Cleaning House

Someone drew an irregularly shaped heart on one of the red doors. The practical joker used chalk so it was easy to rub off. I am sitting on the pavement, feeling cheated. I shouldn't be here, rubbing off graffiti and waiting for who knows what. It's a Sunday. On Sundays, I usually like wasting my time and forgetting things.

I came home expressly to have my aunt's ancestral house cleaned. It was 10am and I have been waiting for the cleaners for almost half an hour. Because the house is located near the main road, it is lamentably dusty,even on the outside. The dust motes are unforgiving, almost loverlike in their hold on doors and on the cement walls.

Finally, I see the cleaners crossing the street. The other one is a stranger to me but the other boy used to be our janitor in the building that we owned. I talked to them for a while before putting the key into the lock. We could hardly open the door because of the profusion of electric bills left by the electric company. They managed to pile up and together served as an annoying blocker.

I truly have no intention of paying for the electricity because they were going to take this house anyway. Just the way the others took our own house and the school that my mother spent her whole life building. This effortlessness calls to mind insipid phrases. Easy as pie. Nothing to it. Piece of cake.

This is how my life is now- a fortress of carefully defined words that I have built around myself so that I can justify the things that are happening around me. During my free time, I string together words and tie them on my head. They form a pink, happy bandana.

I let the two cleaners in and I continue sitting on the pavement. I shield my eyes from the sun. This house, it's supposed to be good luck because it faces the sun. We've been trying to sell this house for years now and they say that it's actually bad luck because it is surrounded by funeral parlors. Never mind that this house is a lot cheaper than the others being sold in the other side of the street. Nevermind that this house has a beautiful balcony. Bunch of sissies. I wonder at these people who find strength in superstition. I wonder how they have managed to come this far.

I read the book I have brought with me. Soon, I am finished reading. I feel incredibly dizzy because of the heat. I don't like the sun much. The light gets into my eyes and I am momentarily confused.

I decide to buy something cold to drink from the store next to the house. It feels like summer around here. I realize, suddenly, that this is a strange city. Summer when it's raining in other places. Rainy during summertime.I feel surprisingly conventional and am disgusted with myself for expecting that things should be a certain way when I should know that they never are.

I drink the soda straight from the can. I distrust straws because they don't give me enough of what I need and using them makes me feel like I'm commiting an infidelity. I can hardly see the cleaners because of the crazy dust motes and the heavy furniture. There are still couches and chairs in there. The sofa bed that my mother died in is covered with dust. My father's old tv set is lying on its back, wondering what has happened to our days of splendor.

The cleaners finish with the rooms downstairs. I am still outside, taken aback by how alien this place is to me now. I believe that I have stopped loving it, like I would an irrational lover. Seeing this house again made me realize that the people I have loved are no longer here. They are reduced to smiling faces in sepia, covered in months of neglect and forgetting. This place, this city will no longer serve me any purpose. It only makes me remember, which is, at times as bad as having insiduous nightmares.

The cleaners move on to the other part of the duplex. I hear the banging of chairs that they have probably mishandled because they are tired. More furniture. What I am to do with all this history, with these remnants of war? I am a remnant myself, a blemished residue of things past.

I am scared of being mishandled. I know I make people tired.

I decide that I am finally lonely so I muster up enough courage to go upstairs and see if they were doing their job. The first thing I notice are the green walls. I peep at the green kitchen and look in the green comfort room. So much green. It was my parents' favorite color. I want to be disassociated from the color and take pains not to touch it. What was it supposed to symbolize? Was it life? Luck? When I have a family or a house of my own, I don't want to see a speck of green in it. It would make me too weary.

I look around warily. I have always been afraid of ghosts. People seem to have the habit of foisting their own ghosts at me when, clearly, my cupboards are filled with them.

I climb up the stairs. This used to be my home, I tell myself. I feel ridiculously melancholic and lose my family all over again.

It is dark upstairs. Dust everywhere. I look curiously at the old room where my parents used to sleep in the first year they were married. There was a small sink, a tiny bathroom, then the bedroom itself. Leaning on one of the cabinets was the store sign that belonged to Ma. Melle's Mart in red, looping letters. The rest of the board is green. I touch it and feel her smiling.

I go out of the room and proceed to the balcony but once I get there, I stop, content to just stare at the blank space. There used to be a table there (made of Narra, no doubt) and a chair. Newspapers would be strewn all over the table and also his mug. This was my uncle's and mine's nook. I see myself as a young girl, unmistakably overweight which didn't matter because I was loved. I am peering through his magnifying glass while he is explaining the difference between mites and ants. Do you see the difference? Have I taught you well? He keeps on repeating these questions after every lesson. Then we would go downstairs and pretend to look at movie stars that have suddenly come visiting.

Afternoons in this house were peaceful. This was where I was forgiven anything. This was the house I thought of running away to when I was 5 and furious at my mother. Nevermind the fact that it was a jeepney ride away from the house that we lived in before. Distance to me was inconsequential then.

My uncle would buy pumpkin sweets from the vendors and I would tell him stories. I continued telling him stroies until I was 16. When I reached college, I did not visit anymore. He surrendered to complications of diabetes in their green comfort room one Wednesday night. I was sorry but not repentant. I refused to look at his face in the coffin.

When the cleaners open the door of the other half of the house, I see, beyond the flitering dust an old, heavily-framed family photo. I do not know if it was the heat, or my loneliness, or my guilt for feeling misplaced but they were all there, shouting at me, asking me Do you see the difference? Have I taught you well? They were no longer still and waiting but were reaching out to me, their arms wonderfully elastic and willfull- their voices carefully fashioning caricatures of death out of my soul.