Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

And there wasn’t. The doctor assumed that my father had passed in a morphine-softened sleep, but now I wondered if he’d gone into cardiac arrest while my mother satisfied some dying wish. Perhaps this would haunt her in the days to come. The hair she usually pinned back hung loose around her face. But I felt calmer than I had the night before; there was no mystery. She’d served him to the end. I should have known she would.

—

In the basement of the Immaculate Conception Funeral Home, the mortician curved a sponge between his fingers, spackling my father’s face with brown grease. An American parlor would never have allowed me downstairs. But Manila wasn’t so strict, and I liked to keep a close eye on everyone I paid. The mortician had gone darker than my father’s current skin tone, closer to the shade he was before the illness. I wondered if my mother had shown him a photograph.

The funeral directors led us to their Holy Family room. “We asked for the penthouse,” I said. They apologized; a service was running long in their Epiphany suite. “Then tell them it’s time to leave.” My father had relatives coming from all over the archipelago to pay their respects, I explained — from all over the world, in fact. Again they were sorry, throwing in a sir: the funeral taking place in Epiphany was a child’s. “Did the child pay you in American dollars?” I asked. Doing business in Manila hardened something in me, the same muscle I’d observed in men who stood up in hospital rooms and did all the talking for their families. I focused on the French doors of the penthouse as we skated my father past the displaced mourners and their four-foot coffin.

Our family brought in plates of fried rice, barbecued chicken, pineapple salad in condensed milk, sandwich halves stacked in pyramids. Only the corpse, really, distinguished the wake from any other party. People kissed and caught up. Bebot fiddled with the green Commodore computer. My uncles set up speakers beside the guestbook and blew into the microphones: Testing, testing, one two three.

“Loretta, please eat,” an aunt was saying. “Next time we see you, you’ll be invisible.”

My mother accepted a cheese pimiento sandwich. Then the room started to fill with the family’s insistent clamor, and I longed for another escape. She looked like she could use that, too. My sandwich-pushing aunt noticed the bare platform around the coffin. “They call this a ‘full-service’ funeral parlor,” she said to me, “but apparently that does not include flowers.”

I saw my chance. “The flowers aren’t going to buy themselves,” I said, approaching my mother’s chair. “Shall we?”

She abandoned the sandwich and took my arm. We stepped out onto Araneta Avenue, Manila’s funeral district, walking past the parlor, stonemasons, chapels, coffin shops, and rent-a-hearse garages: one after another, like beads on a grim rosary. A rough and glittery dust filled the air, as if crematory ashes had mingled with fumes from the traffic.

We stopped at a flower stand outside the parlor. “How much?” I asked the vendor, pointing at a white spray of carnations and roses that my mother liked. I didn’t know what flowers cost. I never bought them in New York — not for promoted colleagues or sick friends, certainly not for women. Flowers reminded me of my father and the hangdog contrition that followed his nights of drinking: the swooping, romantic gestures that came after he’d blackened an eye or broken a bone.

“Five thousand pesos,” said the vendor, “plus fifty per letter on the banner.”

FONDEST REMEMBRANCES, the display models said. IN LOVING MEMORY.

“I can do two thousand,” I said, “banner included.”

The vendor shook his head. “This is difficult lettering, sir. The roses are imported.”

“That’s a pity.” I took my mother’s arm and headed for the next kiosk.

“Twenty-five hundred with banner,” the vendor shouted after us.

I walked on, to keep him guessing for a few paces, before doubling us back. I couldn’t have cared less about the cost of flowers. I simply wanted every peddler in the city to know he didn’t stand a chance against me.

None of the things I wished to say to my father were printable, so I took my mother’s suggestion: REST IN PEACE, YOUR LOVING FAMILY. We strolled the avenue waiting for our banner. “Don’t let anyone try that on the sari-sari, ” I said.

“I don’t think anyone could,” she said. “You still haggle like the best of them.”

“What choice do I have? They can read balikbayan written on my forehead.”

“Ah, no — it’s too long to fit there.” Her words hung in the air a moment before I realized I should smile. Ten years before, I had arrived in New York with ideas of what I’d miss most about my mother: her cooking, her voice, the smell of rice and detergent in her skin and hair. I did not expect to miss her humor, the small wisecracks that escaped her mouth sometimes, often from behind her fingers, hard to hear.

When we returned for the flowers, my mother reached out as if to carry them. I waved her away as I paid. “This thing is nearly twice your size.”

“You underestimate me,” she said, pretending to flex her muscles.

—

After the memorial service, my uncles offered to stay with the body overnight. The last of our relatives were expected in the morning. We would bury my father in the afternoon.

Back in Mabini Heights, my old bedroom was mine again. The air conditioner seemed louder now that I was alone in the room, but I slept easily. I dreamed of winter in New York, walking alone in snow, pulling my collar up against the cold.

I woke in a sweat again. The AC had stopped. I turned the dial, but the vents stayed silent. I flipped the wall switch and got no light.

A brownout. My first since returning to Manila.

Moonlight from the window told me only a few hours had passed. A muffled sound, like crying, came through the wall. I stood, ready to console my mother on the sofa or at the kitchen table. But the living room was empty, the kitchen dark. The only light I saw flickered weakly from the sari-sari. Approaching the screen door, I saw a candle burning on the counter. Was she keeping vigil? Praying? I squinted in the shadows.

She certainly wasn’t crying. In fact, she was laughing — a strange, sleepy laugh that dominoed through the sari-sari. She reached along the counter and picked up a white square. Succorol. I watched her slide it through the wicket. Then she was repeating my instructions, in my accent.

“This isn’t Tylenol, if you know what I mean.” She drawled the words, like a cowboy trying to speak Tagalog, as if I’d lived in Texas, not New York, for the past ten years. She reached toward the wicket and came back with a fistful of cash.

I turned from the screen to the darkness, as if a film projector behind me had faltered. Her laughter followed me through the living room as I tripped against the furniture and nearly missed the sickroom doorway in the dark. I opened the drawer where we’d stored the yellow box. Six Succorol patches left, of the thirty I’d brought. Five days had passed since I’d arrived, four since I’d given them to her.

My skin itched with the humidity. I grabbed the fan beside my father’s bed and flapped it at myself, then felt ridiculous and snapped it shut. Nothing about my mother — not her voice, soft as a lullaby, when I could hear it; not her hands, drying themselves on her lap; not her posture, a constant curtsy — squared with the woman in the sari-sari. I had to erase that strange laughter from my mind, the tongue that wet her thumb before it counted out the money.

Returning to the dresser, I fingered the box of Succorol. Would the world end if I indulged this once, crossed another boundary, broke one more rule?