In the Country (20 page)

A nearby cop confirms. No service. Not today.

But there has got to be a way into the city. There was a way nineteen years ago, wasn't there? When the Guzman family brought you with them from Manila to New York, only to send you back?
I wish we could afford to keep you, Esmeralda,
Mrs. Guzman said, once she had learned just how expensive New York was.
People in this city do it for themselves.
She handed you a one-way ticket back to Manila and the number of a good family there who needed a maid. You found a way to stay then, and you will now. In your bag you hook your thumb into the chaplet, whose gold-plate knobs have been rubbed black from years of prayer.

You turn and walk south underneath the rusty, quiet elevated tracks.

City people pride themselves on walking everywhere. “We're more like Europe than like the rest of America that way,” Doris has said. John says his brothers live inside their cars (an insult).
My nieces can't go ten blocks in the city without whining.
What's wrong with cars? you'd like to know. Your clogs crunch over pebbles, twigs, and broken glass. Your feet are rioting already, every pain you've been contending with for years fired up. The pinpricks—quick and sharp along your arches—started at sixteen, the year you left your family's farm for Manila, to nanny and clean house for a city cousin who had married well. The bruise between your third and fourth left toes—a swollen nerve, your nurse friend tells you, but to you it feels round, like a pebble in a horse's hoof—grew the year that cousin moved to Qatar and bequeathed you, like a car or a perfectly good table, to the Guzmans. The L-shaped tendon from your right shin to the instep has been sore for six years, as long as you've had your green card. Since meeting John, you've noticed both your big-toe knuckles have gone numb.

Farther down the avenue, the Chinese characters turn into spoken Spanish in the streets. Small children in blue uniforms stream out of school, canceled today. At first they laugh and babble, as kids do when they get a taste of freedom. Then some look up at their teachers, smell their parents' fear.

“Why aren't you at work?” says one girl to the father who's arrived to pick her up.

You know some words in Spanish; you know
trabajar
and
nunca
and
mañana.

One boy starts to cry. You think of
carabao
back home, who'd snort and stamp and know to head inland before a storm. One girl drifts from her class to join the crowd a block away. They're gathered at the window of an electronics store, watching the news, again and again, on screen after screen after screen.

Only because you know a bit of Spanish do you catch the words
la segunda torre.
You would not, less than two miles back, have understood these whispers in Mandarin or Cantonese.

“Otro avión,”
they're saying.

“Ocurrió otra vez.”

Often, when you came in, he'd be reading. His screens would have gone dark, with white and red and green and blue windows that grew in size as they flew closer—meaning he hadn't touched the keys in a while, and his computer was asleep. And he didn't like just any book. He liked them thick as cement bricks, and probably as heavy: books to prop a steel door open. With tiny print on thin pages that crackled as he turned them. When a colleague knocked, John moved his mouse to send the flying windows away and hid the book under his desk, next to his shoes.

Or else he'd be typing away: an e-mail in a white window, so many lines of words that looked like they could add up to a thick book of their own. He'd click his way out of them when a colleague came, the way he'd hide his book.

He was writing to his family, his wife's family, the doctors, lawyers, all the people needing answers about her, and what he planned to do. “It takes me so long to say things,” he said. “I don't know why. The irony is,
she
was all about the phone. She always said she could take care of something in a two-minute call that I'd spend an hour e-mailing about. She thought I was long-winded. She'd look over my shoulder and say,
No one's gonna read all that.
She thought most everyone was long-winded, including God and Tolstoy. I'm the crusty old one—I like novels long enough to age you while you read them.
Ninety-nine percent of books should have been thirty-three percent shorter,
she would say. She quantified a lot of things. Sometimes we wondered if the wrong one of us ended up in books and the wrong one in money.”

You bowed your head while changing out his garbage bag, his wife's picture like an altar you'd just passed.

“Wow. That's a lot I spewed out, Esmeralda. Let's talk about you. You must e-mail all the time. With your family so far?”

You shook your head. “I don't have a computer,” you said, thinking with pride of all the ones you've bought for people in your village. “I type too slow. My mother doesn't know how to e-mail.”

“You get home to her much?” he asked, which set you off again. You, Esmeralda, whom nuns and priests and parents always praised for being
such a quiet child.
Doris likes to say,
Nineteen years under one roof and that is news to me,
whenever she learns anything about you.

“I always thought that once we bought the land,” you started, “I'd go home for good.”

But once those 1.6 hectares were all paid for, the dirt floor needed wood; the tin walls needed cinder blocks. Of course, a house that sturdy should also have faucets and a flush toilet. And even when the house was finished, there was always family to think about. Pepe ran off, but others came to need things in his place. Cousins had babies, who grew up to go to private school and college. Aunts and uncles got sick, needing medicine. And when they died, it cost money to bury them. Then there was the larger family: the village, and they knew about you too. The church could use a new roof after Typhoon Vera tore it off. Who else would pay for it? Who else could they depend upon? Not the sweet plantation daughters who ended up dancing go-go at Manila bars. Not the men who gave up looking for jobs in the capital and hunted scraps from garbage dumps instead.

“A trip home costs a lot of money,” you told John, “and time off work. My family needs some things more than I need a vacation.”

“And your brother, what does he do?” John asked.

You thought about it. “He gets into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“All the kinds.”

You told him about Pepe in grade four, sniffing glue and paint thinners with older friends. About his disappearance from the farm at twelve, and his return, months later, with a motorcycle. How he'd paid for it, no one could tell. About the accident on that motorcycle that scarred his face for good. About the botched electronics-store robbery that landed him in jail.

“He's at the farm every few months,” you said. “He stays one day, a week, two weeks before he disappears again. If I stopped sending anything, who knows when my mother would see him?”

“I'm sorry.” John gave you the same eyes Doris did, when she asked if you got tired of supporting all those people.
Doesn't it get heavy, Esmeralda—the weight of the world?

You shrugged. “I think having no one to lean on you is worse.”

Sometimes it did get heavy, sure. But then, you did get to go home, each week on Sunday, to the one House and one Father who were never far away. Each day, His Book reminded you—chapter by chapter, verse by verse—what joy it was to serve, to bear another's load. Those loads weren't heavier than a crown of thorns, were they? No heavier than a cross.

They've closed the bridge's westbound lane. Everyone else is streaming east out of the city, as far from the smoke as they can get. Not all of them move fast. Some stop at the pink cables and snap pictures. Even if you had a camera with you, you wouldn't need to. You will not forget the way the towers look today. Like chimneys of a house the sea has swallowed.

At the river, cops are waving west the only cars allowed into the city: ambulances and their own.

But there has got to be a way into the city.

Desperate, you remember a man you once overheard, in a deli, talking to his friend. The man had sworn off all American women. “They're just so
hard
on you,” he said. “The foreign girls appreciate what we can do for them.”

His friend had doubts about finding a wife abroad.

“Just try it, man. I like FilipinaFinder-dot-com. Or WorldWideWed. Be careful, though. A lot of them these days are
business
women, if you catch my drift.”

He meant that some women would play a man—or many men, that is—for fools. They made a job of visiting and being visited, their schedules all booked up with fiancés who paid their passage back and forth to different cities, meeting future in-laws who would plan and go to weddings where the bride didn't show up.

“They always say they're nursing students,” said the expert. “What's nicer than a nurse, right?”

I was right,
John had said.
My wife's nurses are Filipina.

You look down at the clogs your friend at church swears by, and at your pale blue skirt. On any other day, you wouldn't dare. You wouldn't cross the street. You wouldn't stand at the plaza's edge, or wave at the ambulance approaching the mouth of the bridge.

May God forgive you, Esmeralda.

It slows. An EMT rolls down the passenger window.

“Elmhurst, right?” he says. He nods at your shoes and blue uniform, sees what he wants to see.

You nod back once.

“There's room for one more in the back.”

John must have gone to a meeting, or the men's room, the night your dustrag came too close and moved his mouse an inch or so across his desk. This happened sometimes, and not just with John. The screens woke from their floating windows and filled up again with numbers. Or sometimes, in John's case, words. An e-mail he had yet to send, in its white window. You didn't read them—weren't supposed to, didn't want to, and would never have, that night, except your eye caught on the one word you could not ignore.

Your name.

Esmeralda—when's the last time you heard such a chintzy, soapy, froufrou name? Ridiculous.

You froze, looked at the door. You kept your gloved hands, with their Windex bottle and their dustrag, where they were, and moved your eyes down quickly, in case he came back.

…Thanks for taking time with me the other night. Not sure (don't want to imagine) where I'd be without someone to talk to about this, and I'm hoping—trying—not to need much more than to talk about it.

It comes down to the vow, right? In sickness and in health. Not “in health, and some amount of sickness I can bear.”

Even the setup's a bad soap opera: “I met someone” (even the words sound pitiful to me, a married-man cliché). And of all people, the woman who cleans my office every night. Who even HAS a name like Esmeralda anymore? Esmeralda—when's the last time you heard such a chintzy, soapy, froufrou name? Ridiculous. And yet. I met her, I went home, I turned the bookshelves upside down to find
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
to keep the name in my head. To have something to say to her the next day.

I can't remember the last time I stayed up late to read a book, the last time I cared what happened next. But now I sneak them in at work, an addict. I still read to Anne—she would have wanted that, I think—but not those long old books. I started off with those, to tease her. And I thought, superstitiously, that more pages would keep her alive longer. Then it got to where I couldn't tell if she could hear the words, take any of it in. I know
I
stopped hearing them. Now I read her magazines and children's books. Is that sick, am I trying to get rid of her, without knowing it?

Meanwhile I bring
Hunchback
to the office, wait for openings to read it to the cleaning lady.

This woman—Esmeralda—has a story. Sad one. No money, very little love. Some luck, I'll give her that—some priest took pity on her the day she was supposed to go back to the Philippines, gave her a job cleaning his church on Barclay Street. But if you add it up—all the shit she's eaten, from the dirt floor she was born on to the village that's been leaching off her all these years, I think she wins, between us, despite Anne. But I feel happy hearing it from her. Is that fucked up? I hear about her hopeless junkie brother and my heart feels lighter, knowing someone else out there loves someone who doesn't exist anymore, though he's there, the same and not the same. It's not just that—not just, her story's like my story and “we get each other.” It's that I'm thinking about stories, other people's, in a way I haven't since before Anne got so sick. I ride the elevator, look at passengers, consider lives outside of my own misery for once. I pity Esmeralda, and other people—I hear Anne's voice:
that's patronizing
—but it's a refreshing alternative to pitying myself. I watch her—Esmeralda, cleaning windows—and she's opened something, let some air and light into the sickroom.

There's the animal part of it too. No doubt about it. You've spent your life proving it can be turned off, kept under control—no sympathy from you on this front, I get that. But it must be said, so you don't think I'm making high-minded excuses. It's about sex, for sure—but also survival. I keep thinking about being close to someone who's
not dying.

We're all dying,
I can hear you saying. Maybe.

Remember being young, in summer, our first jobs—how dusk, the 5 or 6 or 7 p.m. hour—used to feel? The best part of the day—possibility, freedom—starting. Fifteen years now it's meant something else for me: getting ready to go home to Anne, the beginning of another long night. Now Esmeralda comes in, between 5 and 6, and part of me is punching out of my shift at the Y again, at quitting time.

I think of Anne, of who she was, of who we were to each other—two best friends in love—and I can't see her saying, “Don't. You signed a piece of paper.” Too dickish? Too convenient? Does every lowlife think of his situation as the one technicality? The person I would ask about this can't answer now. Lucky you…