Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

—

Main Street looks different early in the morning. The jade pendants and roast ducks have not shown up yet in the Chinese shop windows. A strip of orange tape is stretched across the top of the stairs you would have taken to catch the train.

A nearby cop confirms. No service. Not today.

But there has got to be a way into the city. There was a way nineteen years ago, wasn’t there? When the Guzman family brought you with them from Manila to New York, only to send you back? I wish we could afford to keep you, Esmeralda, Mrs. Guzman said, once she had learned just how expensive New York was. People in this city do it for themselves. She handed you a one-way ticket back to Manila and the number of a good family there who needed a maid. You found a way to stay then, and you will now. In your bag you hook your thumb into the chaplet, whose gold-plate knobs have been rubbed black from years of prayer.

You turn and walk south underneath the rusty, quiet elevated tracks.

City people pride themselves on walking everywhere. “We’re more like Europe than like the rest of America that way,” Doris has said. John says his brothers live inside their cars (an insult). My nieces can’t go ten blocks in the city without whining. What’s wrong with cars? you’d like to know. Your clogs crunch over pebbles, twigs, and broken glass. Your feet are rioting already, every pain you’ve been contending with for years fired up. The pinpricks — quick and sharp along your arches — started at sixteen, the year you left your family’s farm for Manila, to nanny and clean house for a city cousin who had married well. The bruise between your third and fourth left toes — a swollen nerve, your nurse friend tells you, but to you it feels round, like a pebble in a horse’s hoof — grew the year that cousin moved to Qatar and bequeathed you, like a car or a perfectly good table, to the Guzmans. The L-shaped tendon from your right shin to the instep has been sore for six years, as long as you’ve had your green card. Since meeting John, you’ve noticed both your big-toe knuckles have gone numb.

Farther down the avenue, the Chinese characters turn into spoken Spanish in the streets. Small children in blue uniforms stream out of school, canceled today. At first they laugh and babble, as kids do when they get a taste of freedom. Then some look up at their teachers, smell their parents’ fear.

“Why aren’t you at work?” says one girl to the father who’s arrived to pick her up.

You know some words in Spanish; you know trabajar and nunca and mañana.

One boy starts to cry. You think of carabao back home, who’d snort and stamp and know to head inland before a storm. One girl drifts from her class to join the crowd a block away. They’re gathered at the window of an electronics store, watching the news, again and again, on screen after screen after screen.

Only because you know a bit of Spanish do you catch the words la segunda torre. You would not, less than two miles back, have understood these whispers in Mandarin or Cantonese.

“Otro avión,” they’re saying.

“Ocurrió otra vez.”

—

Often, when you came in, he’d be reading. His screens would have gone dark, with white and red and green and blue windows that grew in size as they flew closer — meaning he hadn’t touched the keys in a while, and his computer was asleep. And he didn’t like just any book. He liked them thick as cement bricks, and probably as heavy: books to prop a steel door open. With tiny print on thin pages that crackled as he turned them. When a colleague knocked, John moved his mouse to send the flying windows away and hid the book under his desk, next to his shoes.

Or else he’d be typing away: an e-mail in a white window, so many lines of words that looked like they could add up to a thick book of their own. He’d click his way out of them when a colleague came, the way he’d hide his book.

He was writing to his family, his wife’s family, the doctors, lawyers, all the people needing answers about her, and what he planned to do. “It takes me so long to say things,” he said. “I don’t know why. The irony is, she was all about the phone. She always said she could take care of something in a two-minute call that I’d spend an hour e-mailing about. She thought I was long-winded. She’d look over my shoulder and say, No one’s gonna read all that. She thought most everyone was long-winded, including God and Tolstoy. I’m the crusty old one — I like novels long enough to age you while you read them. Ninety-nine percent of books should have been thirty-three percent shorter, she would say. She quantified a lot of things. Sometimes we wondered if the wrong one of us ended up in books and the wrong one in money.”

You bowed your head while changing out his garbage bag, his wife’s picture like an altar you’d just passed.

“Wow. That’s a lot I spewed out, Esmeralda. Let’s talk about you. You must e-mail all the time. With your family so far?”

You shook your head. “I don’t have a computer,” you said, thinking with pride of all the ones you’ve bought for people in your village. “I type too slow. My mother doesn’t know how to e-mail.”

“You get home to her much?” he asked, which set you off again. You, Esmeralda, whom nuns and priests and parents always praised for being such a quiet child. Doris likes to say, Nineteen years under one roof and that is news to me, whenever she learns anything about you.

“I always thought that once we bought the land,” you started, “I’d go home for good.”

But once those 1.6 hectares were all paid for, the dirt floor needed wood; the tin walls needed cinder blocks. Of course, a house that sturdy should also have faucets and a flush toilet. And even when the house was finished, there was always family to think about. Pepe ran off, but others came to need things in his place. Cousins had babies, who grew up to go to private school and college. Aunts and uncles got sick, needing medicine. And when they died, it cost money to bury them. Then there was the larger family: the village, and they knew about you too. The church could use a new roof after Typhoon Vera tore it off. Who else would pay for it? Who else could they depend upon? Not the sweet plantation daughters who ended up dancing go-go at Manila bars. Not the men who gave up looking for jobs in the capital and hunted scraps from garbage dumps instead.

“A trip home costs a lot of money,” you told John, “and time off work. My family needs some things more than I need a vacation.”

“And your brother, what does he do?” John asked.

You thought about it. “He gets into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“All the kinds.”

You told him about Pepe in grade four, sniffing glue and paint thinners with older friends. About his disappearance from the farm at twelve, and his return, months later, with a motorcycle. How he’d paid for it, no one could tell. About the accident on that motorcycle that scarred his face for good. About the botched electronics-store robbery that landed him in jail.

“He’s at the farm every few months,” you said. “He stays one day, a week, two weeks before he disappears again. If I stopped sending anything, who knows when my mother would see him?”

“I’m sorry.” John gave you the same eyes Doris did, when she asked if you got tired of supporting all those people. Doesn’t it get heavy, Esmeralda — the weight of the world?

You shrugged. “I think having no one to lean on you is worse.”

Sometimes it did get heavy, sure. But then, you did get to go home, each week on Sunday, to the one House and one Father who were never far away. Each day, His Book reminded you — chapter by chapter, verse by verse — what joy it was to serve, to bear another’s load. Those loads weren’t heavier than a crown of thorns, were they? No heavier than a cross.