Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

—

That night I lay in my parents’ bedroom. Jet lag and the whir of an electric fan kept me awake. Somewhere above me a gecko made its loud clicking noise, and I was no longer used to the Manila heat. But I refused to sleep any closer to my father, even if it meant losing out on the AC.

Down the hall, he groaned nonstop, as if to say, unless he slept, no one would.

Growing up in this house, I used to hear other noises from him at night. I must have been four or five years old, lying where he did now, the first time a lowing through the wall made me sit up. Until it had echoed once or twice, I didn’t know the voice was his. My father sounded more like a flagellant on Good Friday, parading through the streets of Tondo. I thought my mother had found a way to strike back: that he was the one, this time, suffering and forced to beg.

I rushed to the door they’d forgotten to close, and detected my parents’ shapes in the dark. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Naked, but hidden from the waist down by my mother. She knelt, a sheet around her shoulders, wiping the floor with a washcloth. And though she was at his feet, though her shadow rose and fell as she cleaned, as if bowing to a king, my father did not look to be in charge at all. He peeled the lids off his eyes, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth. His skin was waxen with sweat. Stripped and drained, limp and compromised — he could not have hit her, in this state.

Then he saw me in the doorway. “What now?” he said, alert again, his fists starting to lock.

My mother startled. “Anak!” She pointed past me, the wet washcloth covering her hand like a bandage. “Get out!”

I ran out to the yard. Not to escape him, but because I knew he’d punish her for every second of my presence there.

This was before I’d learned much about sex; I was too young to be disgusted by it. For a while after that, whenever I heard him groan in the darkness, I didn’t know enough to pull my pillow over my ears or run outside in embarrassment. Instead my father’s baying, and his stupor afterward, put me under a kind of spell. I’d listen through the cinder-block wall, believing he had fallen out of power, was in pain. Whatever else he might do to my mother, at any other hour, during this shimmering nighttime transaction he was the conquered one.

—

A swarm of aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins’ children descended on the house early the next morning. I passed out all my pasalubong, or homecoming gifts: handheld digital games, pencil-and-stationery sets, duty-free liquor, nuts and chocolates I’d stockpiled on layovers in Honolulu and Tokyo. A balikbayan knew better than to show up empty-handed.

After the gifts came the inquisition. How cold was it in America, how often did it snow? I kept my lines brief. I had a role to perform: the balikbayan, who worked hard and missed home but didn’t complain, who’d moved up in New York but wasn’t down on Manila. “You get used to the winters,” I said. I didn’t tell them I loved the snow, was built for the American cold, and felt, upon entering my first job in a thermostat-controlled pharmacy, that I’d come home. What did I miss most about the Philippines? “The food, and Filipinos,” I said. “Good thing the nurses always bring me lumpia and let me tag along to Sunday Mass.” But my days in New York never involved Mass or lumpia: outside of work, I spent my free time exercising at the gym, or cleaning my apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of a building made of steel and glass. What about women — was there someone? An American? “The hospital keeps me busy,” I said. “No one special enough yet to meet you.” I didn’t describe the women who sometimes spent the night with me, how they chattered nonstop, intimidated by the tidy home I kept. “Is this an apartment or a lab?” said one, glancing at my countertops. “Are we getting laid here, or embalmed?” asked another, under the tightly tucked bedspread. In every case, I found a reason to stop calling: false modesty, too loud a voice, careless toothpaste spatters around the bathroom sink. Any time a woman opened her mouth and I could imagine myself clapping a hand over it, pinning her to the bed, I knew that my father still breathed somewhere inside of me. I couldn’t risk repeating his life.

The questions ended when the karaoke began. Bebot, my cousin’s son, had hooked the monitor of my old Commodore computer, outgrown since I first bought it in New York, to a DVD player. When he fed it a karaoke disc, song lyrics and video footage of couples on the beach appeared in green screen. I took on “Kawawang Cowboy” (Pathetic Cowboy), a Tagalog satire of “Rhinestone Cowboy,” to show I remembered my Tagalog and to cover my lack of singing talent with silliness. “A pathetic cowboy,” I sang. “I wish I could afford some bubble gum / Instead of dried-up salty Chinese plum….” The family roared. In New York, the nurses would have shooed us out of any hospital. But here no one worried about disturbing my father, who’d loved karaoke and had a gift for it. In a voice like wine and honey, he used to croon everything from Elvis Presley to classic Tagalog love songs. Even I had to admit that, back then, his signature “Fly Me to the Moon” was charming.

My mother scuttled through our living-room reunion like a servant, pulled in opposite directions by sick groans and the sari-sari bell. I thought again of the Succorol, but stayed in my seat. Twice — first in Tagalog, then in English — I had taken a pharmacist’s oath to tell the truth and uphold the law. People lost jobs and licenses for less. If our suppliers discovered their mistake, called all their clients and somehow — between time stamps, shift schedules, signatures, and security footage — found me out, I could land in jail, to say nothing of the damage to my name with colleagues and the department head who’d trusted me with inventory to begin with. Deceit of any kind was a foreign country to me. As a child, I’d never so much as shoplifted a comic book, or lied to a teacher, or cheated at a game of cards. This discipline earned me perfect grades in high school, scholarships through college, my first job at a Manila drugstore, a doctor of pharmacy degree from my school’s brother university in New York, fast promotions at the hospital. Whenever I saw classmates copy each other’s homework or make faces behind the priests’ backs, I thought of my father, and how he too must have started small on the path to worse.

I considered hiring a live-in nurse, but my mother was the kind of woman who waited on even the people she’d paid to serve us, back when we could afford them: the laundress, the gardener, the yaya who watched me before I started school. Now she did the same for relatives who covered sari-sari shifts and friends who visited them. They all ate at our table and helped themselves to free snacks and sodas from the store. A paid nurse would only give her another plate to wash, another chair to pull out.

The next time the bell rang, I followed my mother into the kitchen and through the screen door. Away from my family’s relentless yammering, the sari-sari felt like a sanctuary again: in but not of the house, and cooler than the crowded living room. My mother helped a customer, then gazed at the baby monitor, perched up on a shelf between jars of Spanish shortbread and tamarind candy.

“I’ve got a gun without a bullet and a pocket without money,” she turned to me and sang, off-key. “You inherited my singing voice, anak. Sorry.”

“Apologize to your family,” I said. “They had to listen to it.” From the shelf I picked one of her favorites: pastillas de leche, soft mini-logs made with sugar and carabao ’s milk. My mother had a sweet tooth that didn’t match her frame. I set the yellow box on the counter and reached into my pocket.