Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(52)

She spent the evening telling me about the importance of keeping clean and predicted my need of a third water container. She also handed me a stash of her unused feminine pads, ones she hadn’t needed since becoming pregnant. She warned me of the dangers of becoming a woman.

“You’ll need to protect yourself, your body. You are changing, blooming, becoming more fragrant. And if there’s one thing I want for you that I wish someone had prayed for me, it’s that you keep your fragrance bottled and that nobody unworthy would ever spill it.”

I had no response. I looked at the perfume bottle on the upturned tin—a plastic vessel containing Diyosa’s essence. I wonder what my essence smells like, I thought. And I thought many other things that hadn’t occurred to me: peaks and troughs throughout my body—calves and ankles, hips and waist, baby breasts and the skin between.

The week of my first menstrual period, I paid little to no attention to school or my books. I visited Diyosa in her room as soon as I got home and spent the afternoon and evening there until right before her men came. On Tuesday, we powdered our faces, glossed our lips, brushed our hair, and listened to her radio. The music and the company took me back to jeepney joyrides, to slowdown and sway time in Paolo’s van. On Wednesday, we snuck into Mama’s basement closet and tried on her clothes, pretending to be belles and debutantes at Mansion Royale. On Thursday, I showed her my keepsakes: Paolo’s old Nintendo, which I pretended to power on and play, the handed-down Game Boy, pictures of me with Paolo and Papa, and Tiffany, Calbolite, and Rollerblade Barbie. I showed her my books, and she requested for me to read them aloud.

On Friday, I showed her where Tachio was buried.

“This is Our Lady and she watches over my baby brother,” I said, making the sign of the cross on my heart. “He died on my birthday.”

She said nothing and rubbed her belly.

I rubbed it, too, and made the sign of the cross on it, and said, “You’ll be a good mama. He’ll be lucky to have you.”

“He?” she asked, grinning and forming dimples on her blushing cheeks.

“I think it’s a boy. I know it’s a boy, like Tachio.” I wrapped my arms around her waist and kissed her belly. “I know you’ll take care of him and give him a good life—because ghosts don’t live in your body.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s at least one ghost living in my mama’s body. She changes back and forth. But you don’t go back and forth.”

Diyosa sighed. She took my hand and walked me out of the garden, up the grand staircase, and into my bedroom. She tucked me in bed, kissed my forehead, and said, “Thank you.”

On Saturday, water day, I knocked twice and opened the door to her bedroom and found only the cot that lay in the middle of the room, the upturned tin, the pocket mirror, the flamingo-pink blush, the peacock-colored palette of eye shadow, and the Revlon stick. No bottle of perfume. No Diyosa. A note had been left leaning against the mirror and blush. Diyosa had composed a letter that said she needed to leave the mansion for a new life, and that she would continue to pray for me, especially the young woman I was becoming. She warned me of the harm that might come with my becoming an adolescent, but also advised me to stay hopeful for a way out. Hope for both of us, she wrote.

I stepped out of the room and closed the door behind me. I attempted to sing our song, but the words wouldn’t come and the tune wouldn’t form. Earlier in the week, my abdomen cramped as a rite of passage. Now my heart wrenched in pain. The twisting inside my chest choked the notes and the melody, expunging every verse about the river and the wind. I left Diyosa’s things untouched, enshrined, in the space where, at separate times, she, Papa, and I had found refuge. Stored away in a bedroom we had called “extra,” her belongings waited for her return. And I—I had other things to do. I had water to fetch, food to scavenge, books to read, monsters to fight, and another woman to get to know.

Myself. Alone.





Sleep Now





1998


I inspected for termites on weekends when Elma worked fourteen-hour shifts at the wet market. She’d been saving money to buy inventory with—goods for her sari-sari. Out of boredom, I knocked on walls and floors with my knuckles, listening for a hollow sound. My hand hovered over patches that resembled soft spots on a baby’s head: wood that had morphed into eggshell.

Mama wasn’t amused by my game.

“You learn these games from being with those people. We are important people, don’t you remember?” she said, walking past me down the long dark hallway and scoffing while she clipped on costume earrings. “Please be done with your game before our guests arrive.”

She didn’t have to tell me. I knew to flee before the men arrived. The nuns next door cued me. Gong, gong, the convent bells rang. When the clock struck six, I ran upstairs—at least I tried to run—to my safe space, alone again, accompanied only by the swishing of curtains and the light from coils. I scampered in fear of the darkness below, like an ant hurtling away from a growing puddle. I chanted as I panted, “SOS. Save our souls. Save our souls.”

I stopped at the landing. A hole in the corridor floor drew me to a halt. It gaped and faced the ceiling, mouth open wide and ready to swallow whatever or whoever neglected to hop over or step aside. The orifice could hold an adult-size thigh. The hole meant that the termites, which had lunched their way through the back-lot shanty, the basement walls, the ballroom arches and furniture, the long dark hallway’s floorboards, and the lanai door, had made their way to my haven. I had no memory of slipping and jarring a foot or a knee through a soft spot on the floor. But there it was—a hollow space—which meant someone had been roaming where I thought I roamed alone. I swallowed my spit and scanned the corridor from end to end. I looked down through the crater and then stepped over it.