“These are very, very delicate,” the lady of the house says. “Silhouettes cut by the European artist Mister Auguste Edouart on his tour of these United States.” She looks to her bored teenage daughter, who is waiting for her piano teacher to arrive.
Your Grannie’s figures were not all of heavy black paper. They were not behind glass. She did not have to tell you that they were “very, very delicate.” Your Grannie’s likenesses were cut from whatever she could get her hands on.
When the lady of the house leaves you to your cleaning, the daughter stands at your side.
“With them being black like that, that lady could be you,” the daughter says. You start to hate her a bit more. She is about your age, you guess, and has taken you as her personal servant whenever you are not in service to her mother.
You lean in toward the figures, searching for Mister August’s signature. Your Grannie’s Master August.
“I hate all these dead people on the walls, watching my every move. At least these don’t stare,” she says.
Her hand flutters at her jaw line, ruddy with pimples. “I saw you lance my sister’s boil. Can you help my complexion? I have my own pocket money if you can keep a secret.”
You can keep secrets.
13.
You had to.
When the men (and boys) of the house start to corner you, you borrow a bigger uniform and keep your hair covered. You are always busy, in a rush to somewhere with witnesses. There is no hiding place for live-ins.
You are your mother’s outside child. The whispers are not even whispers about your ruined mother. The secrets not even secrets. Adults speak freely around you because you know how to disappear. Your mother disappeared. Your father died. Becoming invisible runs in the family line. You try to make yourself invisible before they can force you to disappear.
14.
Your cousin is gray around the edges. She is tall and almost glamorous. Almost. A pinched look of bitterness has settled into her features and makes her look sterner and older than she is.
You ask your cousin how to leave this very elegant house. Your cousin tells you that you will never get set for day work. That you will be destroyed without a home, a family to take you in. She tells you stories about all of the live-ins who left and came crawling back. She spits the names of the ruined ones as a warning: Gladys. Morease. Mary Francis. Eloise. Hortense. Ruby.
“I will not speak a word on your behalf to return if you leave this household,” your cousin says. She taps her hand over her heart as she says this. A pledge. A promise. A hope. A worry that is something a little less than a blessing. Her fingertips break loose from the pledge and tug nervously at her stiff, high collar. Her eyes rim with tears.
15.
The string of ruined women’s names is a map. When you quietly ask about the ruined women, bit by bit you find your way. Miss Gladys gives leads for houses where the menfolk will mostly leave you be. Miss Morease helps you enroll in the penny-saver at her church. Miss Mary Francis loans you her map of the city. Miss Eloise promises to make your first day work uniforms. Miss Hortense teaches you to roll a cigarette and drink corn whiskey. Miss Ruby runs the boarding house where all these ruined women once lived.
“Get yourself set,” Miss Ruby says, “then come see me.”
So you bide your time at that terrible, grand house. To get set, you must learn to speak and keep quiet. You save every penny back. You make yourself useful to your household and to their guests. On your day off, even though your legs shake, you ride the streetcar up and down to learn the city.
You keep stashing your pennies. You do complexion work on the sly for your employer’s spoiled friends. You let your stomach grumble when you pass the people selling food in the street. Slowly your money grows. This is a day’s wages. This is a week. You mark the stations on the jars. This is a month. Six months. A year. Set.
16.
When you are set, you start day work like everyone else with housekeeping and laundry, but soon, much of your money comes from skin work. You hone the profile with creams and tonics, and you are known for your extractions. You have a whole arsenal of sharps: tweezers with and without a slant, needles run through the blue of a flame before they free ingrown hairs, sewing tools repurposed for the job. You use the tools of your trade to poke and prod the face, tighten the skin. Your best tools are your sharpened fingernails, wrapped in cotton to press up long-submerged sins.
You blame their favorite food or drink or cosmetic or habit for their imperfections. You frown and tell them to abstain from what they love best. This is the first deprivation that some of them have ever known. How they thank you for this punishment. How they admire the longing they feel for their vices denied.
How they ooh and aaah over the pain you inflict. They come to crave the ecstasy of the release you provide as you squeeze out the blackheads, lance the boils of pus and blood, and steam the whiteheads up to ooze. They crave the sting and burn of the astringents and tonics you slap into their skin. They feel pure and regal. Saintly.
You wear a white work dress for skin work. When Miss Eloise measures you for this dress, you weep from missing your Grannie. The white uniform lets them know that to clean this type of dirt costs more than to scrub a floor. You always leave a bit of blemish behind. You make your work almost perfect. Close to perfect. And wait for time to do the rest.
17.
In the basement at Miss Ruby’s there is an illegal club where the musicians and dancing girls come to be themselves when they are finished with white people. One night she tells you your cousin’s story. For a few weeks not so many years ago, your almost glamorous cousin left her very elegant house. She did not get herself set first. She did not save up the cash, make the contacts, or learn the city by streetcar on her day off. She met a man right there in the basement club who promised to marry her. She waited for three days for him to return.
“He was a wonderfully terrible man,” Ruby says.
18.
You and the other girls eat breakfast together and share chores around Miss Ruby’s place. You make the coffee and fill the cups.
“Do this in remembrance of me,” Sally says and holds her coffee cup up for a toast.
“What?” You ask.
“That’s what the old lady said in my dream,” Sally says.
“What old lady?” you ask. Sally yawns. She is no good before coffee.
“The one with the stars on her dress,” Sally says.
Sally has the new girl position near the drafty window. You loaned her your Grannie’s quilt.
You realize it has been months since you destroyed a likeness. You are busy – keeping your room paid for, learning new dances, and work, work, work. You haven’t actually stopped, you tell yourself, only put it off.
Later, when you’re alone, you check on the likenesses and they are silent, haughty as ever. You take out a likeness from the group, a man in a cape. You hold him on your palm, ponder a suitable destruction. You glance at your Grannie’s quilt on Sally’s bed. You flush with the duty of what she’s asked you to do, the slow destruction of the flesh of those who sinned against her.
You want to snatch the quilt off Sally’s bed, to climb under it and dream. Instead you pack the likeness away. You borrow one of Sally’s dresses without permission. You line your eyes and rouge your cheeks. You spray perfume on the nape of your neck and head downstairs to sweat and dance.
19.
You plan to tend to a likeness on the next day off, but now that you do day work, you work every single day that you can. Your nights belong to your lover, who is full of laughter, song, and a tenderness you have never known.
Your Grannie comes to you in the night and shows you her scars. She is naked, but you do not look away. She hands you a likeness of herself. When you wake up you look and look for it and sob when you realize that the likeness and your Grannie only exist in the land of dreams.
20.
Your lover gets you to pose for a photogr
aph in front of the club where he works as a back-up piano player and bartender. You tell him to keep his money. You tell him that your hair isn’t right, you have on the wrong dress, but he insists. He wraps his arm around you and he is Jacques, Honor, James, and Master August.
The photo comes back a few weeks later. Your lover shows you how the cardboard back folds out to make a little frame. He stands it up on your little dresser. In the photo, the wind has lifted the hem of your skirt. He holds on to his hat. Together, you lean against the wind.
“You two make a fine pair,” Sally says when you show her the photograph. “In fact, you favor. He could be your kin.”
This is the only likeness you have of yourself.
21.
You have been dealing with a likeness. With the finest pumice stone you could find, you have been slowly eroding the figure cut from heavy white stock. The likeness that you are working is stubborn. You wonder where this woman in the fancy gown is, whether she shrieks when her skin rips, or does she whimper? Which of your Grannie’s scars does she place her name to? Would she even know? The tendering lasts longer and longer.
Your skin is chafed and raw from it. You are trying to get ready for work, to get into your clothes before the flash of tendering can be seen. You have been careful with the likeness, working on the parts of it that would be under your clothes.
“What’s troubling your back?” asks Sally.
“Maybe my new soap is vexing me,” you say.
“Be careful your complexion folk don’t see that,” Sally says.
22.
Your lover is singing softly:
I’m going home on the morning train
I’m going home on the morning train
He has taken ill. The doctor has been no use. He can barely put on clothes. His skin is irritated. Every touch pains him. His back. Your back. His arm. Your arm. His face. His lovely, lovely face. Your face. You make compresses with gauze soaked in chamomile and sage tea. You beg ice chips from the iceman.
“Thank you, thank you,” he says burning with fever.
“Tell me, lover,” you beg, “where are your people from?”
Even without the fever he could not answer you. He was put out. Abandoned. Bastard.
Like you.
We’re all bound up together.
You are feverish with knowing. You search your lover’s face for your Grannie’s, for some feature of the likeness, but you have pumiced it into a dark, ragged shape. You remember the burn on your Grannie’s arm, her wince, her shout. You imagine a bright red thread stitched from you to your Grannie, see it tremble as you set that likeness against the flame for the first time. You follow the thread from you to your lover as he trembles in bed.
Each likeness a life.
23.
You lock the likenesses away. You stow them in a box at the top of the closet. Under your bed. On a bright, cold morning you take them to the river to tumble them all away and yourself, too. The likenesses shift and writhe in your pocket. You feel an invisible web of ropes tighten and tighten around you, cutting off your breath. Long dormant, they have grown powerful, greedy since your Grannie came to trouble Sally’s sleep. You turn and run back to your room. The likenesses settle.
You pumice away a little more of the likeness and can breathe again even as the welts on your back start to weep.
Your Grannie endured the wounds of her bondage. She carried them into freedom. She refused to forget. She took her payment. She demands you remember. The work is yours now. It has claimed you.
You gaze down at your lover, sleeping with his mouth open just so. He burns with fever still. You burn with fever, too.
Later, he calls to you: “Lover, lover, come here and let me look on you.”
You approach his side and settle next to the bed.
“I’m here,” you say. His eyes are rimmed red. His skin raw and ragged. He opens and closes his eyes, searching for you. Your fingers ache with need. The likeness is just an arm’s length away on the dresser, telegraphing a wild heat.
“Bring our picture from over yonder. Come look at us together, pretty and strong,” your lover says.
You hold the picture up close to his face. You hide your own face behind the cardboard frame. You won’t look at the photograph. Your lover’s fevered eyes tell you what you already know. In fact, you favor. He could be your kin. His eyes, gone pale with fever, search for you – on the photograph, all around this tiny room. If they already gone, this’ll find the next in line.
The likeness shimmers in your hand before you remember grabbing it; you take the pumice to the likeness and scrub. The woman in the dress is almost gone, chafed beyond recognition. It will be delicious to finish it off, a deep breath of air after almost drowning.
You are almost gone.
Past the wreckage of pulp and your trembling hand, your lover trembles.
The thread tugs you between your Grannie and your lover. The thread tightens, soon to break.
Art by Eric Orchard
Angela and the Scar
by Michael Janairo
* * *
April 1900
Ilocos Norte Province, Philippines
She padded barefoot and silent in the early morning darkness – long before any rooster’s first crow – across the nipa hut’s floor. Snores rumbled out from the older couple in the neighboring hut, and Angela didn’t want to wake them and give the woman she called Auntie Dungo anything more to gossip about.
She gathered things that had been her father’s, things she had saved without her mother knowing. From her small, wooden chest, she took out a threadbare cotton shirt, hole-ridden trousers, and a beaten, floppy-brimmed hat – the clothes her father used to wear while working the tobacco fields. From a spot hidden behind her books, she grabbed the same sheathed bolo knife that had been found on his body after a failed rebellion four years before.
She wore the shirt inside out, cinched the trousers with a bit of rope, and tied the leather straps of the sheathed bolo around her waist. She drank some water from a jar, filled a canteen, and slung it over her shoulder.
From a basket, she clasped the last three eggs, cracked them open one by one, and sucked out the yolks and whites. That was all her mother had left her the morning before, when she took all their chickens to the market outside town. Her mother hadn’t returned. Angela had no brothers or sisters; her grandparents, like her father, were dead.
She rolled up the frayed pant legs, set the hat over the uneven tufts on her freshly shorn head, and crept through her empty home, down the stairs and through the barangay. By starlight, she walked footpaths that skirted fields of sweetly ripe tobacco plants, rose between rice paddy terraces alive with chirping insects and croaking frogs, and climbed into the hills, where light breezes let faint traces of sea-salt air mix with the rich dryness of fallen leaves from balete trees.
The day’s first light cast a blue-green glow as she walked the forest edge. Long, ropy tendrils wound round wide trunks or hung lazily from muscular branches, as if they had always been there and always would. She kept walking until she smelled cigar smoke. She planted her feet and they sank into the cool, soft soil. She called, “Buenos días, Señor!”
A cough from high in the tree turned into thunderous laughter. A booming voice said, “Angela! You’ve come back!”
Leaves rustled and branches creaked as her kapfre descended. He didn’t climb with slow and deliberate pauses to doublecheck footholds and handholds like a human would. Instead, he glided through leaves, branches, and limbs, leaving them swaying behind him. His body seemed to flicker and change, one moment, part giant; the next, part tree. She thought it magic and smiled with delight, despite her situation, to see him standing before her.
He clutched a lit cigar in one meaty hand. He wore baggy pale cotton pants torn at the cuffs, a dingy white shirt, and a dark vest with deep pockets stuffed with cigars and who knew what else. A smile spread across his bearded, weather-beaten face, a vigoro
us light shining in his deep black eyes. He doffed his hat, bent his back in an awkward bow, and then, straightening, lifted his brows and widened his eyes as if to make his lined face as open as possible. “You’ve come to live with me forever?” He sucked deeply on his cigar and exhaled a long, white stream. “Together, we will live atop the trees and watch over the forest.” He took another puff and smiled.
Angela’s smile waned. Even though she felt comforted by his routine words, she knew she couldn’t give her usual reply. “I can’t go with you; my mama needs me,” she said as usual. Then she added: “You see, there’s a war going on and my mama hasn’t come home.”
“Hmm,” he said, brows tight. He scratched his beard, leaned against the tree trunk and again said, “Hmm.”
Usually, their banter would lead to stories, riddles, and jokes. They only stopped when they heard voices of others, most often rice farmers in the fields below. At that moment, his eyes would turn into Os of surprise and he’d smile at her, wink, and disappear back up into the trees.
He puffed on his cigar for a while before saying: “War? What’s that? Some kind of game?”
“You don’t know?” she said, unable to hide her surprise or the whine in her voice. She realized her mistake, confusing an ancient forest spirit for a human adult. “It’s not a game. It’s–” she didn’t know what to say next as words crashed into her mind: Yanqui, Peninsulare, Illustrado, Insurrecto, Spain, America, colonialism, empire, occupation, benevolent assimilation, nationalism, patriotism, Philippines, freedom, rebel, guerrilla, revolution. She knew these words were important, but they stood for things she didn’t quite comprehend. She said, “War is when strangers come with guns and your father is killed and your mother disappears.”
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 18
