AT MERIENDA

Ξ THIRD PRIZE WINNER AT THE 55TH DON CARLOS PALANCA MEMORIAL AWARDS FOR
LITERATURE (2005), SHORT STORY DIVISION. THIS WORK IS NOW THE PROPERTY OF
THE DON CARLOS PALANCA FOUNDATION, AND SHOULD NOT BE PUBLISHED WITHOUT
PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR AND THE DON CARLOS PALANCA
FOUNDATION. PUBLISHED IN THE PHILIPPINES FREE PRESS, 24 SEPTEMBER 2005.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

There are stories that can be told a thousand times, stories with an awful weight that to relieve oneself one
has to repeat the story over and over and over and over. I, however, do not know whether my story bears
retelling. Perhaps I won’t even have the energy to tell it a second time. All I know is that I have to let this
story go now, because it is all over. The weight that used to settle on my shoulders and had sometimes
drawn blood is now gone. It has, throughout time, turned itself into a fine mist that has all but
disappeared. Where has all the weight gone when I have kept it all to myself all these years? Only time, in
its eternal jest, can know.

When I was very young my parents and I spent our Sundays at my paternal grandmother’s house. My
cousins and I call her Bita, short for Abuelita. I do remember, very vaguely, a time when we called her
Lola, but somewhere along the line someone in our family must have gotten the idea to call her in the
Spanish. Bita lived, post-Bito (who died of a heart attack when I was a year old) in a large old rented
house inside a residential compound that belonged to her friends, the Jordanas, in Naga City, near the
San Francisco Church that was built in the 1500’s.

One afternoon, when I was four, I woke up from my nap and eavesdropped on my aunts through a crack
in the door. My aunts and my mother and Bita were at the table, eating their merienda. The capiz
windows were open, and sunlight was streaming through the opening in that watery kind of yellow-orange
that slanted towards a large glass bowl of latik. Itas, the old crone that took care of seven of my aunts and
uncles when they were babies, came out of the kitchen with some drinking glasses. At the table was
Norma, who was the wife of Bita’s eldest son Herbie. Then there were Mita and Inez, both Bita’s
daughters, who came after Herbie. There was also Shirley, the wife of Basting, and Irma, wife of Manolie,
both also Bita’s sons. And of course there was my mother, Eden, wife of my father Eddieboy, who was yet
another one of Bita’s sons.

“So when are you due?” Bita asked my mother.

I think I saw my aunts start ever so slightly. I heard a fork clink a little too loudly on a plate.

“August,” my mother answered.

“Have some more latik,” Irma said

“Does Eddieboy already know?” asked Norma.

“Not yet,” my mother answered, her lids lowered.

Bita looked up to the ceiling. “Joventino,” she called out in the general direction of the kitchen.

Joventino appeared, very tall and straight, very thin, and very old and pale, like a phantasm. “Yes,
Senora?” he asked in a cold, thin voice.

“Joventino, there are cobwebs in that corner,” Bita said, an arthritic finger pointed steadily at a dark
corner. How she could see cobwebs with her failing eyesight I could not understand then. “Don’t neglect it
tomorrow.”

“Yes, Senora,” Joventino said, and then faded back into the kitchen noiselessly.

Mita poured herself a glassful of Coca-Cola from a pitcher. “I can’t imagine why Rosita would steal from
me,” she said. Rosita was her daughter Bambi’s yaya.

Bita sighed, “Those pearls.” She clucked her tongue. “They were lovely.”

“Yes, they were,” Mita said.

“They belonged to your Tita Leonor,” Bita added, referring to Bito’s mother.

Mita shook her head somberly.

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“It’s just dreadful. We just don’t have maids like we used to,” Inez said. “Like Nitang. Mama, do you
remember Nitang?”

“Of course I remember her, hija. She was the best.”

All this time my mother was quietly eating her suman sa latik.

“Yes, she was,” Mita said. “Never a wrong crease, never a missed meal, never a speck of dirt on the
children’s faces.” Then she turned to my mother. “You’ve never met her?”

“No.”

“Of course she hadn’t, Mita,” Inez said. “When Eddieboy married Eden, Nitang was already bedridden and
blind as a bat in Caraycayon.”

“I’ve met her, and she didn’t like me,” Shirley said.

“Shirley, stop that,” Mita said, and then she added a little too sweetly, I thought, “Nitang is a wise woman
and is a good judge of character, especially of women.”

Shirley’s eyebrow twitched a little, and then she picked up her fork, her long, red manicured nails glinting
in the watery yellow of the afternoon sun.

“Este, Joventino,” Bita called out again.

“Senora?” said Joventino, appearing at her side.

“There’s another one,” Bita said, pointing at a different corner of the ceiling.

“Yes, Senora,” he replied, then disappeared again.

“But Itas here makes the straightest and sharpest creases on trousers, and makes the perfect scrambled
eggs,” Inez said.

“Mornings are practically a dream with those creamy eggs. And of course, Massing makes the best suman
sa latik in the whole world. Don’t you think so, Eden?”

I saw my mother smile a little. Her fingers were short and stubby and the fork seemed a little too dainty
for her hands.

It is amazing how we remember certain things so vividly for no rhyme or reason. I don’t even remember
what else happened that day, or in the days that followed, but I remember that scene at the table as if it
were painted in oil and then imprinted into my mind. My mother was wearing a drab brown blouse.
Shirley was wearing a bright red pattern that showed her cleavage and matched her red nails. Mita was in
black silk with gold buttons, fat as ever. Inez, always the classically stylish one, was wearing a blouse of an
unremarkable color and simple design that drew attention to her perfect, oval face. Norma was in dark
blue, Irma was in green, and Bita was wearing a floral muumuu. Bita’s lounging slippers matched her
muumuu. And that sun, streaming through the open capiz windows in its watery state, rendered the
women’s heads golden.

I remember when my mother was not always that quiet. I remember her in a long dress tie-dyed in
various shades of yellow, her face red, and her voice loud. She was crying, alternately tearing at her hair,
stomping her feet, and burying her face into the flabby chest of this huge, dark, ugly man in a long, white
coat who seemed to be comforting her. She kept saying, “Nonoy ko! Nonoy ko!”

That moment was so unnatural that I felt like I was outside of myself. I think I could even see myself then,
still so tiny, sitting on a little stool and wearing my tiny dress in the same fabric as the dress my mother
was wearing. I remember looking up and behind me and seeing that my back was against a sort of tall
table made of metal. It felt rather cold against my back, and I remember wondering what could be on that
table that made my mother cry so.

Years after, when I was old enough to understand that I had a brother who died at that cold, tall table, I
sometimes remember seeing my tiny self in a tiny tie-dyed yellow dress and sitting on a tiny stool, and
wonder if death caused the remaining living to become more composed, more refined, less free with
words and gestures. Perhaps it’s because of the accommodations that they have to make in order to move
on. They have to put their memories some place, or at the very least subdue them.

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When Joe, Mita’s diabetic alcoholic husband who smoked three packs a day, contracted lymphoma,
cancer of the lungs, and a tumor at the back of his head, there was no mention of Joe dying. We knew
what we knew and that was that. We sat at the table for merienda and partook of ibos, palitaw, bibingka,
arroyo, binutong, balisoso, and the family classic, suman sa latik, and everyone talked about everything,
but not about Joe. And sadly, not about Mita, either. Even Bita, who had survived Bito, did not talk of
death, as if her loss rendered her inept at feeling loss a second time. And when Joe finally died, bald,
emaciated, incoherent, and half-blind, there was just a slight reddening in the eyes of his wife and
children. If there was genuine grief, it was lost in the food and the flowers. My aunts, traditional
Christians, were respectfully silent, but their faces were blank. Even my great-aunts -- white haired,
powdered, perfumed, bejeweled, Spanish-speaking dowagers as fat as the entire province of Camarines
Sur was wide -- pursed their lips and clucked their tongues and fanned themselves at the chapel decorated
with white flowers and talked about everything else but Joe.

“Este, Antonia, when is Joseling coming back from Australia?”

“No se, Tita. He said he was having too much fun with the mujeres there. Que barbaridad!”

And then, artificial laughter.

Candy was there. She was one of our second cousins, a granddaughter of Caruso, Bito’s older brother.
Candy was thirty-two, single, and had cancer. She was at that time about to travel to Manila in a few days
for chemotherapy. I saw her as different, not cold, bright with the passion to battle a disease that had a
death wish on her. I wasn’t particularly close to her but I stayed beside her the whole time, trusting,
hoping for her to say or do something, anything, that would take this pointless calm, this strange
unearned normalcy, away. I wanted her to summon all the demons of pain and grief and despair to
breathe down fire and ruffle the hairs and skirts of all those people eating ibos and palitaw and balisoso
and suman sa latik amid the flowers. But there wasn’t even any breeze. Not a leaf stirred.

Gina, wife of Raymond, another one of our second cousins and a first cousin of Candy, sidled over to us
with her plate of ibos.

“Hi, girls,” she said, her smile sweet as the tiny mound of white sugar lying beside her ibos on the dessert
plate. “Care for some ibos?”

“I’m not particularly hungry, but thanks,” Candy said.

“I’ll go eat in a while,” I said.

“I have something to give you, Candy” Gina said.

“What?” Candy asked.

“It will change your life, I swear,” Gina answered.

“What is it?”

“It’s a book. The Purpose-Driven Life.”

I exhaled the heaviest exhalation of my life.

“Really?” Candy asked. “I’ve heard about it. Is it any good?”

Gone was the possibility of the demons of pain ever appearing.

“It’s very good, really. It changed my life,” Gina answered. I searched her face. She was wearing the exact
same shade of lipstick she has worn every single day of her life since perhaps her marriage to Raymond.

I looked at Candy, her eyes large, dark, and deep, her teeth prominent in her wan face. She seemed
sincerely touched. I excused myself and dipped my head and walked towards the table where all the food
was. And after a while, everyone went home. Not a single word was uttered about the faithful departed.
And to think that he was no saint.

“I’m no saint, Annie,” my husband said to me at three o’clock in the morning when I asked him where he’s
been. “I do need to drink with my friends sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” I echoed.

“If that’s your definition of pure evil,” he added. He stood up from the edge of the bed. He seemed to fill

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the entire room with his bulk.

“Sometimes,” I said again.

“Don’t start, Annie. I’m not in the mood for this.” He walked over to the closets and started undressing. I
could almost see the odor of cigarette smoke and beer wafting all throughout the room in sickly greens
and browns, forming distorted, toothless faces with huge maws for eyes.

I could hear Bita shuffling from her bedroom to the bathroom. She did that almost every hour during the
night. It was very convenient for my husband, who had someone to let him in during the wee hours of the
morning.

In his crib, Chandler stirred and made small mewling sounds. I went over to him, wondering if he felt
cold, or hungry, or was having a bad dream. I prayed that he could not smell the distorted green and
brown faces floating around the bedroom. I prayed that he could not feel the tension between his father
and me. I prayed that he never be involved in a lover’s quarrel, or ever be disappointed by a person he
loves and trusts, or ever be made to cry over the lost era in time when he used to be happy, or ever feel his
heart break so perfectly in all the right places that it doesn’t even really break into pieces but just
separates into smooth fragments that fall to the ground so noiselessly, inevitably, as if they belonged
there.

I heard my husband grunt. He was already in his nightclothes, and was rubbing the small of his back. I
opened my mouth to tell him that he had to lose weight so as not to aggravate his back problem, and then
changed my mind. It seemed that all I ever told him were things that he already knew. This was the
irreversible fate of people who had made love to each other a thousand times.

Chandler stirred again. I picked him up and rocked him in my arms. Barely two months old, he still had to
grow eyebrows, but his face was already perfect.

At times I felt that staying in this family actually required a kind of blandness of character, a certain
sparseness of emotion. Everything, every single experience, had to be washed down with water and
antiseptic before it could be digested by the frail, flimsy, sickly heart. It kept the peace in our meriendas,
but I get the feeling that our hearts were never fully in the present but were constantly darting to and fro
across certain times of our lives, filtering and re-filtering things, constantly making their
accommodations.

“Before you marry, you should open your eyes wide, because marriage is the time to close them,” Bita said
one afternoon when my cousin Bunny, one of Mita’s daughters who lived abroad, came by for a vacation.
Our house was always first on her list of houses to visit because Bita lived with us.

“God, latik!” said Bunny. “I missed this so much.” She put three squares of sticky green suman onto her
plate and practically poured an entire bowl of latik over them.

Bunny shoved a huge piece of suman dripping with latik into her mouth and chewed with gusto. I, on the
other hand, chewed on a small piece of suman and let it stay in my mouth for as long as I could, even
though it had turned tasteless. I was six months away from getting married, and nobody else in my family
knew about it yet. I was to be formally proposed to in a week, with the parents present, but I was leaving
telling them until the last possible moment.

“Sally still makes them,” my mother said, smiling at Bunny’s childish enthusiasm.

“Sally? Sally who?” asked Bunny, her mouth full.

“Oh you haven’t met Sally,” said Bita. “She’s the one who makes our latik now. She stays with your Tito
Dindo in Malinao.”

“It’s Massing I remember,” Bunny said. “I remember her as –“

“Old,” interrupted my sister, who was sixteen and who would get pregnant when she was twenty.

“Yes, terribly old,” said Bunny, and then she laughed. And then she added, “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been
gone too long, sometimes I feel like I’ve been gone just a few weeks.”

“She must have been close to ninety when she died, I think.” I said.

“It’s possible,” my mother said.

“Don’t speak when your mouth is full, hija,” Bita told me. I was happy to be finally marrying a man I
loved, but when I swallowed my suman at Bita’s behest, somehow it caught in my throat.

4
I sipped Coca-Cola from my glass and glanced at my mother, who was telling my sister to wear a longer
blouse that didn’t show her belly button. My sister said yes, but seemed both unsure and rebellious.
Perhaps it was true that a woman, intuitively, knows what is to become of herself.

Bita clucked her tongue and looked towards the ceiling. “Conching,” she called out to one of my mother’s
maids.

Conching waddled in, short, dark, and stout, wiping her hands on a piece of rag. “Senora?”

“Cobwebs, Conching,” Bita said, pointing at a corner of the ceiling. “You missed them.”

“Yes, Senora,” Conching said, and then waddled back to the kitchen. I marveled at the discretion of all the
maids that have come to us. They seemed to have carried gracefully the tradition of acknowledging the
presence of cobwebs that didn’t exist.
Bunny started telling stories about the places she’d been to, and the people that she’d met.

“Just remember, hija,” Bita said again, “open your eyes wide before you marry, because marriage is the
time to close them.”
I wondered then if it ever occurred to Bita that that was exactly what Bunny was doing, opening her eyes
wide. She was now past thirty, and she had remained single.

Bito’s womanizing was legendary. He lived at a time when it was usual for the sons of the haciendero to
get their maids pregnant. I still have photographs of the hacienda, Mical Bical, which was built by
Sebastian, Bito’s father, when he married Leonora. The photographs are in sepia, the color of secrets and
regret. Only the people in the photographs knew the real color of the clothes they were wearing when the
photographs were taken. There were no blues, no reds, no yellows. Nobody wore bright orange lipstick in
sepia photographs, and no one had pimples, or wore crumpled dresses, or had on runny nylons. The sepia
enveloped the eternal moment in an opaque dimness, much like the subterfuge of memory.

I wondered if Bita ever cried when she found out about those women. Way below her in social stature,
they nevertheless shared the same man, received the same touches, kisses, whispered words, as if the very
man who cast them into these opposite roles had erased the boundaries between and among these women
and, even if just momentarily, rendered them all of equal potency. Bita’s face, wrinkled, freckled, and
powdered, showed no traces of tears. Always she would appear very composed at the merienda table,
supervising the placement of the dessert plates and the serving trays and the drinking glasses, an arthritic
finger always extended to this place and that thing and those food, and towards the cobwebs that weren’t
really there but which all of a sudden appeared at the periphery of her vision every time the conversation
began to veer towards uncomfortable subjects. I could not ever imagine her crying over laundresses and
cooks and their illegitimate children who would not even be allowed by law to use to Bito’s last name,
although they would probably be followed by the shadow of their ancestry because of the vague
resemblance that they bear to Bito and my aunts and uncles. I wondered how my aunts dealt with this
issue with their own husbands. I wondered if they knew exactly how many women and how many children
there were. But they don’t talk about these things.

I wondered how I myself would feel when, eventually, in fifteen or twenty years my husband’s illegitimate
daughter would suddenly show up on my doorstep, smile, and introduce herself, wishing to partake of her
father. I heard that her mother was small and dark, like a pygmy. I knew early on that my husband’s
daughter would look nothing like her mother. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t know how to handle it. I had no
frame of reference.

“Do I have to say it again, Annie?” my husband asked me. “You can’t go.”

“But don’t they let their wives go with them?”

“No. Why would they?”

“Well, haven’t you heard about men taking their wives out to meet their friends?”

“There’s a time for that,” he grunted as he sat on the bed to take off his shoes.

“When?” My voice was a little too loud, and I bit my lower lip.

“I’ll let you know.”

“Well, if ever I can’t go out with you and your friends, can you just stay home some nights so we could
talk?”

5
“We’ve been married almost three years, Annie. We’ve already talked enough about things. And we’ve
already talked about Chandler. What else do we have to talk about?”

“Well, stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“You know, like what you did at work today, or where we are going for Christmas, things like that.”

“You won’t understand my stories about my work, Annie. And I haven’t thought of Christmas yet.”

And like a dismissal, he stood up and went to the bathroom. I remember thinking that perhaps it really
wasn’t a good time for him because it was already four o’clock in the morning and he was drunk.

I gained fifty pounds when I was pregnant. In the span of seven months that I stayed home to watch my
belly grow, I felt like I was water constantly on the verge of vaporizing. I was not so much conceiving as
being conceived. All the melted parts of me, my arms, my legs, my back, my head, my heart, my stomach,
seemed to flow together into a deep, limpid pool of heavy water that seemed to grow larger, deeper, and
denser week after week after week, until finally, it was all over. I did not cry during my almost ten hours of
labor, and I did not cry in the delivery room until after I felt that blessed relief of Chandler and the
placenta being pulled quickly away from me. Then, I cried so hard that I felt like I was being washed by
rain -- torrents of rain -- and at the back of my mind I wondered if my mother felt like she was being
washed over by torrents, too, when she was crying, in that dress, in that hospital, over my baby brother’s
death. I had no way of knowing. But then the rain stopped, and then I felt solid again and it felt right, for
after all, I had a son who was alive.

Suman sa latik was a family favorite. The suman was made of sticky pulutan rice wrapped in banana
leaves in three-inch squares that are about half an inch thick. They were steamed in a huge pot, and what
comes out is an unflavored sticky suman square colored a light green by the wrapping. Latik is very light
brown, sometimes beige, and is a grainy, sticky sauce made of milk and sugar that sweetens the suman.
Some of my relatives like eating both the suman and the latik when they are still warm. Some like the
suman warm and the latik cold, and some like it the other way around. I like them both cold. Since I was a
child, our suman sa latik was always made by Sally, who lived with Bita’s son Dindo and his wife Gilda and
their five children in Malinao, Bita’s hometown. But it was Massing who had been in the family kitchen
making latik for our family since Bita’s children were still little. From Malinao, in Bita’s parents rambling
old house, where Great-Aunt Mary, Bita’s unmarried younger sister, and Emily, Bita’s unmarried niece,
now live, Massing would make suman and latik by the cauldron-ful and have them sent to Tigaon, where
Bita lived in Mical Bical with Bito and their ten children until the sixties. Before Massing it was Syria. And
before Syria, there must have been someone. There was always someone far, far back in the past who
begins these things.

“No,” my husband said to me when I asked him if I could take a job.

“But I can’t live like this,” I answered back, though careful to keep my voice low.

“This life that I give you is bad?”

I kept quiet. Nothing that I could have told him at that moment would have been something that was
totally new to him.

“I need to get out of the house. Just a part-time teaching job. Please,” I said. I tried not to sound too
pleading. I wanted to preserve a certain dignity through it all.

“What can you possibly teach?”

“Well, Economics. Taxation, too, probably.”

He shook his head slowly. I bit my tongue.

“What about Chandler?” he asked

“Chandler will be fine. There’s Yaya Meling.” Yaya Meling has been in our family since I was five.

“Only for a couple of hours a day,” he said.

6
“Okay.”

“In the afternoons, when Chandler is asleep.”

“Okay. Thank you so much.”

“I have to go,” he said, taking his keys and his cigarette case.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to my parents. I’ll be there for the weekend.”

“Can’t we go? Chandler and me?”

There are moments when you just know deep inside your soul that the next words that will follow will
change your life forever, or perhaps your life has already changed even before the words came, and you
just didn’t know it, and you just felt the need to anchor that portent of change onto the words, for want of
a handhold or a point of cognition.

“Not now, Annie. Not now,” he said. He closed the door quietly behind him when he left.

My days were filled with Chandler. My son was amazing. Born at 6.3 pounds, he nevertheless filled the
entire house. His eyes, huge and dark, would sometimes stay on me for fifteen minutes and would not
even blink that I felt flattered that I deserved that much attention. His lashes were so long and golden that
I would long to touch them with my fingertip but wouldn’t for fear that they might turn to stardust. His
hands, rolled into tiny fists, were so translucent I could almost see his fingertips curled inside them. I
would caress his back while he slept and marvel at the perfection of his skin, pinkish beige, and when I
would try to imagine him as a grown person, with coarse, dark hair on his chest and arms and legs like his
father had, somehow my heart would grow heavy, and then I would will myself to stop imagining him ever
changing, not wanting to ruin the moment. When I bathed him he would squeal, and pound at the water
with his hands and laugh, cheeks all puffed out, pink gums revealed, and with not a tooth in sight. He
smelled of milk and clean skin, it’s such a wonder that everyone smelled like that during the very first
months of their lives, regardless of who they would become in the course of time. Having Chandler, seeing
him in his perfection every single day, had somehow turned both of us into a dreamlike kaleidoscope, in
which every split second saw a change in us, every breath different, every heartbeat distinct, every eye
blink unlike the one before.

My days were incredibly unpredictable, but my nights were always the same. Always there was a bubbling
anxiety in me at around dinnertime that perhaps my husband would be home, that perhaps at that very
moment he would all of a sudden be filled with an overwhelming feeling of love for me and our son and a
need to be with us and have dinner with us. Always I would glance out the window and believe that he
would be coming in through our subdivision’s gates and approach our house at 30 kph, twice the speed
limit, rushing to be with us. And always he never came. Always I would have my dinner without him, and
my son would fall asleep without his father watching over him. My days were vibrant, wonderful, exciting,
and never the same as the one before. But my nights were always the same, except perhaps when there
were times when I forget what my husband’s face looked like.

He did not take the news well. When I told him I wanted out of the marriage, he pursed his lips, he sulked,
he gave me dark looks. He even brought Chandler into the discussion.

“I’m taking him,” he said.

“And who will raise him?’

“I will.”

“You’ll have to stop drinking nightly for that.” I tried to suppress a strange little smile that seemed to
bubble up from me.

“I can do that,” he said. I knew he couldn’t.

“Because he would have to be read to every evening, and he’s a light sleeper.”

My husband of three years looked at the floor, glanced at Chandler sleeping in his crib, and then looked
back at the floor. Defeated men, I found out, did not always cry.

“Okay, maybe not now,” he said finally.

7
“Okay,” I said. But I knew I’d have Chandler for the rest of my life.

He took his keys and his cigarette holder and left. The next night, he moved out.

If I could tell my story in as few words as possible, that would be even so much more than what I would be
truly capable of saying. For after everything has been done, words become irrelevant. Even if there is
room for a thousand tellings, my voice, my mind, my heart, would have already sunk deep into the nadir
of remembrance, and then after a while, would have gained immateriality. This is the accommodation that
I make so that I could go on.

I now have nine aunts. Norma, Mita, Inez, Shirley, Gilda, Irma, Anne, Beth, and Charita. And then of
course there’s my mother. Shirley, though, had stopped coming since I was in high school. They say she
already has a new husband somewhere. The remaining ones are all fat, except for Charita and Anne, who I
still believe will eventually succumb to the call of their womanhood and grow folds and flab that will
finally declare them worthy of their intake of the thick, sticky, starchy meriendas that were part of our
family’s tradition. Even some of my cousins have started to grow fat, too. Both Bambi, Mita’s eldest, and
Michelle, Irma’s eldest, have humongous breasts and hips. So do Irma’s other daughters, except for Richie
who, though conscious about her waist and stomach, still has the heaviest-looking legs I’ve ever seen.
Charita’s eldest, Bea, is clearly in a struggle, although it is understood that she would temporarily win,
being just in her teens and at the height of vanity. Trina, Norma’s eldest daughter, is constantly
moderately plump, although she doesn’t seem to care. Inez’ only daughter, April, has rather thick legs, a
portent of things to come. Being Eden’s eldest, and being older than Bea and Trina and April, I feel I am
far behind, but somehow I know the genes and the food intake will have their way, in time.

Naty, our maid with the grizzled head of hair and the protruding lower lip, rouses me from my reverie to
tell me that it is time for merienda. I close my book, which I wasn’t reading anyway, get up, and walk
indoors. I breathe in the aroma of warm suman wrapped in banana leaves and the sweet, cloying smell of
latik. Through the window I could see that the assembly at the table is well under way. Chairs are being
brought in from the different rooms of the house for the aunts to sit on, and the entire room seems
orange. When I enter I am motioned to an empty chair between Norma and Beth.

I sit, and take a plate and fork from Naty. I plop the sticky green suman onto my plate and smear it with
latik. “This is good,” I say, chewing my food carefully. “Arrived from Malinao today?”

“Yes,” Mita answers.

“Don’t talk when your mouth is full, hija,” Bita says, and sips water from her glass.

I swallow. “Sally is the best,” I say, smearing another piece with latik.

“She is,” says Beth.

“But now she’s very weak,” Gilda says. “Just a couple of days ago she could not get out of bed. She has
been working for so long.”

“She should be taken out of the kitchen,” says Joan, Anne’s daughter, who is set to be married this year.
“She shouldn’t be making latik for us anymore. Someone else should do it.”

“It won’t taste the same,” says my mother.

“Latik is latik,” I say. “We’ll get used to the slightly different taste.”

“She never married, you know,” Charita says. “Sally.”

“Maybe she didn’t need to be,” I say.

“Maybe all she needed was to make suman sa latik,” adds my sister, six months pregnant. She licked the
latik off her lips.

All around me I see my aunts’ heads bobbing very subtly up and down, some of them pretending to be
chewing, some of them pretending to be nodding at something else other than what had just been said.
Bita comments on the cobwebs she spies on the ceiling and motions to Conching to walk over to her. Beth
invites Irma to try on a blouse that she bought in Baclaran. Anne tells Norma of her new hobby, cross-
stitching.

I sip my Coca Cola, take another bite of suman smeared with latik, and realize that I will have to call my

8
lawyer soon. Around me talk shifts to draperies and plants, and Naty waddles in to bring more suman and
latik. I see the afternoon sun streaming in through the windows in a watery kind of orange, the slanting
rays of the late afternoon touching the edge of the table near my mother’s plump white elbow. I am calm,
in the company of women who have watched me grow up, who would keep me company at funerals and
weddings and childbirths, and who would watch my marriage crumble and share their latik with me. After
all those years that the smell of food wafted through our non-discussions and our trifling conversations,
we have become our own most essential sustenance. We are women of silence and carbohydrates.