Now You See Us, page 5
“Is it a big house?” Angel asks, picturing Cora without any other help in a sprawling Bukit Timah compound.
“There’s a lot to do, but my ma’am still looks embarrassed when she sees me making the beds or washing the car. I’ve given up counting the number of times she has apologized for not being able to cook. Whenever I make a meal, her face goes red and she says sorry. And if she does have to ask me to do something, she pretends it took her by surprise. ‘Oh! Cora! Could you hand-wash these?’ ‘Oh! Cora! Do you mind going to the shops?’”
“What happened to her previous maid?”
“She’s never had one,” Cora says. “There were nannies for her daughters, who are grown up now, and then she just hired a weekly cleaning service and she’d spend all of Sunday at the spa while they did everything.”
Angel’s mind flashes to a memory with Joy and she begins to laugh. “Joy and I went to one of those fish spas last year when I returned to Bulacan.”
“Where the tiny fish bite the dead skin off your feet?” Cora asks.
“It was awful,” Angel says. “We screamed and screamed. It didn’t even hurt! She just started squealing, and that set me off, and the owner came and yelled at us for scaring away the other customers. We were in hysterics. We got banned from that spa for life.”
“How is your sister?”
Angel’s smile fades. “She’s going to work in Saudi Arabia,” she says.
Cora hesitates. “Good money,” she says.
“Irresistible,” Angel agrees. Her eyes bulged out of her head when Joy told her what her salary would be—more than twice what Angel made. Back when Angel’s mother started showing the first signs of lung disease, Angel had rushed to sign up to work in Qatar but it was Joy who forbade her. There were too many news reports about domestic workers there being abused by their employers. Every couple of years, the death of a Filipino in the Middle East sent shock waves through the Philippines, and women avoided the sweet-talking recruiters who tried to convince them it wasn’t so bad. But there were enough women who needed that kind of money to send siblings to college or pay off loans for their children’s medical bills, so they took the gamble.
Cora and Angel are still underground but now they also seem to be underwater. The domed ceiling is an animatronic aquarium. A shark sails over their heads, and neon spotlights swing to the pop beats throbbing through the walls. Cora is asking a question, but Angel can barely hear her. She points to a swatch of sunlight at an entrance on the first floor, and Cora clutches her hand as they weave their way to the escalators and stagger out onto the street. There is a rumble in the distance, but Angel isn’t sure if it’s from an impending storm or the giant billboard screen across the intersection, where an animated robot has burst into flames that are transforming into the words Coming Soon. Three women are taking selfies in front of a display of luxury cars in the sparkling atrium outside the Ion shopping mall, their phones angled from long wands.
“This way,” Angel says as they head towards the narrow underpass that will bring them to Lucky Plaza. Cora knows where it is; now she is the one leading the way, driven towards a place that feels like home.
Lucky Plaza is heaving with Sunday crowds of Pinoy women rummaging through clothing-store racks for pyjamas, shoes, and purses. Angel and Cora make their way through a corridor of money-changer windows with green and red lights marching around the borders of their signs. Passing a souvenir shop, Angel hears a woman asking about the price of a pair of plastic camouflage toy binoculars. “And this one?” she asks, holding up a snow globe, then a pack of scented soaps, then a silver picture frame. Her enthusiasm feels familiar. All the pasalubong Angel has bought over the years for her family could fill up this floor. On Angel’s first visit home, her father devoured a box of seashell-shaped milk chocolates, and her cousin shyly presented a traced outline of his right foot so she could buy him sandals that fitted. Pride bloomed in her heart, and when she returned to Singapore, she spent many Sundays collecting items for the balikbayan box that she sent home once it was full.
Most of the tables in the basement food court are already taken by this time, so Angel brings Cora to an eatery on the third floor. A frown comes over Cora’s face as she scans her options: deep silver trays piled high with crispy rolls of lumpia and rich oxtail stew. “I can’t believe how much they’re charging for the galunggong,” she says, nodding at the tray of fried mackerel. “And eight dollars for grilled liempo? Look at how small those portions are.”
“Your lunch is on me,” Angel says. They squeeze their way into the restaurant.
“Don’t be silly,” Cora protests. “You’re younger. I’m paying.” But Angel insists. She tells Cora to find a place to sit, then she chooses their dishes, puts them on a tray, and carefully navigates her way to their table.
There is a flyer on the table for Balik Express, a print of their signature glossy black tape stretched across the page as a banner. Cora’s eyes bulge at the rates listed there too. She holds up the flyer and shakes her head slowly.
“This is a premium balikbayan service,” Angel assures her. “The post office upstairs still does a good job, but Balik Express takes less time. They have all these fancy add-ons, like they’ll send you a professional video of your family receiving their gifts.” Cora is still thinking in pesos, a habit Angel falls into every time she returns to Singapore from a home visit and everything seems astoundingly expensive. She still has a stockpile of menudo sauce packets and Magic Sarap seasoning from her last trip home, enough for several more months of comfort meals.
Twirling her fork through her pancit bihon and watching the steam escape the fried noodles, Angel tells Cora about a Turkish drama series she’s been watching online—“Even without the English subtitles, you can follow the story”—and about the soap she bought to try to lose weight: “It’s called diet soap. I saw it in an ad. It washes away your cellulite.”
“That is nonsense. You bought it?”
“I believed it! They had a whole range of products. I wondered about the bubble bath, though.”
“You soak for two hours and disappear completely, is that the idea?”
Angel giggles. “I guess so. Anyway, it didn’t work. Big surprise.”
“You’re looking thinner these days than I remember you.”
“I lost some weight,” Angel says. “I had a bad breakup last year . . .” She hesitates. She could refer to Suzan as siya and then Cora wouldn’t know whether she was talking about a man or a woman. Before Angel came out to Joy, Joy made the assumption that Angel had a boyfriend. Angel never had to correct her as long as they were speaking in Tagalog, and she could hide Suzan’s identity behind a pronoun that had no gender. But it still felt like a lie, and Angel is done with hiding who she is.
“Suzan didn’t see the relationship the same way I did.” Although she doesn’t put any emphasis on the name of her ex, Angel hears it blasting through a loudspeaker.
Cora nods slowly. “It was a girlfriend?” she confirms.
“Yes.” Please don’t tell me I’m confused, Angel thinks. That was what Joy told Angel when she came out to her. It’s a phase, she said dismissively. Maybe Cora is thinking the same thing. Maybe she is wondering about all those men that Angel pretended to have crushes on at Reverie Residences—the lifeguard, the FedEx delivery driver who sang the only Tagalog song he knew to any Filipino working in the building.
“I’m sorry Suzan hurt you,” Cora says finally. “What happened?”
Angel is so relieved, she could hug Cora. “I met her around the time that I left my old employers, the Lai family, and started working for the Vijays. We were together for nearly three years,” Angel says. Her first days in the Vijay house coincided with falling madly in love with Suzan. On some mornings when she stands on the wide apartment balcony, the sight of kingfishers darting between the trees still reminds her of the quick flash of Suzan’s grin.
“She was everything,” Angel says. “We even talked about immigrating to another country and getting married.” She doesn’t want to look at Cora when she says this. “Then she met somebody new. A Pinoy guy who works in shipping.”
Was that the hardest betrayal to handle? Or was it when Suzan denied she had ever been a lesbian? Or was it when their friends began supporting Suzan, celebrating her choice, making it clear that they never believed the love between two women could be anything other than confusion or convenience?
Suzan had loved Angel. Their relationship wasn’t about the lack of available Filipino men or wanting to have sex without the risk of pregnancy. Angel had been with those sorts of women too, but those relationships didn’t go deeper than trysts in pay-by-the-hour hotels or quiet park corners. “We talked about how we were tired of hiding. I thought she meant she wanted to come out to her family. I didn’t know she was thinking of pretending to be who she wasn’t.”
Cora’s face brims with sympathy and she reaches out and grips Angel’s hand. “This is your first time talking about it?”
“I told Joy about Suzan,” Angel says. A fresh wave of pain washes over her. “She didn’t understand. After my last visit, Joy told me they didn’t need me to pay her daughters’ school fees anymore. She said that I needed to save my money for myself, but I think it’s because I told her I was gay. She doesn’t want me to influence her kids somehow.”
“It’s not such a bad thing to stop sending all of that money home, Angel. Remember when you first started working here? You were standing in line at the remittance centre every week.”
“Everyone needed help,” Angel recalls.
For the first two years she was here, Angel paid most of her mother’s medical bills, but after her mother passed, requests came flooding in from other family members. Her cousin Tito’s motorcycle needed repairs; could she help cover the cost? Her recently widowed aunt’s farm needed gasoline for the machinery; could Angel pay for that? Money for waterproof schoolbags, to fix a leak in a roof, to bribe an official—Angel said yes, yes, yes until Cora taught her to say no. “You’ll end up borrowing from loan sharks at this rate,” Cora had warned her. Cora had been working in Singapore for ten years when Angel arrived in 2001, and she had seen other domestic workers go into debt to try to please their families back home.
Angel can’t help noticing that Cora is different now, and not just because of the deep age lines that score the corners of her eyes. She used to show up in eateries like this with fire in those eyes, ready to distribute the free weekly newsletter that she wrote for Filipino workers. Everybody was eager to read those folded pink sheets for tips and useful information from a veteran worker. Around the holidays, she always included a special edition about packing balikbayan boxes, complete with diagrams on space-saving and tips on padding fragile items like Ritz crackers and souvenir shot glasses. She advised women about resolving conflicts with employers too, and she always included all the hotline numbers they could call for help. In 2001, there was a famous murder, and Marisol Concepcion, a maid from Nueva Ecija, was executed in Singapore for strangling her employer and her daughter. The Philippine newspapers reported that Marisol had been framed. Most women didn’t have computer access in their employers’ homes, so they began filling the cybercafés to read the news online until Cora offered to consolidate the information into an extra page for no charge.
Now Cora seems diminished. Sadness drapes over her like a cloak. Angel wonders who takes care of people like Cora, women who are so often depended on to take care of others. The thought of being bereft and alone unsettles her. “Your family is well?” she asks casually.
Cora nods but after a beat she says, “My nephew Raymond died.”
“I know,” Angel says before thinking.
Cora’s face seizes with panic. “Who told you?” she asks.
“On Facebook,” Angel says. “Somebody commented. I saw it just before you took your profile down.”
This information seems to bring Cora some relief, but Angel notices that Cora has dropped her hand and her fingers are clenched in a tight fist. What happened? Angel wants to ask, but the words don’t form. Cora looks too fearful, as if she might spring out of her chair and run away if Angel pries. Angel’s gaze settles on three women at the next table whose orders of suman malagkit have just arrived. “Dessert?” Angel asks. The women peel open the banana leaves to reveal rice cakes soaked in coconut syrup. Behind them is a display case of cassava cakes and fried skewered plantains.
Cora, still lost in thought, shakes her head. “Let’s take a walk, then,” Angel says, and Cora picks up her things slowly to follow her.
Outside, the sky has grown darker, and it looks as if the sleek silver skyscrapers are icicles dripping from the low clouds. A fat raindrop plops onto Angel’s head as they step out onto the boulevard. “This way,” she tells Cora. The downpour begins as they hurry towards the awning of a hotel lobby. A procession of blue and yellow taxis threads through the front entrance. Angel and Cora dodge the slow traffic and the sudden blooming of umbrellas as thunder cracks and the clouds shed the rain in a torrential rush.
“It’s freezing,” Angel squeals as they enter the lobby, where the fierce air-conditioning gives her goose bumps. Two doormen in tailored coats nod to greet them. Cora runs her fingers through her short hair. They wait and watch as the lobby begins to fill up with other escapees from the weather. Although Angel feels guilty for marvelling at any kind of storm after what happened to Joy’s home in Bulacan, the chaos is comforting to view from behind these wide glass windows and red awnings. The raindrops blur the dagger-sharp edges of the towers, and lights from the buses smear across the glistening black roads.
“I need to use the toilet,” Cora says. She and Angel walk towards reception, but a desk clerk stops them. He doesn’t greet them like the doormen automatically did. “The washrooms are for hotel guests only,” he says. The women taking the selfies outside the Ion mall earlier trot past them to the washroom entrance, boxy white shopping bags swinging from their wrists. Angel feels a flash of anger; they don’t even hesitate, and the desk clerk doesn’t give them a second glance.
“What do you think he would have said if we told him we were guests? If we had just made up a room number?” Angel asks Cora as they step outside again.
Cora wipes the raindrops from her eyes like they are tears. “He would have asked for more proof. Our keys. Our passports.”
“Our grandparents’ names,” Angel quips. “How much liquid we drank.”
They try to dodge the rain all the way to a sheltered bus stop, and then it’s a short sprint to another haven: Tangs department store. It’s a sale day, too busy for anybody to mind them. Customers flocking towards the racks are accosted by salesgirls with perfume spray bottles and invitations for free makeup trials. “I’ll be in the bra section,” Angel tells Cora, who nods and hurries to the washroom. Two saleswomen are folding bras and chatting animatedly to each other when Angel starts to look through the sports bras. “Come, girl, I take for you,” one saleswoman says. Her name tag reads mei. “What size you want?”
“Can you measure me?” Angel asks.
Mei nods and picks up her measuring tape. Her colleague smiles at Angel. “Day off?” she asks in Tagalog. Angel nods. “You get one a week?”
“Yeah,” Angel says. “Where are you from?”
“Iloilo,” the saleswoman replies. “I don’t usually work on Sundays either, but we’re getting overtime because of this sale.”
“Lots of customers?”
“The rain always helps to bring in the crowds. Where are you from?”
“Bulacan,” Angel says, and she watches the woman’s features crumple with sympathy.
“That flood!” she says. “On the news, I saw people living on their rooftops.”
“Good thing they still had rooftops,” Angel says.
“Was your family caught up in it?”
“Not too badly,” Angel says, because this is easier to say than the truth. There is no space in small talk for describing the swirling water that inched its way up her nieces’ ankles and rotted the wooden floors that her brother-in-law had laid with his own hands.
Mei steps away from Angel and writes down her measurements. She looks back and forth between them curiously. “Relax, Mei, we’re not talking about you,” the Filipino saleswoman tells her. Angel laughs. “Anyway, best of luck. My colleague will show you some of our latest styles. It’s time for my lunch break.”
Angel bids her goodbye and continues shopping. She holds up a sports bra with an adjustable racer-back strap and pictures herself wearing it on long morning runs in the park. Mei clears her throat and tucks her hair behind her ear. She gives Angel an apologetic smile. “There’s no discount on this one.”
Angel figured as much. But when Mei tries to nudge her towards a range of plain bras with flimsy cups in sizes S, M, L, and XL, Angel holds on to the bra. “I will try it on,” she says, knowing full well that she won’t end up buying it. It is eighty-nine dollars, more than half what she earns in a week.
On her way to the fitting room, she notices a small crowd has formed near the MAC counter. Voices are rising. There is a young, pale Filipino woman with glossy black hair wearing a pair of skintight denim shorts that are cut to reveal the half-moons of her pert bottom. Three saleswomen have surrounded her, and Angel’s first thought is that she has stolen something. Angel can only see her face in profile, but her voice rings clearly across the department store: “I don’t have to buy it!”
The saleswomen’s voices rise as well, and one of them returns to the counter to make a call. As the Filipino woman continues arguing, she turns to reveal a heavily made-up face. It looks like she has tried every sample of every product on this floor, and the saleswomen are now pressuring her to buy something.
Angel waves Cora over when she notices her wandering back from the restroom. Another round of heated arguing catches Cora’s attention. She takes one look at the Filipino woman and marches over to the counter. Do they know each other? Angel hurries over to join them.
