In the Country (2 page)

When my mother returned, she spoke to the girl and poured the Sarsi cola into a plastic sleeve, thin as a layer of onionskin. She stored the bottle in a crate that would go back to the factory. How had I forgotten? I'd drunk sodas from plastic sleeves up until the age of twenty-five. And yet the liquid bag I handed over made me think not of my childhood but of some dark, alien version of the waste pouches and IV fluids I'd see at the hospital.

“Relax,
anak.
” Dragging a stool to the center of the store, my mother invited me to sit under the ceiling fan. “You're sweating.” She handed me a mango Popsicle from the freezer case. The jaw-cramping sweetness of each bite felt vaguely humiliating as I sat and watched her work.

Unlike me, she had no trouble hearing her customers. No sooner had a face appeared at the wicket than she was reaching for the shoe polish or cooking oil. Her right hand could pop open a bottle cap while her left tore a foil packet from the shampoo reel. To the voice of a young boy, so small I couldn't see him through the wicket, she sold three sheets, for ten centavos apiece, of the grainy, wide-ruled paper on which I'd learned to spell in grade school. It was a way of shopping I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next.

That night I lay in my parents' bedroom. Jet lag and the whir of an electric fan kept me awake. Somewhere above me a gecko made its loud clicking noise, and I was no longer used to the Manila heat. But I refused to sleep any closer to my father, even if it meant losing out on the AC.

Down the hall, he groaned nonstop, as if to say, unless he slept, no one would.

Growing up in this house, I used to hear other noises from him at night. I must have been four or five years old, lying where he did now, the first time a lowing through the wall made me sit up. Until it had echoed once or twice, I didn't know the voice was his. My father sounded more like a flagellant on Good Friday, parading through the streets of Tondo. I thought my mother had found a way to strike back: that he was the one, this time, suffering and forced to beg.

I rushed to the door they'd forgotten to close, and detected my parents' shapes in the dark. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Naked, but hidden from the waist down by my mother. She knelt, a sheet around her shoulders, wiping the floor with a washcloth. And though she was at his feet, though her shadow rose and fell as she cleaned, as if bowing to a king, my father did not look to be in charge at all. He peeled the lids off his eyes, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth. His skin was waxen with sweat. Stripped and drained, limp and compromised—he could not have hit her, in this state.

Then he saw me in the doorway. “What now?” he said, alert again, his fists starting to lock.

My mother startled.
“Anak!”
She pointed past me, the wet washcloth covering her hand like a bandage. “Get out!”

I ran out to the yard. Not to escape him, but because I knew he'd punish her for every second of my presence there.

This was before I'd learned much about sex; I was too young to be disgusted by it. For a while after that, whenever I heard him groan in the darkness, I didn't know enough to pull my pillow over my ears or run outside in embarrassment. Instead my father's baying, and his stupor afterward, put me under a kind of spell. I'd listen through the cinder-block wall, believing he had fallen out of power, was in pain. Whatever else he might do to my mother, at any other hour, during this shimmering nighttime transaction
he
was the conquered one.

A swarm of aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins' children descended on the house early the next morning. I passed out all my
pasalubong,
or homecoming gifts: handheld digital games, pencil-and-stationery sets, duty-free liquor, nuts and chocolates I'd stockpiled on layovers in Honolulu and Tokyo. A
balikbayan
knew better than to show up empty-handed.

After the gifts came the inquisition. How cold was it in America, how often did it snow? I kept my lines brief. I had a role to perform: the
balikbayan,
who worked hard and missed home but didn't complain, who'd moved up in New York but wasn't down on Manila. “You get used to the winters,” I said. I didn't tell them I loved the snow, was built for the American cold, and felt, upon entering my first job in a thermostat-controlled pharmacy, that I'd come home. What did I miss most about the Philippines? “The food, and Filipinos,” I said. “Good thing the nurses always bring me
lumpia
and let me tag along to Sunday Mass.” But my days in New York never involved Mass or
lumpia:
outside of work, I spent my free time exercising at the gym, or cleaning my apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of a building made of steel and glass. What about women—was there someone? An American? “The hospital keeps me busy,” I said. “No one special enough yet to meet you.” I didn't describe the women who sometimes spent the night with me, how they chattered nonstop, intimidated by the tidy home I kept. “Is this an apartment or a lab?” said one, glancing at my countertops. “Are we getting laid here, or embalmed?” asked another, under the tightly tucked bedspread. In every case, I found a reason to stop calling: false modesty, too loud a voice, careless toothpaste spatters around the bathroom sink. Any time a woman opened her mouth and I could imagine myself clapping a hand over it, pinning her to the bed, I knew that my father still breathed somewhere inside of me. I couldn't risk repeating his life.

The questions ended when the karaoke began. Bebot, my cousin's son, had hooked the monitor of my old Commodore computer, outgrown since I first bought it in New York, to a DVD player. When he fed it a karaoke disc, song lyrics and video footage of couples on the beach appeared in green screen. I took on “Kawawang Cowboy” (Pathetic Cowboy), a Tagalog satire of “Rhinestone Cowboy,” to show I remembered my Tagalog and to cover my lack of singing talent with silliness.
“A pathetic cowboy,”
I sang.
“I wish I could afford some bubble gum / Instead of dried-up salty Chinese plum….”
The family roared. In New York, the nurses would have shooed us out of any hospital. But here no one worried about disturbing my father, who'd loved karaoke and had a gift for it. In a voice like wine and honey, he used to croon everything from Elvis Presley to classic Tagalog love songs. Even I had to admit that, back then, his signature “Fly Me to the Moon” was charming.

My mother scuttled through our living-room reunion like a servant, pulled in opposite directions by sick groans and the
sari-sari
bell. I thought again of the Succorol, but stayed in my seat. Twice—first in Tagalog, then in English—I had taken a pharmacist's oath to tell the truth and uphold the law. People lost jobs and licenses for less. If our suppliers discovered their mistake, called all their clients and somehow—between time stamps, shift schedules, signatures, and security footage—found me out, I could land in jail, to say nothing of the damage to my name with colleagues and the department head who'd trusted me with inventory to begin with. Deceit of any kind was a foreign country to me. As a child, I'd never so much as shoplifted a comic book, or lied to a teacher, or cheated at a game of cards. This discipline earned me perfect grades in high school, scholarships through college, my first job at a Manila drugstore, a doctor of pharmacy degree from my school's brother university in New York, fast promotions at the hospital. Whenever I saw classmates copy each other's homework or make faces behind the priests' backs, I thought of my father, and how he too must have started small on the path to worse.

I considered hiring a live-in nurse, but my mother was the kind of woman who waited on even the people she'd paid to serve us, back when we could afford them: the laundress, the gardener, the
yaya
who watched me before I started school. Now she did the same for relatives who covered
sari-sari
shifts and friends who visited them. They all ate at our table and helped themselves to free snacks and sodas from the store. A paid nurse would only give her another plate to wash, another chair to pull out.

The next time the bell rang, I followed my mother into the kitchen and through the screen door. Away from my family's relentless yammering, the
sari-sari
felt like a sanctuary again: in but not of the house, and cooler than the crowded living room. My mother helped a customer, then gazed at the baby monitor, perched up on a shelf between jars of Spanish shortbread and tamarind candy.

“I've got a gun without a bullet and a pocket without money,”
she turned to me and sang, off-key. “You inherited my singing voice,
anak.
Sorry.”

“Apologize to your family,” I said. “They had to listen to it.” From the shelf I picked one of her favorites:
pastillas de leche,
soft mini-logs made with sugar and
carabao
's milk. My mother had a sweet tooth that didn't match her frame. I set the yellow box on the counter and reached into my pocket.

“Oh, no you don't,” she said. “This is on the house.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“We're a Filipino store; we don't accept American dollars.”

“Nice try. I exchanged my money at the airport.”

“Your money's no good here.”

“Stop giving things away for free.” I unwrapped one of the
pastillas,
knowing she wouldn't start ahead of me. “That's no way to keep a business afloat. There's my first piece of advice for you.”

“It's your second,” she said. “Yesterday you said it was too hot in here.” She pointed at the whirling blades on the ceiling. “People pay all kinds of money for good business advice, don't they? So I'm not giving anything away for free.” She frowned as she bit into a
pastilla,
as if eating required all her concentration.

I took my hand from my pocket, and we crunched for a while without speaking.

“If I ever leave the hospital and open my own pharmacy,” I said, “it will be a lot like this.” I walked her through my rather old-fashioned vision: tinctures and powders in rows, a mortar and pestle here, a pill counter and weighing scale there.

“Oh,
anak.
” I'd become her young son again, pointing at a mansion in Forbes Park or a gown in a shop window, luxuries I vowed to provide her in the future. My mother's eyes filled with tears. “Your pharmacy will be fancier than this. And you could have built it years ago, if you hadn't been busy helping us.”

That settled it. Nothing disturbed me more than the sight of her crying. It was time to end her call-button servitude, once and for all. “Ma,” I began, “I've given everyone their
pasalubong,
except you.”

The baby monitor groaned, bringing her to her feet. “You've given me so much already.” She wiped her eyes. “
Pastillas,
free advice…” Setting down the call bell and the
SERVICE
sign, she rushed out, again, to attend to him.

I dropped five hundred pesos into the cashbox and brought the rest of the candy to my relatives in the living room. Once they'd emptied the box, I took it to my room and filled it with the patches of Succorol, then went to the sickroom and closed the door behind me.

My mother was pressing a washcloth to his forehead. “You're a CEO, not a slave,” I said. “No more scurrying around. You've got a business to run.” I showed her the Succorol and how to use it, peeling a square from its adhesive backing and pressing it to my father's side. “Remove this and apply a new one at the same time tomorrow,” I said. “On his back, or arm—anywhere there isn't hair. Rotate or you'll irritate the skin.” In my mother's notebook I started a new page and recorded the dose. “So we don't double up,” I said. “This isn't Tylenol, if you know what I mean.”

We stayed until my father quieted and slept. I closed the yellow box, now full of Succorol, and placed it in the top drawer of the dresser. Before we left the sickroom, she touched my cheek. “You're home,” she said. “All the
pasalubong
I need.”

In the living room the family had switched from karaoke to a Tagalog movie. Even in green it looked familiar, observing the rules of every melodrama I'd grown up watching: a
bida,
or hero, fought a
kontrabida,
or villain, for the love of a beautiful woman. The oldest films would even cast a pale, fair-haired American as the
bida
and a dusky, slick-mustachioed Spaniard as the
kontrabida.
Between them, the woman spent her time batting her eyelashes or being swept off her feet; peeking out from behind lace fans; fainting or weeping; clutching a handkerchief to her heart or dangling it from the window as a signal; being abducted at night, or rescued from a tower, or carried away on a horse. My relatives talked back to the screen as it played.
Kiss! Kiss!
they insisted, not with any delight or romantic excitement but in a nearly hostile way, heckling the protagonists and the plot to quit stalling and hurry along to the payoff. Even I joined the chorus. When, at last, the
bida
won the woman, we cheered and whistled, again not out of joy so much as a malicious sort of triumph. The script had succumbed, in the end, to our demands.

For three days my father dozed peacefully, waking only when my mother fed him or shifted a bedpan under his haunches. With the Succorol, he never groaned again. At first she ran to check his breathing throughout breakfast and lunch, but by the second day she trusted the baby monitor to show the rise and fall of his chest, his mouth dilating and shrinking. Seeing her relax, I slept better too.

Meanwhile the heat climbed to ninety-three degrees. I woke on my fourth night in the country feeling stained by my own sweat. Next door the air conditioner was humming, and I craved the cold rush that first greeted me there. If I could just stand in that doorway a moment, I might feel better and fall back asleep. I found my way through the dark living room, running my fingertips along the cinder block. The door creaked on my push. I stepped forward into the chill, but didn't enjoy it for long.