In the Country (14 page)

Some of us, by the time Minus One began, couldn't help but speculate. “If it's true,” said Vilma Bustamante, “just for the sake of argument, if it
was
someone's husband—whose?”

Maybe Domingo Cruz, said Dulce deLumen; Rowena could be oblivious sometimes.

Maybe Jose Zaldivar, said Luz Salonga; he only pretended to be so busy and so religious.

Not Efren Espiritu, said Rosario Ledesma. Rita would have his head or his something-else on a platter and he knew it.

Our husbands remained our allies, as we rated our friends' marriages, proud of how our own stacked up.

But later, on the drive home, Baby's words floated back to Dulce deLumen.
Where did you think he was?
By the time her children were dozing in the backseat, Vilma Bustamante thought of the Christmases and summers spent four thousand miles away from Ver, the spaces between aerograms, phone calls, sentimental cassettes she'd recorded of the children's voices and mailed back to Bahrain. Pop music blasted from the foam Walkman ears on Luz Salonga's daughter.
Where would I be without you?
Luz could hear, the lines of a love song turned sinister.

After she'd tucked in her little one, Fe questioned Jose Zaldivar, her brain tormented with the math of dates and alibis. “Absolutely not!” said her husband, slamming their bedroom door closed. “Good God. Never.”

Domingo Cruz turned off the bedside lamp beside a hysterical Rowena. “I won't dignify this nonsense with an answer.”

For Rosario,
no
was enough. “She had me there for a second,” she said, kissing Vic Ledesma good night, sorry to have doubted him for even that long. But others couldn't shake their suspicions. Dulce woke Nestor deLumen in the middle of the night in tears. “If this were true, which it is not,” said an exasperated Nestor, “could you blame us? Who decided that a wife and mother's not a woman anymore? Would it kill you to wear a little perfume, make some effort?” Rico Salonga confessed to a horrified Luz that, although he'd been a faithful man, he didn't see the big deal about mistresses, so long as wife and kids were well provided for. Vilma pulled it out of Ver Bustamante that several Christmases ago, while she and the children were in Manila, he'd consoled one of the
katulong
in their living room. “Minnie was homesick and couldn't stop crying,” he said. An arm around her shoulders turned into a kiss, a shamefaced mutual apology, and nothing more. They'd recognized their one-time error and religiously avoided one another since. “As for this Baby,” Ver said (he was the one crying now), “I barely know what she looks like. Please believe me.”

We quarreled ourselves hoarse. Some of us grew so sure of a past betrayal we felt it like a poison in our gut. Fe demanded details on the fling Jose Zaldivar would not admit to: “When did it start? Last Christmas? On a night you drove her home? Did you do it here, in our bed? Just tell me if you're still seeing her. Are there others?” Dulce accused Nestor deLumen of practical stupidities: “Ever hear of a condom? The Pill? What kind of idiot knocks another woman up, with everyone you've got depending on you, here and back home?” Luz banished Rico Salonga to the sofa. Vilma Bustamante threatened revenge. Rowena Cruz threatened to tell the children. Dulce deLumen even threatened divorce.

The heat had been rising through all of May, and for those of us who feared the worst, our simplest indoor chores—laundry, balancing the checkbook—felt no safer than minesweeping. Vilma Bustamante tiptoed through her own home, glancing over her shoulder, alert for lipstick stains and crumpled receipts. “Men stray,” said Dulce deLumen's mother over the phone one night. “It's a fact of nature.” What did we expect? That they could live on aerograms and cassettes alone?

Finally, Rowena Cruz led some of us—Dulce, Fe, Luz, and Vilma—in a march to Baby's house. “Woman to woman, we're begging you,” Rowena shouted at the window shades. “We haven't eaten and we haven't slept. Put us out of our misery, Baby, and tell us who did this.” We watched the door, like cops on a stakeout. Rowena of all people might have kicked it down, if it hadn't given so easily on her push.

Inside we found the same thick carpets and sleek furniture that had greeted us in our own homes when we first arrived. We stepped carefully through the rooms, cringing when the floorboards creaked. The bathroom smelled of mint shampoo but contained none of Baby's trademark trinkets or cosmetics. “Baby,” we called, finding a black
abaya
on the closet floor. “Baby?” we called, louder, as we traipsed through every room a second time, in case we'd missed her. After a while, we stopped expecting a response.

That Friday our little ones marched up the church aisle to receive their First Communion. As the priest made the Sign of the Cross over their veils and
barong Tagalog
s
,
Rowena Cruz's army of truth seekers learned that they had stormed Baby's house a few hours too late.

“She's out of your hair now,” whispered Rita Espiritu from her pew. “She won't bother anyone here again.”

For Rita—along with Flor, Lourdes, Paz, and Rosario—had remembered that the Arabs had their own solution to the Baby problem. And—for her own good, for our suffering friends and the very sanity of our beloved circle—they'd deployed it. A British obstetrician, one of Flor Bautista's colleagues, had accompanied them a few days earlier to visit Baby.
I've seen women in your predicament give birth in handcuffs,
warned the doctor,
just before they went to jail.
Baby was advised to catch the next plane to Manila.
This is Bahrain,
Lourdes Ocampo reminded her,
not Olongapo City.
Even the so-called playground of the Gulf had no room for an unwed mother.
You're in enough trouble as it is,
Flor Bautista said. Without a job, Baby had already jeopardized her status on the island once over.
“Repatriation,”
said Rosario Ledesma peacefully.
It's got a nicer ring to it than “prison,” don't you think?
Money was quickly pooled for a plane ticket. At the consulate, Efren Espiritu managed to smooth over the snag of Baby's expired work visa.

Those of us just learning of this mission stared, with jaws ajar, as our First Communicants filed back from the altar. We should have known the only law that could contain her was the one that ruled us all. And we did start to feel better, as our friends predicted. Knowing Baby had left the island balmed our hearts, unclenched our muscles. That this all happened during Ramadan renewed our awe and obligation toward our hosts. “The Arabs are fasting,” we reminded the children when the Mass was over. “Show them your respect.” They crouched into the footwells of our cars to crunch their Jordan almonds and chocolate eggs in secret.

We never did find out who had betrayed his wife with Baby. Or if indeed she'd faked the scandal, just to watch us squirm. In any case, our husbands went to work the next day and the next, loosening their ties at night and dumping their briefcases on the sofa, as they always had. We schooled our growing teens in deodorant and maxi pads. We helped the little ones with end-of-year quizzes and construction-paper crafts. Our families would expect us home in a few weeks, not far from where we knew that Baby, by the end of summer, would give birth.

We reunited in the fall and saw each other often, though our parties didn't happen every Thursday as before. In Baby's wake we shrank a little from routine, from rituals that might invite disruption. We were a little warier, too, of the
katulong
who came to our houses to share our food and accept our hand-me-downs. For the first time they seemed capable of harming us. And yet none of them “pulled a Baby” on us, as Lourdes Ocampo termed it, that year. In fact, they acted shyer and more self-effacing than before, as if atoning on behalf of Baby, ashamed that one of their own had wronged us so, afraid we might suspect them of such wickedness. By the time Dolly and Bongbong announced that they were expecting their first child, all was well. They even named Paz and Alfonso Evora as the godparents.

Some of our husbands walked a narrower line after the Baby scandal. Vilma Bustamante joked that if she'd known her house would turn into this wonderland of flowers, cards, candy, balloons, and jewelry, she might have hired someone like Baby to shake things up years ago. And some husbands swung in the opposite direction. It served Dulce right, Nestor deLumen believed, for taking him for granted, that she was not so certain of him anymore. He came home later and drank more, realizing for the first time in their marriage that he could.

Our babies started to complain about us calling them our babies. This upset us less than knowing they'd grow older still—old enough to understand that we would always call them babies, old enough to ignore anything we said altogether.

That year Hope Espiritu and Arvin Ledesma graduated from high school. Faith Salonga was admitted to Columbia University in New York, while Joseph Ocampo barely eked his way into his mother's alma mater in the Philippines. These were always moments of reflection for us: the larger world brought in, the reminder that we'd all move from this island sometime, our success gauged by how far our children had surpassed us. “When do you leave?” they asked each other, when acceptances arrived from Baltimore or London or Sydney. The question was not
if,
not “Will you go?” for we'd assumed that all along. The island was a way station, never a home.

Over the years we toasted each other and scattered to Amsterdam, Chicago, Jackson Heights, Vancouver. For a time, we had to tell all our new acquaintances what Bahrain was.
A small desert island off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
Then came the nineties, and a war that put this strange hot chapter of our lives on the map. Two decades later, we watched from living rooms in Toronto and Dallas and Honolulu as the Pearl Monument, once a fixture in our lives, the roundabout through which we drove our children to the park or ice cream shop, was razed to the ground, its white fragments like the shattered bones of a whale.

Our children grew into jobs and families of their own. They married so often outside the community it no longer surprised us. Poor Chad Bustamante even had to convince his parents, when he proposed to a Filipina, that he'd done so out of love, not duty. Some had children without marrying at all. When we met our hybrid grandchildren, with their hyphenated names, we almost wept at their beauty. We couldn't stop touching their hair or trying in vain to name the color of their mesmerizing eyes. In school they learned Spanish, French, Arabic, Mandarin, or Hindi. “ ‘Tagalog School' is not really a thing,” said Heather Bautista, who couldn't well instruct her kids in things she barely remembered herself. “Anyway,” our children reminded us, “it's not as if they can use it in more than one country.” We almost mentioned the Filipino who bused our table in Germany and the Filipina who cleaned our cabin on a cruise ship to Alaska, but this wasn't what they meant, and we knew it.

Some of our marriages didn't last all that transnational drift. Over the years we heard that Dulce deLumen was now Nestor's ex-wife, and that Fe Zaldivar had become a stepmother. And somewhere outside Palo Alto, Flor Bautista lived alone—happily, so far as we knew. We never thought we'd leave our husbands or take up with other women's, like villainesses in some soap opera. But some of us formed shadow families of our own, after all. We boarded buses, crossed whole continents on trains, or watched the lights of our old cities shrink as we climbed into the sky. We moved into apartments whose leaks and leases we would have to handle on our own; we lay awake in single beds, sensing that we'd snipped a cord not just from home but from the law of gravity itself, and if we tumbled off the planet altogether no one, for a while, might know.

What all this did was get us thinking again, for the first time in years, about Baby, the woman who had once been enemy and outcast to us. Now we were outcasts, of a certain sort, as well. Time had toppled our pillars of domestic and family life without her help. It might be overstating things to say we've walked a mile in Baby's high-heeled shoes; we had advantages she didn't, after all, to ease our lonely exile from the land of perfect wife- and motherhood. But now we do know something, do we not, of what it is to be the woman other women hope not to become? The world's so big, it has exploded our old ideas, and we're not the people who condemned her then. We've wondered if she too has changed. Whenever we hear
Baby,
a not-uncommon name in Echo Park or Cabbagetown or Daly City, we turn to check for that familiar pair of slender legs, that orange head of hair.

Now that her husband has grown old and frail and needs such care as she once gave their children, Vilma Bustamante wonders if, after he dies, Baby and her child might turn up, claiming a connection. We have all imagined it: a click of heels across the parlor floor, a scent of Opium overwhelming the condolence wreaths. She would be older now. Her child, like all of ours, would be grown up. Would he or she look fair, like the American half of her, or would we see our husband's features right away? Our guesses as to what the years have been for Baby vary, like the paths we've taken around the globe. Not all of us believe she wound up in Olongapo for good. Luz Salonga has pictured her repenting, like a modern Magdalene, her flame-red hair under a wimple. Rowena Cruz believes the nursery, not the nunnery, redeemed her, and that Baby found her calling as a mother. Paz Evora would like to think that Baby went to school and on to a career. We know these images have more to do with our own obsessions than with any Baby that existed or exists. We know the likelihood of seeing her this way is slim. And still we picture it, every so often: this rare reunion with our distant past, the chance to look at her again and maybe recognize our selves.