Between
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People talk of a fast descent into insanity as if the psyche only moves
in one direction, but Vero dips and whirls; she has a grasp on the sit-
uation, and then she doesn’t. She knows the appropriate thing to say,
and then she loses it; there’s enough air, and then there’s none.
“Yes.” LiLi’s brow furrows. “I could never do such a thing—about
the birth control—of my own children.” She wipes a hand across her
eyes, weary. “My brother and sister, I mean. Nene and Totoy.” Her
eyes glisten when she says their names, but her face stays hard. “We
do not talk about—” She drops her voice as if speaking a dirty word
against her will “—birth control, in my home.”
“Maybe I’m not cut out to be a mother.” Vero looks out the window
addressing her confession to the forest, but she waits, breath held,
for LiLi’s response. She cannot imagine saying such a thing aloud to
anyone else. LiLi is an empty container. Vero can put this thought
there and leave it.
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“Every woman feel that way sometimes, Vero. We do our best, when
we can.” The intensity in LiLi’s voice surprises Vero. She’s trying to
tell Vero something, a thing of great importance to her, but again,
Vero turns away from it. She has come so far, wanting a connection
with this woman, this stranger in her home, but now she has doubts.
What would a real connection mean? In this context?
“I will put you in my book too.” Vero jerks the conversation back to
safe ground. “In my Mommy’s Alphabet.”
B is for the boredom
Of all that parenting work.
Thank goodness for the nanny
So mommy can her duties shirk.
Vero hears her own entreaty in the verse, a desperate plea lurking
behind the strident rhyme, the offside joke. Tell me I don’t fall short.
Tell me!
“I don’t know what this means. Shirk.” LiLi is mad now. Vero
knows it for certain. Her chair screeches around to face the children’s
table. She takes Jamal’s spoon from him and shovels the last few bites
of cold egg into his mouth. “We do five bites, JJ. You count with me.”
Eliot counts along—“one! two! three!” — but Jamal only chews. Vero
thinks to tell LiLi that Jamal speaks Tagalog, but then she realizes
that LiLi will, of course, know. LiLi knows many things about Vero’s
boys. Vero sits with this thought for a moment, her hands clenched as
if in prayer, and then she lets it go. She decides it is okay, this life that
exists beyond her. What else could it be?
◊◊◊
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“Have you seen Mister Shane?” The words come up from Vero’s throat
like a cough, a gag.
Ligaya tries so hard to stay out of her employers’ business, to live in
their house but outside of their “personal affairs.” Yet here is Vero pull-
ing her in. Ligaya thinks Vero should read the nanny brochures. What
good is it if only one of them knows the rules?
“Mister Shane? Good lord. Did you hear that? I need a coffee.”
Vero is falling apart. That—a woman falling apart—looks the same
in any country. Ligaya should try to help hold her together. But the
holding together of the mother is not in Ligaya’s job description.
Still, Ligaya likes Vero, a little bit. Better than she liked Madam
Poon. Maybe Ligaya likes Vero for all of her trying. Madam Poon
knew better than to try. Vero is not as smart as Madam Poon, or as
practical.
Ligaya brews coffee and sets a cup—prepared just as Vero likes it—
on the table in front of her. She hopes Vero will drink it and then go
to her plant of army tanks, leaving the boys to their day. Caring about
Vero is too much work. Ligaya has enough work.
“Oh, LiLi. Thank you. You’re magic.” She sips. “Coffee is magic.”
She takes the cup and stands at the window, her forehead pressed
against the glass.
“I meant to say Shane. Just Shane. Have you seen him?”
This world is not made for women, thinks Ligaya. Not in the Philippines.
Not here. Maybe not anywhere.
LiLi lifts her lips into a soft smile she rarely shares with adults
here, the kind of smile she’s especially careful not to share with Shane
and Vero. The brochure has said to keep boundaries, to always main-
tain the privacy of the family. But today? This poor woman. How can
Ligaya keep boundaries here with this sad mother whose husband is
gone? Ligaya understand that sadness far better than she would like to.
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“He will be at work now, yes? He be home for supper. I make his
favourite.”
Ligaya wonders if Vero knows what Shane’s favourite dish is.
Ligaya knows. She will make white fish with chili powder and canned
tomatoes, served on white sticky rice. Shane always asks for seconds
when she makes that meal. Pedro’s favourite dish is chicken. He chews
on the drumstick until his lips shine with grease, sucks every bit of
marrow out of the bone, and then smiles at Ligaya with his chipped
front tooth. She once asked him where it came from, that broken
tooth. You don’t need to know everything about me, my Ligaya. Now she
wishes she knew nothing about him. She tells her mind to stay away
from him, but her mind does not obey. There has been nobody else.
“Thank you, LiLi. Shane would like that. If you make his favourite.
Thank you.”
While LiLi washes the boys’ hands and faces and marches them
to the dishwasher with their empty plates, Vero watches as if she is
at a movie theatre. Ligaya wonders if she searches her mind for a
memory of putting Jamal and Eliot to bed last night. Brushing their
teeth as the salt ran through the egg timer? Sitting between them as
they stalled over the pages of their favourite book about a boy whose
magic skates let him win at hockey? Putting her nose to their freshly
washed hair as she kissed them goodnight? Vero will not find any
such memories. Ligaya put them to bed, and Ligaya got up with them
this morning.
“How long have you been working, LiLi?”
The question startles Ligaya, as if Vero has seen her naked thoughts.
Ligaya waves her hand vaguely in the air. “No worries, Vero.” It is a
North American expression— no worries!— but sometimes seems to
mean its opposite. “No worries at all.” Ligaya smiles again.
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◊◊◊
Vero takes a long drink from her cup. It’s already half empty, though
she doesn’t recall lifting it to her lips before now. The coffee is strong
the way LiLi knows Vero likes it. Vero drinks deeply again, enjoying
the burn of it against the back of her throat, the buzz of it through
her veins.
But the caffeine heightens Vero’s senses when she craves the oppo-
site. She leaves her mug on the dining room
table and goes in search
of the blender. LiLi has gradually reorganized the entire kitchen until
Vero can’t find anything. By the time Vero locates the blender in the
bottom corner of a cupboard near the stove, LiLi has already emptied
Vero’s cooling coffee down the drain, rinsed her cup, and placed it
in the dishwasher. Everything about LiLi speaks of efficiency: her
no-nonsense wardrobe, her brisk movements, her reluctance to smile
for Vero or Shane—as if lifting her facial muscles would be a wasteful
use of energy.
“You can ask me where is blender. I know.” LiLi closes the dish-
washer door in a huff of foul-smelling air. When she speaks again,
she has faced away from Vero. LiLi’s mood has shifted again. They’re
both unpredictable—irritable one moment, unexpectedly kind the
next. There’s a suffocating energy in the house, the air too close, too
dense.
“You did not like the coffee,” LiLi says before Vero can respond to
the first accusation.
“I know a better breakfast drink.” Vero stabs the blender’s power
jack into the wall. “I learned it in Jamaica.”
Vero can make a milkshake as well as Mike the Jamaican bartender,
and hers will come without the attitude: a Dirty Monkey with a smile
rather than a snarl. She drops a banana into the blender.
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“You and I can both have some. We’ll celebrate.” Vero swallows
hard, trying to choke her own hysterical treble. “A homecoming
party.”
Vero counts to five as the brown syrup pours from the Kahlua
bottle. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Imena
said this—in her black leather pants and bustier, a whip held firmly
between her teeth as she stretched over the bar, breasts nearly spill-
ing free, her thick, muscled arm reaching for the 151-proof rum that
Mike kept hidden under the front counter. Imena free-poured into
her own glass before tipping the bottle in Vero’s direction. “Sometimes
being a bit numb helps.” She did not smile or invite Vero to respond.
“Sometimes, but not always.”
Vero measures the first shot of rum into the blender, but then,
when she finds no other liqueurs in the cabinet, adds another splash
of rum for character. And then another. “There’s no such thing as too
much character,” she says aloud.
R is for the sweet, sweet rum
Most moms avoid til afternoon.
But mix it with bananas…Voila!
A healthy drink! You can’t have that too soon!
Vero sings under her breath, as much in Hedonism as she is in
Sprucedale, her mouth watering in anticipation of this treat of booze-
drenched ice cream, the cool sweet run down her throat, the weight in
her belly, the warm lazy hum of it floating through her bloodstream.
“We play downstairs, Eliot. Bring your brother.”
Eliot wails. He’s been promised the park.
“Shh, Eliot, shh. We play our special game. In my basement. We
do fun.”
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Vero presses blend to drown out the grating whine.
“We go to park later. We stay close by now. In case mommy needs
us.” LiLi speaks the last sentences with a forced loudness, so Vero will
hear her over the blender, and then she hurries the boys downstairs.
LiLi will stay here. LiLi she can count on.
Shane keeps a beer mug in the freezer for that one post-ride beer.
Nobody uses that mug except him. But Shane is not here. Vero takes
his frosty mug and fills it to the rim with her Jamaican concoction.
LiLi, she thinks, is always here, as reliable as my own shadow.
Vero pays LiLi, of course, there is that, but who isn’t paid? One
way or another. Life: it’s all a barter system. That’s the lesson Vero
learned in Hedonism.
“To LiLi,” Vero lifts the heavy mug in the direction of the stairs.
“To LiLi,” she says again louder, hoping LiLi hears in the basement.
Cold sweetness hits her throat first, but then the delicious burn of
the rum chases away the numb ache. It’s not bad, her concoction, not
bad at all. “To LiLi! ”
For her, Vero drinks again.
◊◊◊
Ligaya shoos Jamal and Eliot downstairs and puts them in front of
the television. Usually she is good about limiting their screen time,
but today, she needs space. Eliot happily watches the boy in the
cape spelling English words to save the day. Jamal yammers away in
Tagalog, running a string of trains up and down the wooden slide.
“Mabilis tren! Tren fast!” He’s oblivious to the television. There is
enough fun in this boy’s head, thinks Ligaya. He does not need the tele-
vision, this clever boy.
No Tagalog, Ligaya thinks to say. Only English. And no more Philippines
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Game. No more secret. She will say these words soon. Tomorrow. Or the next day. By September. Eliot starts junior kindergarten then. She and
Jamal can work on English when Eliot goes to school.
“Sakay na! Choo choo!”
Ligaya has taken pleasure in Jamal’s Tagalog this last year, the ease
with which he took to the language. She knows Jamal is not hers, she
has always known that, but he has been like hers.
When Nanay’s face flickers onto Ligaya’s computer screen, Ligaya
does not try to smile for her. Not today.
Nanay has no patience for the sullenness on Ligaya’s face. “Why is
your brow furrowed?” Her voice cuts in and out. The static ages her
voice, transforms her to an ancient croaking woman.
But with even this small glimpse of the Philippines, Ligaya finds
Pedro on her mind, her head resting in the nook of his shoulder as she
watched the thin white line marking an airplane’s movement across the
sky. She thinks of her cousin Corazon, too, and the two of them in the
streets of Hong Kong, a red blanket across their laps, a box of steaming
pansit noodles cupped in their hands. Ligaya likes Jamal—she likes
him a lot, loves him even—but she would say goodbye to him right
now for just one more hour in the company of either Pedro or Corazon.
One more hour. The thought embarrasses her. Pasensya na, JJ, so sorry.
“Life is hard here, Nanay. I don’t feel like smiling today. I get tired of
pretending. My life here is not like I put on Facebook. All smiles and
friends. I miss my home.” Ligaya says the last part softly. She does not
want Eliot and Jamal to hear. “You are at your sister’s home now. Often.
Maybe you don’t understand my life.”
“Yes,” Nanay speaks curtly, “life is hard. I know that.” She does not
say it with kindness. She too is worn out today. “Nene and Totoy. They
need school clothes. They need school textbooks.” Ligaya tries to pic-
ture Totoy old enough for school, his black hair combed flat to his
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head, bleached white socks pulled hig
h to his knees, nearly meeting his
checkered school shorts. “Remember, Ligaya, it’s all God’s plan. This is
necessary, not for your own fun.”
Ligaya holds her breath and counts to three— isa, dalawa, tatlo. Only
then does she allow herself to speak. “With that I agree, Nanay. I did
not come here for fun. We can both say that is true.”
“Not for fun.”
Ligaya does not know why Nanay repeats her like this. The connec-
tion is poor today. Nanay’s face flickers, and the sound of her words lags
behind the sight of her moving lips. One moment the words are quiet
under the static, the next they are loud and distorted.
“Show me the boys, Ligaya, take me on a walk around the basement.”
But Ligaya does not want to show Nanay anything today. Somehow,
it is today’s distortion and flickering and static that allow Ligaya to
ask the question—to say the name—that they have all been avoiding.
“How is Pedro?” Ligaya says it slow and even, not letting herself drop
her eyes, not letting anything that might be interpreted as weakness, or
hope, sneak into her words.
“Ligaya, he is—” Ligaya is certain Nanay will lie, but then Nanay
blinks hard twice and raises her small wrinkled hands to her face, rubs
her eyes, which might be wet. It looks as though Nanay’s hands spread
the moisture to her cheeks. “It is best that you forget Pedro.” Nanay says
this with her eyes lowered, her voice choked. “Your father and I have
forgotten him. The children will forget him soon enough.” Nanay raises
her eyes and waits for Ligaya to respond.
Ligaya will not. She can think of nothing to say. She watches her
own impassive face in the computer. She already knew this anyway.
Pedro’s absence. She has no angry words for him now, no sorrow, no
anguished tears. Where she expects to feel these emotions, she feels
only the heavy weight of fatigue.
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“I am sorry,” Nanay finally says. “We are all sorry.”
“Yes,” Ligaya says. “I hear that word often. Everyone is sorry.”
Only when Nanay has gone does LiLi hold her fingers to the blank
computer screen. She speaks English into her mother’s absence. “I love
you, Mama.”
She says it aloud just to hear how it sounds.
◊◊◊
Vero moves a rocking chair into the bay window in Shane’s office and