by Angie Abdou
honest. We can explain things more. We can help her. But she needs to
tell us.” Vero has finished her miniature cup of coffee and holds it out
for more. She’s no doll. Bernie fills it before speaking.
“Think of it, Vero. Communication is going to be tricky. Com-
munication can be a challenge between two people who speak the same
language, between two people who were raised in the same family.”
Bernie’s eyes flit to the front entrance of the agency. She locked the
door for their meeting, hanging up a “back in fifteen” sign. She now
uses her eyes to tell Vero that her time is nearly up. “Maybe you need to
lower your expectations.”
Vero sighs and carries her empty cup to the sink in the backroom.
She wishes LiLi would just tell her what’s on her mind.
But when LiLi does finally say what’s on her mind, it surprises
Vero—not like a cake with candles, but like an unexpected gust of wind
that nearly blows her vehicle off the highway.
LiLi sweeps the kitchen floor as Vero and Shane eat a beef and wild
mushroom curry LiLi prepared for them. She has given the boys ice
cream in front of the television, and the house is deliciously quiet.
“You can stop, LiLi. We’re done work for the day now. Time for you
to be done too.” Vero smiles. “You work too hard.”
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LiLi moves the toddlers’ chairs to sweep under the little table where
Jamal and Eliot ate earlier. “It okay, ma’am. I just cleaning the boys’
dinner table, and then I go to my room.”
“Your dressing room, LiLi?” Eliot is going through a football phase
and understands everything in its terms. In his world, LiLi plays for
the opposite team.
“Yes, Eliot, my dressing room. I rest for tomorrow’s game.”
“Thank you, LiLi. I appreciate your hard work.” Vero hates the con-
stant gratitude in her voice, as if she can’t think of anything more
real to say and must hide behind the veneer of etiquette. She takes
a healthy sip of her Pinot Grigio. “But I guess it is easy for you here,
I mean, if the only other time you’ve taken care of kids was in Hong
Kong. Here—better pay, better working hours, better treatment.” She
smiles at Shane as he tops up her glass. “Here, you have such a good
relationship with these kids. Almost like having your own.”
The look that crosses LiLi’s face is one Vero has never seen before.
It starts at the crease of her hairline and rolls over her face, pulling
everything down with it. Vero hopes LiLi does not have the stomach
flu. That’s the last thing they need in the house.
“In the Philippines, we love children,” LiLi says as if holding her
breath against an onslaught of nausea. “There is no adults’ table and
kids’ table.” She pushes the little chair into the little table and gives
the surface a harsh swipe. “In Philippines, there is only family table.”
As if the words and their tone surprise LiLi as much as they sur-
prise Vero, she scoops Jamal up under her arm and runs for the potty
as if in response to some emergency.
Vero listens to Jamal screaming while LiLi sings the Baa Baa Brown
Poo song and wonders if LiLi will ever be able to call this frozen land
my country.
◊◊◊
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The snow doesn’t let up at all that winter. Skiers smile. Business owners
smile even harder as tourists pour in from all over the continent. From
the writing desk in the window nook of Shane’s home office, Vero
works—a new insert for the Piranha III—and watches LiLi push the
boys away from the house, her face bent down away from the cold as she
sludges through the snow, all her weight forcing the stroller forward.
“I never know cold,” LiLi says when Vero asks. “Here the cold is
until my bones.”
It takes Vero longer than she imagined to get to know LiLi. She’s
embarrassed by her own naïveté, as if she believed LiLi would just
move in from across the world and be an instant confidante, a help-
mate, a friend—a sister. She pictures Bernie sneering at this. Vero
knows now that she will have to work at this relationship. Sometimes,
while Jamal sleeps and LiLi plays quietly with Eliot, Vero brings her
stacks of LAV specifications and spreads them out on the dining room
table. Checking last year’s manual against this year’s, she highlights
suspicious differences. She makes sure the soldiers know to bend their
knees and duck their heads. She does this work in the kitchen so she
can ask questions of LiLi, can engage her. She will put in time and
make LiLi a friend. Even in the privacy of her own mind, she no longer
uses the word “sister.”
“How are you finding the Sprucedale Catholic Church?” Vero taps
her highlighting pen against the cannon of a diagrammed LAV-IV as
she talks.
“It’s okay, ma’am.”
“You must be happy that you’ve found the other Filipina nannies
and have made friends so quickly?”
“Yes, it’s okay.” LiLi pulls food from the fridge, piling it on the
counter, but she pauses and makes eye contact with Vero at each answer.
The effort is concentrated.
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“You’re bonding nicely with the boys. Your work is going well?”
“Yes, it’s okay, ma’am.” She spreads peeled carrots in a neat line on
the cutting board. Eliot is watching Cars: The Movie. He is allowed
only one hour of TV time per day. Shane and Vero have been firm on
this rule. As they’ve become more comfortable with their employer
role, they’ve admitted to themselves that rules are necessary.
“Really, LiLi, you don’t have to call me ma’am. I’d prefer you didn’t.
Please.”
“Yes, okay.”
“Vero.”
“Vero.”
LiLi chops the carrots, moving the sharp CUTCO knife. Another
unused wedding present. Shane pulled it from deep in the drawer
when LiLi arrived, demonstrating its impressive sharpness by cutting
a penny in half. Shane loves tricks like this, but LiLi looked mystified.
“Why would anyone want to cut pennies in half? In Tagalog, we say
Sayang naman. Pera din yan. It translate maybe like ‘What a waste,
this is also money.’”
Now LiLi moves it so quickly that Vero fears for her tiny, almost
childlike fingers. LiLi races through carrots, garlic, onion, ginger, the
rapid click, click, click of the knife’s blade tap dancing on the board. Be
careful, Vero wants to tell her, but the set of LiLi’s face does not invite
advice.
When Eliot’s hour of TV time expires, LiLi lures him over to her
with a strategically placed miniature football field of building blocks.
Vero envies how easily Eliot comes to her and plays Lego at her feet.
She sings to him while she chops. Building, building, everybody’s build-
ing. All of LiLi’s English songs are this one song,
always to the same
tune that Vero does not recognize.
Clean up, clean up, everybody clean up.
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Eating, eating, everybody’s eating.
Sleep time, sleep time, everybody’s sleeping.
Vero gives up on conversation and focuses on the engineers’ commas
and apostrophes. “Just get these ones done pronto, Vero Baby.” That
was Edward’s instruction. “We need ’em now. Nobody ever died from
a misplaced punctuation point.” The government requires an editor’s
signature. Vero is paid to give that signature. But she will read every-
thing first—the instructions for the air conditioning, the high-ca-
pacity generator, the Caterpillar diesel engine, the MK 19 40-mm
grenade launcher. That is her job.
She’s happy to leave it when she hears Jamal call from upstairs.
“LiLi! LiLi!”
“It’s so good to hear a new word in his vocabulary,” Vero says to
LiLi. “He has so few I recognize.” Vero holds up a hand as LiLi
makes a move for the stairs. “I’ll get him. I’m sick of work anyway.”
Vero drops her highlighter on the dining room table and scrapes the
chair across the floor as she pushes away from her manuals. “No fair,
is it?” She winks. “You’re never allowed to say that to me. Sick of work. ”
When Vero returns, she bounces Jamal on her hip and watches
over LiLi’s shoulder.
“Mmmm, carrots, JJ. Can you say car-rots?” Vero holds the orange
nub before him. He reaches for it but says nothing.
“Mommy, JJ doesn’t say carrots. He’s a duck,” says Eliot.
“Looks delicious, LiLi. So much healthy food.” Vero gives the
carrot to Jamal. “Thank you.” She mouths the words, slow and delib-
erate, to Jamal. “Thank. You.”
“It’s no problem, ma’am. I love to cook.”
“Did you cook a lot at home? Seafood?” Vero strives for some
image, however fuzzy, of where LiLi comes from, what home might
feel like.
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“We not go fish at sea. I live far from coast. In land. But yes, we eat
fish sometimes.”
“Inland? I didn’t know that!” Vero’s voice rises, and she cringes at
her performance of enthusiasm, as if she’s speaking to a child who
needs to be lured into the adult world of conversation. “Are there
mountains?”
“There are much rice farms. Very hot. We are near a river, where it
is a bit steep, but very flat just below.”
“What kind of food do you cook there?”
LiLi smiles into her piles of neatly chopped vegetables, “We eat
rice and rice and rice.”
“Would you like to go back?” Vero has asked this question in so
many ways since LiLi’s arrival and always gets the same answer: It’s
okay, ma’am. LiLi is a poem written in a different language, and Vero
cannot translate her.
This time, though, LiLi pauses, her knife hovering as she tilts her
head to one side. “I like to see my family. My mother is a teacher. My
father a mechanic.” Vero knows this much already, but LiLi says it
as if to herself, summoning them. “But there is no work. There, it’s
so…” She brings her knife down hard across a carrot’s tip. “So, I send
my money. The government there, it’s very…” She turns on the tap,
scrubs hard at a pile of mushrooms. “But I work here and I help my
family. So…” She turns off the tap, sops the remaining moisture off
the mushrooms with a paper towel, and wipes her hand on the front
of her apron, letting the silence hang between them. “I stay.”
Everything Vero wants to know lives in the ellipses.
“You must be homesick,” Vero says.
LiLi uses the dull end of her knife to sweep the mounds of veg-
etables into an oversized crockpot, another of her domestic discov-
eries. “Oh…I…it’s…I like Sprucedale.” She nods quickly, her face
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bobbling. “Very nice. I lucky. Sa awa ng Diyos, we say. Through God’s
mercy.”
“Do you have a boyfriend back home?” Vero has hinted at this
question before, but has never been so direct. She’s seizing on LiLi’s
opening today, wants to force a story out of her.
“Before I left the Philippines, we were …There was a boy.” LiLi
bites her lip in an expression that reminds Vero of a different time.
High-school dances. Dorm-room secrets. LiLi looks almost mis-
chievous, for a second. “Then …” LiLi focusses her attention on an
unopened can of tomatoes, and Vero feels the story slide out of her
grasp. “Things change. I here now.” LiLi looks like herself again.
Closed. All the meaning is in the silences.
One Sunday afternoon, Vero sees LiLi in the Walmart with her
gaggle of nanny friends, and she looks like a different person, wear-
ing eyeliner and lipstick, laughing as she hides her smile behind
her hand, an elbow looped through the arm of a Filipina woman.
They load their cart with shampoo and cooking pots and running
shoes—sending it all home for family—glowing with the thrill of
each purchase. But when Vero steps close, their faces go blank.
“Hello, ma’am. Vero.”
“Enjoying your day off?”
“Yes, it’s okay. We like to shop.” LiLi is polite but her face is
distant and cold. She wishes Vero was not there, that is clear.
Vero longs for that little crack of warmth LiLi showed to her in
the kitchen. The biting of the lip, the near smile, the boyfriend
confession.
The two women she’s with look younger than LiLi. Their long
hair shines and they wear too much makeup, reminding Vero of
teenagers who put their faces on in a gas-station restroom only
after passing the inspection of their parents.
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Vero knows she looks a wreck. Shane has the boys, and she has
just come from a run with Joss. She’s wearing a Petro Canada toque
she got for free at her last fill-up. No makeup. Grey, torn sweat
pants. She knows she does not match the image these women have
of a well-off North American lady. She disappoints them.
“Who are your friends?” Vero smiles. Her insides hurt, like
they’re being pulled in two directions. These women don’t want her
in their Sunday. She should leave.
But Vero doesn’t leave, so LiLi introduces her to the others. She
must, Vero sees Bernie smirking, she has the social skills of the con-
querors passed onto the conquered.
“This is Lualhati. We call her Lu. She works with family on the
west side. This is Jennalynn. She works for a doctor. They both
nanny.” Vero shakes the hands of both women.
“This,” LiLi turns to her friends and gestures toward Vero, “is my
boss.” Vero is surprised at how much this hurts, this way of naming
her. She turns away before they can see the sting.
◊◊◊
house to themselves. At those times, Vero can imagine they might
one day be friends. Vero can at least imagine that LiLi remembers
their phone conversation, the promise from Hong Kong: I will be
like your sister, an auntie taking care of your boys.
They sit on the double bed in Jamal’s room watching him play in
his crib. He doesn’t cry or talk, not in any words that make sense,
but he does not sleep either. When the rise to leave, Jamal cries, a
whiny string of nonsense. “Wag ka alis! Wag ka alis!” They don’t
know what he means, but his distress is real enough. So Vero and
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LiLi sit on the bed and look at him. “He’s two now,” Vero says. “We
should move him into a bed. Soon.”
You’re done for the day, LiLi, Vero thinks to say. You do not have to
stay with me. But she keeps her silence. She likes that LiLi hasn’t scur-
ried down in the basement the moment her work day ended.
LiLi smiles at Jamal. “You have good boys, Vero.”
Not beautiful. Not brilliant. LiLi does not exaggerate. But from her
“good” means more. “Thank you, LiLi,” Vero reaches toward LiLi’s
arm, almost touches it. “I can see their goodness, feel it, more with
you here to help me.” She looks away from LiLi, sensing she’s making
her uncomfortable with so much attention. “It’s true: they are good.”
Vero begins to explain what she means, but from the corner of her eye
she sees LiLi nod.
What LiLi asks next surprises Vero.
“Do you find giving birth hard? Vero?”
Nobody has asked Vero that before. Shane was there so he doesn’t
have to ask, and Vero has no little sister. Cheryl had said all she would
ever say to Vero about motherhood before the babies were even born.
“My generation worked for a world in which women could do any-
thing. Your generation misinterpreted that to mean that you must do
everything.” Vero remembers Cheryl wearing a turtleneck and cordu-
roy pants that flared at the ankle, a joint smouldering in a Mason-jar
lid on the coffee table at her elbow as she made this statement. But
Vero does not trust this memory. It feels invented.
“Eliot was an emergency C-section,” Vero tells LiLi, crossing her
legs and leaning into the headboard. “That was like getting a package
