Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(44)
At dismissal, I packed my bag, pushed my chair under the table, and sighed out the anxiety over what to do for the next several hours. Mama forgot to pick me up, always showed up at the school gate as late as 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. Five or six hours to kill, five or six hours to wander on campus, lying to my classmates and teachers as to why my mother had not picked me up. “Late business meeting.” Or “The new office is under construction and they probably just ran into some issues. Don’t worry, she should be on her way. I’ll be fine. I’ve sent her a message on her pager.”
And there the hunt began.
After school, I searched for soda bottles and returned them for the two-peso deposit. A snack cost ten to fifteen Coke, Sprite, or Fanta bottles, and dinner about twenty to thirty a plate, depending on the viand. The best place to find the bottles was at the foot of the steps, where girls late for the next period left half-consumed beverages as they hurried to class. Glass bottles also marked the perimeter of the soccer field and basketball gym. Before me they gleamed and beckoned: one rich girl’s trash is a poor girl’s dinner.
Of course, I had to be sly about it. I couldn’t just barrel through school corridors like a homeless person with a shopping cart of junk. Finesse, my mother taught me, was a secret scrounger’s armor. I walked behind the lower-and upper-school buildings, instead of down the main hallways. I took the emergency exits instead of the main doors. I spied for bottles from the bleachers, pretending to watch the cheerleaders and volleyball players practice.
My yellow-checkered skirt had pockets deep enough to hold a bottle, and my backpack—lined with crumpled paper to soundproof against the clinking of glass—held up to ten. Each trip to the cafeteria’s back window was twelve bottles: twenty-four pesos, or half a meal. Two hours of work bought me supper and killed nearly half of my lonely waiting time.
At home, glass crystals from the chandelier had been my treasure. At school, glass bottles were my loot.
After my work was done, I had three to four more hours to spend at school. By then, the janitors had cleaned classrooms and were weeding the field or disinfecting bathrooms. The Philippine sun had begun to set, painting the sky purple, then pink, then orange, and then swiftly, as though night longed to take over, blacked-out black. It was then that I hid in the library.
The library promised not only shelves of books but a kind of giant public living room that allowed me to be around people and have privacy—the balance I needed for my double life. It provided air-conditioned space with a sofa, armchairs, desk chairs, and beanbags. I didn’t feel lonely, but I could also keep to myself. I picked a neglected aisle, the geophysics section, and cried a little and let myself be weak for a minute or two. Then I took a cleansing breath, smiled, made a turn into the magazine section, and la-di-da all over again. A new face.
On clammy late afternoons and shadowy evenings, the library housed an assembly of girls-school outcasts. Kyra Kleptomania, who stole ring pops and cookies from the snack cart. Jaqui the Beanstalk, who towered over the short Southeast Asian student body at five foot eight and moved as though her limbs were made of wet sand. Zandra, whose celebrity mother appeared on TV so frequently and, like Mama, often forgot to pick up her daughter from school. Marissa, who had a mustache and considered pathological lying a sport. I assimilated into peer groups just fine, as long as nobody knew of the shortage at home and of Norman’s creatively abusive ways.
A library was the missing part of the mansion: the one room the architect forgot to sketch on the blueprint. Of all the sections of the house—ten bedrooms, three maids’ quarters, one gym, one lanai, one breakfast room, one ballroom, one disco, and one bar—not one was considered for keeping books. Odd, because Mama prized education—the one inheritance from her Ilustrado upbringing that poverty could not take away. Had they created a space with built-ins and studies, I would’ve had a refuge apart from my bedroom at home. But, had there been such a sanctuary, Norman surely would’ve converted it into something filthy—a chamber for drinking or housing chickens. He would’ve torn apart the books, pulled out pages, and turned them into a cot for whoring. Or he would’ve knocked down desks, sawed them in half, and fashioned them into a pen for his fighting cocks.
The library was better off at school.
I spent hours getting acquainted with works by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Scott O’Dell. They spoke to me in the language of my heart: fiction for the young.
The day I flipped open A Little Princess, I felt as if I weren’t alone. In the story, a bookish girl named Sara Crewe lost her father and befriended a servant named Becky. Sara had once lived in an opulent mansion, but her father’s disappearance and the First World War had forced her to live in an old attic and give up her toys and clothes.
When I read Island of the Blue Dolphins, I thought I was Karana, the girl left stranded and alone on an island. She, too, had a brother whose curiosity led to trouble. He died after being brutally killed by a pack of feral dogs. Karana hunted, made weapons, and built a home out of whalebones to survive. She loved the water, domesticated animals she encountered, and developed a kinship to them. She had a friend, Tutok, a domestic helper on a ship that docked on the island. Reading Island, I imagined Paolo as the curious and lost brother, and Elma as Tutok. I pictured Milo as the otter and Lucky as the red fox. I reincarnated Tweetie as Lurai, the tame bird. I imagined the mansion as a deserted isle, moored to the seafloor, marooned, inaccessible, isolated, and wild.