Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Her feet were dusty in their rubber tsinelas. She was not in uniform but in a shapeless duster like the ones her mother wore. Only when I looked up did I recognize the cloud of curls and the dark indio face from school. Annelise, for her part, did not seem to remember me. Blunt and bold as she looked, her first words to me were polite. “Evening, sir,” she said. My mother would have approved: she liked when people understood that ours was an English-speaking household. “Your labandera cannot come today. I’m her daughter, Annelise.” Her voice was as forceful and as flat as a wooden spoon against a table. It was not a voice that would sing sweetly to you, or tell tales. “If you show me where the clothes are, I can start now.” I let Annelise into the house. Beside me, she trailed the powder-clean scent of fresh laundry.

A narrow stone paving led from our back door to the grass and the house’s outer wall. Clotheslines hung in between. Annelise surveyed the plastic basins, the steel sink and faucet, and the folded ironing board. She seemed accustomed to breezing into strangers’ houses to do the wash. She turned on the faucet, testing the water temperature with her fingers.

“Is your mother sick?” I called out, over the sound of water striking a basin.

Annelise seemed surprised that I should ask. “No. She just gave birth to a son.” She unfurled some lacy garment of my mother’s, scanning the front and back for stains.

Had I known that our laundress was expecting a child? She stooped and wore such tentlike clothes, it was odd to think of her in such terms at all. I suddenly realized with horror that, among the other laundry, Annelise would soon be scrubbing my briefs. I wheeled myself over the cracked, loosening cement and reached for my laundry basket. “These are clean,” I said, balancing the basket on my lap and using my other arm to retreat toward the house.

Annelise gave me a puzzled look, then shrugged and wiped her hands on her duster. “She was pregnant when she started here,” she said, as if she’d read my earlier thoughts. “You didn’t know what she looked like not pregnant.”

“Can I bring you anything?” I asked.

Most servants apologized shyly for so much as breathing or taking up space in a room. Annelise looked up from the wash and said, “Do you have a radio?”

I brought a small transistor from my room and set it on the windowsill between our yard and the kitchen.

“Thanks.” She smiled. “We don’t have one at home.” Drying her hands on her duster again, Annelise tuned the dial to a radionovela. The characters of Pusong Sinugatan (Wounded Heart) included Joe, an American soldier, and Reyna, a Manila debutante, who met fatefully in 1944. “A pair of star-crossed magkasintahan, ” the announcer called them. The radio was old and full of static. Shampoo jingles alternated with bombs and air-raid sirens. “After a word from our sponsors,” said the announcer, “we’ll find out what the Japs have done to Reyna’s beloved papa!” Annelise plunged her shining brown arms into the suds, unaware that I was listening along.

—

Our first coed Catechism took place at the Academy of Our Lady. The girls played with their skirt hems and pencil cases as we arrived. My classmates filled the spare desks along one wall of the room, leaving me only the space behind the very last row to park my chair. I spotted Annelise up front. Her curls hovered over a composition book. Sister Carol rapped her desk with a ruler to quiet us, and Father O’Connor said something about miracles.

Sister Carol directed us to a passage in Luke. “Annelise Moreno,” she called, for a first reader. The laundress’s daughter stood.

“A woman with a hemorrhage of twelve years’ duration,” Annelise began, “incurable at any doctor’s hands, came up behind Jesus and touched the tassel on his cloak.”

There was a murmur on the girls’ side of the room, and some of Annelise’s classmates giggled softly into their hands.

“Immediately her bleeding stopped,” continued Annelise. “Jesus asked, ‘Who touched me?’ ”

Two girls in the row before me turned to each other. “How fitting,” said one. “ She should touch that cloak!”

“Hemorrhage girl!” whispered the other. They giggled and then mumbled something else I couldn’t catch.

“Everyone disclaimed doing it, while Peter said—” Annelise began, then stopped and slammed her Bible shut. She whirled to face my corner of the room. I startled, briefly convinced that she was glaring at me. “Rose and Gemma, if you have something to say,” she called, “say it loud and to my face. Don’t cover your mouths. Let’s hear it.” Her voice was hot and full of challenge. The two girls in front of me crossed their legs and laced their fingers, then glanced at each other, wide-eyed.

“Miss Moreno!” Sister Carol rapped her ruler against the desk. “Were you not instructed to read a passage from the Bible?”

“I was, Sister Carol,” said Annelise, without lowering her voice.

“Then tell me, please: why do I seem to be hearing other words out of your mouth?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Those words were meant for Rose and Gemma.”

“I see. As a reminder, Miss Moreno, that teachers, not students, are in charge of classroom discipline, you may remain standing at your desk until I invite you to have a seat. Let’s have someone better able to follow instructions read where you left off.”

Annelise didn’t argue, but didn’t seem ashamed either, as she placed her hands at her sides and stood straight in her place. There was more giggling and murmuring. The pleats of her pinafore were perfectly ironed, but a single crease slanted down the back of her blouse. One fallen strand of her frizzled hair hung on to the wrinkle, stubbornly. I didn’t realize, till Annelise’s replacement began to read in a calm, dull voice, that Annelise’s had set my heart racing. I’d never heard a child speak to adults with such boldness, or stand almost with pride while being disciplined.

At the end of our lesson, after Sister Carol allowed Annelise to sit again, Father O’Connor brought out an offertory basket full of paper slips, which he shook gently. “It’s time to partner up for the fiesta,” he said. “Gentlemen, when I call you, please step forward and draw your lady’s name out of the hat.”

Students shifted in their seats. I believe it was fate that brought Annelise and me together, for Father O’Connor announced, as if on a whim, “Let’s start at the end of the alphabet today, and go backward from there.” He glanced at the roll. I had inherited my surname, like my handicap, from my grandfather, and — ever since Joel Zamora’s family had moved to Manila — always came last on the list. “Danny Wilson, Jr.,” said Father O’Connor.

Faces turned as Sister Carol helped widen an aisle for me. I rolled awkwardly to the front of the room. At each spin my wheels struck the legs of another girl’s desk, a sound that seemed to ring into the hallways. “Watch your step, Manny,” Ruben whispered. “You wouldn’t want to stub your toe.” The girls — each praying silently, I knew, for anyone but the class cripple — turned away as I passed, and fiddled with their girlish things: a gilt-edged Bible, mechanical pencils, a blue heart-shaped eraser whose left lobe was blackened and rubbed flat with use.

But I had a silent prayer of my own. I glanced at Annelise’s curls, and imagined their powdery scent, just before Father O’Connor lowered the basket before me. Was it Father O’Connor, or another priest, who had taught us to pray with pure and total trust that our prayers would be answered? I closed my eyes and reached for her name.