Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

I stood in the foyer comforting Aroush until her tears and drool formed a damp spot on the shoulder of my blouse. I grew tired. Despite being smaller than a healthy five-year-old, Aroush felt solid and hefty in my arms. I sat down with her on the new gliding rocker in my living room.

At this time of day, I would normally have been waking up, descending the stairs to make my first cup of coffee. That kind of leisure had troubled me when I first became a housewife, at the age of thirty, the year we came to Bahrain. It felt not only dull but somehow criminal: I’d always worked at some job or other since I was twelve years old. And work was not a matter of choice for Minnie, who sent her wages home to a sick mother and school-age relatives in Manila. In college I had marched with tenant farmers on the Congress Building, and built a campus barricade with striking jeepney drivers, throwing firecrackers at the military helicopters overhead. It felt strange for all that activist fervor on behalf of working people to have gone down the gold-fixtured toilet and matching bidet of this house, once Ed and I moved here.

Aroush’s crying faded to a grunt, and then to rattled breathing. I sang her a song of greetings and good mornings that included both her name and mine. She cried again when I stood to install her in her recliner. I imagined Mrs. Mansour and her servants tiptoeing around Aroush because she cried so easily. A common, well-intentioned error. In fact children like Aroush needed more stimulation, not less, than regular ones. I stroked her hair, her thumbprinted cheek, and her knee; I turned on the chair’s massage function and sang some more.

Back in Manila, I had chosen my field for reasons I would never share with anyone. It seemed in college that if a girl was not rich, or beautiful enough to marry rich, then there were two honorable ways for her to survive: nursing, or teaching. Weak in science, I would not have made it through nursing school. Yet I had a medical kind of appetite for staring at disorders, at things gone gruesomely wrong in the body, which seemed wasted on ordinary teaching. I was drawn to special education, whose textbooks included pictures of collapsed spines and rock-like formations in the brain. I liked the sound the two words made together and the person I became in other people’s eyes when I uttered them. I told stories of afternoons spent coaxing antisocial boys out of bathroom stalls and of violent girls who bit me until the skin broke. “You’re brave, Sal,” people said. “I wouldn’t last a day.”

I guided Aroush’s hands over a stuffed terry-cloth bear, a satin blanket, a ball with knobs on its rubber surface. A cold tin rattle set her off again. The growths on her hands were buoyant to the touch, the rust-colored henna patterns drawn to perfection despite their uneven canvas. I wondered if the henna artist had special dispensation, like the Mansours’ Filipino servants, to enter Aroush’s bedroom, or if Mrs. Mansour knew how to paint the vines and flowers there herself.

She arrived at three o’clock sharp to pick up her daughter. “You must reward every response she shows, to any stimulus at all,” I told Mrs. Mansour. To demonstrate, I set the alarm clock one minute ahead and sat silently in front of Aroush, holding her hands, waiting for a reaction. Mrs. Mansour’s presence there seemed to require a performance on my part. The clock rang, and Aroush startled at the sound. “Good girl!” I cried, clapping my hands and exaggerating a smile. I kissed her cheek.

“How wonderful,” said Mrs. Mansour. She bent down and took Aroush into her arms, murmuring to her in Arabic. “Today, clocks; one day, symphonies. Right, Teacher?”

At fifty dinars an hour, I could hear Minnie saying, who was I to argue? I looked away as Mrs. Mansour covered Aroush with her veil and went to the door. “We will see you tomorrow, Teacher,” she said, her eyes misty with hope. “For the meantime, here is our gift to you.”

There was a basket on our front step the size of the cradle of Moses, its cellophane wrapping tied with a gold ribbon. Inside were tropical fruits and comfits I hadn’t seen since leaving the Philippines: sugar apples, bristly-skinned rambutans, strips of dried mango, shredded coconut preserve. I looked up to protest, but the gate had already clicked shut behind Mrs. Mansour and my little student.

—

At night I served Ed his dinner of pork and root vegetables. “How was your day?” he asked. My husband was always the first between us to ask how the day had gone — even in Bahrain, where on some days all I had to report was the price of cabbage, or the latest plot twists on Falcon Crest. Today I told him about Mrs. Mansour. “She seems to believe her daughter will be an astronaut or artist one day,” I said. “This limp, drooling, averbal, severely delayed child.”

Ed kept his face close to the bowl as he ate, chewing openmouthed while his spoon secured more. “Sweetheart, if you had tennis courts in your backyard and a separate wing for the servants, you might lose touch with reality too.” Bits of squash and potato landed on his place mat and the surrounding tablecloth. “How much did you say she was paying you?”

“Fifty an hour.”

“Dinars?”

“Dinars.”

“Not bad. Soon I’ll be here watching soaps, while you bring home the bacon.” Ed winked at me in the manner of people who cannot wink: both eyelids fluttered awkwardly, as if sand had blown into them.

In the Philippines, before marrying Ed, I had warned him that I did not want children; I worked with them, and I had no desire to bring my work home. Ed didn’t mind. “I’d make a lousy father anyway,” he had said. “I can’t imagine sharing you with anyone else.” When I gained weight during our first six sedentary months in Bahrain, Ed proclaimed himself a lucky man. “Now there’s more of you to love,” he said. He was a decent, doting husband, remarkably blind to my deficiencies. His devotion had once offered me an oasis: from gossipy friends and demanding family members, from challenged students and their challenging parents.

But now that we really did live on a desert island, I was finding myself less and less in need of that oasis. Here in Bahrain, where my daily stresses were so few, where television or groceries provided the most taxing strains on my attention, I’d grown more and more aware of what came with Ed’s constant, indestructible love. His incompetent winks. His noisy, desperate way of eating. The texture of his skin, baked rough and leathery by this new climate, and its now perpetual film of grease. The odors of sweat and petroleum on his body and in his clothes after a day’s work.

I had no right to find such fault with him, of course. Now that I brought in no part of the household income, was losing what looks I ever had, and could rarely even offer interesting conversation, some basic patience and loyalty were the least I could give Ed in exchange for his kindness. I owed him winks in return. I owed him my permission to sit at the dinner table in those damp clothes when he was too exhausted to shower or change. I owed him hums of sympathy when he complained about his job. And I owed him my dutiful, wifely laughter when he ridiculed those who worked with him.

If his day had been pleasant enough, Ed’s face would take on a goofy, simian expression at dinner, and he’d wag his head from side to side in imitation of his Indian subordinates. “The new Bumbai are so difficult to train,” he said now. “First of all, I can’t understand a word they’re saying. They’re like chickens clucking in boiling water. Vee are vorking as qvickly as vee can, sir. ” If he had suffered a bad day at work, I would also know it by Ed’s face: his features would contort with bitterness, and his voice would imitate, instead, the hard, thumping English in which his Arab superiors had scolded him.