Midnyte Madness (Part One Chapter 3)

Merry’s Tangerine Thoughts in Angeles City

BUT merrily did I not really understand my mother’s decision for us to fly to a distant land, follow Barry and for her to marry him there.

Sure, she gave me her reasons, but what did I really know?

And, sure, I promised I would marry Barry when I turn eighteen. A promise that was a super, super secret.

But I made the promise only because I never argued with my mother.

I loved her and would never do anything to displease her even if the many complicated things she said had left me more confused than before.

And even if I wanted to merrily seek advice from a friend about this confusing thing, I could not. I had no friend. Well, except for Midnyte. I could talk to the witch’s black cat like a real best friend.

We left Caloocan City many years ago.

This was immediately after my mother and the witch had a big fight. They angrily traded names. My mother called her friend traitor, and her friend called my mother blind and crazy.

Eventually, they went for each other’s throat.

Well, actually, they just pulled each other’s hair while my mother sobbed in a rage and the witch wailed like a banshee. The witch had a big belly at the time. Pregnant, my mother said with a sharp hiss and a loud spat about the witch’s protruding belly.

Between living in Caloocan and where we were now, my mother and I had moved to three other places, each no different from the other. Some people called them depressed areas but most called us, dwellers of those areas, squatters.

Then we ended up in Angeles, a city of bright lights and many pale-skinned old men of all shapes and sizes. I did not find another black cat to befriend with in all those other places.

But here in Fields Avenue, I found someone who was as ugly as Midnyte’s mistress. She was Thelma, my mother’s former co-worker as a dressmaker in a clothes shop called Tangerine. My mother worked as dressmaker in Tangerine for only a month, or thereabouts.

She was enticed to work as a cashier’s assistant in the girlie bar across the street.

But not for long now.

“You’re going abroad soon, Merry, but you don’t seem excited at all,” Thelma said to me, her eyes scrutinizing me with a hint of concern.

“Should I?”

“Of course, you should! It’s everyone’s dream, leave this damned country.”

“Is it?”

“It is!”

“It’s not my dream.”

Thelma looked puzzled. “What’s your dream then?”

“I haven’t thought about any dream, even going abroad, which you said was everybody’s dream.”

“Why, aren’t you happy with your mother’s future husband?”

“He’s old,” was all I could say.

We were inside the tiny clothes shop, behind the glass display shelves of accessories. All the clothes on sale were neatly hung in half a dozen racks in front, the better-looking ones were hung separately on the walls. The custom-made pieces were in a separate rack near the counter at the back, sheathed in flimsy, white garment bags.

Thelma and I were having supper: rice and stir-fry vegetables for her, soft drink and a packet of crisps for me. It was past 9:00 o’clock in the evening.

Fields Avenue was alive with men and women, foreigners and locals, and vendors and assorted other people.

The girlie bars and nightclubs and restaurants were brightly lit on the outside. The little shops like Tangerine were not as well lighted.

Like all other establishments along Fields, Tangerine was open until the wee hours of the morning. And while my mother worked in the bar across the street, I waited up for her at Tangerine. We’d been doing this for nearly two years now. It was her way, she told me, of making sure I was safe — unlike if I were left on my own in our rental place in the fringe of a depressed area.

“Yes,” I repeated, as if to convince myself why I was not excited at going overseas. “Barry’s too old.”

Thelma laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. There was derision in it. “Anya, your mother, is old as well.”

“She is?” I was bewildered. My mother had always been mistaken as my elder sister, never as my mother. So I looked upon her as not old.

“Anya may look about twenty-three but she’s actually thirty-two years old. Still, that’s old for the likes of Barry. I know him. He likes them very young, like you. You may be fifteen but you actually look twelve.”

I pretended not to hear what Thelma just said.

“I heard that the younger the girl, the longer Barry kept her in bed for his pleasure. But men, especially pedophiles like him, cannot marry very young girls. It is not legal. However, he could pick any eighteen-year-old in the bars to marry him.”

It was my first time to hear the word pedophile. I would have asked Thelma what it meant, but I became suddenly defensive when Thelma alluded to my mother.

“My mother is not a bar girl!” I almost screamed.

“If I had Anya’s good-enough face and voluptuous body,” Thelma just snorted, ignoring what I said. “I would not work as a checker or cashier’s assistant in a girlie bar. I would work as waitress or as dancer.”

“Why?”

“So I could earn more. Of course, waitresses and dancers have to go out with customers, sleep with them, to earn more.”

“My mother, before Barry became her boyfriend, went out with Joes after work. But she did not earn more.”

“Who? Those guys who took you and your mother for quick midnight snacks before you went home?”

I nodded, remembering how sleepy I was whenever Mother fetched me from this shop after her bar duty. I was usually asleep by then on a folding cot in a corner of Tangerine. She had to drag me, sometimes even rub the sleep off my eyes, so I would get up.

At the restaurant, often at McDonald’s, the smell of burger and fries could not fully wake me up. But beneath the thick haze of sleepiness in my head, I knew that another admirer of my mother, a habitué in the bar or a foreigner on holiday, had taken us for a treat.

“Those Joes were suitors of your mother,” Thelma explained. “She could’ve had lots of money if she went to bed with them. They wanted her simply because they could not have her. She did not want to sleep with any of them. Simple as that.”

“Mother would only sleep with my father. She said that to me.”

Thelma snorted again, loudly, as she gathered her empty lunchbox from our makeshift table. She’s done eating and I was still munching on the salty crisps. While putting the dirty lunchbox and spoon in her meal bag, she said —

“In all my years sewing and selling dresses mostly for those working girls in the bars and clubs, I have not met one who is as foolish and as crazy as your mother over a man.”

I thought I knew what Thelma was talking about.

“I have lived here all my life,” here meaning the length and breadth of notorious Fields Avenue, “and all those girls who have fallen for some cheating guys, they eventually realize their folly. So they either find another cheating guy, or they find someone who’s a keeper.”

I didn’t understand what a keeper was, but I did not interrupt Thelma.

She continued, “Either way, they move on. They learn from their mistakes. But your mother is altogether different. She has not learned. She sticks and clings to your father, Roger, as if he’s the only man of earth. He’s good-looking, of course, that cannot be denied.”

I sipped the last few drops of my soda making an airy gurgling sound through the straw.

It was a sure way to irk my mother. Thelma, however, did not mind my doing so. So I did, and did it loudly.

It was, perhaps, my way of trying to drown out the sound of chaos in my mind. Thelma knew exactly, as I did, what made my mother leave Manila — to follow my father, to be near where he had chosen to shack up with his current girlfriend.

The latter was the night manager of a 3-star hotel in the periphery of Fields Avenue. This woman was able to snag a job for my father as driver of the hotel van that was used to fetch and bring guests to the airport, or to wherever the guests wanted to go.

He lived with the girlfriend, naturally.

And naturally, as my mother had done over and over in the past, she and I took up residence in the vicinity.

My mother stalked my father and begged for whatever crumbs of attention he could spare her.

“Mother loves him very much,” was all I could say, more to myself than to Thelma, “even if she has agreed to marry Barry.”

“I was glad when Anya accepted Barry’s offer. I really am happy for you, Merry. Your mother can now finally focus on what is best for you.”

“But she does!” I protested.

Thelma began to reply but was distracted when her cell phone beeped. She had a text message.

She read it, sent a reply, then turned to me again, saying, “Your mother’s total focus is on your father. How to see him, beg for his love. Even if he has a live-in girlfriend and even if she has to cough up some money for his vice so he would agree to see her.”

A couple of customers walked in to look at swimsuits and other kinds of beachwear. They were regulars. I recognized it by the skimpy dresses they had on that were sewn by Thelma.

The latter attended to them while I cleaned up our makeshift table. At the same time, I also thought about money.

Money that we always did not have even if my mother worked regularly, money that was not available to me when I needed to pay school tuition, books and other stuff for school. I always had to quit in the middle of the school term because my mother could not afford even my daily allowance.

Maybe, I said to myself, my father needed the money more than I.

But wasn’t he supposed to buy food for me and mother, pay our rent, and send me to school? Was he, really and truly, a pest like how Midnyte’s mistress called him eons ago?

Thinking of the witch’s black cat made me smile.

I was glad that my thoughts turned to my friend.

I felt intense pleasure as I saw, in my mind, how Midnyte dismembered a pest until its final convulsive shudder.

I almost danced a jig as I remembered an old salve to a recurrent confusion in my head.

(to be continued)

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it. Hoping that you will follow through reading the next chapters of this novel until its end.

If you wish to read the Introduction and the other chapters, the links are provided below.

Introduction My Madness That Is Midnyte

Part One Chapter 1 Midnyte Madness: A Tale of Two Terrors

Part One Chapter 2 Midnyte Madness — Merry Meets Midnyte

Part One Chapter 4 Midnyte Madness — Merry + Barry = Happy Together?

This is what inspired me to create Midnyte in this non-fiction piece: Midnyte’s My Madness

Find me on LinkedIn | WordPress | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon Author’s Page