by Angie Abdou
like secrets and they like an extra nanny in the basement, as if their
Ligaya has multiplied. Twice the tickles, twice the admiration, twice
the treats, twice the applause at their mastery of tricky words like
sumbungero.
Ligaya and Cheska linger upstairs during their one week reprieve.
They eat at the big oak dining room table and watch movies on the
giant flat screen television. To torment Ligaya, Cheska threatens to
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take a bath in the oversized jet tub off the master bedroom and come
downstairs wearing Vero’s terrycloth bathrobe with its Four Seasons
logo.
“I send pictures home to my mama, and she says, ‘Cheska, you get
fat!’ I say, ‘Mama, there are no men for me in this country; eating is
my only pleasure.’ She says, ‘With a backside like that, there will be no
man for you in any country.’ Hay naku! ”
Cheska stands in the middle of the living room, staring at the leather
furniture, the arching windows looking out on a sprawling backyard,
the shining black granite countertops. Vero taught Ligaya just how to
polish those countertops. “Take special care of these,” she requested.
“We could feed a family of four for a year on what these cost.” Cheska
tilts her head back and looks at the high ceiling, the rows and rows of
pot lights. She spins a slow circle, eyes wide. The hunger in Cheska’s
eyes embarrasses Ligaya. Finally Cheska stops spinning, spreads her
arms. “One day,” she says, “I will have a house like this one.” Reverence
fills her voice, as if she’s speaking in a church. Ligaya wants to slap her,
and turns her back so Cheska won’t see the violent impulse cross her
face. Ligaya instantly recognizes the lack of fairness in her reaction.
Cheska only gives words to what Ligaya also thinks, voices a desire
that Ligaya feels too intensely for words. Cheska says what Ligaya
wouldn’t dare.
◊◊◊
Every evening after her shift, Cheska comes over so she and Ligaya
can play in the big kitchen. They make piles of flatbread stuffed with
garlic peas, deep bowls of pork-blood stew and puto, stacks of plantains
rolled in egg-roll wrappers. They fill bowls with anchovies fried to a dry
crisp. Cheska has brought Zamboanga octopus from a recent visit to
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Vancouver. They steam it, and Cheska dangles the raw tentacles from
her eye sockets, making Jamal squeal with delight and Eliot shriek in
horror. “Cheska, you are a child,” Ligaya says, but there is kindness in
her voice. Cheska and Ligaya cook as if they will invite an entire village
for the feast. The whole house smells of fish sauce. Ligaya has been
granted one week free of Shane and his “issues.” Let the house smell.
“We’re not tattletales,” Eliot says, sniffing the fish sauce in the air,
knowing his father would disapprove. “I like the smell, LiLi.” He wolfs
down the fish, fried plain for him. The buttery white flecks fall from
his lips when he speaks. “I mean, Ligaya,” he says, wiping his bare arm
across his food-stained mouth. “It’s still the Philippines game, right?”
This is the first time Ligaya has heard her real name full and loud
in his mouth, not relegated to basement whispers. A part of regu-
lar conversation. No secret. “Yes, Eliot, for a while more we play the
Philippines game.”
“Well, I like the smell, Ligaya. It reminds me of the Philippines.”
She does not ask him how a smell can remind him of a place he’s
never been.
◊◊◊
Cheska lies on her stomach on Ligaya’s bed, bare heels in the air, flip-
ping through Vero’s running magazines. “Why doesn’t she have fash-
ion magazines?” There’s a bowl of peanuts at Cheska’s elbow, and she
eats them one at a time, licking her fingers after each. “Or the celebrity
ones?” But Cheska continues to leaf through the pages, the glaze of her
eyes matching the gloss of the page.
Eliot digs into Ligaya’s secret drawer and passes the well-thumbed
pictures to Jamal, naming the subject of each as if they’re as familiar as
his own family.
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“Nanay, that means mother.”
“Tatay, that means father.”
“Nene.”
“Totoy.”
“Pedro.”
Ligaya flinches on Pedro. “Nene and Totoy,” she repeats, just for the
luxury of feeling the syllables in her mouth.
“They’re your brother and sister, right, Ligaya?’ Her full name has
become so familiar on Eliot’s tongue that she fears he will use it when
his parents return. She should ban it now. For the habit.
“Yes, Eliot. My little brother. My little sister.”
“But aren’t they too little? Aren’t you big enough to be their
mommy?” He speaks into the faces of the photograph, his eyebrows
pinched in concentration, searching for the answer to some mystery
he knows hides there.
“Maybe, Eliot. Maybe I’m big enough.” She looks way from the
photograph, their bare feet, their dirty shorts. “But they are my
brother and sister.”
“You seem big enough to be a mommy.” Eliot scratches his chin,
staring hard at the two children frozen in time. “You seem too big to
be their sister.”
“Eliot, that’s how it is.” Ligaya tries to keep the hardness from her
voice. It is not his fault. None of it.
Jamal holds the photo of Nanay up to his face; he likes the cool,
smooth surface against his cheek. Ligaya pries it from his sweaty boy
fingers, places it carefully back in the drawer.
“Knowing Jamal, he will eat the picture as soon as look at it,” she
says to Cheska to explain the sharpness in her movements. But she
will not meet Cheska’s eyes or even turn in her direction. She will not
try to explain why her voice sounds as if she has forgotten how to
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breathe. A child’s understanding, that is one thing, but Ligaya cannot
bear to see the knowledge in Cheska’s face too. Big enough to be a
mommy. Yes.
◊◊◊
On Thursday, Mr and Mrs Schoeman take Jamal and Eliot during the
afternoon, and Ligaya fills her time by walking to the agency down-
town to visit Bernie. She aims for a time she knows the office will be
slow so Bernie might offer to make her tea in the special Philippines’
way. Bernie keeps a cassava in the fridge for such occasions. Ligaya
resists the vanity of thinking it is only for her and assumes Bernie is
visited by many nannies who enjoy her company. Bernie understands
the Filipina nanny way, and does not leave Ligaya to sit idle while
she works, knowing that watching someone else work makes Ligaya
uncomfortable and fidgety. She directs Ligaya to slice the cassava into
thin pieces while she boils the ginger. Over the steaming water and
clack of the sharp knife, they talk. Ligaya tells Bernie things she tells
no one else, perhaps because Bernie does not try so hard, does not ask
ridiculous questions. Bernie appears to barely listen at all. She makes
herself an empty space into which Ligaya can dump her thoughts after
the satisfaction of hearing them aloud, just once.
“I’m your advocate,” she told Ligaya when she first arrived. “I can
also be like a friend, if you want.”
It was the “if you want” that won Ligaya.
“How’s your proctalgia fugax times two?” Bernie dips the tea bag
into the steaming ginger water.
“Procta…?” Ligaya is not use to feeling confusion with Bernie. She
stops slicing and studies Bernie’s face looking for the joke.
“Pain in the ass in Latin,” Bernie smiles, drying her fingers on a tea
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towel. “A pain so bad it sometimes wakes you up in the middle of the
night. It’s a medical condition. But kids, they sometimes feel like a
medical condition, when you’re the one doing all the caring for them.”
Ligaya bites her lips and thinks of the poster behind their backs.
The blonde mother snuggled close with her blonde child, the dark
nanny reading to the child held at arm’s length. The formality between
the nanny and child in this photograph is false. Such formality would
be more likely with the parents. The nanny spends all day with the
children. Who could maintain such stiff posture day in and day out?
Not Ligaya. She doesn’t know how to respond to Bernie. Jamal and
Eliot can be a challenge, and Ligaya would like a holiday. She would
like to curl up in her single bed, pull the covers over her head, and
sleep for a week. But she does not call Jamal and Eliot names. Where
she comes from, adults do not call children names.
“Oh, I don’t say that. Pain in the…! About Eliot and Jamal.”
“Right. You can’t say it. So I will.” Bernie’s eyes wrinkle at the cor-
ners, and she always seems on the verge of winking. Her expression
says, It’s okay to laugh. What else can we do? Ligaya tries to imitate her
lightness.
When they drink the tea, Ligaya opens her mouth wide against
the cup and lets the pieces of yam slide past her teeth with the liquid.
She sucks on their sweetness during the breaks in their conversation.
Bernie picks the yams from her cup and holds them between her fin-
gers, nibbling while Ligaya talks.
It’s nice to have this one pair of ears. Ligaya tells Bernie that she
wrote a test last week, before Vero and Shane left, for her driving
learner’s license. “Takes me so long,” she says, “Sometimes I am five
minutes just to figure out what the question asked.” But with an allow-
ance of extra time, Ligaya passed the written test. Bernie says she will
take her for driving practice. Ligaya does not know what she hopes
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to achieve with this license. She has no car and no place to go. But
the idea of driving is a kind of freedom. Bernie does not question her
motives. She does not ask about Vero, either, doesn’t seem to wonder
whether Vero knows of Ligaya’s plan to learn to drive. Ligaya has not
told Vero, who would turn this new goal into her own project. She
does not want driving lessons from Vero.
Ligaya watches Bernie drink the tea, expecting her to flinch. With
the sweet yam and spoonfuls of extra sugar, the tea is too sweet for
North American tastes. Ligaya suspects Bernie drinks it just to be
polite, though Bernie claims she makes it at home for her girlfriend,
Shauna. “She has a sweet tooth that would put any ten-year-old to
shame.”
“Maybe she part Filipino,” Ligaya jokes, pouring herself another
cup of tea, while Bernie has barely begun hers. Shauna drives ambu-
lance for the city of Sprucedale. Ligaya imagines herself doing the
same job once she learns to drive, when her family is here and she has
graduated from being a nanny.
The August sun shines hot through the agency windows. It’s a
day to take for granted in the Philippines, but here the sun is wor-
shipped when it finally appears. On Ligaya’s walk to Bernie’s office,
she detoured by the beach, which crawled with athletes jammed into
long-sleeved, skin-tight black wet suits. Some even wore hoods. Sea
monsters, that’s what they looked like to Ligaya. But Shane had pre-
viously explained to her that the people in wet suits were training for
a triathlon: they swim, they bike, they run. People in this country are
obsessed with making sweat. Humans are curious creatures, thinks Ligaya.
Those who needn’t worry about survival invent ways to punish them-
selves. As she walked along the shore watching the triathletes, the sun
burned her skin, but its heat didn’t remind her of home, except in the
not-reminding. In that way, her Philippines home is always with her.
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Ligaya would give anything to quit sweating now as she sits in the
window, working up the courage to speak. Today, there is something
Ligaya wants to tell Bernie, maybe even needs to tell her. She looks
into the bottom of her second cup of tea, swirls the sugary liquid.
Bernie nibbles, saying nothing, as if she knows Ligaya has something
that only silence will pull from her.
“Bernie, I tell you…” Ligaya finally says, eyes still in her tea cup,
“about my boyfriend back home? The one who went into the bed with
my friend? They forced to marry? I the godmother of new baby?”
When Bernie says nothing, Ligaya lifts her head to see if Bernie is
listening. Bernie nods ever so slightly, but says nothing. She has put
her cup down and curls a piece of her hair around her finger as she
listens.
“I tell this to Vero, like it is me.” Ligaya drops her head again. “That
is not my story. That happen to my cousin, Corazon. But my true
story different.”
This time, Ligaya does not look up. Eventually, Bernie prompts her
with a single word. “Yes.” Ligaya imagines a warning in the word: Are
you sure you want to tell me this? But she cannot stop now.
“I have my own children. Nene. Totoy. My daughter. My son. Not
sister. Not brother. Pedro is their father.” As easy as that, it’s out.
Ligaya turns her attention to her body, checks to see if the confession
makes her feel different, lighter, but Bernie’s words interrupt her.
“Your application said single. Your application said no children.”
Ligaya listens for a note of accusation but finds none. Tell me, the
tone says. Explain. Ligaya thinks (hopes) she hears something else
there too, something like, I will try to understand.
“What difference does it make? Once I am here, my children are
not mine. Once I am here, what kind of mother can I be? I am no
mother.” Ligaya tucks her hair behind her ears, sets her cup on the
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table, and meets Bernie’s eyes. “I am no mother to them anymore.
That is no lie.”
“I do not know this information, Ligaya. Once you leave my office,
it’s as if you never told me. Understand?” Bernie’s words are firm but
her eyes are soft. “Keeping something like this a secret? My ass is on
the line. I’d lose my job. Maybe worse.”
“Nobody know but you, Bernie. Nobody here will ever know.”
Ligaya nearly wishes she had kept quiet. What if people in Sprucedale
knew? What would they think of her? They would judge. Ligaya’s
own judgment is enough to bear. “Not even Cheska.”
Bernie pinches her lips together until she has none and then holds
her flat palm across her mouth, closes her eyes.
“I cannot tell Vero the truth. It will make her too sad.” Even if
Ligaya wanted to tell Vero, she could not. Her motivation has gone
beyond sadness. Now Ligaya cannot tell because of the lie. There will
be legal implications, she hears Mister Shane. His “issues” would run
wild with this detail. And then what? Ligaya cannot go home. She
doesn’t have the money even for a ticket. “And how will I forget my
sadness if I see it in Vero’s face every day?” Ligaya thinks she sees
Bernie nod, her eyes still closed, but the movement is so slight that it
could be Ligaya’s imagination, her wishful thinking. “I must forget.”
Ligaya makes this confession only to Bernie. She leaves it there.
It’s the only way.
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FOUR
Hedonism is a sandbox for your inner child, nourishment for
the mind, body, spirit, and soul. Pleasure comes in many forms.
Choose one. Or two. Or more. And with absolutely everything
included in one upfront price, you never have to think about
money. Not even tips. Just what to do next. And when.
— Hedonism II brochure
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The pregnant Swiss woman wears nothing but a broad-brimmed
straw hat. It casts a protective shadow over her face and shoulders
but leaves an orb of protruding belly exposed to the late-day sun.
Her stretched navel, pulled so thin it looks ready to split wide open,
