefcases on the sofa, as they always had. We schooled our growing teens in deodorant and maxi pads. We helped the little ones with end-of-year quizzes and construction-paper crafts. Our families would expect us home in a few weeks, not far from where we knew that Baby, by the end of summer, would give birth.

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We reunited in the fall and saw each other often, though our parties didn’t happen every Thursday as before. In Baby’s wake we shrank a little from routine, from rituals that might invite disruption. We were a little warier, too, of the katulong who came to our houses to share our food and accept our hand-me-downs. For the first time they seemed capable of harming us. And yet none of them “pulled a Baby” on us, as Lourdes Ocampo termed it, that year. In fact, they acted shyer and more self-effacing than before, as if atoning on behalf of Baby, ashamed that one of their own had wronged us so, afraid we might suspect them of such wickedness. By the time Dolly and Bongbong announced that they were expecting their first child, all was well. They even named Paz and Alfonso Evora as the godparents.

Some of our husbands walked a narrower line after the Baby scandal. Vilma Bustamante joked that if she’d known her house would turn into this wonderland of flowers, cards, candy, balloons, and jewelry, she might have hired someone like Baby to shake things up years ago. And some husbands swung in the opposite direction. It served Dulce right, Nestor deLumen believed, for taking him for granted, that she was not so certain of him anymore. He came home later and drank more, realizing for the first time in their marriage that he could.

Our babies started to complain about us calling them our babies. This upset us less than knowing they’d grow older still — old enough to understand that we would always call them babies, old enough to ignore anything we said altogether.

That year Hope Espiritu and Arvin Ledesma graduated from high school. Faith Salonga was admitted to Columbia University in New York, while Joseph Ocampo barely eked his way into his mother’s alma mater in the Philippines. These were always moments of reflection for us: the larger world brought in, the reminder that we’d all move from this island sometime, our success gauged by how far our children had surpassed us. “When do you leave?” they asked each other, when acceptances arrived from Baltimore or London or Sydney. The question was not if, not “Will you go?” for we’d assumed that all along. The island was a way station, never a home.

Over the years we toasted each other and scattered to Amsterdam, Chicago, Jackson Heights, Vancouver. For a time, we had to tell all our new acquaintances what Bahrain was. A small desert island off the coast of Saudi Arabia. Then came the nineties, and a war that put this strange hot chapter of our lives on the map. Two decades later, we watched from living rooms in Toronto and Dallas and Honolulu as the Pearl Monument, once a fixture in our lives, the roundabout through which we drove our children to the park or ice cream shop, was razed to the ground, its white fragments like the shattered bones of a whale.

Our children grew into jobs and families of their own. They married so often outside the community it no longer surprised us. Poor Chad Bustamante even had to convince his parents, when he proposed to a Filipina, that he’d done so out of love, not duty. Some had children without marrying at all. When we met our hybrid grandchildren, with their hyphenated names, we almost wept at their beauty. We couldn’t stop touching their hair or trying in vain to name the color of their mesmerizing eyes. In school they learned Spanish, French, Arabic, Mandarin, or Hindi. “ ‘Tagalog School’ is not really a thing,” said Heather Bautista, who couldn’t well instruct her kids in things she barely remembered herself. “Anyway,” our children reminded us, “it’s not as if they can use it in more than one country.” We almost mentioned the Filipino who bused our table in Germany and the Filipina who cleaned our cabin on a cruise ship to Alaska, but this wasn’t what they meant, and we knew it.

Some of our marriages didn’t last all that transnational drift. Over the years we heard that Dulce deLumen was now Nestor’s ex-wife, and that Fe Zaldivar had become a stepmother. And somewhere outside Palo Alto, Flor Bautista lived alone — happily, so far as we knew. We never thought we’d leave our husbands or take up with other women’s, like villainesses in some soap opera. But some of us formed shadow families of our own, after all. We boarded buses, crossed whole continents on trains, or watched the lights of our old cities shrink as we climbed into the sky. We moved into apartments whose leaks and leases we would have to handle on our own; we lay awake in single beds, sensing that we’d snipped a cord not just from home but from the law of gravity itself, and if we tumbled off the planet altogether no one, for a while, might know.

What all this did was get us thinking again, for the first time in years, about Baby, the woman who had once been enemy and outcast to us. Now we were outcasts, of a certain sort, as well. Time had toppled our pillars of domestic and family life without her help. It might be overstating things to say we’ve walked a mile in Baby’s high-heeled shoes; we had advantages she didn’t, after all, to ease our lonely exile from the land of perfect wife- and motherhood. But now we do know something, do we not, of what it is to be the woman other women hope not to become? The world’s so big, it has exploded our old ideas, and we’re not the people who condemned her then. We’ve wondered if she too has changed. Whenever we hear Baby, a not-uncommon name in Echo Park or Cabbagetown or Daly City, we turn to check for that familiar pair of slender legs, that orange head of hair.