Everyday People Read online

  My parents still lived in Mabini Heights, a suburb of Manila and a monument to a time when they belonged to the middle class. My father had called himself an import-export businessman before sliding, through the years, down a spiral of unrelated jobs, each more menial than the last, and harder for him to keep. And my mother had been a nurse before he banned her from working outside the house altogether. But if they’d come down in the world, so had Mabini Heights. Ever since my childhood in the seventies, when so much of that middle class fled Marcos and martial law, houses had been left unfinished or carved up for different uses. Squatters set up camp amid the scaffolding and roofless rooms. Families took in boarders or relatives. Our house had changed too: on its right, a gray, unpainted cinder-block cell had been added, taking up what used to be a yard. My parents had cemented over the grass and built this sari-sari store five years earlier, selling snacks and other odds and ends through a sliding wicket to people on the street. The sari-sari compromised what I imagine was the dream of my parents, who grew up poor: a green buffer between the world and their world.

  The addition seemed to shrink the main house to a toy, its windows tiny and its clay roof something storybook elves might have built. Next to it, I felt gigantic. I hunched my shoulders as I followed my mother inside. I was convinced, walking behind her, that the dishes on the shelves were rattling.

  “Papa’s in here,” said my mother, opening the door to my old bedroom. The blast of cold came as a shock, then a relief. There was an air conditioner now, in the window under which I used to sleep as a child, and my old bed, where my father lay, was pushed into a corner. I saw, from the straw mat rolled up beside him, that my mother had been sleeping on the floor at night. Otherwise the room was clean and bare and quiet as I remembered—same white cinder-block walls, same wood-tiled floors, same smell of mothballs from the same chest of drawers—if all faded a little, like an old photograph. My mother kept a tidy house—a trait we shared—and things probably lasted longer in her care.

  Two oxygen tanks stood beside my father’s bed. He breathed through a tube. The sight of him brought me back to New York, where I lived, and to the hospital where I worked as a clinical pharmacist. My father no longer resembled me. The short boxer’s physique, a bullish muscularity I’d always detested sharing with him, was gone. In fact he no longer resembled anyone in the family; he belonged now to that transnational tribe of the sick and the dying. Without the dentures he’d worn most of his adult life, my father’s mouth was a pit, a wrinkled open wound below the nose. What I could see of his eyes, under lids that were three-quarters closed, did not appear to see me back. He looked not only thin but vacuum-dried, desiccated—less a human than the prehistoric remains of one.

  He groaned, a low and heavy sound.

  “All right, Papa. All right.” My mother took a brown dropper bottle from a chair next to the bed. “This used to hold him for a while,” she said. “But lately he’s complaining round the clock.” Steadying his chin, she released a dose of liquid morphine into his mouth, with the dainty caution of a woman ladling hot soup or lighting a church candle. He let out another groan. “Shhh.” She stroked the sides of his face. Even bedridden and in pain, my father had managed to preserve their old arrangement: when he called, she was there to wait on him.

  I’d predicted this, and how much I would hate to watch. In my suitcase, I carried an answer. Succorol was the newest therapy for chronic pain on the market in America. White and square, the size of movie ticket stubs, Succorol patches adhered to the skin, releasing opiates much stronger than morphine. Doctors had just started prescribing them to terminal patients in New York. Succorol could take years to reach the Philippines, a country whose premier pharmacy chain boasted LAGING BAGO ANG GAMOT DITO! (WE DO NOT SELL EXPIRED DRUGS HERE!) as its tagline. Still, something kept me from unpacking the patches right then. I did not want my mother to see my hands shaking—to know what I had done to bring them here in the first place, let alone the price I’d pay if anyone found out.

  “Is that better, Papa?” My mother returned the morphine to the chair next to a rosary, a spiral notebook, a folded white hand fan. She logged the dose in the notebook like the nurse she’d once been. I picked up the fan and opened it, rib by wooden rib. Its lace edge had frayed, but the linen pleats remained bright and clean. I remembered sitting in her lap as a child during Sunday Mass, as she flicked her wrist back and forth to cool me with it.

  She’d brought my father to the doctor eight months before, when he had trouble breathing and couldn’t finish a meal without hunching over in pain. His belly had grown to the size of a watermelon and, from the veins straining against the skin, nearly as green. When my mother called me in New York and said “liver cancer,” I imagined my parents as clearly as if I’d been sitting in the free clinic with them. I saw my father shrug or grunt each time the doctor addressed him, as proud and stubbornly tongue-tied as he always became around people with titles and offices. I saw my mother frown in concentration and move her lips in time with the doctor’s, as if that would help her understand. I saw her dab the corners of my father’s mouth with the white handkerchief she always carried in her purse.

  Because of his age and his refusal, even after this diagnosis, to stop drinking, he never qualified for a transplant. At my mother’s request, I wired money into a Philippine National Bank account that I kept open for the family. Whenever someone needed rent or medicine or tuition back home, I sent what I could, having no wife or children of my own to support. In my father’s case, I thought about refusing. But it occurred to me a relative might say he could get better care in America. His coming to New York for treatment and staying with me—or, worse, in the hospital where I made my living—was something I’d have wired any sum to avoid.

  When chemotherapy did not stop the cancer’s spread to his lungs, when radiation did not shrink the masses, my father’s doctor began to speak in a code we both understood: pain management instead of treatment; not recovery but comfort in his last days. My money turned from doxorubicin and radiotherapy to oxygen tanks, air-conditioning, the dark-brown bottle of morphine. Still, I expected my father to survive. For all the years I’d spent wishing him dead, it was my mother’s role in the family drama, not his, to suffer. Esteban has got some heavy hands, the family always said. Loretta is a saint. When she called to tell me end-stage, my mother may as well have said we’d never lived under a clay roof in Mabini Heights, that I remembered my entire childhood wrong.

  • • •

  I insisted on seeing the inside of the sari-sari store before lunch. “Corporate headquarters,” said my mother. She pulled aside the screen door that once led from the kitchen onto grass.

  Once more, I felt like an ogre in a dollhouse. The vast and open yard of my childhood amounted now to just ten feet from the screen door to the wicket, and barely six across. Sacks of rice, tanks of soy sauce, and bricks of dry glass noodles, stacked against the walls, narrowed it even more. Candy in glass jars, each with its own metal scoop, sat in rows upon the shelves above. Reels of shampoo and detergent hung from the ceiling, dispensing Palmolive or Tide in single-use packets. I thought of the thin, sealed sleeves of Succorol, flanked by dental floss and blister-packed vitamins, in a side pocket of the toiletry bag lodged between my socks and shirts. A complete amateur’s attempt at smuggling, which nearly froze my heart nonetheless as I sent my luggage down the airport X-ray belt.

  I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. Sari-sari meant “assorted” or “sundry,” and so the store smelled: like a heady mix of bubble gum and vinegar, salt and soap, floor wax and cologne. My mother switched on a ceiling fan that hung between the fluorescent striplight and the wheels of Tide and Palmolive.

  “We should get you another air conditioner,” I said. “There’s a lot that could melt or spoil in here.”

  I walked to the far end of the store and ran my palm along the wooden counter. Receipts were impaled on a spike next to a calculator with a roll of printing tape. Behi
nd the scratched Plexiglas wicket, my mother had placed a call bell and a RING FOR SERVICE sign. They’d opened the sari-sari five years back, after my father was fired from another job, this time for stealing a crate of Tanduay rum from the restaurant where he’d been waiting tables. “He isn’t built to work under someone,” my mother had said. “It’s just not his nature, answering to another man.” I said nothing, just sent the money they needed to start. The sari-sari gave her a loophole, at least, in his law against her working outside the house.

  At the time I hadn’t minded so much about the money, which I never expected to see again. But I knew I’d miss the yard, my refuge in the years before I could stand up to my father. When he called my mother a dog or a whore or a foul little cunt who’d ruined his life, she sent me outside. When he seized her by the hair and asked, What did you say? What did you just say to me? she sent me outside. When he struck her face with the underside of our telephone until she wept and begged, first for forgiveness and then for mercy, she sent me outside, into the grass of the yard, where twigs from the acacia tree would have fallen overnight.

  • • •

  In the kitchen, my mother set the table for two. Then she planted a baby monitor at the third chair and tuned it to a grainy black-and-white broadcast of my father snoring. “This thing saved me,” she said. “Now I can keep an eye on him while I work. Or while you and I sit and eat together.”

  But she hardly sat or ate at all. Throughout lunch she alternated between serving him and serving me. She stood to answer a groan from the sickroom, then heaped my plate with fried rice and beef. She uncapped a bottle of San Miguel for me, then went to feed him a bowl of broth. I spent most of the meal alone with him: my father’s screen image and me, facing off across the table.

  At this time three days earlier, I was in the hospital, taking inventory of the narcotics cabinet. As I unloaded the most recent shipment of Succorol, I found six more boxes than were counted on the packing slip, a surplus as unlikely as it was expensive. And immediately I imagined my mother, titrating morphine into his mouth by hand, as I recounted the boxes and rechecked my number against the invoice. I thought of my mother, running back and forth between the sari-sari and the sickroom, as I typed the lower figure into the inventory log. I thought of her, crying or praying after morphine had ceased to comfort him, as I wheeled the Pyxis in front of the surveillance camera and slipped a month’s supply of Succorol into the pockets of my lab coat.

  “Bed or bath?” she asked, returning to the kitchen. A pail of water was filled and waiting for me in the bathroom; on the master bed, new sheets. Which did I want first? All that was missing was the “sir.”

  The baby monitor groaned on the table. The call bell dinged in the store. My mother glanced from one to the other, torn.

  “I’ve got the store,” I volunteered. “You take care of him.” Her eyebrows rose, but I said, “What is there to know? I saw price tags on your jars and a cashbox under the counter. I’ll print receipts from the calculator if people want them.”

  As it turned out, I was no help at all. My first customer wanted shampoo. I pulled too hard on the Palmolive, unspooling hundreds of packets to the floor. My mother had to climb a stepladder to reel them back in. Another customer asked for detergent. I ripped a packet of Tide down the middle, sending a flurry of blue-flecked snow everywhere. My mother swept up after me with a broom. The women barely spoke above a whisper, sometimes covering their mouths to hide bad teeth. “Ano?” I asked, over and over. The louder I asked, the softer they answered. The farther they retreated from the wicket, the closer I stooped to read their faces, feeling more like a bully than a shop clerk.

  My father’s groans, on the other hand, I heard perfectly well. In her trips back and forth from the sari-sari to the sickroom, my mother moved the baby monitor to the freezer case, rushing from the store as soon as he called or stirred on-screen. While she was gone, a teenage girl asked me for Sarsi cola. Relieved to understand, I handed her a bottle from the freezer. She giggled, staring, and said something else behind her hands. “. . . plastik” was all I heard. Remembering the jar of plastic straws on the counter and the bottle opener underneath, I uncapped the bottle and added a straw. She giggled and shook her head, asking again for “plastik.” I wondered if she meant a plastic shopping bag and searched the store, finding one crumpled on a shelf. Now she was giggling too hard to speak. I felt as confused as in my earliest days as a clinical pharmacy resident in New York—a beginner desperate to impress my superiors, bungling even the basics.

  When my mother returned, she spoke to the girl and poured the Sarsi cola into a plastic sleeve, thin as a layer of onionskin. She stored the bottle in a crate that would go back to the factory. How had I forgotten? I’d drunk sodas from plastic sleeves up until the age of twenty-five. And yet the liquid bag I handed over made me think not of my childhood but of some dark, alien version of the waste pouches and IV fluids I’d see at the hospital. “Relax, anak.” Dragging a stool to the center of the store, my mother invited me to sit under the ceiling fan. “You’re sweating.” She handed me a mango Popsicle from the freezer case. The jaw-cramping sweetness of each bite felt vaguely humiliating as I sat and watched her work.

  Unlike me, she had no trouble hearing her customers. No sooner had a face appeared at the wicket than she was reaching for the shoe polish or cooking oil. Her right hand could pop open a bottle cap while her left tore a foil packet from the shampoo reel. To the voice of a young boy, so small I couldn’t see him through the wicket, she sold three sheets, for ten centavos apiece, of the grainy, wide-ruled paper on which I’d learned to spell in grade school. It was a way of shopping I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next.

  • • •

  That night I lay in my parents’ bedroom. Jet lag and the whir of an electric fan kept me awake. Somewhere above me a gecko made its loud clicking noise, and I was no longer used to the Manila heat. But I refused to sleep any closer to my father, even if it meant losing out on the AC.

  Down the hall, he groaned nonstop, as if to say, unless he slept, no one would.

  Growing up in this house, I used to hear other noises from him at night. I must have been four or five years old, lying where he did now, the first time a lowing through the wall made me sit up. Until it had echoed once or twice, I didn’t know the voice was his. My father sounded more like a flagellant on Good Friday, parading through the streets of Tondo. I thought my mother had found a way to strike back: that he was the one, this time, suffering and forced to beg.

  I rushed to the door they’d forgotten to close, and detected my parents’ shapes in the dark. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Naked, but hidden from the waist down by my mother. She knelt, a sheet around her shoulders, wiping the floor with a washcloth. And though she was at his feet, though her shadow rose and fell as she cleaned, as if bowing to a king, my father did not look to be in charge at all. He peeled the lids off his eyes, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth. His skin was waxen with sweat. Stripped and drained, limp and compromised—he could not have hit her, in this state.

  Then he saw me in the doorway. “What now?” he said, alert again, his fists starting to lock.

  My mother startled. “Anak!” She pointed past me, the wet washcloth covering her hand like a bandage. “Get out!”

  I ran out to the yard. Not to escape him, but because I knew he’d punish her for every second of my presence there.

  This was before I’d learned much about sex; I was too young to be disgusted by it. For a while after that, whenever I heard him groan in the darkness, I didn’t know enough to pull my pillow over my ears or run outside in embarrassment. Instead my father’s baying, and his stupor afterward, put me under a kind of spell. I’d listen through the cinder-block wall, believing he had fallen out of power, was in pain. Whatever else he might do to my mother, at any other hour, during this shimmering
nighttime transaction he was the conquered one.

  • • •

  A swarm of aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins’ children descended on the house early the next morning. I passed out all my pasalubong, or homecoming gifts: handheld digital games, pencil-and-stationery sets, duty-free liquor, nuts and chocolates I’d stockpiled on layovers in Honolulu and Tokyo. A balikbayan knew better than to show up empty-handed.

  After the gifts came the inquisition. How cold was it in America? How often did it snow? I kept my lines brief. I had a role to perform: the balikbayan, who worked hard and missed home but didn’t complain, who’d moved up in New York but wasn’t down on Manila. “You get used to the winters,” I said. I didn’t tell them I loved the snow, was built for the American cold, and felt, upon entering my first job in a thermostat-controlled pharmacy, that I’d come home. What did I miss most about the Philippines? “The food, and Filipinos,” I said. “Good thing the nurses always bring me lumpia and let me tag along to Sunday Mass.” But my days in New York never involved Mass or lumpia: outside of work, I spent my free time exercising at the gym, or cleaning my apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of a building made of steel and glass. What about women—was there someone? An American? “The hospital keeps me busy,” I said. “No one special enough yet to meet you.” I didn’t describe the women who sometimes spent the night with me, how they chattered nonstop, intimidated by the tidy home I kept. “Is this an apartment or a lab?” said one, glancing at my countertops. “Are we getting laid here, or embalmed?” asked another, under the tightly tucked bedspread. In every case, I found a reason to stop calling: false modesty, too loud a voice, careless toothpaste spatters around the bathroom sink. Any time a woman opened her mouth and I could imagine myself clapping a hand over it, pinning her to the bed, I knew that my father still breathed somewhere inside of me. I couldn’t risk repeating his life.

  The questions ended when the karaoke began. Bebot, my cousin’s son, had hooked the monitor of my old Commodore computer, outgrown since I first bought it in New York, to a DVD player. When he fed it a karaoke disc, song lyrics and video footage of couples on the beach appeared in green screen. I took on “Kawawang Cowboy” (“Pathetic Cowboy”), a Tagalog satire of “Rhinestone Cowboy,” to show I remembered my Tagalog and to cover my lack of singing talent with silliness. “A pathetic cowboy,” I sang. “I wish I could afford some bubble gum / Instead of dried-up salty Chinese plum. . . .” The family roared. In New York, the nurses would have shooed us out of any hospital. But here no one worried about disturbing my father, who loved karaoke and had a gift for it. In a voice like wine and honey, he used to croon everything from Elvis Presley to classic Tagalog love songs. Even I had to admit that, back then, his signature “Fly Me to the Moon” was charming.