Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(4)
Or was it the sin of my mother? Was it atonement for the many previous pregnancies intentionally or unintentionally terminated? Was the Catholic Church right after all, that every pregnancy was a life, and every life was worth a mother’s time on bed rest, no matter how busy or affluent or important she was? Or was my early birth a resurfacing of Mama’s long-kept, deeply buried secret, one that Paolo and I suspected every time she called me by another name: Mara, meaning bitter. Was my coming in haste “from heaven to earth,” as Papa used to say, punishment for having dishonestly baptized Paolo as Mama’s firstborn? Was my rash arrival an ejection from the womb—a utero-muscular reaction to the lullabies she hummed to a chestful of baby-girl clothes that were never mine?
My coming was the beginning of what the maids referred to as sira-ulo—broken head. Over the years, Mama repeatedly lamented the moments of the day I was born. She appealed to an imaginary court.
“Those doctors were incompetent! I would have had you full-term had they just left me at my office instead of rushing me to the ER. I wasn’t overworked. They need to stop blaming my duties and my parties and my heels. There was absolutely no need for an emergency induction or meds or IVs. I was fine. You were fine. It was supposed to be fine.”
Papa always answered with his typical optimism. He focused on how well I made it through months of being in an incubator—a plastic womb—and how quickly I fattened up, how the tubes sticking into my nose, belly button, and arms never kept me from learning how to coo and smile. He focused on my Lucky Star.
“She holds the sign of a good future ahead of us,” Papa said sporadically, no matter the topic of conversation. “She is made of light, and so the star twinkles in her left hand.”
Papa always pointed to the stars at night, the Manila sky as his favorite movie and Orion’s belt as his favorite scene.
“That’s Orion’s belt, the most noticeable constellation. Those three stars always point to the North Star—that’s you, Paolo, and me. Us three, always pointing to our true north, always looking to the light. Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka. These stars will be with you always, especially in the dark of night. They were with me in the desert; they will be with you here. Always remember: We were not made for normal. And for that, I am sorry.”
Was he wise? Or was he ignorant and superstitious? Was I a wound, a scar—stigmata impressed upon the skin by sin? Was I born of flesh or was I born of light?
Papa once read to me from a children’s encyclopedia: “Supernovas shine their brightest when they explode and die.”
1989
My parents should have thrown me a birthday party with balloons or clowns or puppeteers, and party hats and sprinkles and a pi?ata. Instead, they lavished me with three ball gowns for the day, a tower of champagne glasses sparkling in the hot sun, an emcee paid to announce the arrival of VIPs, and an octagon table the size of a bed for the guests’ largesse: tins of Turkish delight, matching gold bracelets and necklaces, velvet hair bows bigger than my head, and oddly, the most age-appropriate of them all, Rollerblade Barbie with lighters for skates. The long-legged doll was a gift from a young woman and a young man who referred to themselves as my half sister and half brother.
“You don’t really know us,” they said, “but we have the same father.”
The young man showed me how to make Barbie’s skates flicker. The skates sparked a small flame when they skidded against the floor. I was both delighted by that Barbie and scared of it. Little rich Filipino girls didn’t often play with fire, or any of the other elements: air, water, or soil. We were kept clean and unsweaty by our yayas, our nannies. But really, my parents should’ve let me get sweaty, let me eat cotton candy, let me get frosting on my clothes, dirt under my toenails, and silly string in my hair. They should’ve given me that kid-themed party, what would’ve been my third, because it was also to be my last.
I was never to have a birthday party again.
The mansion would not have another reason to celebrate.
Most guests at the party didn’t know who I was and had never talked to me, but it didn’t bother me because I was too busy stealing licks of icing from the back side of the garden-themed cake. I was too busy ripping lace ruffles off the socks that made my ankles itch. My yaya caught me behind the three-tiered cake, licking fondant roses, and with a handful of lace shreds, and hoisted me back up to my room for a scrub-down of my face or a change of itchy socks to even itchier socks. Or worse, for an Aqua Net spray spree, making my slick hair stiff as bamboo.
Paolo, my mother’s son from her first marriage, spent the entirety of the party at the DJ booth, watching how vinyl was spun and scratched to make Michael Jackson or Madonna sound like Prince or Boy George.
Copying my brother’s dance moves was the most fun part for me: how he stuck his elbows out and followed this move with a pop of the shoulders and a snap, also known as the love shack; or how he did the MC Hammer—a fluid squiggle of his limbs and an abrupt lock, followed by a squat, a jump, and landing on a crisscrossed stance; or the best one, the one I couldn’t emulate—the magical gliding backward across the floor, the then-ubiquitous moonwalk.
“Not like that, like this,” my brother said, showing me how to properly isolate my neck and limbs from my torso. His constant correcting, teaching, and mocking were his way of reminding me that he was five years older than I was.