Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

—

They’ve closed the bridge’s westbound lane. Everyone else is streaming east out of the city, as far from the smoke as they can get. Not all of them move fast. Some stop at the pink cables and snap pictures. Even if you had a camera with you, you wouldn’t need to. You will not forget the way the towers look today. Like chimneys of a house the sea has swallowed.

At the river, cops are waving west the only cars allowed into the city: ambulances and their own.

But there has got to be a way into the city.

Desperate, you remember a man you once overheard, in a deli, talking to his friend. The man had sworn off all American women. “They’re just so hard on you,” he said. “The foreign girls appreciate what we can do for them.”

His friend had doubts about finding a wife abroad.

“Just try it, man. I like FilipinaFinder-dot-com. Or WorldWideWed. Be careful, though. A lot of them these days are business women, if you catch my drift.”

He meant that some women would play a man — or many men, that is — for fools. They made a job of visiting and being visited, their schedules all booked up with fiancés who paid their passage back and forth to different cities, meeting future in-laws who would plan and go to weddings where the bride didn’t show up.

“They always say they’re nursing students,” said the expert. “What’s nicer than a nurse, right?”

I was right, John had said. My wife’s nurses are Filipina.

You look down at the clogs your friend at church swears by, and at your pale blue skirt. On any other day, you wouldn’t dare. You wouldn’t cross the street. You wouldn’t stand at the plaza’s edge, or wave at the ambulance approaching the mouth of the bridge.

May God forgive you, Esmeralda.

It slows. An EMT rolls down the passenger window.

“Elmhurst, right?” he says. He nods at your shoes and blue uniform, sees what he wants to see.

You nod back once.

“There’s room for one more in the back.”

—

John must have gone to a meeting, or the men’s room, the night your dustrag came too close and moved his mouse an inch or so across his desk. This happened sometimes, and not just with John. The screens woke from their floating windows and filled up again with numbers. Or sometimes, in John’s case, words. An e-mail he had yet to send, in its white window. You didn’t read them — weren’t supposed to, didn’t want to, and would never have, that night, except your eye caught on the one word you could not ignore.

Your name.

Esmeralda — when’s the last time you heard such a chintzy, soapy, froufrou name? Ridiculous.

You froze, looked at the door. You kept your gloved hands, with their Windex bottle and their dustrag, where they were, and moved your eyes down quickly, in case he came back.

…Thanks for taking time with me the other night. Not sure (don’t want to imagine) where I’d be without someone to talk to about this, and I’m hoping — trying — not to need much more than to talk about it.

It comes down to the vow, right? In sickness and in health. Not “in health, and some amount of sickness I can bear.”

Even the setup’s a bad soap opera: “I met someone” (even the words sound pitiful to me, a married-man cliché). And of all people, the woman who cleans my office every night. Who even HAS a name like Esmeralda anymore? Esmeralda — when’s the last time you heard such a chintzy, soapy, froufrou name? Ridiculous. And yet. I met her, I went home, I turned the bookshelves upside down to find The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to keep the name in my head. To have something to say to her the next day.

I can’t remember the last time I stayed up late to read a book, the last time I cared what happened next. But now I sneak them in at work, an addict. I still read to Anne — she would have wanted that, I think — but not those long old books. I started off with those, to tease her. And I thought, superstitiously, that more pages would keep her alive longer. Then it got to where I couldn’t tell if she could hear the words, take any of it in. I know I stopped hearing them. Now I read her magazines and children’s books. Is that sick, am I trying to get rid of her, without knowing it?

Meanwhile I bring Hunchback to the office, wait for openings to read it to the cleaning lady.

This woman — Esmeralda — has a story. Sad one. No money, very little love. Some luck, I’ll give her that — some priest took pity on her the day she was supposed to go back to the Philippines, gave her a job cleaning his church on Barclay Street. But if you add it up — all the shit she’s eaten, from the dirt floor she was born on to the village that’s been leaching off her all these years, I think she wins, between us, despite Anne. But I feel happy hearing it from her. Is that fucked up? I hear about her hopeless junkie brother and my heart feels lighter, knowing someone else out there loves someone who doesn’t exist anymore, though he’s there, the same and not the same. It’s not just that — not just, her story’s like my story and “we get each other.” It’s that I’m thinking about stories, other people’s, in a way I haven’t since before Anne got so sick. I ride the elevator, look at passengers, consider lives outside of my own misery for once. I pity Esmeralda, and other people — I hear Anne’s voice: that’s patronizing —but it’s a refreshing alternative to pitying myself. I watch her — Esmeralda, cleaning windows — and she’s opened something, let some air and light into the sickroom.

There’s the animal part of it too. No doubt about it. You’ve spent your life proving it can be turned off, kept under control — no sympathy from you on this front, I get that. But it must be said, so you don’t think I’m making high-minded excuses. It’s about sex, for sure — but also survival. I keep thinking about being close to someone who’s not dying.

We’re all dying, I can hear you saying. Maybe.

Remember being young, in summer, our first jobs — how dusk, the 5 or 6 or 7 p.m. hour — used to feel? The best part of the day — possibility, freedom — starting. Fifteen years now it’s meant something else for me: getting ready to go home to Anne, the beginning of another long night. Now Esmeralda comes in, between 5 and 6, and part of me is punching out of my shift at the Y again, at quitting time.

I think of Anne, of who she was, of who we were to each other — two best friends in love — and I can’t see her saying, “Don’t. You signed a piece of paper.” Too dickish? Too convenient? Does every lowlife think of his situation as the one technicality? The person I would ask about this can’t answer now. Lucky you…

You panicked. Turned away from the screen and started dusting, anything — a file cabinet, even the wall, then looked over your shoulder, like a fugitive. You wish you’d knocked his coffee down, the picture frame, instead. Those things could go back to their places. But this screen, this window — you couldn’t put it back. You heard the words inside your brain, even when you shut your eyes. Embarrassment, a slippery disgust slid through you, as if you’d seen a naked photograph he meant to hide. Or found some private trash inside his bin. You sprayed the screens and wiped, as if Windexing the words away.

And the screens did darken; the little windows floated back. It worked!

When John returned, you made sure to be far from his computer.

“Es!” he cried. You could have fainted.

Confusion, like an illness, tied you up inside. You vowed never to come near the lip of his desk again. Seeing your name, yourself, in his words, as he saw you— froufrou, dirt floor, cleaning lady, of all people —you winced. And yet, these words too: happy, air and light, the best part of the day. For weeks you couldn’t clean his office without flushing at the cheeks, feeling a mist above your lip. What kind of schoolgirl silliness was this? You cursed him for it. Called up every dirty word you’d ever learned from fights or movies, here or in the Philippines. Fuckshitjerkoffthedevilsonofawhore!