Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(48)

“Oh no!” I said. “My water!”

“What did you do? Why did you let go?” Elma said.

“Can we go back? Can we fetch more water? I won’t drop it this time, I promise.”

“No. It’s almost afternoon, and it’s Saturday. The line is too long now and no one will let us cut in line on their weekend off.” Saturday was water day. Everyone collected water for the week ahead. Sundays are church days, so no one fetched water then.

Saturday.

“I’m sorry, Elma, but I don’t think this’ll be enough,” I said, still bracing my ice-cream bucket.

“You can have some of mine, and you’ll just have to skip your bath.”

“I can’t be dirty!”

“You can’t afford to be clean.”

“I can’t stay at my school if I’m dirty.”

“Then do a sponge bath with very little water. Just make do.”

“Elma, you don’t understand, I have to be clean. It’s an exclusive private school.”

“Clean the important parts and you’ll be fine.”

“No, I can’t,” I said, starting to cry.

A teenage boy, pedaling a tricycle, stopped in front of us. He called us dalagitas, young ladies, or more specifically, almost young ladies. “Can I help?”

“Pouty over here spilled half of her water,” said Elma.

“Miss Maganda,” he said. Beautiful. “I can help you get more water, Miss Maganda.”

“Che!” she said, furrowing her brows and blushing from ear to cheek. “I have no time for pedicab boys calling me things.”

“Sorry, miss. Just trying to make you smile. You two look like you’ve had a long morning. Let me help. Please.” He patted the duct-taped cushions on the sidecar.

I got in the trike, followed by Elma, who, for the first time all morning, had nothing to say. She looked straight ahead, never glancing at the boy or me. She disregarded my ignorance and his town-boy affection.

“Dalagitas, stay here. I’ll take care of it,” the boy said as he rallied our empty and half-empty containers.

Neither of us responded nor moved.

A minute later, Elma handed me the pan de sal roll. “Here.”

Embarrassed still by my spilling, I took the soggy, sweaty cellophaned sandwich. I unwrapped it, broke it in half, and gave her a piece. She quickly grabbed and munched on it. We said nothing when the boy came back and nothing all the way home. The boy cranked and curbed on his three-wheeler. The swishing of water filled the muggy mosquito-filled air.

“Salamat,” Elma and I said in unison as we stepped off the sidecar.

The boy saluted us and pedaled away.

“Salamat, Elma,” I said.

Elma shrugged and smiled, then picked up her buckets. I walked back to the upstairs bathroom, and Elma to her shack, taking our containers to our designated parts of the mansion.

I decided to store my containers in Paolo’s old bathroom. On Sunday morning, I gave myself a sponge bath with five centimeters of water, leaving twenty-five more in the ice-cream bucket and thirty in the jug. I did the math on paper, scheduling my week’s ration: fifty-six centimeters in total made about nine centimeters per day. From Sunday morning until Friday night, I would measure the water with Paolo’s old ruler, and use a couple centimeters for drinking and five for washing my hands, hair, and body. When I sponge-bathed, shampooed, or washed my hands, I stood in the middle of a basin, collecting the used water for flushing the toilet.

My system worked on the first day, the Holy Sabbath. I rejoiced in my white Sunday dress as though it were my own baptism day. Fetching water and storing it and using it were rites of some sort, I thought. From the terrace next to Paolo’s old room, I listened to the convent’s call to worship. I sat with my legs dangling between the terrace rails, swinging them back and forth to the rhythm of the church bells. I stretched out my hands through the slats, reaching for the voices calling to the Living Water. I praised with the nuns and parishioners, not because I understood who or what or why they were worshiping, but because I knew what it was to have something to drink. To have water and to enjoy it—that was my devotion. My song of gratitude for something physical merged with, transformed into, the adoration of the spiritual. The nuns sang and I echoed. Our prayers rose like the smoke of incense, dancing, to the heavens. As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God.

Elma and her family spent their day at El Shaddai, the charismatic church that met at the Quirino Grandstand stadium. Mama and Norman woke up at 4:00 a.m. for an early drive to Abra, the province where Norman’s mother was from. They had a new venture up in the northern mountains, Mama said. She assured me, by handwritten note slipped under my bedroom door, that the venture—something political—would make us rich again.

I left the note where I found it.

I took advantage of daylight and finished my homework, penning poems and reading about direct and indirect objects by the window. I watched parishioners in their charcoal-pressed ochre, orange, and batik clothes, walking home from church while carrying their babies on their hips, exchanging food wrapped in banana leaves with relatives and neighbors along the way. So happy and so normal, I thought.

I kept working to wash away my loneliness. I swept the upstairs floor, polished the handrails, wiped the life-size mirror free of streaks, and changed my sheets to a crunchy set of linens that hadn’t been touched since my yaya left. I finished my portrait orders from school—a caricature for Ma-an and a neon name tag for Paola.