decisions now. I make the decisions. You just say ‘thank you.’”
Bernie pressed her lips together until she had none and dropped
her head back to sigh at the ceiling, as if it were the only other rational
presence in the room. “Have you heard what they say about getting
a puppy as a present?” asked Bernie. Vero expected her to waggle her
finger at Shane. “A nanny? For a present? Even worse.” She tapped
her fingers on the counter. “Not cool at all.” Her gaze fell on Vero, and
she very nearly rolled her eyes.
Shane back-pedalled then. Of course, he wouldn’t think of giving
someone a nanny as a present. Of course, the hiring of a nanny would
be a Serious Family Decision. Of course, Vero needed to have the big-
gest share of the input. Clearly. “That being said,” he smiled in a way
he knew accentuated the deep dimple in his left cheek, “it wouldn’t
hurt to set things in motion, get the wheels spinning, while Vero Baby
makes up her mind.”
Vero waited for him to launch into his spiel about growing up in
South Africa, where everyone had servants. His family had four: a
driver, a nanny, a maid, and a gardener. When he was eight, a black
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man came to the house, and Shane famously yelled over his shoulder
to his family, “A boy is at the door to see you.” It was Bishop Desmond
Tutu coming to discuss church policy with Shane’s grandfather, an
Anglican minister. A “boy”—that’s what they called all their black
servants. How would young Shane know this black man was different
from the rest of their black men? He didn’t.
The incident turned into one of those embarrassing moments
that he couldn’t stop re-telling, as if reliving it through story was his
self-inflicted penance. Vero could see Shane biting down hard on the
story this time, though.
Good thing, too. Bernie softened to him by the end, walked them
through the application process, and gave them a stack of nanny pro-
files to browse. Afterward, Shane pulled Vero into his back office at
the pharmacy and spread all of the pictures out on his desk like a pack
of tarot cards, each one pointing to a different, less difficult future, a
future in which his wife had more time for backrubs and blow jobs,
and less cause to list his (seemingly infinite) shortcomings.
“Life is short, ” he said, lifting Vero’s small body onto his desk and
drawing her legs around his waist, lowering his mouth into the crook
of her neck. “We can have everything. Let’s take it.”
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CHAPTER TWO
The small apartment is quiet and dark. No feet pound above
Ligaya, no bossy women yell orders next door, no newlyweds squawk
like strangled roosters in the apartment below. Finally, the world is
still, and Ligaya can unfold her mattress in the closet and get some
rest. If she falls asleep quickly, she will get five hours before she must
wake to prepare Madam Poon’s breakfast.
Madam likes her congee on the table by the time she comes out
of her room at seven. When she eats, Ligaya must not look at her,
even though there is nowhere else in the small apartment to look.
Ligaya has become skilled at looking nowhere. When Madam Poon
finishes her breakfast congee, the dishes must disappear at once, and
still Ligaya must not look at her. When Ligaya has washed every
dish and bathed and fed baby Hui, she will take him on the bus to
the market. They will buy white fish and fresh vegetables to steam for
dinner. Maybe Mister Poon will be home from his business trip by
then, and Ligaya will spread a little extra butter on the fish and use
one pinch of salt, just the way he likes.
Madam never says when to expect the Mister. Ligaya hopes he
comes today. Madam always treats Ligaya with more kindness when
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he is home. Jiao is Mister Poon’s first name. Ligaya has heard Madam
Poon call him that in their bedroom; the apartment is so small that
Ligaya hears everything. She can tell from the volume of the rustling
sheets through the thin walls which of them fidgets in the night.
Hui does not call his father anything. Sadly, the boy’s mind is not
right. “There is delayed development,” Mister Poon told Ligaya just
after she arrived in Hong Kong, and that is all the explanation Ligaya
ever gets. For this delay in development, Ligaya has grown to be
grateful. It makes Hui pliant, one blessing in a job far more demand-
ing than Ligaya imagined when she flew out of Manila.
Even though Ligaya looks forward to Mister Poon’s time at home,
she knows she must be careful not to encourage his interest in her.
If he speaks to Ligaya often, Ligaya pays for it when he leaves. Last
week, the night after he left, Ligaya had only a small, cold piece of
leftover milkfish to eat, and only after Madam Poon had finished her
dinner, after Ligaya had washed every dish and scrubbed every pan,
after she had teased every crumb out of every corner.
“You eat what I tell you to eat,” Madam Poon screamed, waving
her scrawny arms in the air like a scarecrow in a tornado. “We cannot
afford you filling your face on every luxury. We bring you here to
work, not to eat!”
Ligaya nodded. “Yes, Madam. Sorry, Madam.” She shaped her face
to express docility and subservience, but her thoughts were her own:
Panget ka. Mukha bruha. You, Madam Poon, are an ugly little witch
with no bum. Who could ever love you? Nobody.
But Ligaya tries not to think of last week or next week or even of
tomorrow. Ligaya tries not to think at all. Now is the time for sleep-
ing, not thinking. She digs for her phone, hidden far under the shelves
in her sleeping closet. Madam has forbidden Ligaya to have a phone.
But Ligaya cannot use the Poon phone either.
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Madam says no to many things: no phones, no Tagalog, no days off.
But the fish-brained woman has less control than she thinks. Ligaya
tries to silence the weak but rising in her mind. But Madam Poon’s
husband is always away, and she too is lonely. She too is unhappy. Even as
lonely and as unhappy as me.
A home does not have space for two adult women. How could this
sad, lonely woman care for Ligaya? Ligaya, who cooks Mister Poon’s
favourite dishes. Ligaya, who sleeps with Hui cradled close to her
breast.
Ligaya does the job of a wife.
She is younger than Madam Poon.
She is prettier than Madam Poon. Nobody would say otherwise.
These things matter. Ligaya knows they do.
And then Mister Poon goes away, and Madam Poon sleeps alone.
She is meanest when she sleeps alone.
Yes, Ligaya could pity Madam Poon, if she allowed that single
“but” to take hold. T
hat kind of pity will not help anyone here. When
the blanket is short, we must learn to bend. Ligaya’s mother said that,
just before Ligaya left. Mother cupped her hands around the back of
Ligaya’s head and pulled her close, until their foreheads touched. “My
daughter.” She stroked her hair with one hand. “When the blanket is
short, we learn to bend. We must.”
Hating Madam Poon, making her a fish-brained, scrawny witch,
is only one of the many ways Ligaya tries to make this shrunken
blanket fit.
Ligaya taps the calendar application on her forbidden phone and
checks off one more day in Hong Kong. Already she has checked
seven months and twenty-three days since she arrived from Manila.
Even then, eighteen hours had passed since she said goodbye to her
family in her hillside village before walking into Taal. Ligaya did not
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cry then, and she did not cry during the four-hour bus trip to the
airport. She rested her forehead against the dusty glass of the window
and counted the reasons she must go. There were many.
Ligaya packed no photographs when she left. She wishes now for
one of Nene. She brings an image to mind. Just before Ligaya left,
she cut Nene’s hair, inadvertently leaving the girl’s short bangs slanted
and the hair at her shoulders jagged. In Ligaya’s mind, Nene runs
through long grass, her too-short bangs crooked and her six-year-
old arms outstretched as she chases chickens around the yard. Ligaya
always let Nene “help” with the chase, but then shooed her inside
when it came time to butcher.
Ligaya wishes for a picture of Pedro too. Her whole body wishes
for that. But she blocks his image. She will see him again, when the
right time comes. For that, she must trust in God.
Ligaya did not cry on the bus, she did not cry on the plane, and she
will not cry here. She sets her face hard against the possibility of tears
and powers off her phone. She slides it back into a dark corner where
Madam will never have occasion to look. Ligaya smiles into the dark
at the thought of Madam down on her knees in this dusty corner, her
cheek next to the floor, and her bony rump in the air.
Ligaya first heard about the work available in Hong Kong during
a summer heat wave, while up to her elbows in cold washing water.
She’d known about Hong Kong always, it seemed, but not with any
awareness that it could mean something to her, could impact—abso-
lutely alter—her life. But there, out in the yard, bent over a barrel of
washing, forearms cold and chafed in water straight from the well,
the message penetrated. She dipped her mother’s dress, stained with
a spot of menstrual blood, and scrubbed hard, barely registering the
noise blaring from the radio propped in the dust by the back door.
Instead, she listened to Totoy and Nene playing. She couldn’t see
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them, but she imagined them engaged in a match of luksong tinik,
Nene raising her hands for Totoy to jump over, up and up until he
missed, tripping into the dust and running back to Ligaya with a
bloody nose, a skinned knee. If more kids came, they would play luk-
song baboy, all bent over in a line taking turns leaping over each other’s
backs. As she scrubbed, the radio volume seemed to increase by itself.
“HONG KONG! STEPPING STONE TO CANADA!”
Ligaya, we mean you! That’s what she heard.
Her mother and her father were in the house, hiding from the hot
sun. It was still dry then, but monsoon season was fast approaching.
“Fish for dinner again,” her father would joke when the rains came,
flooding their house, the riverbanks overflowing with fish that swam
right in the front door of their little home. “The Lord provides.” In
monsoon season, the slippery tilapia were plentiful and easy to catch,
swimming through the living room, their silver scales shimmering
gold as the evening sun caught them at the right angle through the
open windows.
From this high rise towering above Hong Kong, such a thing
seems impossible, as if Ligaya is remembering a dream. But they were
real, those fish in her house. Disoriented by furniture and splashing
feet, the tilapia darted into corners, quivering but otherwise still, as if
waiting to be caught.
Ligaya and her family never went hungry in monsoon season.
“Hong Kong! Follow your dream—”
Ligaya looked quickly toward the house and turned off the radio.
But after that, she saw the ads everywhere, no longer irrelevant back-
ground noise. On the radio, in the newspapers, popping up online:
“Hong Kong, the gateway to happy life in Canada!”
Well, she is here now, in the gateway, but memories of the
Philippines come to her at night in her closet, not so much floating
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across her mind as bashing down the door. Lying under the stars with
Pedro, warm earth beneath them, her head rested in the firm crook
of his arm. He smelled of fish oil and Marlboro cigarettes. A plane
flew overhead, and her eyes followed the thin trail of white in its wake
until it disappeared.
“I don’t want to go.”
Pedro rolled toward her, rested a calloused hand against the skin
Because he didn’t tense at her objection, she continued. “I under-
stand the reasons. I will be paid in dollars. I will bring the family later.
But why do I have to be the one forced to go?” Ligaya had heard other
women ask these same questions, raking leaves behind the houses in
the morning, complaining of the sacrifice.
“Ligaya.” Pedro whispered the word, as if it were a song, a wish.
“Women shouldn’t talk politics.” He put his mouth to hers and held
it there, stopping her words.
No tears, Ligaya reminds herself now as she hugs her knees into
her chest on her bed, a cushion so thin she feels the floorboards. The
mattress smells of dying people’s urine. Of course, Madam would not
have wasted money on a brand-new mattress for Ligaya.
Ligaya knows exactly what she’s worth here, but she will tolerate
this place and these people for the good of her family, to create a life
of opportunity. Her beautiful Philippines has become the land of no
opportunity. She pulls her only sweater over her shoulders, rests her
face against this old mattress that is temporarily hers, and closes her
eyes.
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CHAPTER THREE
Shane’s brother Vince sports a pineapple across his
crotch, Shane a Mexican flag. A bushy line of hair runs up toward
Shane’s belly button, and hair grows down the inside of his legs to
mid-thigh. Vince appears to have shaven for the occasion, smooth
as river rock. Even his tree trunk legs shine, lit golden as the eve-
ning sun slides into the Pacific.
The angle of the sun suggests that the whole family should be
leaving the beach to prepare Christmas dinner, but Vince has chris-
tened Christmas Day “Speedo Navidad.” He has declared, in the
way that Vince does, that he and his brother will spend the day
wearing bikini briefs and downing girly drinks at the swim-up bar.
“Feel free to call it Bikini Christmas, if you’re more comfy with
Inglés,” he assures them. “It’s a multi-lingual celebration.”
Mexico Christmas with the Schoemans is an annual tradi-
tion. While Shane clicked away on Expedia booking this year’s
flights, Vero envisioned her father-in-law, Gregory, waving his fat
privileged fingers at the harried waiters who ran from one beach
umbrella to the next, balancing trays of coconut shells filled with
rum. “Una mas! Por favor! Una mas! ” Before Vero had even stepped
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off the plane, she felt the weight of Heather Schoeman’s perpetual
judgment.
“You’re giving Jamal Advil? Again? ”
“Television can be very detrimental to the developing brain.”
“Never sleep with your babies. Adults have to have…some…pri-
vacy. The husband needs his wife too. Sharing a bedroom with your
kids is—I’m not the first to say it—a recipe for a doomed marriage.”
Listen here, Heather Schoeman, Vero wanted to scream, get the fuck
out of my bedroom!
As Vero and Shane prepared and packed the mountain of equip-
ment required to leave home with two young children, Vero avoided
thinking about her brother-in-law, his biceps the size and shape of
softballs, a knife tattoo running from his elbow to his wrist, the bloody
tip pointed at his pulse point, where he’d tattooed his college foot-
ball number, 72, in thick black lines. Vince, she knew, would bellow
his beer-sodden way into the condo in the middle of Jamal’s nap.
If she dared to ask him to turn it down a notch, he’d tiptoe around
like a cartoon character, raising his knees to his chest, and delivering
a stage-whisper soliloquy about King Jamal’s royal sleep. Vero also
knew that Vince would monopolize Shane’s time in Mexico, acting
like the two of them still wore the same high-school football jersey.
When the three of them were together, Shane belonged to Vince.
But that’s what Shane’s family did: they spent Christmases in