LUISA A. IGLORIA

After Alex Tizon’s article "My Family’s Slave" as regards Eudocia Tomas Pulido 

(The Atlantic, June 2017)

HELP

At the resort's all-you-can-eat breakfast

buffet, the expatriate family instructs

their live-in Filipino maid to share

the plate of the toddler who is her ward.

She has to feed him first, of course—while

chasing him every now and then around

the table. After everyone has gone

back for seconds and thirds, the mistress

of the house instructs the maid to go back

for more bread, more pastry, more cake;

then stuffs these into large ziplock bags

she'd brought with her in her purse.


*

One girl brought with her only one purse

when she came to help out in our home

one summer in the sixties. I don't know if

she was a niece or cousin several times

removed, or just someone from the same

village of my mothers. I don't know

the terms or circumstances under which

she came to live with us and train to serve

or what kind of a salary she was paid.


But she had most of Sunday off, after she

helped put breakfast on the table.

And she had to be back by dusk, in time

to help with dinner preparations.

*

The household tasks they gave her: sweeping,  

mopping, buffing the old wood floors with half

a coconut shell husk; the laundry heaped in a large

tin basin outside, under the sayote vines.  She had

a cot in the sewing room, a closet where she

could stash her new fund of hand-me-downs

alongside the folding ironing board.  She wasn't

the first, she wasn't the last. Through the years

a few of them came and went, to stay for one,

two months, a season: Ana, Maring, Jean, Delia. 


The one who stayed the shortest was a girl

from Abra. After only two days, she gave

notice. When she left, several shirts

went missing from the clothesline.

*

One of them we had to teach how to use

the flush toilets. Another nearly broke her tooth

on the a plaster mold of one of Disney’s seven

dwarves, a cake topper on one of my daughters’

birthday cakes. The one who stayed the longest

was Nora, who I could tell favored one over

the other of my mothers though she was careful

not to show it. When my parents and the man

I used to be married to had a fight, we were

kicked out of my parents’ home. But they

asked Nora to live with us so she could help me

with my three children; my youngest, then a baby,

became her baby too. And she was helpmate more

than servant, intuiting what it was that might be

needed in the day to day, offering her opinion,

before we settled on a course of domestic action.

To this day, from Hong Kong, where she now works

as a maid in the household of a couple with a tea

business, she asks about that child and like any mother

yearns for a bit of news, some glimpse on social media

of the child she helped me rear in those days.

*

My US-born child says one evening

at the dinner table after we talk about the Alex

Tizon article in The Atlantic: I don’t think I could ever

get used to someone waiting on me like that, hand

and foot—helping dress and bathe me, cutting up

my food, fanning the flies away or trying to cool me

in the shade… I tell her it wasn’t ever like that

during those times we used to have live-in maids

or katulong—helpers was our preferred term.

Though I know enough about unspoken hierarchies

of class even within a family, that can change

the tenor of relations from one moment to the next.

My paternal grandmother, for instance—she

who did not really approve of my parents’ marriage

because my mother was a mere farmer’s daughter:

she used to call all our helpers muchacha—

meaning girl, but with a definite undertone

of peasant, servant, minion, low-class.

*

Most of the time though, it is us,

the womenfolk, who tend to the tasks

for keeping home: without cease, a chain

of labors that start from daybreak long

until after the sun goes down; without pay,

without leaves, without regard for whether

or not we have “real jobs” outside the home.

No one will ask and if they do it’s token:

do you need a hand? where does this go?

Or, you’re so good at what you do!

You’ve thought of every detail!

Your people, so industrious, so

devoted. Always, always working.

*

When I teach Bulosan’s America

is in the Heart, I like to dwell on those

details in scenes showing the interactions

of Carlos’ mother in the market: first, with the

upper class woman who looks but does not buy,

who walks through the stalls in her finery

followed by a girl who holds a parasol to shield

her mistress from the sun. I wonder who this girl is:

whether she is a daughter of the tenant-farmer

whose father and grandfather before him owed

a debt to the senorita’s father who owns the land?

And then, there is the poor old woman

who has no money to pay for even a small

cupful of shrimp paste but is so hungry she begs

Carlos’ mother to let her plunge her cracked hands

into the bowl that she might at least have the dregs

of that harsh and sustaining contact when she rinses

them in water that she will drink—And I ask,

is there no help for it then? Is this all there is?

A history of debts accruing interest from one

generation to the next, bonds that help nourish

and protect but that also have the power to exact

a high price: whereby we’ll look to both neighbors

and kin as vassals have done to their feudal lords.   

  

   

Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of the chapbooks Haori (Tea & Tattered Pages Press, 2017), Check & Balance (Moria Press/Locofo Chaps, 2017), and Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015); plus the full length works Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015. www.luisaigloria.com