Geraldine Yap
Lucy surveyed the odd assortment
of dusty boxes, plastic wares, cutlery, plates, and giant mayonnaise bottles
on the floor. Her parents were moving to a brand-new house. After decades
of paying rent to Doña Antigua and her heirs, the Tans finally had
a house of their own. Unfortunately, the new house was much, much
smaller and their "collections" had to find a new home.
"Lucy," her mother said.
"See if you want any of the stuff before I donate them to the nuns."
Lucy squatted in the midst
of the junk and picked up her photo albums and a few romantic novels she
bought when she was a teenager. Then, she selected a couple of plastic
stools - her children could use them.
Lucy was thirty-three years old.
She was so thin that people sometimes think that she was much younger than
she looked. Her short brown-black hair was trimmed into a hair-do
best described as “comb and run”. That was all she could do these
days – comb and run. She put on her lipstick and powder at the bank
just before the doors opened for business.
Lucy lived with her in-laws for ten
years now. Some of her friends thought she was crazy.
But Lucy thought she was practical. She had been married for six
years before she discovered that her husband had a son elsewhere, a son
much older that her eldest daughter.
When she confronted her husband,
he merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “What do you intend to do about
it?”
Bitterly, she wondered what would
happen if she kept her silence and pretended to know nothing. But
as it was, her husband moved out of the house and lived with his mistress,
visiting her only when he felt like it, and sometimes, attending parties
together. Lucy had no option but to continue living with her in-laws.
Her salary as a bank teller was not enough to support her three children.
But most of all, she was afraid of the scandal.
Lucy tried to recall why she married
him. Certainly, it was not for love, at least, the kind of passionate
and romantic love of the movies. He was eligible, not a bad-looker,
and the only son of a wealthy ship-owner.
Perhaps, I also passed his list of
qualifications for a good Chinese wife, Lucy remembered painfully.
She was from a good family, though not as rich as her in-laws, and she
was good-natured, quiet, and well-bred. They had a grand church wedding,
even though both of them were not really Catholics, and a banquet of fifty
lauriat tables.
Her in-laws were kind but sometimes,
Lucy felt they were just tolerating her because of her children.
But there was nowhere for Lucy to go. She was a married woman and
married women belonged to her husband and her husband’s family, according
to the out-dated notions of her own upbringing.
She was about to rise when she spotted
something familiar, a dirty basket with a lid. She tugged the catch and
chips of red paint flaked off. Inside the basket was a teapot edged in
gold paint. The slender spout and the lid were also gilded.
A red dragon was painted on one side of the teapot and a phoenix was on
the other. Yin and yang. Male and female.
Am-mah made tea in it and the
red padding was to keep the tea warm when thermos bottles were not yet
invented. Lucy remembered how Am-mah loved the red color. The
family's first jeep, the cushions, the electric fans, and Lucy's underwear
were all red.
Suddenly, Lucy remembered.
She was eight years old then,
on a summer vacation, and feeling bored. Her brothers and cousins
hogged their only black-and-white TV and Lucy did not care much for the
shows they were watching. In those days, there were no piano lessons, no
art classes, no karate classes, and no computer classes. In those days,
summer meant nothing to do for the younger children and work for the older
children.
“Am-mah,” Lucy poked into the
kitchen where her grandmother preparing lunch for her brood of four sons,
four daughters-in-law, one daughter, three maids, and twelve workers in
the store.
“Yes, Bee-Ling. What do you
want?” Am-mah looked up from the large mixing bowl containing ground
meat. She never called her by her English name.
“Nothing, Am-mah. I am just
bored.” Lucy replied.
“Then come and help me make
meatballs,” laughed Am-mah and showed her how. “First, get some meat from
the bowl. Then, squeeze you hand and a blob of meat will come out
between your thumb and forefinger. Scoop it up with a spoon and drop
the meat into your palm. Use the spoon to roll the meat around your
palm and it will form a nice ball. See how easy it is?”
Lucy nodded happily.
Soon, she was getting the hang of shaping meatballs.
“Nyora.” One of the maids
announced, “Doña Antigua is here.”
Doña Antigua, their
landlady, was a formidable Spanish mestiza. She was as tall as Lucy’s father
and as fat as Great Third Uncle.
“Mmmm,” said Dona Antigua.
“I smell something nice.”
“Sit down, Doña,” invited
Am-mah. “Here, try some of my meatballs.”
“Ah, my favorites! You make
very good meatballs, O-Muy.” Doña Antigua quickly popped a
couple of meatballs into her wide mouth.
“Good-luck mouth,” spoke Am-mah
in Chinese as she poured some tea for the landlady.
Lucy wanted to giggle but she
knew she mustn’t. She just nodded her head politely, as if Am-mah
telling her to do something.
“Doña, here is the rent
for May,” said Am-mah as she handed a wad of paper money to the landlady.
“Would you like to take some meatballs home?”
“Yes, thank you.” Her
eyes gleamed with anticipation as Am-mah wrapped the meatballs in waxed
paper. “I will be on my way now. Good-bye.”
“Am-mah, you nearly made me
burst.” Lucy was laughing uncontrollably, now that the Spanish woman
was gone.
Am-mah laughed, too.
“But it’s true. She has a good-luck mouth. Every time I cook
something good, she comes along and eat my food.”
“But, Am-mah,” said Lucy.
“You always cook good.”
After lunch, Am-mah had a short
nap and when she woke up, she taught Lucy how to sew pillowcases.
Am-mah sold the pillowcases to a wholesaler. Later, when the sun
became cooler, three Bisayan women arrived. These women sold jewelry
to office girls and wealthy matrons and Am-mah was a supplier of gold,
pearls, jade, and diamonds.
“See this piece of jade,” said
Am-mah, as she handed cabochon to Lucy. “It has a crack. Jade
is like a woman. Once cracked, no more value.”
It had been a fruitful summer
for Lucy. She learned cooking, sewing, and judging the worth of gems
and gold. She learned to love working with her hands.
Her grandmother died years
ago and Lucy never really thought about her much, until now. It must
have been hard for Am-mah to leave the Tall Mountains, to marry a stranger,
to live in a strange land, and to learn a strange tongue. But she
survived. She was a homemaker, businesswoman, accountant, seamstress,
and jeweler even though she was barely literate in both Chinese and Bisayan.
“Oh, Am-mah,” spoke Lucy into the
vacant air. “A woman’s worth is not measured by her virginity or
her reputation. A woman’s worth is measured by how much she values
herself.”
Four years of living a lie was enough,
Lucy mused. She had lost so much weight, hoping that her worthless
husband would come back to her. But she knew now that it would never
be. In the eyes of the law and the church, Lucy may be the wife but
in his thoughts, in his heart, the other woman was his wife.
It was time to start a new life without
pretensions. She decided to demand from him a house and support for
their children. He could certainly afford both. And she would
be free to chase after her dreams, her dream of having a peaceful home
and her dream of seeing her children grow up without tensions and worries.
Lucy decided to keep the teapot.
“It will look nice in my kitchen when I have my own house,” she thought.
End.
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