Five Brothers, One Mother

The Marikina house wasn’t finished yet, but with an ultimatum hanging over our heads, we had no choice
but to move in. Just how unfinished the house became bruisingly clear on our first night. There was no
electricity yet, and the windows didn’t have screens. There were mosquitoes. I couldn’t sleep the whole
night. My sister slept on a cot out in the upstairs hall instead of her room downstairs, maybe because it
was cooler here. Every so often she would toss and turn, waving bugs away with half-asleep hands. I sat
beside her and fanned her. She had work the next day. In the morning someone went out and bought
boxes and boxes of Katol.

Work on the house would continue, but it remains unfinished eight years later. All the interiors, after a
few years of intermittent work, are done. But the exterior remains unpainted, still the same cement gray as
the day we moved in, though grimier now. Marikina’s factories aren’t too far away. The garden remains
ungreened; earth, stones, weeds, and leaves are where I suppose bermuda grass will be put down
someday.

In my eyes the Marikina house is an attempt to return to the successful Greenmeadows plan, but with
more modest means at one’s disposal. The living room of the Cinco Hermanos house features much of the
same furniture, a similar look. The sofa and wing chairs seem at ease again. My mother’s growing
collection of angel figurines is the new twist. But there is less space in this room, as in most of the rooms
in the Marikina house, since it is a smaller house on a smaller lot.

The kitchen is carefully planned, as was the earlier one, the cooking and eating areas clearly demarcated.
There is again a formal dining room, and the new one seems to have been designed for the long narra
dining table, a lovely Designs Ligna item, perhaps the one most beautiful piece of furniture we have,
bought on the cheap from relatives leaving the country in a hurry when we still were on Heron Street.

Upstairs are the boys’ rooms. The beds were the ones custom-made for the Greenmeadows house, the
same ones we’d slept in since then. It was a loft or an attic, my mother insisted, which is why the stairs
had such narrow steps. But this "attic," curiously enough, had two big bedrooms as well as a wide hall. To
those of us who actually inhabited these rooms, the curiosity was an annoyance. There was no bathroom,
so if you had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night you had to go down the stairs and come back up
again, by which time you were at least half awake.

Perhaps there was no difference between the two houses more basic, and more dramatic, than their
location. This part of Marikina is not quite the same as the swanky part of Ortigas we inhabited for five
years. Cinco Hermanos is split by a road, cutting it into two phases, that leads on one end to Major Santos
Dizon, which connects Marcos Highway with Katipunan Avenue. The other end of the road stops at
Olandes, a dense community of pedicabs, narrow streets, and poverty. The noise – from the tricycles, the
chattering on the street, the trucks hurtling down Marcos Highway in the distance, the blaring of the
loudspeaker at our street corner put there by eager-beaver baranggay officials – dispels any illusions one
might harbor of having returned to a state of bliss.

***

The first floor is designed to create a clear separation between the family and guest areas, so one can
entertain outsiders without disturbing the house’s inhabitants. This principle owes probably more to my
mother than my father. After all, she is the entertainer, the host. The living room, patio, and dining room –
the places where guests might be entertained – must be clean and neat, things in their places. She keeps
the kitchen achingly well-organized, which is why there are lots of cabinets and a deep cupboard.
And she put them to good use. According to Titus, the fourth, who accompanied her recently while
grocery shopping, she buys groceries as if all of us still lived there. I don’t recall the cupboard ever being
empty.

That became her way of mothering. As we grew older and drifted farther and farther away from her grasp,
defining our own lives outside of the house, my mother must have felt that she was losing us to friends,
jobs, loves – forces beyond her control. Perhaps she figured that food, and a clean place to stay, was what
we still needed from her. So over the last ten years or so she has become more involved in her cooking,
more attentive, better. She also became fussier about meals, asking if you’ll be there for lunch or dinner
so she knows how much to cook, reprimanding the one who didn’t call to say he wasn’t coming home for
dinner after all, or the person who brought guests home without warning. There was more to it than just
knowing how much rice to cook.

I know it gives her joy to have relatives over during the regular Christmas and New Year get-togethers,
which have been held in our house for the past half-decade or so. She brings out the special dishes, cups
and saucers, platters, glasses, bowls, coasters and doilies she herself crocheted. Perhaps I understand
better why her Christmas decor has grown more lavish each year.

After seeing off the last guests after the most recent gathering, she sighed, "Ang kalat ng bahay!" I didn’t
see her face, but I could hear her smiling. My father replied, "Masaya ka naman." It wasn’t a secret.

Sundays we come over to the house, everyone who has moved out, and have lunch together. Sunday
lunches were always differently esteemed in our household. Now that some of us have left, I sense that
my siblings try harder than they ever did to be there. I know I do. I try not to deprive my mother the
chance to do what she does best.