Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(9)
Getting dressed was not something I could help with. Mama made it her business and nobody else’s. It was a rite she took pride in, basked in, and savored. As she and Papa drifted apart, she had her clothes and the time it took to put them on to hold on to.
When the clothes were on, she slid her feet into designer heels. She owned a collection of over one hundred pairs, every Christian Dior style in every color. She was a few pairs away from dethroning Imelda Marcos as Queen of Shoes. When she wore her red pumps, I imagined her as grown-up Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, but in my mind, she said, “Toto, we’re not in Manila anymore. We’re somewhere better: My-nila.”
When the shoulder pads were fixed, and the stray hair was bobby-pinned and glued down with Aqua Net, there was one last thing to do: Spray on Ana?s Ana?s perfume. She spritzed twice on her wrists, twice on the neck, and once in the air for her to walk through. That was the crowning moment, the scent of bottled orchid.
Mama turned to me, then to the mirror, then to me again. She placed her hands on her hips, raised her chin, and smiled the smile she used for the press, and said, “There.”
Falling
1990
Minutes after she sat down for dinner, Mama began uttering phrases that made Papa slump in his seat and made Lorna and Judith cover Paolo’s and my ears. “You all brought bad luck into my life. Putang ina kayong lahat.”
After her litany, Mama grabbed a carafe by the neck, held it up an arm’s length away from her side, and let go of it, saying, “Everything is falling.”
She then pushed back her chair, got up, and stormed off to her basement closet, calling out words to the evening air and expanding our vocabulary and fright. “Descend! Dive! Plummet! Plunge! Topple! Tumble! Stumble! Subside! Dwindle! Diminish! Die.” She locked herself in her closet and found solace in shelves full of designer friends: Christian, Louis, Salvatore, and Coco.
Papa stood up and walked around to our side of the table, patted Paolo’s head, and bent down to kiss my cheek. He told Angge to sweep up and took his beer and paper to the lanai, knowing that Mama never set foot in the muggy room. Broken pieces of glass sparkled on the marble floor. Beads of lemon iced tea seeped into the weaving of Mama’s rattan chair. Lorna picked up our plates and instructed us to go upstairs and said that we could finish supper while watching a show.
Once upstairs, Paolo and I had no interest in eating. Instead, we played. He turned on his Nintendo console and put on Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation. I played house and pretended to be taking care of Tachio: feeding him and bathing him and rocking and singing him to sleep.
“Shhh, night-night, little one. Close your eyes. Shhhhh. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to brother and sister. Happy birthday, you and me.”
I talked to him about how he got his name, how Mama ate pistachio nuts every day that she was pregnant with him, how she preferred his nose and lips and skin over mine. I told him that he could use anything that I owned—my toys were his toys because we shared a birthday.
I turned four that deathly hot Philippine summer, and Tachio would’ve turned one. I knew that he grew a year older every time I did, but he was always the same baby to me—a few hours old, mestizo, and dead cold. That was exactly what I pictured him to be when I played pretend. It frightened the household staff when they asked me with whom I was chuckling in my room.
“Neng.” Katring called me by the lower-class diminutive version of my name. “Who are you playing with?”
“Si Tachio,” I said, cradling a bundle of sheets in my arms.
“Hoy! Don’t play like that! Your brother might come back from the dead!” Angge said as the rest shuffled away in fear and marked the sign of the cross on their foreheads and hearts.
“But he’s my toy and my friend,” I said.
Then I whispered to the bundle of sheets, “It’s okay. They’re just stupid, like Mama says. We are not stupid, she says. We’re like Lolo.”
His imaginary face with the perfect nose and perfect lips eased up, and his imaginary crying stopped, and his imaginary doe-shaped eyes closed. He fell asleep in my embrace, cuddled in the warmth between a brother and his sister.
Unlike Tachio, Paolo and I grew and changed.
I grew fatter with each meal, as the maids followed Mama’s orders to keep me well fed. Tachio and I had both been born premature, eight weeks shy of our due dates, and were born weighing less than three pounds. Same birthday, same size, same undernourished bodies. The difference was that I lived and he died. His death reminded Mama that children who were too small, too frail, could slip away from life. She had the maids feed me rice and noodles and starchy fruits, and they gave me hot Milo and Yakult cultured milk at least six times a day. It contradicted Mama’s no-carb, no-salt, no-real-meals diet. Whatever she suffered not to eat, I gobbled down and deposited into my pan de sal thighs and jamon de bola belly.
I didn’t complain. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know to make the connection between the size of my thighs and the speed, or lack thereof, of my feet. I didn’t know that when Paolo and his friends played tag in the garden, they always called me It because they knew I could never catch up. They knew I wasn’t a runner. They knew that I would soon shy away from their games, leave them be, and walk upstairs to my bed to read, sketch, and play pretend.