In the Country (16 page)

Her feet were dusty in their rubber
tsinelas.
She was not in uniform but in a shapeless duster like the ones her mother wore. Only when I looked up did I recognize the cloud of curls and the dark
indio
face from school. Annelise, for her part, did not seem to remember me. Blunt and bold as she looked, her first words to me were polite. “Evening, sir,” she said. My mother would have approved: she liked when people understood that ours was an English-speaking household. “Your
labandera
cannot come today. I'm her daughter, Annelise.” Her voice was as forceful and as flat as a wooden spoon against a table. It was not a voice that would sing sweetly to you, or tell tales. “If you show me where the clothes are, I can start now.” I let Annelise into the house. Beside me, she trailed the powder-clean scent of fresh laundry.

A narrow stone paving led from our back door to the grass and the house's outer wall. Clotheslines hung in between. Annelise surveyed the plastic basins, the steel sink and faucet, and the folded ironing board. She seemed accustomed to breezing into strangers' houses to do the wash. She turned on the faucet, testing the water temperature with her fingers.

“Is your mother sick?” I called out, over the sound of water striking a basin.

Annelise seemed surprised that I should ask. “No. She just gave birth to a son.” She unfurled some lacy garment of my mother's, scanning the front and back for stains.

Had I known that our laundress was expecting a child? She stooped and wore such tentlike clothes, it was odd to think of her in such terms at all. I suddenly realized with horror that, among the other laundry, Annelise would soon be scrubbing my briefs. I wheeled myself over the cracked, loosening cement and reached for my laundry basket. “These are clean,” I said, balancing the basket on my lap and using my other arm to retreat toward the house.

Annelise gave me a puzzled look, then shrugged and wiped her hands on her duster. “She was pregnant when she started here,” she said, as if she'd read my earlier thoughts. “You didn't know what she looked like not pregnant.”

“Can I bring you anything?” I asked.

Most servants apologized shyly for so much as breathing or taking up space in a room. Annelise looked up from the wash and said, “Do you have a radio?”

I brought a small transistor from my room and set it on the windowsill between our yard and the kitchen.

“Thanks.” She smiled. “We don't have one at home.” Drying her hands on her duster again, Annelise tuned the dial to a
radionovela.
The characters of
Pusong Sinugatan
(Wounded Heart) included Joe, an American soldier, and Reyna, a Manila debutante, who met fatefully in 1944. “A pair of star-crossed
magkasintahan,
” the announcer called them. The radio was old and full of static. Shampoo jingles alternated with bombs and air-raid sirens. “After a word from our sponsors,” said the announcer, “we'll find out what the Japs have done to Reyna's beloved papa!” Annelise plunged her shining brown arms into the suds, unaware that I was listening along.

Our first coed Catechism took place at the Academy of Our Lady. The girls played with their skirt hems and pencil cases as we arrived. My classmates filled the spare desks along one wall of the room, leaving me only the space behind the very last row to park my chair. I spotted Annelise up front. Her curls hovered over a composition book. Sister Carol rapped her desk with a ruler to quiet us, and Father O'Connor said something about miracles.

Sister Carol directed us to a passage in Luke. “Annelise Moreno,” she called, for a first reader. The laundress's daughter stood.

“A woman with a hemorrhage of twelve years' duration,” Annelise began, “incurable at any doctor's hands, came up behind Jesus and touched the tassel on his cloak.”

There was a murmur on the girls' side of the room, and some of Annelise's classmates giggled softly into their hands.

“Immediately her bleeding stopped,” continued Annelise. “Jesus asked, ‘Who touched me?' ”

Two girls in the row before me turned to each other. “How fitting,” said one. “
She
should touch that cloak!”

“Hemorrhage girl!” whispered the other. They giggled and then mumbled something else I couldn't catch.

“Everyone disclaimed doing it, while Peter said—” Annelise began, then stopped and slammed her Bible shut. She whirled to face my corner of the room. I startled, briefly convinced that she was glaring at me. “Rose and Gemma, if you have something to say,” she called, “say it loud and to my face. Don't cover your mouths. Let's hear it.” Her voice was hot and full of challenge. The two girls in front of me crossed their legs and laced their fingers, then glanced at each other, wide-eyed.

“Miss Moreno!” Sister Carol rapped her ruler against the desk. “Were you not instructed to read a passage from the Bible?”

“I was, Sister Carol,” said Annelise, without lowering her voice.

“Then tell me, please: why do I seem to be hearing other words out of your mouth?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am. Those words were meant for Rose and Gemma.”

“I see. As a reminder, Miss Moreno, that teachers, not students, are in charge of classroom discipline, you may remain standing at your desk until I invite you to have a seat. Let's have someone better able to follow instructions read where you left off.”

Annelise didn't argue, but didn't seem ashamed either, as she placed her hands at her sides and stood straight in her place. There was more giggling and murmuring. The pleats of her pinafore were perfectly ironed, but a single crease slanted down the back of her blouse. One fallen strand of her frizzled hair hung on to the wrinkle, stubbornly. I didn't realize, till Annelise's replacement began to read in a calm, dull voice, that Annelise's had set my heart racing. I'd never heard a child speak to adults with such boldness, or stand almost with pride while being disciplined.

At the end of our lesson, after Sister Carol allowed Annelise to sit again, Father O'Connor brought out an offertory basket full of paper slips, which he shook gently. “It's time to partner up for the fiesta,” he said. “Gentlemen, when I call you, please step forward and draw your lady's name out of the hat.”

Students shifted in their seats. I believe it was fate that brought Annelise and me together, for Father O'Connor announced, as if on a whim, “Let's start at the
end
of the alphabet today, and go backward from there.” He glanced at the roll. I had inherited my surname, like my handicap, from my grandfather, and—ever since Joel Zamora's family had moved to Manila—always came last on the list. “Danny Wilson, Jr.,” said Father O'Connor.

Faces turned as Sister Carol helped widen an aisle for me. I rolled awkwardly to the front of the room. At each spin my wheels struck the legs of another girl's desk, a sound that seemed to ring into the hallways. “Watch your step, Manny,” Ruben whispered. “You wouldn't want to stub your toe.” The girls—each praying silently, I knew, for anyone but the class cripple—turned away as I passed, and fiddled with their girlish things: a gilt-edged Bible, mechanical pencils, a blue heart-shaped eraser whose left lobe was blackened and rubbed flat with use.

But I had a silent prayer of my own. I glanced at Annelise's curls, and imagined their powdery scent, just before Father O'Connor lowered the basket before me. Was it Father O'Connor, or another priest, who had taught us to pray with pure and total trust that our prayers would be answered? I closed my eyes and reached for her name.

We took recess outside. Annelise and I stayed close to the hedges separating the high school from the little girls' playground.

“How is your mother?” I asked.

“She'll be ready to work again next week.”

“I didn't mean—”

Annelise laughed. “She's doing better,” she said. “My little brother kept refusing her nipple, at first. Like a spoiled little prince! But good old Dr. Delacruz brought us some formula.”

Annelise glided easily from Dr. Delacruz to her next subject and then the next, treating them all as casually as she had her mother's nipple. You would presume from her tone that we had known each other for years.

“You seem different from the girls here,” I admitted. Then, fearing I'd insulted her: “Sorry.”

“I am,” she said. “I'm the ‘scholarship girl.' The nuns took me on as their charity case.” She smiled and looked at me expectantly. “And you? Which ‘boy' are you?”

It was not so easy to name my status. How should I explain the fine house, and the servants who were sometimes paid in bowls or jewels to maintain it? What title bridged the space between light skin and no legs, between a white hero for a grandfather and a half-white mother whose doings were whispered of in town? Which “boy” did all these things, combined, make me?

“I'm not the Delacruz boy,” I finally said.

Annelise nodded. As if their ears had pricked at the sound of Ruben's name, some of her classmates approached, and made a show of holding their noses. “You stink, Negrita,” they said. “Stinks to be poor, eh?” Annelise turned away. She faced me and held the handles of my chair, her knees touching my trousers, so that we made a nearly self-enclosed unit on the grass. Her movement made a rustling sound like plastic bags.

“What's in your diaper?” they asked. “We think Negrita needs a diaper change.”

My mother once fired a maid who, she said, filled the house with a wretched odor. “The poor live in a Dark Age of superstition,” said my mother at the time. “I won't have her trailing her animal smells into my house.”

“In one ear and out the other,” said Annelise, looking down at me. “You don't let the things they say affect you, do you?”

“No,” I lied.

Later that week Sister Grace and Father Johnson excused us from a joint Physical Education class, where the other pairs would learn a folk dance called the
kuratsa.
Annelise and I watched from the sidelines of the Doug Prep gymnasium. “It isn't fair that you won't dance in the fiesta, because of me,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“You say this word a lot,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“There you go again.” Annelise grinned. “I used to be like that too. Shy, and ‘sorry' about everything. Anyway, does that seem like a good time to you?” She turned to where our classmates were shuffling along, two by two, some looking like they wanted the gym floor to swallow them. “I wish we had our own radio, though.”

“I listened to
Pusong Sinugatan
last night,” I offered. I didn't mention that I'd missed Annelise's company just as soon as my class left Safety's campus, that I'd wished almost immediately to go back to the Catechism lesson and the recess, or that I'd tuned in to the radio as a way, alone in my room, to conjure her. I didn't talk about searching my Bible at home to reread Luke's story of the bleeding woman.
Daughter, faith has cured you. Go in peace.

“Well?” said Annelise. “Catch me up, then.”

I told her how, after the program had been following their separate paths for days, Joe finally laid eyes on Reyna at a dance. It wasn't love at first sight—not for Reyna, anyway. Joe had to fight through a thicket of other suitors to say hello. Those suitors had only one thing in mind—so said the narrator—but Reyna was too blind to see it, or to notice Joe. It surprised me how easily I fell to talking about these people, like an old village gossip. As if they were neighbors and lived on our same hill in Monte Ramon.

Annelise sighed. “She'll come around.”

I was sorry that she couldn't listen at home. Before I knew what I was doing, I said, “You're welcome to borrow it, Annelise. The radio. Next time you or your mother come…”

“That's kind of you,” she said, “but we'd need electricity for that.”

I felt sorry again, but now I knew not to say so.

“Thanks anyway.” Annelise reached over as if to touch me, but gripped the armrest of my chair instead, helping herself up and excusing herself to the lavatory. As she crossed in front of me she smelled different, this time, from the laundry powder she had used to do our wash. She tossed her hair behind her, sending a damp and loamy scent in my direction. It reminded me of our garden after a very heavy rain, the grass and hibiscus buds gone slick and overripe under the weather.

Because we couldn't do the
kuratsa,
Annelise and I were in charge of serving punch and cake at a dance—a kind of rehearsal for the March performance. The Safety girls wore fancy dresses to this event, with flowers on their shoulders and waists and hems. The boys arrived in white
barong Tagalog
—sheer dress shirts of banana silk thread or pineapple fiber, embroidered at the placket and worn loose over the undershirts we'd tucked into the waistbands of our trousers. I wore the same
barong
I'd worn at my Confirmation the year before, a plain linen one left behind by one of my mother's visitors, still large on me. My classmates raised their eyebrows at the frayed sleeves, buttoning nearly at my fingertips. Ruben, whose
barong
seemed to have gold thread in it, called me
Lolo
as I filled his punch cup. I watched the clock and waited for Annelise.

An hour passed, and then another. She did not come. Three hours into the dance, there was still no one at the refreshments table but me.

A few girls from Annelise's class approached. “Your Negrita girlfriend's on the rag,” said a petite, snub-nosed one, taking a cup of punch from my hand. “She's a freak of nature. Her rags go on for weeks and weeks and she can barely stand for pain. She's bleeding her guts out right now.”

Sharp words, turning this girl's tiny voice and delicate face ugly. I looked away. I knew so little of what female bodies did in secret. Women's privacy, I'd been taught, was sacred. The second story of our house, my mother's zone, was forbidden to me and difficult, in any case, for me to access. Sometimes, when I passed the foot of the stairs, I'd catch a gust of perfumed air or a flash of eastern sunlight as a guest opened my mother's door and then closed it behind him. Ruben once smuggled a medical textbook of his father's to school and showed his friends a page headed “Female Reproductive System.” Excluded from their circle, I glimpsed only something like a symbol of Aries, that ram's head with great curlicued horns. These subjects felt as far from me as my mother's quarters, closed and quiet at the top of the stairs that I could never climb.