In the Country (8 page)

The sob was out of my throat before I could swallow it. I dropped the program into Minnie's lap and gave her my candle, then covered my face with both hands and wept like a child. Unable to stop, I stood and rushed down the aisle between rows of Filipinos staring from their tiny chairs, thinking, most likely, that the dead girl and I had been close.

I walked past the doors of other classrooms, trying to find my breath. The school building formed a horseshoe around a grassy playground. I sat down on a swing and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Faintly, I could hear the classroom congregation shuffling to stand and sing another song.

Minnie followed a few moments later and sat on the swing next to mine. We swung together in that slight, noncommittal way, our feet on the ground. She turned herself around, twisting the chains over each other, then lifted her feet to spin them untwisted. “I know how you feel,” she said gently. “I think everybody in there is feeling it.
Will I die alone, with no one to mourn me but a bunch of strangers in a classroom? Will anybody even remember who I was?
”

I dried my eyes and murmured some agreement. In fact, I had not been thinking of that at all. In my mind I was seeing only Aroush's tumored hands, the droop of her head. “Can you imagine,” I said to Minnie, “if you had to go on living after your life had stopped? If, at a certain age, that was it—the best you'd ever do—the most you'd ever accomplish?”

“I can,” said Minnie. I knew she was thinking still of the girl who died. “I was eighteen when I came here. I'm forty now. I've never done much besides clean rich Arabs' houses.” Minnie turned to look toward the parking lot, so that even years later I would wonder if I'd heard correctly what came next. “I'll probably die in uniform”—she sighed regretfully—“with a dustrag in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaning fluid in the other.”

I squinted, then squeezed my eyes shut. I shook my head. Small, deferential Minnie, who'd backed out of a peaceful strike: she could not be capable of it. I coughed, thinking I might choke, my eyes burning. At the same time, my vision seemed sharper, clearer than before.

Minnie wasn't dead to me after that; in fact what she became was more alive than ever, revealed to me in new textures and colors. I had underestimated her: what looked like a lifetime of toil and taking orders had contained subversions no one, until now, had seen. She'd been silently striking all along; she didn't need my protection. What arrogance, to think I should take up her cause, even the score. I was no smarter than a child, who didn't understand nuances. She was not my mother. (And God only knew, of course, what little mutinies my own mother had waged, in secret: the better life she'd planned for me could not have been enough to get her through her own, every day.)

I had to believe that my friend had suffered, that humiliations I could barely imagine drove her to cruelty.
You've been through a lot,
I could say,
but the child isn't the one who put you through it.
Of course Aroush would be the one to pay the price; Aroush, the only one less powerful than Minnie, the only one who couldn't punish Minnie back. Aroush, who'd done nothing to deserve punishment.

I did not, in that Awali playground, tell Minnie that her suffering was not Aroush's fault, or that her rich employer was a human being too. I drove her home, and then myself. At dinner, I did not tell Ed to spare me his pronouncements about the
Bumbai
and
Arabo
. Their theories had had years to harden; my love for Aroush and sympathy toward Mrs. Mansour couldn't topple them in one day. All I knew to do, and had to do immediately, was right my own mistake.

I invited Mrs. Mansour to spend an afternoon with Aroush and me by the small kidney-shaped pool in our compound. “Parents' Day,” I said. The kindergarten classroom, with its finger paintings and bulletin boards, had made me nostalgic for a “real” school. A glimpse into our days together would prepare Mrs. Mansour nicely for the truth. If she could see her daughter's actual education with her own eyes, she would find joy in Aroush as she was, aim for humbler milestones, no less miraculous for being within reach.

Mrs. Mansour had dressed Aroush in a ruffled pink bathing suit and waterproof swim diaper. “Thank you for bringing us here,” she said, when I unlocked the gate to the swimming pool. “This is quite a nice vacation.”

She was being polite. Surely there was nothing the Astroturf and cement walls had over the boutiques of Bond Street. I eased Aroush's arms into a pair of orange water wings and brought her car seat to the edge of the pool so that her feet touched the surface. Her toenails were painted a dark beet color. I splashed her right foot into the water, then her left, causing her to smile and shiver.

Mrs. Mansour removed her sunglasses and applauded. I took Aroush from her car seat and submerged her to the waist, supporting her against my chest. We faced Mrs. Mansour. I cradled her against one arm and flicked water from my fingers onto her neck and face. She blinked and smiled again. Holding her that close, and smelling the particular warmth of her scalp, I almost lost my nerve, tempted to keep the truth, and the real Aroush, to myself.

“Teacher,” Mrs. Mansour called, “when first I see you, I know you are the right one for Aroush. From looking at you—so independent, so
able
—I know you are a modern woman.”

I bowed my head. Again my eyes hurt as if they'd been blinded and gained total clarity all at once. The sun winked in a million facets off the water. I could hear every slight movement that Aroush and I made through it.

“This is how I will like my girl to be. Alive in the world. I would like that she understand business, understand computers, understand politics.”

The locks at Aroush's hairline had begun to curl from moisture, and I had to speak.

“Mrs. Mansour,” I said, “I'm afraid I have not been completely forthright with you.”

“Forth right?” she said casually, settling back into her chair.

“Honest,” I said. “About your daughter. You know, Mrs. Mansour, that Aroush will never understand business, don't you? That she'll never understand computers, or politics?” A cheat, to ask this way, to suggest that Mrs. Mansour knew the truth despite my lie. So I added, with as much grave certainty as my voice could muster, “She'll always be close to how you see her now.”

“Now you are doctor, as well as Teacher,” she said, her red lips barely moving to say it. She seemed to freeze in the chair, a statue on a throne, her eyes cold as they locked with mine.

“I was confused,” I said, speaking quickly so I wouldn't lose my nerve or her attention. “I thought taking your gifts, your money, would offset some imbalance in the world. Please listen, Mrs. Mansour. Aroush is not Helen Keller, and I'm no Annie Sullivan. She won't write books or cure cancer. But I can teach her to hold objects, to communicate without words, to recognize sounds, even shapes…”

Mrs. Mansour cut a terribly elegant figure against the Astroturf. Only her sandaled feet showed at the hem of her
abaya.
I noticed for the first time how exposed I was next to her black-veiled figure: my tan lines, my hips, all the places where the bathing suit dug into my bare flesh. I held Aroush close, as if to hide my flaws behind hers. My need to come clean was of no concern to Mrs. Mansour. I wondered how many teachers had been interviewed before me and passed over, when they chose to break the truth to her from the start. Someone like Mrs. Mansour must have had no problem holding out for what she wanted most.

“Thank you again for bring us to this place,” Mrs. Mansour said, with a cheery finality to her voice. “It is like Paradise.” A kind of paradise was what she paid me for, after all: the dream of Aroush's bright future. She replaced the sunglasses atop her cheekbones, a warning I understood: that whatever I wished to illuminate, she was happy in the dark. What I had thought of as deception was my duty. If I cared to keep Aroush in my life,
this
was the service I had to keep providing, whether or not I'd thought better of it. And so I held my tongue and treaded water, looking up at where Mrs. Mansour's eyes were hidden from me. From a distance perfect strangers could assume that Mrs. Mansour was my
amo,
and I a servant at her feet.

If you are beautiful and broke, one place left for you is Asia. Usually when I ran out of money I went to Tokyo—always a face cream or a push-up bra there that could use me. This time, I went to Manila. I'd been there once before, with my roommate Sabine. In cities like these there is a demand for blue eyes and light hair and skin like milk.

Manila's airport is a bit like Tokyo's but noisier, more crowded, its faces a few shades darker. I towered, in both cities, over almost everyone. But while Tokyo could match New York for all its rushing, solitary people, in Manila no one seemed alone but me. At
ARRIVALS
each brown face would find the cluster of faces it belonged to and merge into a heap of arms and laughter and chatter. Not that I had blended in much better with Sabine there. She was only half Filipina, and five-ten—almost as tall as me.

I looked for a cab and could only get a stretch limousine—the airport's longest person hailing its longest car. On the highway, skinny boys in wifebeaters dodged the traffic, some wearing flip-flops, others barefoot, their shins and calves dark with scabs. They carried trays of gum and cigarettes. When traffic stalled us, some boys lingered at my window, which was mirrored on the outside. They cupped their hands around their faces and squinted. Their eyes roamed, blank; they couldn't see a thing. There were older beggars too, with body parts missing: hands, a leg, an arm.

This was the city where Sabine was born; when I'd first met her, though, I couldn't guess where she was from. It was a question she had to answer often. “My mother's from the Philippines, my dad is American,” she would say, in a practiced manner. “And no, he wasn't ‘in the service.' ”

Now my driver asked me the same question. “You American, miss?” he said, as he steered through the cars and bodies.

“As apple pie,” I said. It sounded more serious than I meant it.

“I can see that, miss. Where in America? Texas?”

“New York.”

“Here on vacay?” he asked, just like an American would.

I shook my head. “Work.” Then I remembered something. “Look, I've been here before,” I told the driver, “and I know we don't go through Quezon City to get to this hotel.” Five years ago, the cab ride from the airport had taken three hours and cost eight hundred pesos—about double the time and money that we should have spent, Sabine and I later found out. We looked at a map afterward. The driver had taken us along the edges of greater Manila and through Balete Drive, a long street in Quezon City that was supposedly haunted. While scamming us he told the story of a woman dressed all in white who roamed Balete after dark. She'd been run over by a car, he said, and now she crossed the street when least expected, causing accidents, wanting people to share her end. She favored taxi drivers or men who drove alone. One night after his shift, our cabbie thought he ran her over. He didn't see her in the street until too late, and though he heard a thump and saw a body roll across the windshield, he found no woman and no blemish on his car when he stopped and got out. “But I have proof,” he said, rooting in his glove compartment for a length of white lace—allegedly torn from the lady's dress and fished out of his fender hours after the accident.

After that, like a new celebrity or clothing brand, the ghost seemed to be everywhere for me. My first trip to Manila had been packed hour to hour with castings and photo shoots; I didn't sightsee and met only the locals I worked with. The one thing I learned about Manila was this weird and hazy ghost story, which kept on changing shape. Every stylist, every makeup artist knew a different legend of the white lady.

“They say the Japs raped her in World War Two,” said one assistant on a swimsuit job, while she slaked my arms and legs with a light-diffusing cream. “Now she wants revenge against all men.”

“She stopped a Coca-Cola truck on Balete Drive,” said a photographer. “When the driver got out, she was gone. But the leaves of a banana stalk were waving nearby, even though the air was still that night.” This was allegory, he explained; Coca-Cola was America, somehow, and banana stalks the tropical Third World.

“She had big bones, and strong white teeth,” a hairstylist informed me. “The white lady was a white woman.”

I wondered now if the white lady was still popular here or if, like a clothing label or celebrity, her star had faded since my last visit. By the time I left the limousine, sweat had blossomed darkly under my blue cap sleeves. The humidity made a mist over everything; even the car windows were coated with little drops. My skin would probably break out in this kind of heat. The driver charged me three hundred pesos. “Fair and square,” he said. “I'll remember you. I'll tell everyone there was this pretty Stateside actress in my cab, who knew her way around Manila.”

I laughed, picking up my suitcase and going into the hotel. Aside from that Balete Drive business, I knew nothing about Manila. I was not an actress but a “mannequin,” as Sabine liked to refer to us. I was twenty-eight, old enough to know I would never be the Face of My Generation or the Body of My Decade, but not old enough to get it together to do anything else.

The hotel wasn't five-star, but it wasn't bad. There was something holy to it: stark and airy, like a chapel, all lace and dark wood. An effort had been made to save it from the usual peachy wallpapers or gold-framed paintings. A sheer white curtain flared above each single bed. We had stayed here last time as well. “I feel like a princess,” I remembered telling Sabine, never having had a canopy bed before. It turned out to be a mosquito net, and Sabine laughed at me. “
Some
one hasn't lived in the developing world,” she said.

Sabine was my family, which sounds tragic, but it was true. We didn't know our fathers or speak to our mothers. When I was eighteen and had to get away from my mother, and Sabine was twenty and needed a new roommate, our booker introduced us. Had we looked alike, we might not have been friends; but she was a Winter and I was a Spring, and we were never up for the same jobs. For ten years we lived together, in a two-bedroom above a diner that sent up smells of coffee in the morning and fried potatoes in the afternoon. The only time we ever really closed our bedroom doors was when we brought boys home for the night.

In the hotel room, I unpacked some vanilla candles and lit them one by one. This was how Sabine used to soothe herself in strange places. I picked up a grainy-paged magazine from the hotel nightstand and flipped through. It had no photos or interviews in it, though, and what use did I have for a magazine without photos or interviews? The room began to smell like cake. I lay back on one of the beds. Through the little ring at the top of the mosquito net I saw a cockroach, crawling in a slant across the ceiling. I could feel myself falling asleep, which these days was my default state.

I hadn't worked, or looked for work, in five months. I had never been a morning person to begin with, and after Sabine died, getting up for jobs or castings didn't feel possible. Leaving the house at all didn't feel possible. Depending on what kind of sadness I was having, I lived on either what Sabine and I had called vitamin C
₃
—coffee, always black with no sugar; cigarettes from the corner bodega; and cocaine from a model friend who dealt on the side and came around one morning a week—or pizza and Chinese food delivery, whose flat boxes and take-out buckets littered the living room tables; the kitchenette counter; even, eventually, my bedroom floor. For a few weeks my booker tried to call and get me back out there. “Alice, I have a possibility in L.A.,” he said. “The work would do you good. Can you be ready in an hour?” I deleted every voice mail and returned to bed. Sleep became my needy, whining lover, pulling me back down the minute I tried to go anywhere else. For a model on the wrong side of twenty-five, this was disastrous. We were told, sternly and often, that the difference between the “huge” girls and us struggling dime-a-dozen girls was that the huge knew how to wake up early, booking this job and that while the rest of us, who might be just as pretty, slept. My own mother, by her account, could have been huge—was on the dizzying, starlit verge of huge, when some D-list runway show producer knocked her up and saddled her with me.

In Manila's garment district the next day, I stood outside an office among forty girls, all waiting for our names. Casting calls were nobody's favorite. “Cattle calls,” we'd say, or go-sees. We would stand there, sit if we were lucky, and wait an hour or more, usually to hear we weren't right. Sometimes they liked a girl a little but not enough. Or asked us back once, but not a second time. “I didn't realize,” one London editor told me, “that you'd got such a very long torso.” In Milan a woman told her partner: “There's nothing wrong with her
per se,
” and shook her head at me.

A year ago, I would have sized up the girls around me. Usually at least a handful didn't stand a chance. Girls who overdressed, for instance—small and swallowed up in borrowed suits and pumps—or who caked on the makeup, were the clear rookies. You wanted to look chic but clean: a blank, expensive canvas. My uniform was Chloé jeans, a fitted tunic, and canvas slippers I picked up by the dozen in Chinatown. Underneath (and this was key) I wore my flimsiest, most delicate designer underwear. High-end quality was essential, matching less so. Odds were they'd strip you down to really get a look. Jeans were a gamble I took pride in pulling off; my booker liked to say that some girls looked cute enough in denim “but in couture,
shazzam!
They vanish.”

A year ago, I'd have looked around for that kind of girl, or wondered if I was one. But now a crowded room of hopefuls felt like home. I showed one girl—Rae was her name—my book and looked at hers. My tear sheets were old, in fashion time. I'd avoided my booker for so long, in fact, that he stopped calling about jobs and started calling about roommates. “We got a new girl in from Czech Republic that needs a place to live,” he said. “She's been getting steady work.” The following week he had a new girl in from Senegal; the next, Argentina. “Alice,” he said, “let's not pretend you can afford that place on your own.” This was true. After paying double my old rent for five months, I had almost nothing. A few hundred dollars in my bank account was keeping me, alternately, in vitamin C
₃
or in pizza and Chinese. I started signing credit-card “convenience” checks to my landlord. I didn't want a new roommate.

When I returned Rae's book, she made a crack about her morning fight with bronzer that the bronzer won. There were bands of orange at her wrists and elbows where the spray-on stuff had pooled. Seven months ago I might have pitied Rae or hated her. She had extremely narrow hips, and clavicles that could slice cheese. Now I laughed along. When a head with silver hair and smooth young skin that didn't match it poked out of the office door and said, “Alice Anders?” I felt a little sad to leave my new friend.

The silver-haired woman introduced herself as Carmen. She was tiny, barely tall enough to stare into my chest. She flipped through my book quickly. It was always quick, the crinkle and slap of the plastic-sleeved pages. I never could be sure they really saw me. Now, as Carmen and some others eyed me, I filled in their thoughts:
pretty, but then what? All of them are pretty.
People in our business often used the term “It.”
Does she have It?
There was a girl Sabine couldn't stand, who for some months was getting every booking in New York, it felt like. Sabine said, “She is full of It.” “Dipsh-It,” she said about someone else. But she believed—we all did—in “It.”

“It” was different for everybody. Sabine was moderately exotic in a way that pleased a range of people. The almond-shaped eyes, the pillowy lips, the skin that coppered easily in summer, could all be played up or down. She once brought home a brown man who claimed he only dated white women; he gave her sapphire earrings and said, “after your eyes”—which were her father's, blue. Another time she brought home a white man who claimed he only dated brown women; this one gave her an original woodcut etching by Gauguin, and a rare edition of Gauguin's travel diaries too. At go-sees, there was a lilt about Sabine—an upturn to her face that musically matched her voice. Even her name was a little bell. There was a certain lightness to her personality that came with not planning to do this forever. Not wanting any job that much.

I did not have “It.”
Sexy
or
pretty
or even
beautiful
weren't It. Those weren't enough. Editors were always asking me, “Where are you from? Utah? Kentucky?”—always wanting some Cinderella story to fit my sunny, corn-fed look. But I was from New York. No one discovered me at a Wendy's in the Bible Belt. My mother had done some catalog work herself, and I signed on with her booker at fifteen.

Years ago a girl in the industry got raped, had her face sliced up beyond recognition and couldn't work anymore. When I heard this story, I had to wonder what else in the world I was good at. I could think of one thing: I was flexible. There was a trick I had been doing since first grade: I would knit my fingers together, lock my elbows, and stretch the ring of my arms to just behind my head. Here I'd pause—for effect; this is as far as most people can go. Then I'd stretch farther, all the way, until my clasped hands were at my tailbone. I would do it slowly the first time, to simulate a lot of effort, then go back and forth faster and faster, until I was snapping my arms from front to back like a metronome. That's what Sabine called the trick when she first saw it, the Metronome. I could turn my toes out until they faced backward, do the splits both ways, and windmill each arm 360 degrees from its shoulder socket. These things would still be possible if my face were ruined—but without a body? I couldn't imagine. I blanked. Sometimes when I thought of what else was out there, I felt there should be more and weirder options. I felt I would do a very fine job of being a vapor, for example, or a silk scarf. I would make a very good wall.