Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(7)

“So you won’t be hungry in heaven,” I said.

My parents and Yaya had been coaxing and coaching me away from the bottle and toward using a cup for two years. They’d tried every trick and method. And that night, in the garden full of oriental flowers, tropical fruit trees, champagne glasses, and a dead baby, I finally weaned.





Orchids in the Morning





1990


Mama was soft at breakfast. Soft like the orange on her plate, like the ripples from where the tea bag met the hot water in her cup. Soft like the curves of her teaspoon and the collar of her robe; supple like the palms of her well-moisturized hands. She was as pure and easy as morning’s air. And I breathed her in.

She was such a lady, more than any other time, when she sat down and dillydallied over a magazine, leafing, almost combing through it, as if it were the hair of her lost child. It was in the breakfast room where my mother seemed most lucid and lovely to me. Maybe it was the yellow-white morning light coming through the French doors, or the pinkness on her cheeks reflected from the terra-cotta floor, or the orchids she picked from the last well-kept garden in the house.

Or maybe it was the fact that she was there at dayspring—her best hour. She was a morning person; the rest of us were not.

Papa didn’t show up at breakfast awake or ready. He was there to yawn, stretch, and have coffee, to lean into his sleepiness one last time before giving in to the demands of the day. Mama, however, was there to be there—as if breakfast were an affair for invited guests and not the preparations that came before, as if all happiness depended on a leisurely first meal.

When Mama stalled, the maids hurried. They hurried to get Paolo and me into our school uniforms. But we didn’t want to get dressed. A shoe was kicked off the foot three times before it was tied. I refused to let my tangled black hair be combed. I shrieked every time my yaya brushed it. I picked at my socks because the lace around them was itchy. I pouted and squirmed and refused to eat my breakfast. I made clicking sounds with my tongue. I made faces at Paolo.

“Malikot,” Yaya would say. A word that meant both “restless” and “playful.” A notion of both acceptance and annoyance.

“Hmph,” I would say back, with arms crossed at my chest and brows puckered in a frown. Then I would look up and catch Papa looking at me, not through the glasses balancing on his nose but over them and the top of the newspaper he was reading. He gave me the look that sweet-tempered fathers give their daughters when they’ve done something wrong, pulling his lower lip over his top teeth and gazing at me with unhappy, but not angry, eyes. I knew what he meant. He wanted me to stop, be still, and watch my mother. He wanted me to pause and catch it in its rareness.

So I watched.

Mama browsed issues of Vogue, Elle, and Panorama. She licked her finger before turning the page and studied every picture as if it were a work of art. She whispered hmm every time she saw something she adored—a dress, a hat, a pair of shoes—dog-earing the pages and coming back to them to rip them out, then placing them in a folder, along with other ensembles she’d found inspiring.

Then Mama looked up at me and Paolo and asked, “You want to pick your favorite outfits, too?”

Paolo and I nodded, very quickly, as if the offer could be taken away. We walked around to the top of the table where Mama’s white rattan peacock chair stood. He and I each sat on an armrest, feeling Mama’s warmth, yet not touching her body. She brought the magazine closer and flipped through, stopping wherever Paolo and I saw something we liked.

“That one with her shoulders showing,” I said. “I like her top.”

“What do you like about it?” Mama asked.

“I like that it’s black.”

“Black is always a good color. Elegant and effortless.” She smiled at me and tucked my outgrown bangs behind my ear, then asked the maid to fetch a few more folders from the office, wrote our names on them, and said, “These are your folders. Your collections.”

She called out words—words that she thought we could add to our vocabulary.

“Cordial!” she said out loud, looking up, then back down to read.

“Affluent!”

“Recherché!”

“Prêt-à-porter!”

That made Papa smile. There was very little they agreed on, but the silliness and spontaneity involved in spitting out words to the morning air must have rekindled his affections for her. I needed it to. When I watched him watch her at breakfast, I could almost understand what he loved about her in the first place. She was smart, stylish, and pretty. She knew her fashion as well as she knew her dictionary. She was everything every Filipino wanted to be—fluent in the languages of Europe and the Americas, clothed in imports, and with passports stamped in Arabic, Chinese, and English. The things she loved, she loved much, and she was completely given over to them: the designer clothes, the academic achievements, the mansion, the connections, and the political ties.

At breakfast, Mama didn’t talk about other people—not her aerobics friends, her cocktail party friends, her doctor friends, nor her sisters. Instead she talked about my hair, how pretty it was when it was up in a bun, and how it accentuated my jaw and forehead, the very facial features I got from her. She also talked about my cheekbones—which I got from Papa—how they were high but friendly, and how on them a kind smile could hang.