Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(62)
The rain.
My mother, dancing and breaking into a million memories—a million raindrops. A whole world in every tear. Breaking. Falling from the dark clouds, dripping, plummeting, plopping against my skin and vanishing at once.
I was drowning in a monsoon of her.
Not Water, but Whiskey
1999
Norman fell apart without Mama—or me—around. He didn’t know his right fist from his left, his chicken-petting fingers from his key-tossing, ass-grabbing, gun-firing ones. Without a child to torment and another adult to blame, he could not withhold love, pour out wrath, and feel like an inhuman being. Without another’s flesh, his flesh could not be pleased; his filth could not morph into disease. He begged us to come back.
“Water! There’s running water!” He pulled strings and sold chickens and lured Mama with his promises and pleas. “Power, a full pantry, even cable!” one message read.
Mama’s pager buzzed and her cell phone rang. She tried hard to ignore the messages, hiding her devices under car seat cushions and in the trunk. He kept paging and calling, telling her he’d gotten a good deal on one of the fighting cocks.
“Did I mention there’s water?” yet another message on her pager insisted.
“Make it stop! It’s giving me a headache! I can’t breathe!” Mama said in the driver’s seat.
“Just turn it off, Mama,” I said, pressing down on the button.
“My head’s going to explode. Every time it beeps, my head throbs.”
“I turned it off. It’s okay now. Your head won’t explode.”
“Good. I feel better. How’s my hair?” She looked in the rearview mirror.
What Mama ignored consciously, she drank unknowingly: the constant mention of water running through pipes and streaming out of faucets. The messages kept coming. And before we knew it, she was pulling the van up to the driveway and parking it where the red carpet used to be—where I last saw Papa at the house. With one swing of the main doors, she opened the floodgates for provisions that had been withheld from us for years. Norman waited at the foyer, just a foot to the right of the gold console mirror, his arms outstretched for hers and his deep chest voice proclaiming, “Lights! Air-conditioning! A television! The real deal! And water. Did I mention we have running water?”
Mama quickly forgot about meals and refreshments offered by strangers and friends. There was a faucet waiting to fill a tumbler, a kettle ready to boil. She forgot about living in the van and dancing in the rain. Mama ran to her bathroom, and I ran to mine. She turned the gold knobs on the Jacuzzi, stripped off her clothes, and sat in the middle of the whirlpool. The jets hadn’t been used in years, so the first spurt of water came out yellow brown. She bathed in it anyway.
Upstairs, I closed the bathroom door behind me and stepped into my indoor rainfall. We luxuriated in what should have been a normal part of our lives. As water rinsed off lather after lather, we let our baths wash away the manifestos we’d established the week before:
“That we will find a way out of the mansion!”
“That Norman is no boss to us!”
That she and I were a team.
We soaped and sang. All while Norman sat on his side of the bed in an unbuttoned white shirt and drank his whiskey, his aqua vitae, swirling the caramel-colored spirit in his wide-brimmed, thick-base old-fashioned glass. He swirled, sniffed the sweetness and strength, and then swigged.
Whiskey, neat, was how he liked it—not on the rocks, as we didn’t have ice in the mansion for years. Whiskey, neat—no frills and no fuss, just straight up. The quicker it was ready, the sooner it was drunk. And the sooner it hit his brain.
After an hour-long wash, I turned the TV on in Paolo’s old room. I flipped channels as I got dressed. Once I found Wansapanataym, Filipino adaptations of Disney tales, I lay on my stomach with my hair dripping wet and watched a brown-skinned Cinderella hop into her kalabasa carriage. The preteen that I was gushed and tee-heed at the on-screen romance between princess and prince. I was a normal kid again.
And then the scream.
It was the scream I had been waiting to hear since Norman stepped into the mansion, like a fire alarm I saw someone pull the day he barreled into our world. Someone had long ago broken the glass and pulled down the lever, but not until now had the alarm gone off. Mama was supposed to be the alarm but was missing parts or was short-circuited, and her reaction was several years delayed.
There was the call and I was the responder. I got up in one jump, reached my hand under the pillow, grabbed the fork I’d been hiding for four years, and ran downstairs with my weapon held in front of me, like a soldier with his rifle searching for an enemy. I thought of my friends forsaken in the killing fields of Abra: bang-bang.
Paolo and I had trained for this moment—the time when one of us was to kill the Common Enemy. We had practiced in our many playtimes before: how to wield a makeshift weapon, how to load ammunition—pellets in a BB gun, how to throw a grenade of talcum powder, how to stay in hiding and remain silent for days or years, how to survive a drought or famine or a forty-day monsoon, how to ambush, and how to retrieve.
I now had to retrieve my mother.
The long dark hallway led me to the master bedroom, Norman’s lair, where the door had been left a quarter of the way open—as though someone was trying to make an exit but was stopped in her tracks; as if someone was making an escape but had made the mistake of looking back and was abruptly, forcefully, prevented from leaving.