Mother Studies (#6): House

Since the death of the family’s matriarch, the children found no reason to visit the house. Since cancer took away the alpha female of the family of adopted dogs guarding the house, the place has become even lonelier. The new generation of dogs is wary of the children, who they only get to see at most twice a year. The children come back with a brand new set of smell every time, confusing the dogs further.

An empty house does not need much. After the death of the matriarch, my father’s aunt, my mother found herself with so much freedom. It is said that the house is only full with the presence of an infant or a senile member, both always helpless when alone. For years and years, my mother had the centenarian aunt-in-law to look after and now that she’s gone, she’s suddenly free. The house is suddenly emptied of grunts, of urgent ringing of bells, of the clanging of kitchen wares at every meal time, never missing a beat, all the time on time. With the matriarch gone, the house can finally be left alone.

Now, what to do? First things first; fire the maid/caretaker. Without an elderly to look after, the maid is without responsibilities; and money is not wasted paying somebody to idle around. So there it goes; mother fired the maid. Since the house is without a dedicated person to look after its welfare, my mother and her sole companion, my sister, do things independent of each other. Each one cooks her own food. As a result, the house saw the proliferation of instant food, from corn chips to corned beef to instant ramen. Suddenly the cupboard started to fill up with items one would only find in a collegiate cupboard.

My mother's freedom roughly translates to a weekly visit at my apartment in the city. My own house is so cramped, with the extended family members staying over and members of my own entourage, plus some 10,000 sacks of organic colored rice and brown sugar that my mother sells to the supermarket in the city, a TV set, desktop computer, a fridge, electric oven, not to mention the 20,000 second-hand books, my husband's and my only property, all housed in a 50 square meter space. She likes that kind of overcrowding, my mother. It makes her feel we truly have a closely-knitted family even if I barely talk to them. 

In one of her visits, over dinner, I asked, “How do you plan to manage the daily maintenance of the house now that it’s just you and sister, both equally busy?”

“Oh, that’s very easy. We try to make less clutter as possible,” she replied confidently.

“But how?” I repeated.

“We won't cook when it’s not necessary. If we need food,we can always get it from the neighborhood carinderia.”

“And eat on paper plates?” I rebutted.

“Who knows? Maybe?” she replied indignantly.

My younger sister has been living with them since grandmother broke her femur and was unable to live alone. My mother hired a live-out maid who reports for work at 8:00 am and leaves at 6:00 pm or right after whenever she’s done cooking dinner and feeding my grandmother. In between the hours without household help, my sister took over, including being my mother’s executive assistant as well.

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“What DOESN'T work? Clutter reduction? Well, she can always help clean up, no? I’m already taking care of her needs and the least she could do is help me maintain the house. She’s not even obliged to do the laundry because I’m still keeping our laundry woman.”

“What do you mean you’re going to fire her, too?”

And that, my dears, was the second step to her ultimate plan: fire the laundry woman.

“Well, she only has my clothes and your sister’s clothes to wash. Look at how much savings I’d get if we start washing our own clothes.”

“We’ve had her for close to 20 years already. Don’t you think she deserves some kind of a security of tenure also?”

“But what would she do? Wash rugs the whole day? She barely has enough clothes to wash now that your grandmother’s gone.”

When people said that wisdom comes with age, they lied. Look at my mother. Where is the wisdom in that? Where is the wisdom in firing her house help and have her 28 year-old unemployed, bipolar daughter manage the house when she can’t even manage her life?

“But don’t you think it’s a little inconvenient a set-up? I mean—“

“If there’s inconvenience it will be us who’d be inconvenient.”

There are moments in a perfectly reasonable conversation, in a constructive argument that one must stop, not because one is conceding or admitting defeat but because it’s pointless to keep on, anyway. If there’s that moment, it was that moment. 

We do not talk for weeks then on because in her mind, I am still 11 and she is 35. Good, civil, happier talk between us is requisite though at least one a year when the eldest child in the family comes home for the yearly vacation. My sister with her family comes to visit every summer, in holy week, when vacations are longer, daylights are lengthier, the waves in the beaches, much calmer. They have been doing it for the past five, and will be for as long as my parents expect them to.

In the months before the expected home coming my mother would be preoccupied pimping up her outdoor kitchen that are missing a lot of bolts and nails. She is worried that the beams might fall on my sister, kill her, while she is cooking. My sister has been the family’s cook since as far as i can remember and it seems that when she's around, she's always at the kitchen. Most of the foods she prepared do not require so much counter space—fritata, French toast, grilled cheese sandwich, garlic and sundried tomatoes spaghetti, crepes, and oftentimes she would prepare them on the dinner table. Right after we're done with one meal, whe would immediately clear up the table, stack the dishes in the sink and start slicing the tomatoes, onions, beat the eggs until fluffy, grate cheese, melt the butter. My mother on the other hand would be up and about for fiesta foods—KBL, manok kag ubad, laswa with 10,000 kinds of backyard vegetables in them. She said they are to cure my sister’s homesickness. Most of the time she would have to prepare them outside, in her rundown outdoor kitchen because it would be too messy prepared inside the main house.

When that time of the year came, the big time vacation cum family reunion, she saw to it that she’d have more than enough money for kitchen pimping up. My mother has been planning all the while to renovate the outdoor kitchen, integrate it to the main house.

As expected, my husband was asked to provide sketches for what she deemed was a comfortable place cook and eat, without the worries of the rotting structural beams falling on our heads. But my husband refused, having been asked several times and see none of the projects materialize. Except for that proposed strip of commercial spaces he designed several years ago which is now, thank goodness, a P1,500.00/month sari-sari store-videoke-bar convert at night, by the roadside in a rural town. On a clear night, the breeze would carry the drunken voices of drunkards nearby singing to what I would presume, My Way. Classy.

When I asked her if she’s not perturbed by the idea of videoke-ing drunks within her property, she said, “They just drink and sing and go home. Nothing to worry about.”

“But it’s like 10 meters from your bedroom.”

“What do you think are those fences for?”

All designing work for the house that my husband turns down is automatically carried over to me. I did not marry an architect for nothing. So, I was supposed to oversee the kitchen renovation. Timely, since I was to move back to her house having taken on a yearlong assignment in the area.

“First things first,” I told my mother. “What did you want your kitchen for? How do you expect to use it?”

“For cooking,” she replied, a little confused.

“I mean, how do you plan to use it?”

“Well, I would cook and wash dishes there, of course,” she reiterated now even more confused.

“Won’t you be chopping chickens’ heads off there? Or clean fishes? Or slaughter a pig? I’m afraid that if we renovate this dirty kitchen you’ll be taking the dirty work to another place and we might end up with another dirty kitchen which you’ll again renovate and integrate to the house and the house would just sprawl on and on and on…”

“No, no, no. of course, I’ll be cleaning fishes and cleaning chickens and cooking with charcoal stove—it’s going to be a kitchen without a gas stove—and there’d be a brick oven somewhere.”
“How about the big works?”

“What big works?”

“Like fiesta-level kind of kitchen work?”

“Oh, that. We can always have a temporary dishwashing area built somewhere, same with a temporary slaughterhouse, which can be dismantled once the fiesta is over.”

“So what the big kitchen’s for?”

“You see this dirty kitchen is almost falling down and I’m afraid the beams might fall of our heads while we’re busy cooking. And I’m thinking that if I’m just going to repair it, I’d repair it good enough to be integrated with the main house so we’d have a much larger space for cooking. Then the space here,” she said pointing to the floor in the middle of the dirty kitchen, “would be our sort of a new mess hall—our dining area. That one over there,” she said pointing to the area where the dining table is, is gonna be our new lobby. We can have the wall TV there so your dad can watch TV while eating.”

She went on to tell some more, how may sister plans to make pizza and bake bread in the new brick oven. I’m almost out of brain space from ingesting too much design information from her when she gave her last words, “’Ga, do you think installing bricks in the kitchen walls would give us that rustic feel?”

My head almost exploded.

“Mi, I think the best thing to do now is just decide how you plan to use it and assign spaces based on it. Maybe your builders can put up the walls and we’ll just see how the utility areas would go later.”

“Your dad thinks we should get the same floor tiles as your sisters’,” she’s so excited she could buy a factory-load of tiles if I let her.

“I know,” I replied and thought of the best way to burst their bubbles. I refuse to believe what my husband has warned me of: none of what I imagined would ever happen.

The world has a way of surprising a person, and sometimes it’s for the worst. I woke up one day to a kitchen with three sinks. Yes, three sinks, housed in a 200 square meter newly renovated kitchen. I want to say that again. Our kitchen just gave birth to three new sinks. I was assigned to the supervision of this kitchen renovation and I can’t even explain how our house ended up with three sinks over a course of one weekend.

It turned out my mother engineered her way again into advising the builders to retain the old sink, including the tiles, the drain and the water connection, because it’s gonna be a waste taking them out. And also because we are still using it. And because 10 meters is a little far a walk, from our dining area to the new sink of the new kitchen. And because we need cupboards and there are cabinets underneath that sink that can function as cupboards. And because she just doesn't want to.

She can have tens of thousands of reasons to defend her twisted decisions but the builders have stopped hammering the sink to pieces; they were specifically instructed to save the lime green, early 90's era kitchen tiles.

“You know, it will be better retaining this. It's for the good of everyone,” she said opening the faucet, washing her hands of the dirt from collecting the dogs’ bowls outside by the newly installed kitchen sliding door. It was a Tuesday, the first morning of my weekly stay in her house. The sun has just risen but she was up way earlier than the sun to feed her chickens and her dogs, and see about the things inside her residential compound. As she navigated her way from the sink, past the trash basket to the aluminum French doors, her wet hands glistened like she was wearing golden gloves. It was surreal, I almost ran to grab my camera and take her picture.

With quick motion of her hand, almost spontaneous as if she’s done it a thousand times over and over again, she aligned the dogs’ bowls and belt out a very loud, “Totoy!” signaling the dogs that their breakfast is ready. One by one they came, until all four of them are present: two adults and two puppies.

She bent to pick up the little ones and have them eat on a different bowl, separate from the two oldies. As she bent her hair fell across her face, the strands artificially straightened and artificially darkened and with a quick flick of her right hand she put the hair back where they're supposed to be, exposing the receding hairline and the leathery forehead, wrinkled by years of hard work and failed promises of anti-ageing creams.

I suddenly felt so sad for my mother.

“We should just really retain the sink because Duduy needs a bath basin,” she said. As if convincing her doubting self, she added, “It can be his bath basin.”

My mother, always finding reasons to justify the existence of something that should have long been extinguished, smiled in a sudden excitement. Duduy, the new addition to my family would only be a baby for at most 10 months. When it ceases to be his bath basin, it’s just gonna be one uninteresting, uninspiring, out-of-place eyesore in the house.

“And this wall,” she said walking to the wall that’s holding the sink and its other parts together, “we should be retaining this wall since we’re retaining the sink.”

My mother, always out to save things, especially the mundane ones.

“But will this hold, ‘Ga?” she asked, seeing the drain pipe.

“No mother, it will not.”

“Will it last more years, you think?”

“The sink? No,” I said without looking up from my computer.

 “Well, we can always tear it down when it’s dilapidated.”

I look up to see if she was joking, and there she is, standing by the aging sink, her right hand on the faucet, the other clutching one of the dog’s empty, crusted, food bowl. She suddenly looked so old. She suddenly looked like one of those middle-aged loners who only have dogs for company, with her faded, almost thread bare night gown, and hair so straight and so dark so easy to tell they were fake. My mother, she suddenly looked ten years older than her age of 57.

“I know you would mother, I know you would.”

 She turned the faucet on; I glanced at the clock.

“Who’s going to take the first turn for the bathroom?” she asked. Before I could answer, the builders arrive. She hurriedly closed the faucet, wiped her wet hands on her century-old night gown, hurried out to meet the builders, and announced to the world she is retaining her sink.


FIN.