He went to where Miss Mijares sat, a tall, big man, walking with an economy of movement, graceful and light, a

man who knew his body and used it well. He sat in the low chair worn decrepit by countless other interviewers
and laid all ten fingerprints carefully on the edge of her desk. She pushed a sheet towards him, rolling a pencil
along with it. While he read the question and wrote down his answers, she glanced at her watch and saw that it
was ten. ! shall be coming back quickly, she said, speaking distinctly in the dialect "you were never sure about
these people on their first visit, if they could speak #nglish, or even write at all, the poor were always proud and
to use the dialect with them was an act of charity$, you will wait for me.
%s she walked to the cafeteria, Miss Mijares thought how she could easily have said, &lease wait for me, or will
you wait for me' (ut years of working for the placement section had dulled the edges of her instinct for
courtesy. She spoke now peremtorily, with an abruptness she knew annoyed the people about her.
When she talked with the jobless across her desk, asking them the damning questions that completed their
humiliation, watching pale tongues run over dry lips, dirt crusted handkerchiefs flutter in trembling hands, she
was filled with an impatience she could not understand. Sign here, she had said thousands of times, pushing the
familiar form across, her finger held to a line, feeling the impatience grow at sight of the man or woman tracing
a wavering ) or laying the impress of a thumb. !nvariably, Miss Mijares would turn away to touch the delicate
edge of the handkerchief she wore on her breast.
Where she sat alone at one of the cafeteria tables, Miss Mijares did not look *+. She was slight, almost bony, but
she had learned early how to dress herself to achieve an illusion of hips and bosom. She liked poufs and shirrings
and little girlish pastel colors. ,n her bodice, astride or lengthwise, there sat an inevitable row of thick
camouflaging ruffles that made her look almost as though she had a bosom, if she bent her shoulders slightly and
inconspicuously drew her neckline open to puff some air into her bodice.
Her brow was smooth and clear and she was always pushing off it the hair she kept in tight curls at night. She
had thin cheeks, small and angular, falling down to what would have been a nondescript, receding chin, but
-ature.s hand had erred and given her a jaw instead. When displeased, she had a lippy, almost sensual pout,
surprising on such a small face.
So while not e/actly an ugly woman, she was no beauty. She teetered precariously on the border line to which
belonged countless others who you found, if they were not working at some job, in the kitchen of some married
sister.s house shushing a brood of devilish little nephews.
%nd yet Miss Mijares did think of love. Secret, short0lived thoughts flitted through her mind in the jeepneys she
took to work when a man pressed down beside her and through her dress she felt the curve of his thigh1 when
she held a baby in her arms, a married friend.s baby or a relative.s, holding in her hands the tiny, pulsing body,
what thoughts did she not think, her eyes straying against her will to the bedroom door and then to her friend.s
laughing, talking face, to think2 how did it look now, spread upon a pillow, unmasked of the little wayward
coquetries, how went the lines about the mouth and beneath the eyes2 "did they close' did they open'$ in the
one final, fatal coquetry of all' to finally, miserably bury her face in the baby.s hair. %nd in the movies, to sink
into a seat as into an embrace, in the darkness with a hundred shadowy figures about her and high on the
screen, a man kissing a woman.s mouth while her own fingers stole unconsciously to her unbruised lips.
When she was younger, there had been other things to do000 college to finish, a niece to put through school, a
mother to care for.
She had gone through all these with singular patience, for it had seemed to her that love stood behind her,
biding her time, a quiet hand upon her shoulder "! wait. 3o not despair$ so that if she wished she had but to turn
from her mother.s bed to see the man and all her timid, pure dreams would burst into glory. (ut it had taken her
parent many years to die. 4owards the end, it had become a thankless chore, kneading her mother.s loose flesh,
hour after hour, struggling to awaken the cold, sluggish blood in her drying body. !n the end, she had died 000 her
toothless, thin0haired, flabby0fleshed mother 000 and Miss Mijares had pushed against the bed in grief and also in
gratitude. (ut neither love nor glory stood behind her, only the empty shadows, and nine years gone, nine years.
!n the room for her unburied dead, she had held up her hands to the light, noting the thick, durable fingers,
thinking in a mi/ture of shame and bitterness and guilt that they had never touched a man.
When she returned to the bleak replacement office, the man stood by a window, his back to her, half0bending
over something he held in his hands. Here, she said, approaching, have you signed this'
5es, he replied, facing her.
!n his hands, he held her paperweight, an old gift from long ago, a heavy wooden block on which stood, as
though poised for flight, an undistinguished, badly done bird. !t had come apart recently. 4he screws beneath
the block had loosened so that lately it had stood upon her desk with one wing tilted unevenly, a miniature eagle
or swallow' felled by time before it could spread its wings. She had laughed and laughed that day it had fallen on
her desk, plop6 What happened' What happened' they had asked her, beginning to laugh, and she had said,
caught between amusement and sharp despair, Some one shot it, and she had laughed and laughed till faces
turned and eyebrows rose and she told herself, whoa, get a hold, a hold, a hold6
He had turned it and with a penknife tightened the screws and dusted it. !n this man.s hands, cupped like that, it
looked suddenly like a dove.
She took it away from him and put it down on her table. 4hen she picked up his paper and read it.
He was a high school graduate. He was also a carpenter.
He was not starved, like the rest. His clothes, though old, were pressed and she could see the cuffs of his shirt
buttoned and wrapped about big, strong wrists.
! heard about this place, he said, from a friend you got a job at the pier. Seated, he towered over her, !.m not
starving yet, he said with a quick smile. ! still got some money from that last job, but my team broke up after
that and you got too many jobs if you.re working alone. 5ou know carpentering, he continued, you can.t finish a
job quickly enough if you got to do the planing and sawing and nailing all by your lone self. 5ou got to be on a
team.
&erhaps he was not meaning to be impolite' (ut for a jobseeker, Miss Mijares thought, he talked too much and
without call. He was bursting all over with an obtruding insolence that at once disarmed and annoyed her.
So then she drew a slip and wrote his name on it. Since you are not starving yet, she said, speaking in #nglish
now, wanting to put him in his place, you will not mind working in our woodcraft section, three times a week at
two0fifty to four a day, depending on your skill and the foreman.s discretion, for two or three months after which
there might be a call from outside we may hold for you.
4hank you, he said.
He came on the odd days, 4uesday, 4hursday, Sunday.
She was often down at the shanty that housed their bureau.s woodcraft, talking with %to, his foreman, going over
with him the list of old hands due for release. 4hey hired their men on a rotation basis and three months was the
longest one could stay.
4he new one there, hey, %to said once. We.re breaking him in proper. %nd he looked across several shirted
backs to where he stopped, planing what was to become the side of a bookcase.
How much was he going to get' Miss Mijares asked %to on Wednesday. 4hree, the old man said, chewing away
on a cud. She looked at the list in her hands, quickly running a pencil down. (ut he.s filling a four0peso vacancy,
she said. 7ome now, surprised that she should wheedle so, give him the e/tra peso. ,nly a half, the stubborn
foreman shook his head, three0fifty.
%to says ! have you to thank, he said, stopping Miss Mijares along a pathway in the compound.
!t was noon, that unhappy hour of the day when she was oldest, tiredest, when it seemed the sun put forth cruel
fingers to search out the signs of age on her thin, pinched face. 4he crow.s feet showed unmistakably beneath
her eyes and she smiled widely to cover them up and aquinting a little, said, ,nly a half0peso 000 %to would have
given it to you eventually.
5es, but you spoke for me, he said, his big body heaving before her. 4hank you, though ! don.t need it as badly
as the rest, for to look at me, you would knew ! have no wife 000 yet.
She looked at him sharply, feeling the malice in his voice. !.d do it for any one, she said and turned away, angry
and also ashamed, as though he had found out suddenly that the ruffles on her dress rested on a flat chest.
4he following week, something happened to her2 she lost her way home.
Miss Mijares was quite sure she had boarded the right jeepneys but the driver, hoping to beat traffic, had
detoured down a side alley, and then seeing he was low on gas, he took still another shortcut to a filling station.
%fter that, he rode through alien country.
4he houses were low and dark, the people shadowy, and even the driver, who earlier had been an amiable,
talkative fellow, now loomed like a sinister stranger over the wheel. 4hrough it all, she sat tightly, feeling oddly
that she had dreamed of this, that some night not very long ago, she had taken a ride in her sleep and lost her
way. %gain and again, in that dream, she had changed direction, losing her way each time, for something huge
and bewildering stood blocking the old, familiar road home.
(ut that evening, she was lost only for a while. 4he driver stopped at a corner that looked like a little known
part of the boulevard she passed each day and she alighted and stood on a street island, the passing headlights
playing on her, a tired, shaken woman, the ruffles on her skirt crumpled, the hemline of her skirt awry.
4he new hand was absent for a week. Miss Mijares waited on that 4uesday he first failed to report for some word
from him sent to %to and then to her. 4hat was regulation. (riefly though they were held, the bureau jobs were
not ones to take chances with. When a man was absent and he sent no word, it upset the system. !n the absence
of a definite notice, someone else who needed a job badly was kept away from it.
! went to the province, ma.am, he said, on his return.
5ou could have sent someone to tell us, she said.
!t was an emergency, ma.am, he said. My son died.
How so'
% slow bitter anger began to form inside her. (ut you said you were not married6
-o, ma.am, he said gesturing.
%re you married' she asked loudly.
-o, ma.am.
(ut you have 00 you had a son6 she said.
! am not married to his mother, he said, grinning stupidly, and for the first time she noticed his two front teeth
were set widely apart. % flush had climbed to his face, suffusing it, and two large throbbing veins crawled along
his temples.
She looked away, sick all at once.
5ou should told us everything, she said and she put forth hands to restrain her anger but it slipped away she
stood shaking despite herself.
! did not think, he said.
5our lives are our business here, she shouted.
!t rained that afternoon in one of the city.s fierce, une/pected thunder0storms. Without warning, it seemed to
shine outside Miss Mijares. window a gray, unhappy look.
!t was past si/ when Miss Mijares, ventured outside the office. -ight had come swiftly and from the dark sky the
thick, black, rainy curtain continued to fall. She stood on the curb, telling herself she must not lose her way
tonight. When she flagged a jeepney and got in, somebody jumped in after her. She looked up into the
carpenter.s faintly smiling eyes. She nodded her head once in recognition and then turned away.
4he cold tight fear of the old dream was upon her. (efore she had time to think, the driver had swerved his
vehicle and swung into a side street. &erhaps it was a different alley this time. (ut it wound itself in the same
tortuous manner as before, now by the banks of overflowing esteros, again behind faintly familiar buildings. She
bent her tiny, distraught face, conjuring in her heart the lonely safety of the street island she had stood on for
an hour that night of her confusion.
,nly this far, folks, the driver spoke, stopping his vehicle. Main street.s a block straight ahead.
(ut it.s raining, someone protested.
Sorry. (ut if ! got into a traffic, ! won.t come out of it in a year. Sorry.
,ne by one the passengers got off, walking swiftly, disappearing in the night.
Miss Mijares stepped down to a sidewalk in front of a boarded store. 4he wind had begun again and she could
hear it whipping in the eaves above her head. Ma.am, the man.s voice sounded at her shoulders, ! am sorry if
you thought ! lied.
She gestured, bestowing pardon.
8p and down the empty, rain0beaten street she looked. !t was as though all at once everyone else had died and
they were alone in the world, in the dark.
!n her secret heart, Miss Mijares. young dreams fluttered faintly to life, seeming monstrous in the rain, near this
man 000 seeming monstrous but sweet overwhelming. ! must get away, she thought wildly, but he had moved and
brushed against her, and where his touch had fallen, her flesh leaped, and she recalled how his hands had looked
that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her desk and about the wooden bird "that had looked like a moving,
shining dove$ and she turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted, in the dark she turned to him.