by Angie Abdou
keeps lookout. She’s almost forgotten about this view, a tiny corner of
lake in the distance. My room with a view, she’d sighed with feigned rap-
ture when they bought the house, before Shane claimed it as his office.
Here, the two of them shared Argentinian Malbecs, toasting the house,
toasting their own success, celebrating their ability to build themselves
a perfect life. Here, she interviewed LiLi on that crackling line to Hong
Kong. I be your sister, ma’am, an auntie to your boys. Here, LiLi trembled
through Shane’s weekly performance review meetings, Vero downstairs,
left to guess what transpired between them.
Here, Vero will see Shane pull in. He must’ve spent the night in
his office. He will be wrinkled, remorseful. This absence is unlike him.
Funny that it has taken this, his son speaking Tagalog, for him to crack.
But Vero knows it’s not just that. Sometimes simply being alive is hard.
Shane has saved up for a giant chasm, whereas Vero lets life take its toll
gradually in miniature fissures sustained each and every day. “You feel
too deeply,” Cheryl said to her. “It will be your downfall.” And then
Cheryl retreated—choosing not to feel at all.
It’s just words. That’s what Vero will say when Shane returns with a
hand cupped around the back of his neck, fingers tucked into his hair.
Jamal will learn other words. But she realizes that Shane’s anger has
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nothing to do with language. It has to do with Shane’s realization of his
own failure. What failure is felt more harshly than a failure in parenting?
A child should speak the language of its mother. Vero knows that he thought
the language of his father too. Only a personal failure could provoke such
outrage. And to be outed in that way—by a peer, another medical pro-
fessional in the same small city—before Shane could discover his short-
coming for himself. That was the worst of it.
He’s ashamed. There’s nothing a Schoeman hates worse than the
shame of losing.
◊◊◊
Vero must work to focus on LiLi. Every time Vero sees LiLi today, it’s
as if she’s looking for the first time: the perfectly round mole just above
her lip, the gold cross hanging in the smooth dip at her neck, the hands
small as a child’s but always flying, busy with adult work.
“I am going crazy.” Vero speaks the words loudly, straight into her
wide mug, just to hear them echo back. She must fight her tongue to
get it around each word. The loose enunciation that sounded natural in
Jamaica is too clumsy here, too reckless, too dangerous. “I’m going crazy.”
The boys laugh. They find Vero hysterical. Nothing is as funny as this
crazy, silly mommy of theirs. But LiLi does not laugh.
“It’s Shane, LiLi. He’s gone.” Arms hanging loose at her sides, Vero
stares at LiLi: the mole, the cross, the hands. “It makes me sad. That he’s
gone. Sad and scared.” She feels as though she’s lifted a sheet and pros-
trated herself naked for judgment.
There’s a quick twitch across LiLi’s features. It moves like a shadow
from her forehead to her eyes to her mouth and then it’s gone. It’s fear,
thinks Vero, LiLi does not want to know my real story any more than I want
hers.
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“We all have bad days,” LiLi says. “This pain…it get better and
then you forget it.”
Vero does not want LiLi to talk about pain. What she wants is for
LiLi to say that Shane will come home. Of course he will. He must.
But Vero wants to hear it, from some mouth other than her own.
LiLi will not mention it, though. LiLi will speak neither of Shane’s
absence nor his return. Direct reference to the personal lives of her
employers would be indelicate. LiLi has studied the nanny manuals
well. LiLi is never indelicate.
In return, Vero will not mention LiLi’s pain, the kind of pain that
does not go away. The thought is out of Vero’s mouth as quickly as she
thinks it. “You make the rules here,” she says. “Now you do.”
This is drunkenness, this inability to distinguish between an outer
and inner voice. This is why we drink: to give ourselves permission to
confuse the two.
“I mean, you’re doing a good job of running the household. That’s
what I meant to say. Any house needs rules.” Her words are too loud
and too wet. Her hand rests on Jamal’s head, too heavy. He grins up
at her. She’s so funny, this crazy, silly mommy. Vero swallows and tries
again. “Thank you. For everything.” She puts her half-full mug on the
counter, unable to drink another sip. A light Pinot Grigio is in order.
“Oh Vero.” LiLi’s smile reminds Vero of the spring day on the
lawn, LiLi’s face opening to the rare sun like a flower. “I do not make
rules for you. For the boys, some rules.” She busies herself clearing the
dishes. “I glad you like my running of your house.”
LiLi allows herself more words when Shane’s gone. When it’s just
the two of them, Vero gets glimpses of the woman behind the veil of
employee. The two of them—Vero and LiLi—could be more like a
family without him. Three adults is too many for one family. Vero nearly
says it aloud. Indelicate, she realizes, just in time.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The day skips and jumps, Vero finds herself in conversations
she doesn’t remember starting, wonders how previous conversations
ended, pours herself another glass of Pinot Grigio and forges on.
“Is a lion a predator or a prey?” Eliot’s eyebrows push low down on
his eyes. The answer is important.
“Predator,” LiLi answers lightly, wiping milk from the corners of
his mouth with her wet thumb.
“Is a seal a predator or a prey?”
“Mm, prey,” LiLi says less confidently. “Though predator to fish.”
She scoops more green peas onto his plate. He spoons them into his
mouth, his mind on the seal. LiLi nods at Vero over his head, pleased
with this trick of taking advantage of his distraction. “He watch the
animal show on television, Vero. You know Eliot. He like to under-
stand everything.”
The television runs in the background now too, but nobody
watches it. Jamal’s eyes stay stuck on Eliot. Vero reads comprehension
in Jamal’s features. He may not speak English, but he understands it.
But Vero and LiLi were talking about something else. Before this
interruption of predators and prey. LiLi served them dinner: white
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fish with rice and tomatoes, a rub of cumin and curry and chili
powder coating the fish. LiLi removed Vero’s wine glass and wrapped
her hands around a warm cup of black strong coffee. She took Vero’s
fingers and placed them just as she’d placed Jamal’s fingers around his
fork at breakfast.
Shane has not returned for dinner, but ne
ither she nor LiLi
acknowledges the space at his end of the table as they spoon his
favourite meal into their mouths.
“What were we talking about? About Bernie?” The conversation
has gotten away from Vero, caught in a gust of wind and whipped
over the clouds. She can’t reel it back in.
“Yes, Bernie is…” LiLi’s sentence trails off, left for Vero to finish
it, but Vero leaves it to hang, just like one of Shane’s sentences. Why
can’t these people follow their own thoughts through to their own
damn conclusions? Vero will wait.
“She is the other way. A tomboy, we say.”
Still, Vero says nothing.
LiLi pushes fish and tomatoes around her plate, building small
piles. Vero wonders when she will take a bite. She seems to do so only
when Vero looks away. Rarely do they eat at the same table. “She has
a girlfriend,” LiLi finally says, resting her fork on the table. “Not boy.”
Bernie is gay? Vero flushes with her own stupidity that she must
be told this. By LiLi. How could Vero not have known? “Oh yes,”
she covers, “I thought so. We don’t make such a big deal about those
things here. Don’t even differentiate one way or another, most of the
time. Post-gay. That’s the term we use.” She cringes at the exclusion
in her pronouns. We versus you. The implied superiority. We know, you
don’t. It is a trick Shane’s parents would use. We, the white employer,
you, the coloured servant. “There are gay people in the Philippines,
then?”
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It is a stupid question. Vero recognizes it as such immediately. She
pours fast words over the stupidity to bury it. “I mean, it’s so religious
there. I thought homosexuals would be closeted.” Vero does not know
if LiLi will understand this expression. “I thought they might hide
their sexual orientation, I mean.”
“Yes, I know closeted, this way of saying.” LiLi puts generous bowls
of ice cream in front of Eliot and Jamal. “We have gays. In Philippines,
they are more showy than here, men wearing makeup or the feminine
clothes. Here, the gays, they are more—how you say?—subtle. It dif-
ferent in Philippines, though. So much about money. Business. Hard
to know what’s true and what’s…for the necessity.”
Vero tries to make sense of this, what it might mean for LiLi.
Suddenly, Vero recognizes herself as the naïve one, the one who has
lived a sheltered existence.
LiLi fills the silence. “But I only know about Bernie because she
tell me herself.”
Bernie told her?
“You two are good friends then?” Vero hears her own jealousy. A
tight presence in her throat, the words have to squeeze by it to escape.
“That’s good.” Vero forces air into her words. “I’m glad you have
someone. Like that.”
LiLi puts a large fork full of fish and rice into her mouth, chews
with her hands across her lips. Nods.
“I suppose it can’t be me,” Vero says into her coffee mug. “That
friend.”
After dinner, Vero finds a nature show on television and puts Jamal
and Eliot in front of it. She needs for them to be TV-comatose. For
a while. Telatose, Shane calls it, when their eyes sink into their skulls
and the muscles of their faces fall slack. Vero expects LiLi will go
downstairs once her charges are occupied, but she busies herself with
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dishes and brooms and cloths. Vero doesn’t stop her. She’s learned
that work is LiLi’s way of staying upstairs. She’s not comfortable
with idleness, at least not in Vero’s presence. She listens as she works,
though, nods encouragement.
She boils strawberry tea, surprising Vero by taking a cup for herself
and sitting on the couch next to Vero, legs curled under her. Amazing
how this woman knows what Vero needs before Vero knows herself.
“Mothering me is not exactly in your job description, is it?” Vero’s
face feels numb, but the hint of a headache creeps down her skull.
She rests the warm cup at her temple, enjoys Jamal’s hot lazy weight
falling into her thigh. “Thank you, LiLi.”
Vero is grateful for LiLi’s company, but it’s like sitting for a drink
with a hummingbird. Any sharp movement will scare her off, and
LiLi will be back flittering around the kitchen with a broom. Vero
holds her breath, keeps both hands around her mug.
“In my country, when men want to socialize with the friends,
they say ‘ Inuman na! ’ It means, It’s drinking time. The men like beer.
Women, we only take alcohol on very special occasion,” LiLi offers,
setting her tea on the corner table and pulling Eliot into her lap. His
eyes stay fixed on the television, but he melds to the spaces in LiLi’s
body. “And then only a little bit.” LiLi fingers the gold cross at her
throat. “Tomorrow, my mother birthday. I like to have a bit of wine.
With you.” She blushes like a teenager asking permission. “But maybe
you have enough already.”
Vero would like to pour them each a glass of cool wine, raise her
rim to meet LiLi’s. To your mother! To Nanay! But she’s frightened
that a large gesture will send LiLi flying downstairs. Vero simply
sits. They both watch the boys watch television. LiLi leaves her lips
against the warm mug even when she’s not drinking, the other arm
curled around Eliot’s husky frame.
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LiLi has dressed him in a green shirt that brings out the colour of
his eyes. He starts school on Monday, only junior kindergarten, but
Vero still finds it impossible to believe. The summer has left the tips
of his hair golden. They curl at the nape of his neck. Vero tightens
her own grip on Jamal. “God, they’re beautiful,” Vero says of her own
boys, knowing it’s indecorous to admire one’s own offspring. She would
never say it in public.
LiLi smiles her agreement. The smile softens her features. Vero sees
pride in the smile, yet she does not feel threatened by it. She’s grateful
someone else can love her boys with such fullness.
“You’re beautiful too.” Vero watches the blush crawl up LiLi’s neck
in response. “You must have had many admirers at home. Here too, I
imagine.”
“Oh. Nobody say so anymore. Nobody say so for very long time.”
LiLi tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, exposing a stretch of neck.
Danielle’s neck with its suntan was the same colour. Vero had put her
mouth right where the collarbone…
No.
Vero’s gaze has made LiLi uncomfortable. Even the weight of a look
will make this hummingbird fly. LiLi squirms and pushes herself up
from the couch, takes Vero’s empty mug from her hands. “I take the
boys for a bath, now, Vero. You rest. It fine. I not mind.”
◊◊◊
Vero listens to the faucets running above, the boys splashing in the
water. Alone, she can think of nothing but Shane. By now, he’s not
simply at the office. She cannot be down here alone. Not with these
thoughts. She pours herself a fresh cup of tea and follows the sounds
of life. She brings LiLi a cup of tea too, but LiLi’s hands are busy: she
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bends over the bathtub, bubbles up her forearms, her long hair dipping
into the water. When she sees Vero, she wipes the steam from her face
with the inside of her elbow, laughs at the wet mess the boys have made
of the bathroom. “See, you crazy boys! Your mother fire me for this
mess you make.” She splashes water toward their faces to punctuate
her joke.
Vero stays in the steamy doorway, socks dry, holding both cups. Eliot
and Jamal smile at Vero over LiLi’s head. The smile lets Vero feel the
earth under her feet. Without it, she would be convinced she was no
more than a ghost, hovering at the periphery of her own life. Not just
redundant but insubstantial.
LiLi’s shirt rides up, exposing the small of her back. So many North
American women her age have decorated that spot with tattoos, but
hers is blank. When she sees Vero staring, she tugs at her shirt, tucking
it into the waistband of her sweatpants.
“LiLi, can you make sure you’re using English? Always? With
Jamal?” Vero keeps her voice soft. It is not LiLi’s fault.
LiLi stops scrubbing Jamal’s hair. She opens her mouth but then
closes it again without making a sound. She nods once with her eyes
lowered.
“Why am I so tired?” Vero puts the question to LiLi’s back. “You’re
the one doing all the work.” It’s transparent, this praise used to soften
the blow of weakly worded criticism. Vero doesn’t try to hide that.
“My work gives me the energy.” LiLi’s hands move quickly against
Jamal’s scalp. “Too much time left to thinking—that tire anyone.”
Vero does not respond. LiLi has matched her transparent praise with
transparent criticism. Vero leaves LiLi to her work.
◊◊◊
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After LiLi puts the boys to sleep, she joins Vero on the front porch.
“Let’s have that glass of wine,” Vero says, LiLi’s reappearance cause
for celebration. Normally, LiLi would slink downstairs to the basement
