Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “This is on the house.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“We’re a Filipino store; we don’t accept American dollars.”

“Nice try. I exchanged my money at the airport.”

“Your money’s no good here.”

“Stop giving things away for free.” I unwrapped one of the pastillas, knowing she wouldn’t start ahead of me. “That’s no way to keep a business afloat. There’s my first piece of advice for you.”

“It’s your second,” she said. “Yesterday you said it was too hot in here.” She pointed at the whirling blades on the ceiling. “People pay all kinds of money for good business advice, don’t they? So I’m not giving anything away for free.” She frowned as she bit into a pastilla, as if eating required all her concentration.

I took my hand from my pocket, and we crunched for a while without speaking.

“If I ever leave the hospital and open my own pharmacy,” I said, “it will be a lot like this.” I walked her through my rather old-fashioned vision: tinctures and powders in rows, a mortar and pestle here, a pill counter and weighing scale there.

“Oh, anak. ” I’d become her young son again, pointing at a mansion in Forbes Park or a gown in a shop window, luxuries I vowed to provide her in the future. My mother’s eyes filled with tears. “Your pharmacy will be fancier than this. And you could have built it years ago, if you hadn’t been busy helping us.”

That settled it. Nothing disturbed me more than the sight of her crying. It was time to end her call-button servitude, once and for all. “Ma,” I began, “I’ve given everyone their pasalubong, except you.”

The baby monitor groaned, bringing her to her feet. “You’ve given me so much already.” She wiped her eyes. “ Pastillas, free advice…” Setting down the call bell and the SERVICE sign, she rushed out, again, to attend to him.

I dropped five hundred pesos into the cashbox and brought the rest of the candy to my relatives in the living room. Once they’d emptied the box, I took it to my room and filled it with the patches of Succorol, then went to the sickroom and closed the door behind me.

My mother was pressing a washcloth to his forehead. “You’re a CEO, not a slave,” I said. “No more scurrying around. You’ve got a business to run.” I showed her the Succorol and how to use it, peeling a square from its adhesive backing and pressing it to my father’s side. “Remove this and apply a new one at the same time tomorrow,” I said. “On his back, or arm — anywhere there isn’t hair. Rotate or you’ll irritate the skin.” In my mother’s notebook I started a new page and recorded the dose. “So we don’t double up,” I said. “This isn’t Tylenol, if you know what I mean.”

We stayed until my father quieted and slept. I closed the yellow box, now full of Succorol, and placed it in the top drawer of the dresser. Before we left the sickroom, she touched my cheek. “You’re home,” she said. “All the pasalubong I need.”

In the living room the family had switched from karaoke to a Tagalog movie. Even in green it looked familiar, observing the rules of every melodrama I’d grown up watching: a bida, or hero, fought a kontrabida, or villain, for the love of a beautiful woman. The oldest films would even cast a pale, fair-haired American as the bida and a dusky, slick-mustachioed Spaniard as the kontrabida. Between them, the woman spent her time batting her eyelashes or being swept off her feet; peeking out from behind lace fans; fainting or weeping; clutching a handkerchief to her heart or dangling it from the window as a signal; being abducted at night, or rescued from a tower, or carried away on a horse. My relatives talked back to the screen as it played. Kiss! Kiss! they insisted, not with any delight or romantic excitement but in a nearly hostile way, heckling the protagonists and the plot to quit stalling and hurry along to the payoff. Even I joined the chorus. When, at last, the bida won the woman, we cheered and whistled, again not out of joy so much as a malicious sort of triumph. The script had succumbed, in the end, to our demands.

—

For three days my father dozed peacefully, waking only when my mother fed him or shifted a bedpan under his haunches. With the Succorol, he never groaned again. At first she ran to check his breathing throughout breakfast and lunch, but by the second day she trusted the baby monitor to show the rise and fall of his chest, his mouth dilating and shrinking. Seeing her relax, I slept better too.

Meanwhile the heat climbed to ninety-three degrees. I woke on my fourth night in the country feeling stained by my own sweat. Next door the air conditioner was humming, and I craved the cold rush that first greeted me there. If I could just stand in that doorway a moment, I might feel better and fall back asleep. I found my way through the dark living room, running my fingertips along the cinder block. The door creaked on my push. I stepped forward into the chill, but didn’t enjoy it for long.

My mother turned with a gasp, her eyes wide. Moonlight through the window fell onto the bed and, for the second time in my life, the silhouette of my father, bare-chested, the sheet pulled down to his waist. Her back, bent over him in a ministering pose, straightened up. “ Anak, don’t!” She raised her hand to stop me, mittened by a white washcloth, her body twisting to cover his.

I shut my eyes and the door. My stomach turned. I couldn’t go back to their bed now, the place where I’d first walked in on them. Like a child once again, I ran through the living room and kitchen for escape.

The screen door to the sari-sari was locked. I shook it, panicked, before remembering the loop hook above the handle. My fingers searched the wall to switch on the light and ceiling fan. I headed for the wicket as if I could flee through it, then climbed and sat on the counter. A mouse darted across the floor to its hiding place behind the freezer. Moths buzzed around the fluorescent strip above me, and another gecko made its clicking sound. It seemed that all the secret forms of life and movement that took place in this house at night had decided to expose themselves to me, and by the time I forced myself back to bed, the sweat on my neck and face had turned cold.

—

In the morning I heard a man’s voice through the wall. I startled, thinking at first that my father had recovered. Then I recognized it, from long-distance phone calls in New York. The doctor. My father was dead.

At his bedside the doctor was removing the buds of a stethoscope from his ears. He gave me a collegial nod. My mother paced across the room. Pins from her hair had scattered at the foot of the bed. “…peacefully,” Dr. Ramos was saying. “In his sleep.” But my father looked far from peaceful. In death his face had gone thuggish again, the underbite and squashed nose giving him as aggressive and paranoid a look as ever. In forty, fifty, sixty years this was how I might die: with my worst impulses petrified on my face.

My mother had stopped pacing but kept rubbing her hands flat against her lap, as if this time she couldn’t get them clean. “Loretta?” Dr. Ramos said. Only when he called her name a second time did I notice her head rolling backward, her eyes to their whites. I caught her just before she fainted to the floor.

“I’m sorry” were her first words upon coming to. Her eyes bounced from me to the doctor to my father.

“You’re in shock,” said Dr. Ramos. “Happens all the time.”

I opened the fan on the nightstand and waved it over her face. “Nothing to be sorry about,” I said.