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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 must be something, no? To be so rich you think you can buy reality?”
The quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening a blade.
My instinct, my muscle memory, stood with and for the little guy, still.
“I think everybody in there is feeling it. Will I die alone, with no one to mourn me but a bunch of strangers in a classroom? Will anybody even remember who I was?”
“I was eighteen when I came here. I’m forty now. I’ve never done much besides clean rich Arabs’ houses.” Minnie turned to look toward the parking lot, so that even years later I would wonder if I’d heard correctly what came next. “I’ll probably die in uniform”—she sighed regretfully—“with a dustrag in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaning fluid in the other.”
(And God only knew, of course, what little mutinies my own mother had waged, in secret: the better life she’d planned for me could not have been enough to get her through her own, every day.)
Loneliness, whenever I felt it, hit me generally as a hole somewhere between my heart and gut, and now I tried to fill it.
We lived like villagers at the foot of a volcano, hoping never to offend the gods who governed our harvest and our wealth.
Before bed, we prayed for them. The helpers came from farming provinces, like our fathers. They spoke Tagalog with country accents, like our mothers. Our parents too had fled droughts and typhoons in their youth, hoping for steady servant work in Manila. Helping these helpers, who’d traveled even farther, felt like home.
Between Arab bosses and Indian subordinates, British traffic laws and American television, we craved familiar flavors and the sound of a language we knew well.
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.
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.
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.
Damn
But now we do know something, do we not, of what it is to be the woman other women hope not to become?
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.
“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.”
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
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The old girl understood a little more—she who had never touched a serious drug in her life, who enjoyed solitude and craved quiet: the high of gathering and getting loud together, making a righteous kind of trouble.
As if my fancy new college-speak could elevate me from the muck.
Throat cultures, spinal taps—those things compelled her more than caring for a man did. To the question of children she would say: No man I know strikes me as worth repeating. She had a pocket full of answers just like that, before she met Jim.
Utang na loob: a debt of the heart, an unrepayable soul-debt.
Betrayal needs to happen only once to cloud your vision. After that, there could be poison in each cup, a bomb in every drawer. And it’s those closest to her who seem most suspect.
You can leave a place, but places have a way of not leaving you.
They’re all the same to her now, this fraternity of men, who televise their hunger strikes, print articles after they’re told to stop. They prize their causes and their names, their principles and legacies, above all. They eat the rice without wondering how it got cooked and to their table.
The more you hoard a grief. Why should she share? The world has not been generous with her.
Rich-People Power. Martial law, to some, was a rude interruption: now their fancy dinner party can resume.
