this is what happens when you lock yourself in

your tiny apartment, for an entire saturday, ignoring the beautiful windy afternoon, friends' invitations to dinner and drinks, wifely chores and teacherly obligations; as a way to celebrate and recall a mother's birthday and a daughter's short life: you realize that there are limits, that roles you value are contingent upon many things. you also realize that there is a sunday after saturday, that you can hold a conventional celebration with unconventional family and friends. and that stories are stories, and life is life.

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thanks to ma'am jing, for helping edit this little piece. it's coming out in an anthology of modern tales.


The Other Daughter


It took years before it dawned on Anna that she was her mother’s creation. Creation as in brought into existence, manufactured from raw materials; a result of her mother’s systematic thought. No, not at all a figment of the imagination. A product. A being. A whole. Anna was named after her mother’s favorite sister, Aniana. She was created one stormy night, when her mother turned twenty-nine, eager for a daughter after having given birth to two boys. Upon learning this, Anna also instantly understood that she would only live up to the age of twenty-nine, a belief which her mother had laughed off, saying that Anna would live as long as there was life in her creator.

You see, Anna was the character in the stories Aurora wrote for the children. Anna was “The pretty little girl who loved to read books as much as she loved to play with her toys, the one who took naps at two in the afternoon after an episode of Sesame Street, who finished her vegetables before she asked for her candy, who fed and washed her pets once daily, who watered the plants morning and afternoon, who made her own bed, and said her nightly and morning prayers.” She was also “The poor little girl on whose head a colony of lice grew and overtook her entire body, because she played out in the sun all day and she refused to have her hair washed, combed and tied in a tight pony tail, so that she had to beg her fairy godmother to wave the colony of lice away with a wand, promising to never miss a day’s bath, to play out in the sun only when her mother allows her to.” Anna knew she was all those. When she and her siblings were young, her mother would read out loud to them from her little blue notebooks every night. Her mother would glance and wink at Anna at the start of every story. As soon as the soft, hollow voice would begin with “There was once a little girl…” a warm feeling would suffuse Anna’s entire body, and she would snuggle under her mother’s soft, smooth arm. Her mother would then secretly rub the top of Anna’s head with little sweeps of her chin, especially during the most engaging parts of the stories.

Anna was all those characters, yes. But she was also, quite specifically and concretely, the third child of five, with two boys before her and two girls after. Anna, therefore, was the one who got to braid her mother’s long, brown hair before her mother left for work. She got to assist her mother in the kitchen in the peeling and grounding of peanuts for the cookies, and in the mashing of potatoes, cream and butter in the aluminum tub. Anna was a character and a middle child, and she immensely enjoyed the privileges that went with that.

It was also because Anna was the middle child that, of all the children, she was the only one who was sent, perhaps as an experiment, to public school. There she was largely unseen. At first, Anna thought, it was not so much that they did not see her; it was only that they would rather ignore and tolerate her because Aurora, her mother, had been one of the most popular teachers in the same school. But after being part of, and remaining inconsequential in, several group games of patintero, water-water-go, and base-base, Anna seriously got to thinking. The confirmation came after a game of hide-and-seek when Anna realized no one had bothered to “seek” her. She had stood for hours, literally “hiding” in plain sight, her fat butt jutting out from behind a palm trunk, not noticing that it was already late in the afternoon, that the school grounds were empty, that the game had long ended. Anna became truly convinced that she was, in fact, unseen and unheard.

She continued to attend school anyway, even if no one saw her raising her hand to volunteer for an activity, even if no one heard her giving the correct answers to the most difficult questions. She eventually found the courage to ask her mother that she be allowed to continue attending school even when her mother had already left teaching. Anna’s mother had moved on to become first, a cashier in the government bank, then its first female Manager. After a few more years, she left the bank again to become the city’s first lawyer for women.

Unfortunately, Anna had to stop attending school when her mother started taking all those trips, giving all those talks, comforting all those women in all those different far places. Anna had to be by Aurora’s side, or close to her, in order to exist. Far from her mother and her mother’s mind, Anna got lost and ceased to be.

Anna learned her lesson when her mother went on a US trip with the husband. Anna refused to join them. She was enjoying her reading and her classes. School was much too important and fun then, as they were doing “Little Women” in English, “Mariang Makiling” in Filipino, geometric shapes in Math, and baking in Home Economics. Anna stood her ground: she did not want to go.

The morning that Anna’s mother left, Anna found that she could not locate herself either. She could not even leave the room to look for her mother because there were no room, no walls, and no boundaries, to mark the world she had been accustomed to. There were no voices, no air, no light. There was only a sensation of being let go, of being dropped, of disappearing into an abyss. It was the single most terrifying experience Anna ever had.

Anna later learned that on that trip, Aurora had been constantly nauseated and had fever and chills for three nights in sunny Santa Monica. The husband, a lawyer like her mother, there for a convention as well as a vacation, was much distressed over his wife’s condition. He was as devoted to Anna’s mother, as she was to him. Anna saw how they held hands in their sleep, and how, for all his position and power in court, he was almost as dependent on her mother as Anna was.

He was gentle-mannered, quiet, shorter by two inches than Aurora who was five feet and eight inches. He made up for his lack of height, with sharp aristocratic features and a quiet authoritative demeanor. And he was a loving, though at times distant, father to his children. Anna liked her mother’s husband very much, but could not love him, because she simply was not capable – it was not in her system. She loved her siblings because she shared their blood; there was, within her, a mechanism for that love. However, she could not get herself to call him, could not even conceive of him as, father. Simply because there was nothing of him in her. Anna was solely her mother’s creation. Anna knew, and didn’t mind, that he had absolutely no awareness of her existence.

But since that sorry, discombobulating episode, Anna never strayed far from her mother’s side again. That meant leaving school altogether, to be her mother’s personal assistant. School, by then, did not matter much anymore. Anna managed by doing her own reading, when she wasn’t helping her mother in her cases, speeches, and studies, that is. She didn’t mind working with her mother. To Anna, those were perfect moments. And the sense of being whole and complete in her mother’s presence was such that Anna would often forget she was a self at all.

There were, however, a couple of times when Anna felt like going her own way, living her own life. Anna once dreamed of becoming the writer her mother had stopped being. In her own time, at home, Anna wrote stories endlessly, some of which her mother submitted for publication. One piece came out as a children’s book with her brother’s illustrations, under her mother’s name.

Anna also constantly dreamed of singing, of being heard, of sharing her voice, which was exactly like her mom’s—low, full, somber at times times; teasing and joyful at others. Anna had no qualms, no false modesty, when it came to her singing. Often, while at work, riffling through documents, arranging files, stapling together pleadings and appeals, her mother would start to sing, and Anna would join her, their voices rising in an uncanny unison—always on the exact same notes, but from different pitches, and exactly an octave apart. Her mother jokingly told her, one morning, over breakfast, that they should both pursue a career in singing. And they both laughed over the absurdity of this idea. But Anna knew, as her mother also did, that there was an undercurrent of something akin to pain, whenever she sang, knowing that her voice would never be heard by anyone else. It was through Anna’s singing, one day, that her mother suspected that Anna had fallen in love.

Aurora was right. Anna had fallen in love. The mechanism for love that was built inside Anna was set in motion in a way both strange and yet familiar. It was as though there were a part of the man she loved inside her. He was working as part of her mother’s staff, while trying to finish law school. Anna loved the way that the presence of the calm, reserved, young man, seemed to stabilize her mother. Anna even suspected that a big part of her being in love was influenced by this effect he had on her mother. He was, in turn, dedicated to Aurora; sometimes much too dedicated to her. Like most everyone her mother worked with, he was inspired to please her, to measure up to standards he wasn’t even sure existed. There was something in her mother that directed people’s behavior towards her; she was a subtle but powerful force. It was not only her beauty, it was her certitude; a certitude devoid of condescension. What Anna loved about him was that he was not fazed at all by this force that was her mother. He was not indifferent to it, he thrived in it.

He was lean and willowy; androgynous, even effeminate at times. He had long fingers that looked like they were trained on old piano keys, or had spent much time plucking and strumming nylon guitar strings. Oh how Anna had wanted so much to feel him and to be felt by him. Several afternoons and many dawns did Anna spend trying to summon all that she had and all that she was, in order to make a dent in his consciousness, to exist even as a mere whiff in the air he was breathing. But, to no avail. This broke her mother’s heart, too, Anna knew. The man eventually left her mother’s organization, married some nice young girl, moved to New York to pursue a career in immigration law. And he was slowly, eventually filed away, forgotten like an old, passionately argued, but hopelessly lost case.

Anna was able to return to the soothing rhythm of living with her mother. This was only disrupted when her brothers and sisters, one by one, left home to pursue their own lives. Anna suffered most, because she also suffered with and for both Aurora and Aurora’s husband. Much as Anna desired, she could never make up for the sense of emptiness the leaving of the children created in the couple.

Anna was with Aurora and her husband in Dr. Villegas’s clinic when, after a series of annual routine tests, it was confirmed that her mother who had just turned fifty the day before, suffered from an advanced stage of breast cancer. Upon hearing the news, her mother’s heart closed up, the act resulting in an instant quieting in the room. So drastic was the shutdown that Anna heard it very distinctly. In the heavy silence, she ran to embrace Aurora’s stiff body. At the same time, she wanted so much to reach out to Aurora’s husband, to help stop what she knew was the wild swinging of the pendulum crashing against the walls of his heart. She could see it in the lividness of his lined face, even as he himself tried to seem cool, struggled to clear his mind, to make sense of what he just heard. It was only much later, when they got home, that Anna allowed herself the kicking and screaming, the absolute childish resistance, the total lack of restraint, that she had been tempted to give in to while at the hospital.

Soon after, Aurora’s children came home—left their jobs, relationships, schools—to be with their mother, and Anna was glad that they were a family again. Her siblings had become different persons. They had been brought up on love, and had much of it to give. Their presence in the house hastened Aurora’s recovery. Her mother survived the first cycle of chemotherapy. When she was tested again, she was declared clear of cancer cells.

Everyone then insisted that her mother quit her job, give up her fights, learn to relax. Anna, however, understood her mother’s apprehensions about living a purely domestic life. She was convinced her mother should be allowed to live her life the way her mother saw fit. And despite the abatement of the scare over her mother’s health, Anna’s conviction about her own life ending at the age of twenty-nine was starting to influence her actions, decisions, and even dreams.

In the years that followed, everyone resumed his or her life, albeit with some adjustments. Debts had been incurred, some properties had to be sold, in the course of their mother’s treatment. This put a lot of pressure on the husband and wife who had reputations and public images to keep up. Both spent more and more time at work than at home. The fights her mother engaged in became bigger, the stakes became higher. Anna suffered from her mother’s involvement in these legal battles. The less Aurora thought of her, the more difficult the struggle was for Anna to exist unseen and unheard. As Anna neared the age of twenty-nine her dreams also became more strange, more terrifying. Because she knew they were real. They were going to prove themselves real.

On her own, Anna started to grieve even before the deaths and losses occurred. She tried to get used to the idea of the approaching tragedies by writing about them. Her heart bled as she wrote of the confusion and panic. And as she wrote, she herself had to struggle to breathe under the threatening cloud her characters could not escape. The thought of the family breaking apart, of losing someone, haunted the family, underlining their normal conversations, the last few meals they took together in the hospital room, the laughter they shared over some TV sitcom, the last hugs, and nonchalant caresses. After writing the story in her mother’s blue notebook, Anna braced herself for the worst.

Exactly eight years after her mother was declared a survivor of the disease, a growth the size of an orange was found in her mother’s upper left lung, along with several others in her vital organs. The cancer cells ravaged her body and her senses fast, but could not break her composure. Aurora managed to hide her pain most of the time—she kept her back straight, sat cross-legged, even if someone had to help her lift one leg so it could be crossed over the other. It was because her mother was very good at hiding her pain that everyone started believing in miracles instead of the doctors’ prognosis. The doctors would try to tell them that the mother might not have long to live, but the kids would just say, yeah, yeah, so? They have seen their mother bounce back from the worst bouts. They knew her better than anyone else did.

Anna’s dream of a few years before started to play itself out. By the time they celebrated her mother’s her fifty-eighth birthday in the hospital, everything was a potential source of pain—the littlest chink of light, the merest sound, the slightest evidence of smell.

One September night at the hospital, with everyone in attendance for dinner, a strong typhoon struck the city, rendering it pitch black, and keeping everyone stranded in the hospital room. Extra beds had to be wheeled in, pushed right next to Aurora’s own bed. Despite the strong typhoon tearing the city to pieces, the family found something gay in the occasion. It brought back memories of home, years ago, when they were all young, and they would gather round their mother for one of her stories. They recalled some of Aurora’s stories, and, hearing them, Anna’s body was suffused with warmth again.

The situation lifted everybody’s spirit, emboldened them not only to recall the past, but to look forward. Christmas plans were tossed around in the dark room, even ridiculous ones, like the father’s suggestion that they celebrate the holiday during the entire months of November and December. Laughter rang out. Anna clutched at her mother’s left arm the entire night, even as she joined in the laughter and gaiety, trying to ignore the rapid beating of her own and her mother’s heart.

After the laughter and bantering had died down, and only Aurora’s labored breathing was audible, Anna could not sleep. She was certain now that they were going to lose their mother that very night. Knowing that it was going to happen very soon made the knowledge new again to Anna: she was literally nothing without Aurora. This woman was her creator, her God, her Self.

Those were Anna’s last thoughts before she somehow fell asleep.

In the morning, the storm died down to a light drizzle, rendering the scene outside in a milky haze. The room itself was bathed in soft gray. Everyone was still in deep sleep. Anna woke up and glanced over to her mother lying on her side, her right arm still entwined with her husband’s. Anna knew it was up to her now. Anna was, after all, Aurora’s character, and specifically the middle child. Anna was as good at this, as her mother made her out to be. She closed her eyes and recalled her dream.

Aurora is starting to stir. There is a calm, knowing smile on her face, even if there are still traces of sadness in her eyes. She stands on the bed, finally able to extend her limbs after several months. She bends over to kiss her husband, and then each of her children. She then carefully steps over their sleeping bodies to reach for a hairbrush, which she briskly runs over her hair. Then, she pulls open the drawer of the side table, to search inside for her wedding ring and her sunglasses.

It is while her mother is in the act of putting on her sunglasses and testing the strength of her legs, flexing her feet, that Anna awakens fully. At first she does not comprehend the scene before her eyes. She sees her mother carefully but confidently padding her way to the windows, drawing the curtains to the side, sliding the glass panes open, and stepping on to the sill, standing still to breathe in the cool breeze.

Anna scrambles to her feet. She barely has time to smooth her own hair, put on shoes, before Aurora motions for Anna to join her at the window.

In a while, her mother’s attending nurse comes into the room, walks over to where her mother’s body is, still wrapped in her husband’s embrace. From the window Anna and her mother look on worriedly, helplessly, as the nurse taps the man on the shoulder lightly. The others stir and awaken with the vague sensation of last night’s gaiety and laughter still clinging to their senses...

Anna opened her eyes, took one last breath, and braced for flight, as she heard the doorknob being turned, softly announcing the imminent entrance of her mother’s attending nurse.

And so it was that at the age of twenty-nine, at exactly half her mother’s age, at exactly the same age her mother was when Anna was created, the unseen and unheard life of Anna, Aurora’s character and middle child—the other daughter—ceased to be.


QC/Sept. 01-02, 2007