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.
