Liza

M. L. Tan

I was at my parents’ home the day Liza (not her real name) started working for them. She came in through the gate and walked right up to our dogs, without fear. The dogs, in turn, came up frantically wagging their tails like they were welcoming a long-lost friend. Dogs are quick to sense kindness in people.

I asked my mother if she was old enough to work. She’s 18, my mother assured me although I felt she looked more like 12.

Liza, it turned out, was from Manila, and that surprised me because usually, you get household helpers from out there, from the "the provinces", the term conveying poverty, backwardness, hardship. But Liza was a Manilena, having grown up in Caloocan City.

Her father is a gardener, which means he works when there’s work and that’s terribly irregular. It was work as a gardener that brought him into the circuit of recruiters, women who used to scour the countryside for impoverished families with young daughters willing to work in the big cities. Today, it seems, the recruiters do as well in our many urban poor colonies.

My mother had her reservations, similar to what I hear from other women looking for helpers, about taking in someone from the city because they’re perceived as street-smart, with too many friends and relatives that could help spirit away household items or, even worse, arrange for a break-in.

But Liza seemed safe. She was a little girl as far as my mother was concerned. More importantly, she was a little girl too for Marietta, my parents’ mayordoma. As readers know, the mayordoma often makes the most crucial decisions for households. Marietta was pleased with Liza, maybe seeing in her another daughter to raise since her own was now grown up.

Liza, in turn, related well with Marietta. Liza had lost her mother when she was 11, the mother dying in labor, delivering her eight child. Shortly after her mother’s death, Liza dropped out from school. She was in 5^th grade, and has not gone back to school since then.

It is almost unthinkable that women should be dying during childbirth here in the heart of Metro Manila, but that was what happened to Liza’s mother, in our modern times with test-tube babies and genetic engineering.

Liza’s parents had migrated to the city from Samar looking for a better life, and had not found it. At one point, they had moved the entire family to Pampanga and seemed to have been managing, until Pinatubo erupted and sent them fleeing back to Caloocan.

Liza had spunk, sometimes too much of it. She’d break out singing, and then quickly catch herself as Marietta gave her "the look". One time I saw her tweaking Marietta’s cheeks, which I found startling realizing that perhaps the last time any one did that to Marietta was when she was a child, a few decades back. No one, and I can tell you that with all certainty, no one tweaks Marietta’s cheeks.

This was Liza’s first time to work as a domestic helper and I think my parents’ home opened a new world to her, of strange gadgets and appliances and crazy dachshunds that were never chained, and their dog food and their cushions to sleep on. They were dogs that "spoke" English. "Sit!", she learned to command before feeding them. They were dogs too with English names and one, named Bates, she called out with great vigor, for all neighbors to hear and to my great horror, in a Visayan accent that transformed it into a pejorative female term.

Work is light with my parents since there are just two of them most of the time. She rarely went to see her family in Caloocan, mainly because she didn’t know how to go on her own, which again challenges the assumptions we have about people growing up in the city. Her world was a small community in Caloocan.

At my parents’ home, there was time for television (and, sigh, Rosalinda), and kuwento kuwento, and dreams. She wanted to go back to school, maybe do a vocational course. She watched Marietta on the sewing machine, and I imagine the machine probably represented a world that could be, if she could eventually learn to use it.

But one day her elder brother came by, and told her he didn’t want her working as a maid. He works in a shoe factory sewing sandal straps and said he would manage, he would put her through school.

Before she left my parents’ home, Liza threw her arms around Marietta and cried her heart out, saying she wanted to stay but couldn’t. You don’t argue with your Kuya in our society. I guess you don’t argue with anyone, period, when you’re a wisp of a girl named Liza, growing up in a city of too many dreams.