Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(8)
She talked about her orchids—deep purple whorls of globular petals—how they were her “most favorite thing in the world.” She described them as regal, graceful, delicate, and rare. She called them “exotic” and explained that the orchid’s purpose was purely ornamental. She argued, “I don’t agree with the Greeks that orchids are for fertility. If that were true, I’d have a garden full of babies.”
I thought she was right. Every time I got a whiff of the orchid’s perfume, I smelled exactly what she described—something poised, something tropical, something striking and sure of its draw. I confused that smell with the scent my mother wore, Ana?s Ana?s by Cacharel.
In between sipping tea and eating an orange, Mama hummed the tune from our Betamax tape rewinder. She hummed it with amusement, like she was humming a song sung by Julie Andrews, and not a cheap tune played by an electronic plastic square. She wasn’t a singer, but her singing with closed lips comforted me. It was hard to believe that from those same lips came yesterday’s wounding words: “Stop playing in the sun! You’re already dark, too dark! Like a maid!”
Mama talked about what Paolo and I were like as babies. She emphasized how small I was—two pounds exactly at birth. She talked about how much she hated not being able to take me home, and how some people were just “plain insensitive” because they kept referring to me as a mouse. She said that she paid for the best incubators the hospital could find and insisted that I had no reason to ever fear.
“You’ve been through so much, yet you were so little. You’ve been through the worst of it, and you fought for your life. You can handle anything. Those doctors said you’d never make it, but here you are, eating breakfast with me. I kept you alive.”
Then Mama’s temper started to get heated and her tone changed from calm to controlled. She brought her teacup and saucer up to her mouth and held them there, not sipping—just supporting them from the base and handle. The lusterware trembled with her manicured hands. Her cup and saucer clinked in rhythm with my heartbeat. I opened my mouth into a little O, inhaling, drinking what could be the morning’s last dewdrop of Mama’s softness.
She set down her cup and breakfast ended.
There was no lingering of any kind. The chinking of silverware stopped. The chairs were pushed back and then in and under the table. Magazines were left open to the last page read. Forks and spoons (not knives—those were for dinner) left the proper way, at the two o’clock position. When breakfast ended, there was no orange left on Mama’s plate, just the peel.
When Mama got up, I got up. I followed her to her bedroom, into her makeup room, trailing so close behind her as if to catch the tail end of her softness. As soon as we walked into that room filled with palette after palette of makeup, I knew it was gone. It was no longer Breakfast Mama I was standing next to. It was Mama made of cosmetics from Rustan’s, Manila’s upscale department store.
Getting Dressed Mama was keen and swift, like the wind that blew a door shut. She walked over to her clothes valet like a lioness with eyes fixed on her prey—a pressed wrap dress or blazer in zebra, cheetah, or leopard print. She sat her five-foot-flat figure on her upholstered vanity stool. And there began the transformation—from au naturel to clad.
“Come watch,” she said, dabbing a wedge sponge on a pot of foundation, then priming one side of her face with it. She handed me the sponge and told me to try it.
“Like this?” I said, touching her face so gently that the motion left little to no effect on her skin.
“No, dab it like you mean it. Cover the blemishes on my face. Like this one right here,” she said.
I looked at her, not at the mirror, and saw none.
“Okay,” I said, smearing yellowish-beige product from her temple to her chin.
She walked me through the different strokes of applying makeup, teaching me tricks for an angled contour, shading and blending. She taught me the layers of an “original glow”—moisturizer, primer, foundation, concealer, blush, and bronzer.
“Now take this,” she said, handing me a brow brush she’d dipped in orchid-purple eye shadow.
When she felt like I was ready, she gave me permission to do her eyes, that is, to make them look bigger and deeper set. I learned how to turn a mono eyelid into a perfectly creased almond shape; a dark shade on the outer corner of the eye turned it into something very mestiza.
Mama showed me how to curl and volumize stubborn Filipina lashes. She used a blow-dryer to heat a lash curler and crimped the short hairs with it. Then she finished them with several coats of mascara. She outlined her brows with a brown-black pencil, making her face sharp and strong.
Next she did her lips. She traced them with a maroon stick, then spread rouge from the inside to the corners of the upper lip, and twice from side to side on the lower. She pressed her lips onto tissue to seal the color in her puckers. Her lips were so red, so pronounced, that I could focus on nothing else in the room; it was a scarlet that outclassed everything around it.
Then her robe came off. She untied the sash, and the silk cover-up fell from her shoulders, sliding off her arms and onto the floor. The maids picked up the robe later, long after she’d left the room and was at lunch or a meeting.
The maids ushered me away from the makeup room and to the chaise lounge, where her selection of Hermès bags sat, to brush my hair as I looked at and longed for Mama, who was three meters away.