Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(17)
“Ang galing natin magsulat, Ate Katring.” We’re good at writing, big sister Katring.
She gave me a hug and said, “And you—you are another reason why I don’t want to leave this mansion.”
I rested my head on her shoulder and said, “I don’t want you, or anybody, to ever leave. I don’t know why you keep saying that.”
“Oh, forget I said anything,” she said, squeezing me hard and sighing.
“Dehlia! Katring!” We heard Mama beckon. It was time to clear the breakfast table.
Back on the main floor, Mama and Papa sat across from each other. Dehlia picked up plates and loaded them onto a tray. Katring wiped the table with a vinegary rag as I sat in my chair and listened to my parents’ conversation. Papa explained to Mama that our supplies had started to run low. We were down from tens of millions to just a couple of them. According to his computations, Mama had to cut her couturier, Mr. Albrando, off the budget and resort to buying ready-to-wear.
“It’s your choice—another cocktail dress, or a maid waiting on you and keeping your house clean. Imagine what your aerobics friends would say if they came over and the house was a mess and there was one less servant to send on an errand,” he said.
“Makes sense,” Mama replied, thumbing through her Rolodex for Mr. Albrando’s phone number. “I’ll close my couturier account, but I have to keep all the shoes I own now.”
“All right,” Papa said, leaning back into his chair.
Katring smiled at Dehlia and me. They took the trays downstairs with shoulders back and heads held high, now unencumbered by the possibility of unemployment.
“Hup, two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four,” I said.
“What’s the matter with you?” Paolo said. “Stop marching behind me.”
“You’re the leader and I’m the G.I., like G.I. Joe, so I have to follow you and your orders,” I said.
“Well, I order you to get away from me,” he said. “Wait a second. What do you know about G.I. Joe? Have you been playing with my toys?”
“At the hospital you said I could play with your toys. Remember, I almost died and you gave me your Game Boy and you said I could . . .”
“Blah, blah, blah,” he said, cutting me off. “But you can’t break them, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, then paused for a minute and adjusted the gun belt I had fashioned out of construction paper. I mumbled, “Hey, if you want, I can make you a gun belt, too.”
Paolo looked away, avoiding my glance like he usually did, then peered at my belt from the corner of his eye.
“It does look awesome. You’ve always been creative like Papa,” he said. “But yeah, it’s cool.”
“Okay, cool. I’ll make you one,” I said. “A really cool one.”
“Okay, I guess we can be cool together,” he said, now looking at me. “Like a kid army.”
I spent the afternoon cutting and gluing strips of construction paper and measuring them around my waist. I posed in front of the mirror in the upstairs hallway, pretending to pull a gun from my belt and firing at my reflection, blowing smoke off the weapon’s barrel and once again firing at the soldier in front of me.
Paolo stepped out of his room, eager to see what I had made for him. He told me he loved it and ordered me to bring him all the pillows I could find. I lugged bolsters, neck rolls, throw pillows, body pillows, and down pillows from every room. We built a fort at the end of the hallway, between my room and his.
“Bang! Bang! I shot him!” Paolo said as he peered out of our pillow fort, aiming his gun—his middle finger and thumb—at our pretend enemy.
“There’s more of them! Here, throw the grenade,” I said, handing him a bottle of baby powder.
He hurled the bottle overhead and counted, “One . . . two . . . three . . .”
“BOOM!” we said together.
Then we high-fived, stood up, turned around, and saw what a mess our grenade had made. Talcum dust covered every inch of the upstairs hallway. Our jaws dropped in shock at first, but it didn’t take long for us to find humor in the havoc—the havoc we made together. We snickered and snickered until our snickers turned into snorts.
“Kuya,” I said, interrupting our fun, “so who do you think is our Common Enemy?”
He looked out again at the filth before us, made a fist with one hand and punched it into the other, and said, “Whatever it is that makes us unhappy.”
Elma
1992
Elma was our laundrywoman’s daughter, the youngest of nine. She looked, as my yaya put it, short-of-seven-soap-baths-darker than I was, almost black. She had a “cookie face”—round, flat, with barely a nose, and no forehead. She didn’t have thighs, just long, narrow pipes with scabbed, blotchy knobs for knees.
Her parents came from a Philippine province called Bicol, where sweet pili nut and giant Saba bananas grew, an impoverished region painted with natural beauty from sea line to mountaintop. My parents, as most people from our class, only visited the place for logging and farm-fishing opportunities.
In Bicol, the people ate very spicy food—as if their taste buds were direct descendants of the local Mayon, an active, but perfectly conic volcano. Although lovers of picante food, Bicolanos have a reputation for studied calmness and for rarely showing their rough edges. As we Tagalogs would say, Sa loob ang kulo. The boil is inside. They are a people who care, bend, and sway. They don’t like trouble.