In the Country (12 page)

Over the next few weeks the Gulf Bank janitresses—Dolly, Girlie, Tiny, Missy, and Pinkie—drew us a portrait of their vain, eccentric new flatmate. “Our very own Madame Marcos,” they called her, someone we couldn't imagine scrubbing a toilet or pushing a mop. Baby never cooked, they said. But her beauty regimen often disappeared such staples from the kitchen as eggs, sugar, milk, and mayonnaise, which she whipped into plasters that hardened on her face and stunk up the flat. She soaked her lace panties by hand, their bright dyes staining the bathroom sink. She took long bubble baths that left the tub with a frothy residue, like the inside of a drained milk shake glass. At night, she colonized the living room, following exercise videos at the very hour her flatmates hoped to catch
Dallas.

Baby's father, we learned, was an American seaman who'd been stationed at Subic during the Korean War. Her mother had worked as a hospitality girl outside the navy base. (We whispered these occupational euphemisms, curling our fingers in quotation marks:
“hostess,” “hospitality girl,” “guest relations officer.”
) As a child, Baby did meet her father on one or two of his liberties in Olongapo. “But once the war was over,” said Dolly, “he went home to his wife and kids in America. New Jersey, I think it was.”
Isn't that the way?
we all said. Baby's origins put an American twist on a story we'd all heard before. As children in the Philippines, we hardly knew a family that didn't have its second, secret, “shadow” family. Husbands left the provinces for Manila, wives left the Philippines for the Middle East, and all that parting from loved ones to provide for them got lonely. Years ago, Paz Evora had received phone calls from her father's pregnant mistress. Vilma Bustamante met a shadow nephew, fully grown, at her own brother's funeral. Lourdes Ocampo even began as a shadow daughter, though of course she didn't advertise it.

Girlie, who shared a room with her, told us Baby's scent was Opium by Yves Saint Laurent. The bottle, with its red lid and bamboo-leaf pattern, sat on Baby's window ledge, along with her mirror and makeup and assorted relics of her father: an anchor pin, an eagle patch, a fading snapshot of a freckled sailor in T-shirt and canvas cap. Here, before this little shrine, was where she liked to pluck her eyebrows and glue on her fingernails. “It's like the gulf between Bahrain and Saudi,” said Girlie, of the four-foot space between her side of the room and Baby's. On
her
window ledge, Girlie liked to pray the rosary, keep a Bible open to the day's scripture, and write home to her mother in Pangasinan.

Her flatmates never saw Baby pray, day or night. And because she slept till noon on Fridays, Baby never joined us at Our Lady of the Pillar, the island's only Catholic church. “Friday's when she gets her hair done,” Missy said, during coffee hour. The Pillar was the other place we gathered every weekend, like clockwork. We had our babies baptized there, by Indian priests, in banana-silk gowns we'd ordered from Manila. We forced our teens to sit through Bible Study, ignoring their fake colds or periods and complaints. In this adopted Muslim country, we worshiped with a vengeance. We fanned our sweating faces with the service bulletins through the scorching open-air Masses. What was a little desert heat, we figured, next to the fires that consumed Joan of Arc, the hair shirt under Saint Cecilia's wedding gown, the martyrdom of Agnes?

Every Thursday party ended like this: after the horse races and food and Minus One, our husbands drove the helpers home. “Door-to-door service!” the housemaid Minnie called it. It was the least we could do for the men and women who didn't own cars and rode the public bus to work on weekdays. And they couldn't thank us enough. “That's one less Pakistani next to me this week,” said Dolly, holding her nose. They praised our professional men for stooping to such a menial favor. “Engineer
na,
chauffeur
pa,
” said Pinkie.

Only Baby never thanked us. She seemed to take each ride as her birthright, her long legs striding to claim the passenger seat before any of her flatmates could.

One Thursday, after Flor Bautista stepped out of the living room, Baby began to laugh. Her low and rusty cackle startled us. We'd never seen her so much as crack a smile before. And there was something foul in it, a vulgar quality that made us drop our eyes into our laps. We crossed our legs, as if this would restore the room to decency. Then she stood up, bracelets and earrings jangling, and laughed her way to the bathroom.

We turned to the
katulong,
who dropped their eyes too. “It's the silliest thing,” her flatmate Tiny finally confessed. We could still hear Baby cackling through the bathroom door. “When Fidel Bautista drove us home last Thursday, Baby claimed that he had…
stared
at her.” Tiny tucked her chin to show us “where,” mortified.

Who, in recent time, could we accuse of staring at
our
breasts? The babies, three-four years ago, before we'd weaned them onto solid food?

“Poor Fidel,” said Pinkie. “All he did was open the car door.”

“Baby said something like ‘Wanna take a picture?' ” Missy added. “I never saw a brown man turn so red before.”

At this time Flor came back from the kitchen, and we changed the subject.

That night, as an experiment, we put Baby in Pirmin Ocampo's car. And when he came home, Pirmin swore: never again.

“What's the matter?” joked Lourdes Ocampo. “Couldn't you keep up with her English?”

But Pirmin didn't laugh. During the ride, he said, Girlie had mentioned a faulty light switch in the bedroom she and Baby shared. Pirmin, an electrical engineer, offered to take a look. “
You
wanna come to my
room
?” Baby said, her first words to him all night. Before Pirmin knew what was happening, Baby wagged her finger at him and cackled.
Bad boy, Pirmin Ocampo! Very bad boy!
Pirmin's voice cracked in the retelling. “So much for trying to help!” he wailed to his wife.

Next we gave the job to Rosario Ledesma's husband. And like clockwork, another accusation came the following Thursday, this time out of Baby's own mouth. “That one—so fast with the hands!” she said, jerking her chin after Vic Ledesma. He'd hurried past her into the gambling den. The charge appeared to tickle rather than offend her. We sat and waited, through her wretched laughter, for specifics. But “If you're gonna touch,
touch
” was all she added. “Don't pretend you want a cigarette.”

Rosario later cornered Vic Ledesma, who winced. “I didn't want to waste your time with something so absurd,” he said. “We were in the car, and I reached over to the glove box for a smoke. Right then was when she crossed her legs. So naturally, my hand brushed her knee by accident! And she started howling like I made a dirty joke.”

The thought of Fidel Bautista, Pirmin Ocampo, and Vic Ledesma as lusty wolves was enough to make us choke on our
adobo.
We'd met our husbands in high school, in college, at our first jobs. “Before his balls had fully dropped,” as Rita Espiritu put it. They'd waited for us, more or less patiently, when we were virgins who imagined sex as the great typhoon that would destroy our grades, our futures, and our reputations. They studied business and engineering so they'd never have to work the soil or serve a master. Our mothers' sad, hard lives had taught us just how much a man's good looks and silky voice were worth. Our fathers never wore a suit or wedding ring between them. “Mine chased skirts instead of looking for a job,” said Paz Evora. “Mine drank away what he could win at
jueteng,
” said Fe Zaldivar. “Mine was a dog,” said Vilma Bustamante, “who couldn't learn how to sit or stay.”

Now we had something better than lovers. We had companions. Providers. Sex with these men hadn't ended, but it was quiet, civil, and grown-up, a world away from dirt floors or one-room tenements. “No ‘Lullaby of the Straw Mat' for my kids,” said Rita Espiritu. “I fell asleep hearing all my brothers and sisters being conceived.” Now, even as the babies played outside and the teens turned up their Walkmans, even with the carpets underneath us and the air conditioners above, we locked the master bedroom doors and pursed our lips together so no one would hear us shout. Our husbands apologized for their receding hairlines, their potbellies, the sweat and petrol odors that lingered on their skin.
Let me shower first.
We hoped to hide our stretch marks and cesarean scars.
Hang on and I'll close the light.
Dentures, for the teeth that rotted in our early twenties, floated in cups on our nightstands. Rico Salonga talked to Luz as he would to his mother.
Are you tired? Feeling up to it?
Dulce deLumen steered Nestor like a hospital patient.
Careful not to aggravate your back.

Once in a while we did see flashes of lust, like signals from a far planet. Ver Bustamante couldn't keep his hands off Vilma when she wore the
abaya
a student had given her.
Searching for me in all that fabric drove him crazy.
Paz Evora's husband was roughest in bed on days he'd argued with his Arab boss.
Let's pray Alfonso gets this promotion, or I'll be sore all week.
But mostly they were tender if not inventive lovers. And if they sometimes took us before we were ready, if they sometimes shrank from us before we felt a thing, if they fell asleep faster than we could get started, we remembered their long hours and hard days, the work that gave us beds and private rooms in the first place.

“So he's a gentleman,” we told Flor Bautista, imagining Fidel's bifocals and bald pate as he circled his car to open Baby's door. “Would you expect any less of him? It's just wasted on
her.
”

“Only
she
would take Pirmin's help as a proposition,” we told Lourdes Ocampo.

“Can you blame Vic,” we asked Rosario Ledesma, “for needing to relieve some stress around that woman?”

Our husbands found themselves in a pickle then. On the one hand we still insisted on their duty as gentlemen. “Cuckoo or not,” Rowena said to Domingo Cruz, “I can't put her on a bus while all the other helpers get a ride.” On the other hand, any man who drove Baby home risked more than just her allegations. Even the least jealous wife among us couldn't resist questioning her designated driver afterward.

“Did Baby flirt with you on the ride to Adliya?” Fe asked Jose Zaldivar.

“Do you find Baby beautiful?” Paz asked Alfonso Evora.

“Would you consider it,” Vilma asked Ver Bustamante, “in a different life?”

Bringing Home Baby, as our husbands called it, became the final penalty for the man who scored lowest at the races.

November brought us cooler days, and we started to gather outdoors. Our children dove for coins in the neighborhood swimming pools. Our teens bobbed like buoys in the waters off the public beach. We couldn't turn Baby away from these parties any more than we could send her home on a public bus afterward. We decided to get used to her, the way a village grows to tolerate its fool. “Here comes Baby,” we'd say, at the late-arriving clink of bracelets and gust of Opium. “You know Baby,” we'd say, when her long, painted talons waved away our food. We chalked up any tales of driver-side lechery to Baby just being Baby again. In any case, we'd get a break from her soon enough. By early December we'd booked our plane tickets home to the Philippines.

We liked to spend Christmas and New Year's in Manila, keeping the children out of school for two extra weeks to make the trip worthwhile. Our husbands joined us for part of this, but the helpers, of course, stayed on-island all year long. Before the holiday, we gathered at Fe Zaldivar's house to collect the letters, gifts, and envelopes of cash they wanted to send home.

“And you, Baby?” asked Rowena Cruz. “Anything we can deliver to your family?”

Baby was sitting near the door, tapping her fingernails against her cheek. Without leaning forward, she scanned the denim vests, the tennis shoes, the designer logos the
katulong
had steam-ironed onto cheap clothes: Members Only, Benetton, a Lacoste crocodile facing left.

“Thanks-no,” she said.

“Strange,” said Rosario Ledesma, as we cooked up the year's last fiesta in the kitchen, “to travel so far and have no thought of your loved ones back home.”

“Maybe she has no loved ones back home,” Rowena Cruz allowed.

“But
everyone
needs help back home,” snapped Luz Salonga. “You could be an orphan or an only child and still do better by the Philippines than blowing all your pay on jewelry and press-on nails.”

“Still,” said Vilma Bustamante, “it's not as if I'm dying to deliver packages to go-go bars.”

We agreed we'd have to draw straws for any mission to Olongapo City.

In exchange for our courier services, the helpers would check on our husbands while we were gone. If they felt inspired to brew some
nilaga,
dust some shelves, or even do a little laundry when they stopped by, so much the better. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, we rode bumpy buses from Manila and swaying boats to outer islands. We arrived at tin shacks, where Totoy's mother or Tiny's brother spoke to us in dialects we didn't know. Our brains, grasping for what foreign words we had in store, could only give us
shukran
and
inshallah
—phrase-book Arabic that didn't serve us here.

The holiday melted away; it always did. We returned in January, some of us with our mothers in tow. We gave them guest bedrooms, allowances, rides to the mall. And one by one, before the Feast of the Conversion, they wanted to go home. “Your sister's sick,” said Dulce deLumen's mother. “Your brother lost another job,” said Paz Evora's. Someone in the Philippines always needed them more than we did.
I see you're doing just fine on your own.
Bahrain's empty streets spooked them; the air con gave them goose bumps.