In the Country

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2015 by Mia Alvar

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “White Rabbit,” words and music by Grace Slick, copyright © 1966 by Irving Music, Inc., copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Several stories in this collection first appeared, in different form, in the following publications: “Legends of the White Lady” in
The Cincinnati Review,
“The Virgin of Monte Ramon” in
Euphony,
“Shadow Families” on
FiveChapters.com
, “The Miracle Worker” in
The Missouri Review,
and “The Kontrabida” in
One Story.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alvar, Mia, [date]

[Short stories. Selections]

In the country : stories / Mia Alvar.—First edition.

Pages cm

ISBN 978-0-385-35281-9 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-385-35284-0 (eBook)

1. Filipinos—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3601.L863A6 2015

813'.6—dc23

2014036940

eBook ISBN 9780385352840

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover photograph by TanMan/Fototrove/Getty Images

Cover design by Oliver Munday

v4.1

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for Glenn

My mother was waiting in front of our house when I rode up in a taxi. “There you are,” she said, as if we'd simply lost each other for an hour or two, at a party. I only half-embraced her, afraid she might break if I held too tight. She hadn't been able to collect me from the airport herself. Years ago my father had forbidden her to drive, though I supposed he could do little to prevent it now.

“Let me,” she said, reaching for my suitcase. I waved her away. I would no sooner allow my mother to carry my suitcase than allow her to carry me. “Oh, Steve,” she protested. “You don't know my strength!” She dropped her arms, flattening the palms against her lap, a habit I remembered well. Throughout my childhood she often looked to be drying her hands on an apron, whether or not she was wearing one.

In the decade since I left she hadn't aged, exactly. To my eyes she seemed not older but
more.
More frail; more tired; softer-spoken; her dark, teaspoon-shaped face cast farther down. Every feature I remembered had settled in her and been more deeply confirmed.

My parents still lived in Mabini Heights, a suburb of Manila and 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. “Sshhh.” 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
!
as its tagline (
We do not sell expired drugs here!
). 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 to 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, while 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 strip light 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. Behind 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 re-counted 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.