Drown in Yoghurt and Formaldehyde

(three)

My mother insisted that she had been trying to wake me up for the better part of an hour. I told her she was lying.

“I felt you poke me once,” I pointed out, opening my eyes a little to look at her. “On my ass. How the hell am I supposed to wake up with that?” I turned on the lumpy bed, my back to her, and prayed fervently that she let me go back to sleep.

It was one of those ungodly Monday mornings and the sky was as I have never seen it in months: the evening’s fading bluish purples giving way to the more violent muddy orange of a morning. By all means, I should have been miles and miles away, soundly asleep on my hard dormitory bed, oblivious to the sunrise and the cold at dawn. Instead, I was two hours, a jeep ride and two trains away, still stuck in bed in Cavite.

By spite, I was sure, my mother turned her blow-dryer on and the sound, not unlike a broken blender trying to turn pebbles into dip, was enough to have me move as though I was rolling out of bed. But after a few obligatory rolls, I snuggled deeper into the thinning comforter.

Last night, or rather, some odd three hours ago, just as I had been drifting off into sweet sleep, Mom had poked me yet again, although I had pointedly tossed the same comforter over my face. Ignoring that, and my threat to hit her with the nearest blunt object, she had asked, “Asan yung relo mo?”

I lifted the comforter off my face and scowled in the darkness, trying to remember. “Nasa baba.”

“Baka maupuan.”

“Hindi, nasa dining table.”

“Baka makain.”

I had groaned, becoming more and more awake by the second. I had thrown a pillow at her and then curled into a tighter ball. “Inaantok ka lang. Leave me alone.”

She had probably still been sniggering when I finally drifted off.

With a click, the dryer fell silent. She poked me again, on the same spot. “Wake up, Sasha.” There it was. That “Mom Voice” that once in a while found a way to crawl into my mother’s speech.

I grumbled. But only for show. With one last, wistful burrow into the bed, I got out of it.

As I stood up, one foot landed on her latest James Lee Burke novel, which she had proudly told me she bought for only seventy bucks. (And twelve hours after the statement, she’d closed the paperback with an almost childlike impudence and said, “How dare he put this trash in his book! He has no idea what he’s saying. He didn’t research this!”) I nudged it aside.

I sat on the edge of the bed, my feet firmly planted on the itchy brown carpet. With more-than-sleepy eyes and a less-than-alive brain, I stared into the full-length mirror, in front of which, Mom had taken her usual spot, cross-legged on the floor.

My mother was in her slacks, her bra, and my father’s black socks. A string of pearls was around her neck and she was wearing the earrings I’d made for her a coupled of months before, when I still had time to get a life. They peeked from the short, spiky hair she’d manage dry quickly.

Even from where I was, I could see the droplets of water that clung to the soft skin at her back. Bored, I traced the bony knobs of her spine underneath that skin with my eyes.

“Sasha.”

“Five minutes.”

She was now dutifully applying her make-up for the day. With a too-careful grip, she made precise sweeps of rouge on the apples of her cheeks. The rims of her nearsighted eyes were yet to be lined with the eyeliner she had taken from my make-up kit and the thin strips of her long, straight lashes didn’t have mascara to curl and thicken them yet. Her lips, a bit too dark for her fair skin, were unpainted.

Those lips were now twisted into an exasperated curve. “Elisha. Well?”

“I’m waking up.” I closed my eyes. “Hindi pa tapos yung five minutes.”

“Next time you come here, leave on Sunday.”

There better not to be a next time like that, I thought. Yesterday, I’d come back home unannounced, in a weekend scrunched between deadlines galore, practically sobbing for proper food, a good night’s sleep on a bed with a serviceable mattress, cable television and intellectual argument. Warm human contact. Therapy.

I’d pushed open the swollen wooden door of my parents’ bedroom by sheer will, exhausted by the trip, the things I left behind, and the things still ahead of me. The four of them—my two younger brothers, my mom and my dad—were all in the bed, watching wrestling, playing cards. My mom had been holding the Burke novel in one hand, close to her face, while she ruffled my youngest brother’s John’s light brown hair once in a while.

My mom had looked up with a start when I entered, paused, then squinted. “Uy.”

“Hi, mommy.”

“Sasha?”

“Barely,” I’d said. I wanted to cry.

I then gave my dad a kiss on his unshaven cheek and took the bear hug he offered, then pinched my brothers’ cheeks, to their annoyance. My mother’s slender frame was getting out of bed. I wanted to hug her too, me the too-emotional, moody artist daughter but my mother had never been one for overt displays of affection. She’d most likely stiffen and stare at me as though I were the cat who’d done his business on the bed. But, then again, my mother liked to snuggle with the cat on what should have been clean sheets, much to my dad’s—our honorary laundry man’s—irritation.

“Do you want my pasta?” she’d asked me. “Tomatoes and shrimp? There’s sushi pa, I think, in the fridge. Jeff, may pipino pa kaya? Sasha, kakain ka? Kakain ka.”

I had mumbled something that must have passed for assent because she’d pushed past me and went down.

I had then promptly crashed on the spot she had vacated. Smells like mom, had been my last coherent thought. I had then been shaken awake by both my brothers a rough hour later.

I opened my eyes and saw that she was standing up and was pointing a blusher at me. She blinked a couple of times and I realized with a grimace that she’d probably put on her contacts while I was spaced out. (It never ceases to gross me out, that ritual.) “Ho-o-oy,” she said, drawing out the word, something she usually did when annoyed. “You’ll miss your first class.”

I tried focusing on her though I was barely able to keep my eyes open. Last night, although my mother had offered token resistance, the two of us had watched Armageddon on television, into the wee hours of the morning. I’d talked throughout the film, in an effort to stay awake. She’d shushed me a couple of times but at some points, like when Bruce Willis was bidding everyone goodbye, she’d talked louder than me. Dad had, once or twice, gone up from the living room I’ve banished him to with my presence, to tell us to shut up.

I opened my mouth at a yawn. Before my mother could throw the hairbrush at me—although I’m sure she’d miss, though we were two feet apart—I went downstairs and talked myself into beginning another week.

An hour later, the heels of my mother’s leather boots clicked and clacked all over our linoleum floor, with her gathering this book and that paper, work she’d left lying the night before with my arrival.

My father was in our dilapidated car, honking the horn.

With one foot out the door, narrowly missing a mound of cat poop, my mother turned to Joshua, who was as annoyed with having been woken up as I had been. He was up in bed, that lanky frame of his yet to be stretched to its towering length, taller than me now. She tossed an object wrapped in a plastic bag on the bed beside him, beside John’s sleeping form. Distractedly, she tells him, “O, eto, may cucumber. Alagaan mo sarili mo, okay?”

I paused on my way to our rusted gate and turned back towards her, an eyebrow raised, my lips twitching.

“What?” With a blank expression on her face, she pokes me out of the house, back into civilization.

Labels: Creative Nonfiction

posted by Sasha Martinez @ 9:14 AM