In the Country (11 page)

At Sabine's viewing, someone said if she'd survived the stroke she would have never been the same. This way she got to die young, and be burned forever in our hearts and brains as beautiful. Someone else said,
People don't think beauty's an accomplishment. Maybe they're right, but close your eyes for just a moment and imagine this world without beautiful people in it. Is that a world you'd want to live in?

For a while after her death I was convinced that every stiff neck or cramp, every nauseated feeling, every moment of forgetfulness, was a ruptured aneurysm. If I woke up and sunlight coming through the window felt too bright, I thought,
Is this it? Am I dying?
I still couldn't accept I was alone, I guess—or that I'd always been alone and now I just knew it. No matter how close we had gotten, no matter how well I knew her, there was this fact of death that set Sabine apart from me forever. The trick her body pulled had made me frightened, frankly, of my own body. I wanted, even tried, to forget I had a body altogether.

When I flushed the toilet now, the water cycled in the bowl slowly and very loudly. The faucet, too, was loud. On the floor next to the plastic pail was a bar of soap, rough as pumice. I washed my hands as quickly as I could. I pushed open the bathroom door and stared again into the square mirror just before switching off the light. Then I heard a rustle in the corridor behind me. Afraid to see another rodent, I closed the toilet lid and sat on top, hugging my knees. My eyes adjusted enough to make out the jut of my cheekbones in the mirror, and a moving silhouette beyond my shoulder.

She was different from the woman I had seen outside the restaurant. This white lady was old. Her hair, long and wild against her shoulders, was the shade of ice. I stood and turned to approach her. At the sleeves and hem of her nightgown, I saw age spots all over her hands and feet. It seemed she had been tall—almost as tall as me, before old age hunched her spine. She was by herself, and not so brown as the women I had seen around the city. I wondered what she would do: turn and flee right then, or run just as I plucked a strand of her frost-white hair as proof? Or would she fade, right in front of me, into the darkness of the empty hallway?

I took another step forward. That was when she screamed and ran straight at me. She jumped my shoulders, and I fell back against the floor. Shouting things in gibberish, or maybe Tagalog, she clawed at me. There was the ringing metal scent of blood, and then I was looking at her liver-spotted fist up close. I didn't see stars so much as lightning in my head, a nerve in my brain flashing brighter than the others.

A light came on from another door along the corridor.
“Lola!”
Jorge's friend Will called from his room, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her from me. He talked in their language until she calmed down, then added in English, “Alice is our friend, it's OK.” I touched my nose and looked at the blood on my fingertips. “God, Alice, I'm so sorry,” he said. “My
lola
lived through the war. She's so old. I'm sorry.”

Lights were turning on one after another now; Will's sister came from her room to see about the commotion as well. “Did we wake her?” Jorge asked about the baby. He didn't know where to look or who to apologize to first. He went into the kitchen and came out with two wet washcloths, one filled with ice. “Where'd she nail you?” he asked. I reached for the part of my face that was still ringing. My cheekbone felt tight, like it was being pushed against, and my nose ached. Jorge dabbed at the blood under my nostrils with the washcloth and placed the bag of ice onto my cheek.

Everyone was quiet for a moment, and then Jorge said, “Alice, meet Will's grandmother.
Lola,
meet Alice Anders.”

“There's Manila for you,” Will said. “Everybody but their mother under the same roof.”

“Everybody
and
their mother,” I corrected.

“Exactly,” said Will. He whispered to his grandmother and guided her down the hall back to her room.

“She's not all there,” Jorge said softly into my ear. “Anyone who doesn't look familiar, she assumes is an intruder. You're not the first.”

In the morning I woke inches away from Jorge's scar. It was longer than I had thought, spanning the tip of his nose to his upper lip. I reached up to trace it with my finger, and he opened his eyes. “What is this from?” I whispered.

He drew away from me and sat up, covering his mouth.

“Sorry.”

“I had a cleft lip, when I was born.” He grinned the plastic kind of grin that twinkles, in a toothpaste ad.
“GrinGivers International made my beam come true!”

“I did a thing for them once!” I cried.

He looked at me, incredulous. “You're kind of an idiot,” he said, without laughter or forgiveness. He yawned, looking at a watch he'd taken off and set on the floor beside us. “We're late for work.” Taking my chin between his fingers, he turned my face aside—a bit roughly, I felt. “I'll tell them it's my fault,” he said. “I'll explain.”

Outside, a heavy white mist hung over Balete Drive. In daylight I saw that the tree branches reached so far up that they made arches over the street. The hanging vines thumped and swished over the windshield. Jorge hummed the Alice song while driving.

In the studio, they were furious. It hadn't looked so bad to me the night before, just a redness in some patches of my face. Nothing a good makeup artist couldn't fix. Now the skin was swelling below my eye. Jorge tried to explain, but what could he do? We were paid to look perfect.

“A lot of girls were up for this job,” said Carmen, massaging her temples.

It was the first time since I was eighteen that I'd been sent home with a cancellation fee.

Jorge was speaking rapid-fire Tagalog with a member of the crew when I approached him for the last time. A kind of morning-after shyness kicked in that I hadn't felt earlier, and I handed him my comp card. “If you're ever in New York,” I said, “we should hang out. Call my booker.” It felt less desperate than saying “Call me.” I had an image of him serenading me in the Lower East Side, at another karaoke bar I'd been to, and I liked it.

He glanced at the comp card and then at me, like a client at a go-see trying to remember who I was. I thought,
I should have a new card made up.
This old one had some tacky lingerie shots that I was no longer proud of, and my hair was longer now, with fewer highlights. I hadn't taken measurements in over a year.

“I've never had to leave my country to find work,” he said, “but thanks.”

The front desk of the chapel-like hotel called me a cab. I was glad to see a regular sedan and not another stretch limousine roll into the driveway. Inside I wanted to relax, just let my mind grow blank and stare at the scattered bodies selling candy and cigarettes and garlands, but the driver was another talker.

“He doesn't deserve you,” he said, looking at my bruised face in the mirror. “Walk away, is what I tell my daughters. A guy hurts you like that? Walk away.”

He had it wrong, but for a second I pitied myself. Tears came to my eyes.

“Bruises or no,” said the driver, “you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. But where have I seen you before?”

That made me laugh.

“American?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Vacation?”

“No,” I said. “Work.”

Of course he asked me what work, and I told him. “No kidding!” he said. “Where should I look for you?”

I said, “Liberty Denim.”

“
That
's where I've seen you before!” he said. “My daughters will go crazy! Wait till I tell them. They won't believe.”

I suppose he
had
seen me before, whoever the previous Liberty Denim girl had been, and would see me again, whichever girl they picked next. “I quit,” I said, deciding and believing it right then. “This Manila job was my last.”

“Quit? But you're so young! Too young to retire.”

I figured I could lie about my age and keep on selling sticky drinks. I could lie about my experience and try to wait tables or tend bar. I wouldn't eat or buy too much. Did the Czech or Argentine or Senegalese girl still need a place to live? Would my mother take me in, now that I'd repaid her failure with my own?

“You'll miss it,” the driver said.

“Sure.” But I didn't think so. At most, I'd miss hotel rooms: coming back to sleep in a clean slate every night, every morning my footprints vacuumed out of the carpet.

It took two hours to make it through the midmorning traffic to the airport. The driver heaved my suitcase from his trunk. “If you don't mind, miss,” he said. “If it's not too much trouble?” He made a little rectangle with his fingers.

“OK,” I said.

“For my girls. They'll go crazy. But I need evidence, or they will not believe.”

“OK.” I wasn't famous. People didn't ask for photos often, but once in a while they did.

He rummaged in the glove compartment and came back with a disposable camera. I expected him to look into the viewfinder as I smiled. But he hugged me to his side and aimed the lens at arm's length toward our faces, including himself in the frame. Of course! What kind of proof would I offer, on my own? Without him in it, the picture could be anyone's, from anywhere.

I knew by heart how the angle would distort us: the driver's face, closer to the curve of the lens, would look large and bloated, and I'd seem pale and sharp beside him. “One, two, three, cheese,” he said, and snapped the plastic button.

I'd been at this work for years. I could imagine almost anything and then become it, visually speaking. For this very last picture, I put aside the all-American sex-heat and became the white lady of Balete Drive, cold and not exactly there. I made like moonlight flooding the camera lens. I receded to a bright puddle and dissolved.
Perfect. Right there. Here we go.
By the time they touched my image—blurred it, altered me—there would be nothing left.

Every weekend, in Bahrain in the 1980s, we took turns throwing a party. Luz Salonga hosted the first one that September of '86, and as always, we crowded into her kitchen to help. Rowena Cruz soaked rice noodles at the sink. Dulce deLumen made spring roll skins from scratch, painting batter onto the pan with a brush. Rosario Ledesma threaded sweet pork onto thin bamboo sticks. Over the clatter of dishes and the crackle of oil and the smells of vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, and fermented fish settling on our clothes and skin, we laughed about children and gossiped about marriage, the noise as much a comfort to us as the food itself.

Soon our teenagers came downstairs, whining of boredom. We lent them the car keys and sent them off to the shopping mall for an hour or two. They returned with rented Betamax tapes and watched them upstairs: episodes of
Top of the Pops,
movies that the Ministry of Culture had cleaned up beforehand. (There was no lobster dinner in
Flashdance,
so far as our teens knew; no montage of oily limbs in leotards.) Flor Bautista's son Rommel had hair on his chin already; Fe Zaldivar's daughter Mary was starting to fill out her blouses. We felt we could do worse than raise them on this small Islamic desert island, where some women veiled from head to toe, where cleavage and crotches were blurry bands on-screen.

Meanwhile the babies, as we'd forever call our younger children, tore through the house with their dolls and robots, trucks and ponies. Our “Catholic accidents,” Rita Espiritu liked to say—she was the vulgar one. We'd given birth to them here on the island, in our late thirties and early forties. The teens, who acted more like junior aunts and uncles to them than older siblings, had helped us name them: Jason and Vanessa, Stephanie and Bruce, names they'd accuse us of mispronouncing almost as soon as they could speak. Our babies learned math from Irish nuns and played soccer with Bahraini children and changed their accents at will. “Watch her bob that head from side to side like a
Bumbai,
” said Paz Evora of her daughter Ashley, whose best friends at school were Indians. At noon and sundown, when the muezzin's voice piped from the mosques, our babies ran to the windows.
Allahu akbar!
they sang, as if they knew what it meant.

As for our husbands, they retreated to a room where smoking was allowed and, implicitly, women and children were not. They turned on the television and spread the Sports pages of the
Manama Times
between them. A horse track in Riffa held races every week, but gambling there was
haraam,
of course. And so our husbands made their secret bets indoors, on the same notepads where we wrote the grocery lists. Now and then a great male chorus erupted from the den, hooting at wins, groaning at losses, ribbing one another for bad calls. They waxed authoritative about odds and breeds, trifectas and photo finishes. For speed and grace, said Domingo Cruz, no horse could match the white Arabian stallion whose genetics had not changed in four thousand years. Efren Espiritu talked up the sleeper potential of mixed breeds, which combined their parents' best traits and evolved out of their worst. This was our husbands' surging, primal release from the neckties and briefcases and paper-stacked desks that bound them through the week. The wagers, the beer, and the sizzling pork bits they ate with their fingers broke just about every law sacred to their Arab superiors. Men who'd seemed pummeled into defeat by the office, us wives, “bills to pay and mouths to feed,” relatives back home in the Philippines who took them for millionaires; men from whom we looked away in embarrassment on weeknights, when they sat on the sofa picking trouser-sock lint from between their toes; these same men became brash and young again, every Thursday afternoon in their improvised gambling dens.

In the evening we came together to eat and to sing into the Minus One, a double-cassette stereo system that let us dial down a song's vocal track and step in for Tony Bennett or Stevie Wonder. Holding printed lyric booklets (this was before karaoke gave us words on a screen), we crooned into the microphone: “Feelings,” “My Way,” “Three Times a Lady.” Sometimes Vilma Bustamante's husband changed the lyrics to suit the occasion and Xeroxed them for all to follow. “Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)” became “Manama (Is Good Enough for Me),” to welcome a family who'd just arrived on the island. “I Made It Through the Rain” became “I Made It Through Bahrain,” for a family on its way elsewhere.

Outside the walls of Luz Salonga's house, beyond the fence around her yard, past her street and the gate to our compound, lay the oil fields and refinery that employed most of our husbands. We lived and worked in Bahrain at the pleasure of a people who mystified us. Everything we knew about the Arabs one day could be voided by what we learned the next. Luz Salonga, the most religious one of us, admired their devotion. “I see them kneeling by the highway at all times of day,” she said, “while I can barely sell the kids on bedtime prayers.” But the Arabs that Fe Zaldivar knew worshiped only sports cars and gold jewelry, mansions and shopping trips to London. To Dulce deLumen, who worked in an emergency room,
Arab
meant incompetent and backward. “The best of their doctors couldn't heal a paper cut,” she said. But Rosario Ledesma didn't think a country could get this rich, and have all of Asia at its feet, without some special brand of intelligence. Every morning Vilma Bustamante passed their marble palaces in Saar. Every afternoon Paz Evora drove by crumbling concrete villages in A'ali. It didn't matter that our own community had its kings and hobos, geniuses and fools, heathens and believers; this didn't keep us from wanting a more perfect knowledge of our hosts, a clearer definition. We'd arrived on their island like the itinerant father in the fairy tale about a beauty and a beast, our houses fully furnished by some unseen master. Would he reveal himself to be a prince or monster? We decided early to behave ourselves rather than find out. In their shops and on their streets, we wore hems no higher than the knee, sleeves no shorter than the elbow, necklines that would please a nun. We lived like villagers at the foot of a volcano, hoping never to offend the gods who governed our harvest and our wealth.

We were the lucky ones, and we knew it. Flor Bautista, a nurse, delivered babies at the state hospital. Vilma Bustamante taught English at a girls' school. Paz Evora was a social worker, Lourdes Ocampo an accountant. The rest of us, despite the advanced degrees we'd collected and the résumés we'd built back home, spent our days baking cakes and hanging curtains now, carpooling and grocery shopping, even reading Harlequins or watching soaps while our diplomas gathered dust in file drawers. We'd married engineers, doctors, diplomats, and executives, who earned enough these days to keep us at home.

Other women had come from our country to clean floors or mind rich people's children. Other men had come from our country to pump gas or bus tables, drive cabs or repair the pipeline to Saudi Arabia. These
katulong
—“helpers,” as we called them—were often younger but always aging faster than we were, their skin leathering from the desert sun, their spines hunching over brooms and basins, their lungs fried by bleach and petroleum vapors. They lived not with spouses or children but with each other, five or six
katulong
to a flat. Or else they lived with employers, who kept their passports and work contracts under lock and key. These shy and sunburned servants couldn't host us in their homes if they wanted to.

And so we welcomed them, every Thursday, to eat and sing with us. When they arrived, in jeans and T-shirts our teens had outgrown, we all but hoisted them onto our shoulders. We lifted their feet onto Moroccan poufs or camel-saddle ottomans. We refused the housemaids' help in our sweltering kitchens. We sent the bachelors to watch TV and swig Black Label with our husbands.

Sometimes we tried to match the helpers up. We seated Dolly, a janitress, next to Bongbong, a gardener. “Doesn't Dolly sing like a bird?” we said, or “Have you heard Bongbong impersonate his
amo
?” We found them pen pals in Manila, snapping photographs and drafting letters for them. We owed them a chance at the life we enjoyed. At night we sent them home with leftovers. “The children would rather eat
machboos
anyway,” we insisted. Before bed, we prayed for them. The helpers came from farming provinces, like our fathers. They spoke Tagalog with country accents, like our mothers. Our parents too had fled droughts and typhoons in their youth, hoping for steady servant work in Manila. Helping these helpers, who'd traveled even farther, felt like home.

In October we met Baby, the island's newest
katulong.
She'd come to clean offices at the Gulf Bank, and moved in with five other women who worked there too. When her flatmates brought Baby along to our next party, we expected someone just like them: another sweet, humble church mouse, who'd somehow strike us as child and granny all at once.

We guessed wrong. Before we ever saw Baby, we heard the click of her high heels on the deLumens' doorstep. And before we said hello, we smelled her perfume, a striking mix of cinnamon and roses.

She was taller than her flatmates, taller than us, taller than most of our husbands and even some of our teenagers, whom we'd raised on fresh vegetables and fortified milk. Her heels added more height still. She had the fair skin and narrow nose we'd all tried for as young girls in Manila, before we understood that creams and clothespins wouldn't help. Her hair, the improbable color of Sunkist soda, followed the slant of her jaw, longest at the chin and shortest at the nape, with bangs that stood in front like stiff feathers.

“Pasok!”
we cried, but Baby wasn't waiting for permission. She peered past us to the living room, as if entering a shop instead of a home. By the time we said
“Kumusta?”
her long legs had made it halfway down the corridor. We hadn't known that shoes like hers existed, with their translucent heels and straps: from a distance she appeared to walk on air, with just the balls of her bare feet. When at last she turned to us, we felt like saleswomen who'd kept her from browsing the shelves in peace.

“Hi,”
Baby said in English. Her voice was low and rough, as if the pipes had rusted.

Dulce deLumen invited her to the buffet table.
“Thanks-no,”
she said in English. There was a gap, wide enough to fit a skeleton key, between her two front teeth. These jutted so far out she couldn't close her lips without pouting.

Did she have a rough journey? we asked in Tagalog. Baby shook her head.
“When I'm on the plane, I sleep the whole hours,”
she said, again in English.

Was she finding Bahrain too hot?
“Not so,”
she said.

What did she think of her new employer?
“She's OK also.”
(Although we knew from her flatmates that their boss at the Gulf Bank was a man.)

All very common errors, for someone in the helper class. Why wouldn't Baby just relax and speak Tagalog? “She says she forgot it already,” said her flatmate Girlie. How this could have happened to someone who'd just arrived on the island, none of us knew.

“She'll come around,” said Fe Zaldivar. We too had landed vowing to stick to English—to impress others, to practice, to avoid embarrassing our children. Although the teens still found plenty to ridicule in our accents, nuns in convent school had at least taught us to pronounce our
f
's and
v
's correctly, to know our verb tenses and distinguish genders, to translate
naman
differently depending on the context. But at these parties we spoke Tagalog even to the babies, who barely understood it, for the same reason we served
pancit
and not
shawarma.
Between Arab bosses and Indian subordinates, British traffic laws and American television, we craved familiar flavors and the sound of a language we knew well.

Why would she refuse our food? we wondered, glancing at Baby from the buffet. One look at her bony arms and tiny waist told us she had no need to “reduce.” She sat on an armchair in the corner, drumming her knee with dagger-shaped fingernails.

“No amount of ‘English' can disguise a voice like that,” said Lourdes Ocampo.

“Or hide such teeth,” agreed Rosario Ledesma.

“She opened her mouth,” said Rita Espiritu, “and suddenly I was back at the Quiapo wet market, haggling with the
tindera
over milkfish.”

“Maybe that's why she tries not to say too much?” said Rowena Cruz, who had a soft heart and a breathless angel's voice. “Maybe she's ashamed of those roots.”

So we tried harder. We filled a plate for Baby in case she changed her mind. We tried to forge some bonds at our expense.

“Baby, I'd kill for skin like yours,” said Paz Evora, pointing at the rough brown patches on her own cheeks. “These were supposed to fade after I gave birth, but never did. I blame this climate.”

“What a beautiful color,” said Vilma Bustamante, gazing at Baby's hair while fingering her own split ends. “Is it hard work, to keep a cut like that? It's all I can do to pluck my grays out once a month.” Baby had to bleach it first, the flatmates told us later, before coating the hair with orange.

“Just like Cinderella's,” said Fe Zaldivar, pointing her cracked, unpolished toes at Baby's shoes. “I can't last an hour on anything higher than two inches. Just say the word if yours start hurting, I've got spare
tsinelas
here somewhere.”

During the Minus One hour we seated Dodong, a gas station attendant, next to Baby. But when he offered her the microphone, she shook her head and waved it off, her bangles clinking wrist to elbow like ice cubes in a cocktail glass. No one could get anywhere with her. Even Lourdes Ocampo, our gold-medal gossip, struggled for the single tidbit Baby gave us of her life that day: that she came from Olongapo City, on Subic Bay, some seventy miles northwest of Manila.