Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(70)

“Periwinkle!”

“Kaleidoscope!”

“Beauty!”

“Charity!”

“Hope!”

On Fridays, my girl’s day off from Montessori school, she stays home with me and we play music from our vinyl collection. I tell her, particularly when it’s a Snoop Dogg or a TLC twelve-inch spinning, that my brother loved music. He still does.

“He’s been working as a DJ since he was seventeen years old,” I say. “He used to sneak up to the DJ booth at our mother’s parties.”

“Will he ever come to one of our dance parties?” she says, referring to mornings or evenings when we turn the volume all the way up on the Jensen Three-Speed and dance in our robes, pajamas, and homemade Mardi Gras masks.

“I hope so. He lives in Manila, which is halfway across the world.”

“Tell me again about Manila.”

And I tell her about Manila: the jeepneys, the highways, the street vendors, the tall buildings and large houses bordered by shanties and shacks, the sunsets, the women, the beggars, the old buildings and churches, the stray mammals on the side of the road, the birds hovering over rivers and paddies, and lastly, though I hesitate, the mansion.

“Tell me again about the princesses!” she says.

“My mama threw the most spectacular parties. The princesses—debutantes—wore ball gowns as wide as our coffee table. They danced under a puzzle of mirrors.”

“The kaleidoscope!”

“Yes, my kaleidoscope.”

“Now tell me again about the van!” she says, lying on her stomach and drawing hearts and writing I love Mom on an early draft of my manuscript.

I tell her about the van. I go into detail about joyrides, barkers, passengers, and mixtapes. And I narrate stories about escaping the mansion with my mother and living in the van for a string of nights.

“Were you scared?” she asks, like I used to ask my papa.

“Yeah, but your lolo always told me to be brave.”

Papa followed me to the States two years after I arrived there, but he has yet to follow me to pink-and-orange skies. We talk on the phone two or three times a week, and he tells me, in the same diplomatic, charismatic, and heroic voice he’s always spoken in, that he needs the hustle of the city to keep him alive. If I die, they die.

“I’m brave, too,” my girl says, as she puts on the Super Rainbow mask, cape, and belt I made for her. She climbs up onto the coffee table and assumes flight pose. “Super Rainbow!”

I tackle her to the rug and tickle her until she squeals, “No tickles!”

“No mercy!” I say. I grab her foot and run the tips of my fingers back and forth on her sole. “Little soldier, tell me all you know and I shall release you!”

“Never!” she says, gasping for breath.

I now have her locked down. I blow raspberries on her belly, and she gives in.

“The Beanie Boos sent me and they are hiding under the dining table!”

I pull her into me, just like I did the moment she was born, and forty pounds of her melt into the cradle of my arms. She stays there and tells me all her ideas: sea turtle rescues, volunteering at the South Carolina Aquarium, repurposing old crayons, the war against plastic bags, building scooters for three-legged cats, and selling pink lemonade, purple lemonade, and lime-green lemonade.

The record stops spinning and she gets up. “I can do it, Mama.”

So independent, so me. Strong will, this one. I like it.

She lifts the dust cover, places the Peter Pan soundtrack on the platter, and positions the tonearm and needle on the record’s perimeter. The record spins and she twirls. The hem of her sleeping shirt parachutes up. She hops up once again onto the coffee table, curls her index finger into a hook, and sings in her pirate voice. “Sing, Mama, sing!”

“Hold on,” I say as I scuffle to my closet. I come back out to the living room in the Tiger Lily costume I made for Halloween two years back. I say, “Not so fast, Captain Hook!” and I aim my invisible arrow at her invisible ship. She grabs a handful of confetti—we always have colorful paper shreds all around the house—and she scrunches them into a ball in her hands. She launches and says, “C’mon, Lost Boys! Cannonball!”

One . . . two . . . three . . . BOOM!

We look at the mess between us—the mess we have made together—and laugh.

We are both back on the floor, making snow angels in the confetti, and rolling from side to side to tempt Skye, our seven-pound Maltese dog, to pounce on us and nibble on our collars and sleeves. Anika Louise tells me she is hungry as she shields her face from doggie kisses. So I walk to the kitchen to make grits and fish—food for my half-southern, half-Filipino, full-of-ideas, brown-skinned, black-haired, her-own-kind-of-warrior girl.

Over lunch, she says to the dog, “We need to be thankful for food because Mama didn’t have food when she was little.”

She gives him a bite of her bounty. Then she asks, “Mama, do you miss your mama?”

“I do, but it’s better to miss her than to be around her.”

“Because she does things that hurt people?”

That’s how I’ve explained it to her: that my mother cannot come near us because she does regrettable things.

When I told Mama I was getting married: “A backyard wedding?! How cheap!”