Everyday People Read online

  My mother scuttled through our living room reunion like a servant, pulled in opposite directions by sick groans and the sari-sari bell. I thought again of the Succorol but stayed in my seat. Twice—first in Tagalog, then in English—I had taken a pharmacist’s oath to tell the truth and uphold the law. People lost jobs and licenses for less. If our suppliers discovered their mistake, called all their clients, and somehow—between timestamps, shift schedules, signatures, and security footage—found me out, I could land in jail, to say nothing of the damage to my name with colleagues and the department head who’d trusted me with inventory to begin with. Deceit of any kind was a foreign country to me. As a child, I’d never so much as shoplifted a comic book, or lied to a teacher, or cheated at a game of cards. This discipline earned me perfect grades in high school, scholarships through college, my first job at a Manila drugstore, a doctor of pharmacy degree from my school’s brother university in New York, fast promotions at the hospital. Whenever I saw classmates copy each other’s homework or make faces behind the priests’ backs, I thought of my father and how he, too, must have started small on the path to worse.

  I considered hiring a live-in nurse, but my mother was the kind of woman who waited on even the people she’d paid to serve us, back when we could afford them: the laundress, the gardener, the yaya who watched me before I started school. Now she did the same for relatives who covered sari-sari shifts and friends who visited them. They all ate at our table and helped themselves to free snacks and sodas from the store. A paid nurse would only give her another plate to wash, another chair to pull out.

  The next time the bell rang, I followed my mother into the kitchen and through the screen door. Away from my family’s relentless yammering, the sari-sari felt like a sanctuary again: in but not of the house, and cooler than the crowded living room. My mother helped a customer, then gazed at the baby monitor, perched up on a shelf between jars of Spanish shortbread and tamarind candy.

  “I’ve got a gun without a bullet and a pocket without money,” she turned to me and sang, off-key. “You inherited my singing voice, anak. Sorry.”

  “Apologize to your family,” I said. “They had to listen to it.” From the shelf I picked one of her favorites: pastillas de leche, soft mini-logs made with sugar and carabao’s milk. My mother had a sweet tooth that didn’t match her frame. I set the yellow box on the counter and reached into my pocket.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “This is on the house.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said.

  “We’re a Filipino store; we don’t accept American dollars.”

  “Nice try. I exchanged my money at the airport.”

  “Your money’s no good here.”

  “Stop giving things away for free.” I unwrapped one of the pastillas, knowing she wouldn’t start ahead of me. “That’s no way to keep a business afloat. There’s my first piece of advice for you.”

  “It’s your second,” she said. “Yesterday you said it was too hot in here.” She pointed at the whirling blades on the ceiling. “People pay all kinds of money for good business advice, don’t they? So I’m not giving anything away for free.” She frowned as she bit into a pastilla, as if eating required all her concentration.

  I took my hand from my pocket, and we crunched for a while without speaking.

  “If I ever leave the hospital and open my own pharmacy,” I said, “it will be a lot like this.” I walked her through my rather old-fashioned vision: tinctures and powders in rows, a mortar and pestle here, a pill counter and weighing scale there.

  “Oh, anak.” I’d become her young son again, pointing at a mansion in Forbes Park or a gown in a shop window, luxuries I vowed to provide her in the future. My mother’s eyes filled with tears. “Your pharmacy will be fancier than this. And you could have built it years ago, if you hadn’t been busy helping us.”

  That settled it. Nothing disturbed me more than the sight of her crying. It was time to end her call-button servitude once and for all. “Ma,” I began, “I’ve given everyone their pasalubong, except you.”

  The baby monitor groaned, bringing her to her feet. “You’ve given me so much already.” She wiped her eyes. “Pastillas, free advice . . .” Setting down the call bell and the SERVICE sign, she rushed out, again, to attend to him.

  I dropped five hundred pesos into the cashbox and brought the rest of the candy to my relatives in the living room. Once they’d emptied the box, I took it to my room and filled it with the patches of Succorol, then went to the sickroom and closed the door behind me.

  My mother was pressing a washcloth to his forehead. “You’re a CEO, not a slave,” I said. “No more scurrying around. You’ve got a business to run.” I showed her the Succorol and how to use it, peeling a square from its adhesive backing and pressing it to my father’s side. “Remove this and apply a new one at the same time tomorrow,” I said. “On his back, or arm—anywhere there isn’t hair. Rotate or you’ll irritate the skin.” In my mother’s notebook I started a new page and recorded the dose. “So we don’t double up,” I said. “This isn’t Tylenol, if you know what I mean.”

  We stayed until my father quieted and slept. I closed the yellow box, now full of Succorol, and placed it in the top drawer of the dresser. Before we left the sickroom, she touched my cheek.

  “You’re home,” she said. “All the pasalubong I need.”

  In the living room the family had switched from karaoke to a Tagalog movie. Even in green it looked familiar, observing the rules of every melodrama I’d grown up watching: a bida, or hero, fought a kontrabida, or villain, for the love of a beautiful woman. The oldest films would even cast a pale, fair-haired American as the bida and a dusky, slick-mustachioed Spaniard as the kontrabida. Between them, the woman spent her time batting her eyelashes or being swept off her feet; peeking out from behind lace fans; fainting or weeping; clutching a handkerchief to her heart or dangling it from the window as a signal; being abducted at night, or rescued from a tower, or carried away on a horse. My relatives talked back to the screen as it played. Kiss! Kiss! they insisted, not with any delight or romantic excitement but in a nearly hostile way, heckling the protagonists and the plot to quit stalling and hurry along to the payoff. Even I joined the chorus. When, at last, the bida won the woman, we cheered and whistled, again not out of joy so much as a malicious sort of triumph. The script had succumbed, in the end, to our demands.

  • • •

  For three days my father dozed peacefully, waking only when my mother fed him or shifted a bedpan under his haunches. With the Succorol, he never groaned again. At first she ran to check his breathing throughout breakfast and lunch, but by the second day she trusted the baby monitor to show the rise and fall of his chest, his mouth dilating and shrinking. Seeing her relax, I slept better too.

  Meanwhile the heat climbed to ninety-three degrees. I woke on my fourth night in the country feeling stained by my own sweat. Next door the air conditioner was humming, and I craved the cold rush that first greeted me there. If I could just stand in that doorway a moment, I might feel better and fall back asleep. I found my way through the dark living room, running my fingertips along the cinder block. The door creaked on my push. I stepped forward into the chill but didn’t enjoy it for long.

  My mother turned with a gasp, her eyes wide. Moonlight through the window fell onto the bed, and, for the second time in my life, the silhouette of my father, bare-chested, the sheet pulled down to his waist. Her back, bent over him in a ministering pose, straightened up. “Anak, don’t!” She raised her hand to stop me, mittened by a white washcloth, her body twisting to cover his.

  I shut my eyes and the door. My stomach turned. I couldn’t go back to their bed now, the place where I’d first walked in on them. Like a child once again, I ran through the living room and kitchen for escape.

  The screen door to the sari-sari was locked. I shook it, panicked, before remembering the loop hook above the handle. My fingers searched the wall to switch o
n the light and ceiling fan. I headed for the wicket as if I could flee through it, then climbed and sat on the counter. A mouse darted across the floor to its hiding place behind the freezer. Moths buzzed around the fluorescent strip above me, and another gecko made its clicking sound. It seemed that all the secret forms of life and movement that took place in this house at night had decided to expose themselves to me, and by the time I forced myself back to bed, the sweat on my neck and face had turned cold.

  • • •

  In the morning I heard a man’s voice through the wall. I startled, thinking at first that my father had recovered. Then I recognized it, from long-distance phone calls in New York. The doctor. My father was dead.

  At his bedside the doctor was removing the buds of a stethoscope from his ears. He gave me a collegial nod. My mother paced across the room. Pins from her hair had scattered at the foot of the bed. “. . . peacefully,” Dr. Ramos was saying. “In his sleep.” But my father looked far from peaceful. In death his face had gone thuggish again, the underbite and squashed nose giving him as aggressive and paranoid a look as ever. In forty, fifty, sixty years this was how I might die: with my worst impulses petrified on my face.

  My mother had stopped pacing but kept rubbing her hands flat against her lap, as if this time she couldn’t get them clean. “Loretta?” Dr. Ramos said. Only when he called her name a second time did I notice her head rolling backward, her eyes to their whites. I caught her just before she fainted to the floor.

  “I’m sorry” were her first words upon coming to. Her eyes bounced from me to the doctor to my father.

  “You’re in shock,” said Dr. Ramos. “Happens all the time.”

  I opened the fan on the nightstand and waved it over her face. “Nothing to be sorry about,” I said.

  And there wasn’t. The doctor assumed that my father had passed in a morphine-softened sleep, but now I wondered if he’d gone into cardiac arrest while my mother satisfied some dying wish. Perhaps this would haunt her in the days to come. The hair she usually pinned back hung loose around her face. But I felt calmer than I had the night before; there was no mystery. She’d served him to the end. I should have known she would.

  • • •

  In the basement of the Immaculate Conception Funeral Home, the mortician curved a sponge between his fingers, spackling my father’s face with brown grease. An American parlor would never have allowed me downstairs. But Manila wasn’t so strict, and I liked to keep a close eye on everyone I paid. The mortician had gone darker than my father’s current skin tone, closer to the shade he was before the illness. I wondered if my mother had shown him a photograph.

  The funeral directors led us to their Holy Family room. “We asked for the penthouse,” I said. They apologized; a service was running long in their Epiphany suite. “Then tell them it’s time to leave.” My father had relatives coming from all over the archipelago to pay their respects, I explained—from all over the world, in fact. Again they were sorry, throwing in a sir: the funeral taking place in Epiphany was a child’s. “Did the child pay you in American dollars?” I asked. Doing business in Manila hardened something in me, the same muscle I’d observed in men who stood up in hospital rooms and did all the talking for their families. I focused on the French doors of the penthouse as we skated my father past the displaced mourners and their four-foot coffin.

  Our family brought in plates of fried rice, barbecued chicken, pineapple salad in condensed milk, sandwich halves stacked in pyramids. Only the corpse, really, distinguished the wake from any other party. People kissed and caught up. Bebot fiddled with the green Commodore computer. My uncles set up speakers beside the guestbook and blew into the microphones: “Testing, testing, one two three.”

  “Loretta, please eat,” an aunt was saying. “Next time we see you, you’ll be invisible.”

  My mother accepted a cheese pimiento sandwich. Then the room started to fill with the family’s insistent clamor, and I longed for another escape. She looked like she could use that, too. My sandwich-pushing aunt noticed the bare platform around the coffin. “They call this a ‘full-service’ funeral parlor,” she said to me, “but apparently that does not include flowers.”

  I saw my chance. “The flowers aren’t going to buy themselves,” I said, approaching my mother’s chair. “Shall we?”

  She abandoned the sandwich and took my arm. We stepped out onto Araneta Avenue, Manila’s funeral district, walking past the parlor, stonemasons, chapels, coffin shops, and rent-a-hearse garages: one after another, like beads on a grim rosary. A rough and glittery dust filled the air, as if crematory ashes had mingled with fumes from the traffic.

  We stopped at a flower stand outside the parlor. “How much?” I asked the vendor, pointing at a white spray of carnations and roses that my mother liked. I didn’t know what flowers cost. I never bought them in New York—not for promoted colleagues or sick friends, certainly not for women. Flowers reminded me of my father and the hangdog contrition that followed his nights of drinking: the swooping, romantic gestures that came after he’d blackened an eye or broken a bone.

  “Five thousand pesos,” said the vendor, “plus fifty per letter on the banner.”

  FONDEST REMEMBRANCES, the display models said. IN LOVING MEMORY.

  “I can do two thousand,” I said, “banner included.”

  The vendor shook his head. “This is difficult lettering, sir. The roses are imported.”

  “That’s a pity.” I took my mother’s arm and headed for the next kiosk.

  “Twenty-five hundred with banner,” the vendor shouted after us.

  I walked on, to keep him guessing for a few paces, before doubling us back. I couldn’t have cared less about the cost of flowers. I simply wanted every peddler in the city to know he didn’t stand a chance against me.

  None of the things I wished to say to my father were printable, so I took my mother’s suggestion: REST IN PEACE, YOUR LOVING FAMILY. We strolled the avenue waiting for our banner. “Don’t let anyone try that on the sari-sari,” I said.

  “I don’t think anyone could,” she said. “You still haggle like the best of them.”

  “What choice do I have? They can read balikbayan written on my forehead.”

  “Ah, no—it’s too long to fit there.” Her words hung in the air a moment before I realized I should smile. Ten years before, I had arrived in New York with ideas of what I’d miss most about my mother: her cooking, her voice, the smell of rice and detergent in her skin and hair. I did not expect to miss her humor, the small wisecracks that escaped her mouth sometimes, often from behind her fingers, hard to hear.

  When we returned for the flowers, my mother reached out as if to carry them. I waved her away as I paid. “This thing is nearly twice your size.”

  “You underestimate me,” she said, pretending to flex her muscles.

  • • •

  After the memorial service, my uncles offered to stay with the body overnight. The last of our relatives were expected in the morning. We would bury my father in the afternoon.

  Back in Mabini Heights, my old bedroom was mine again. The air conditioner seemed louder now that I was alone in the room, but I slept easily. I dreamed of winter in New York, walking alone in snow, pulling my collar up against the cold.

  I woke in a sweat again. The AC had stopped. I turned the dial, but the vents stayed silent. I flipped the wall switch and got no light.

  A brownout. My first since returning to Manila.

  Moonlight from the window told me only a few hours had passed. A muffled sound, like crying, came through the wall. I stood, ready to console my mother on the sofa or at the kitchen table. But the living room was empty, the kitchen dark. The only light I saw flickered weakly from the sari-sari. Approaching the screen door, I saw a candle burning on the counter. Was she keeping vigil? Praying? I squinted in the shadows.

  She certainly wasn’t crying. In fact, she was laughing—a strange, sleepy laugh that dominoed through the sari-sari. S
he reached along the counter and picked up a white square. Succorol. I watched her slide it through the wicket. Then she was repeating my instructions, in my accent.

  “This isn’t Tylenol, if you know what I mean.” She drawled the words, like a cowboy trying to speak Tagalog, as if I’d lived in Texas, not New York, for the past ten years. She reached toward the wicket and came back with a fistful of cash.

  I turned from the screen to the darkness, as if a film projector behind me had faltered. Her laughter followed me through the living room as I tripped against the furniture and nearly missed the sickroom doorway in the dark. I opened the drawer where we’d stored the yellow box. Six Succorol patches left, of the thirty I’d brought. Five days had passed since I’d arrived, four since I’d given them to her.

  My skin itched with the humidity. I grabbed the fan beside my father’s bed and flapped it at myself, then felt ridiculous and snapped it shut. Nothing about my mother—not her voice, soft as a lullaby, when I could hear it; not her hands, drying themselves on her lap; not her posture, a constant curtsy—squared with the woman in the sari-sari. I had to erase that strange laughter from my mind, the tongue that wet her thumb before it counted out the money.