The Binder

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Her tita said that they used to be wisps of white painted onto a canvas of blue by Batala. Some legends even said that there were a gifted few who could still see it that way.

“But I’ve never seen someone who sees it like that,” her tita said. “Never met someone who could afford it.”

If her tita was restless and cursing the heavens for an ill-fated shift a short six hours later, she would look up at those purple clouds and try to imagine them in the whitest shade of white. Puti. Like the snow on telebisyon.

“Not ube-flavored,” her tita would say. “But I’d prefer chocolate anyway.” They couldn’t afford chocolate clouds, so she cursed the ube clouds instead. And regardless of their response, her tita would get up to work. Whatever color, the clouds seemed indifferent.

“Or maybe puti like the multo,” her tita would say. “They work the graveyard shift. A skeleton crew.” Tita laughed a lot for someone so tired, and no one was funnier to tita than herself.

Every Sunday she worked in the darkest hours of the morning alongside her skeleton crew of ghosts. Like clockwork, her body would rise at midnight to purple clouds dancing with the blushing sky. She would brush her teeth and comb her hair. She would feed the cats and start the rice for the day. As she left the house, she would make the sign of the cross, and again when she clocked in for work. She called it her act of contrition.

“God understands as long as you remember to feel sorry for it,” her tita said.

Her co-workers did not heed the same tradition, perhaps owing to their existence in a markedly different realm of being. They would waft from aisle to aisle, floating aimlessly from task to task like obedient little clouds (if clouds were white instead of purple, of course).

She would watch them go about their dance on her breaks and ponder their confused expressions. “They look like they pick up the things, but they don’t recognize what they are anymore,” her tita would say. “That’s why we keep so few things, easier to remember. That’s why your genius tita keeps her binder.”

In fact, she kept it all in her binder: a thick, worn collection of sundry papers restrained neatly within three rings. She was glad that the binder clutched her lists so tightly, because of all the stationary she owned it had the most important job of all.

The binder guarded her tita’s very soul, which consisted of an itemized summary of what was afforded to her by present circumstance.

She maintained it with religious fervor.

If they moved, the binder logged the entirety of the exodus from one apartment to the next. If they had a yard sale, the binder recorded all transactions in perpetuity. And when they came home from their monthly grocery run, the binder greeted them warmly from its station beside the tabo. The grizzled veteran was eager to execute its ultimate purpose, tattooed with an assortment of stickers and post-it notes across its worn cover like scars and medals of battles long past.

It was important that she worked with the best: the symphony of clipped coupons and savvy savings was so delicately intricate that it could only have been orchestrated by her tita (or Tudbulul himself). The tune usually began the same: Sixty-four ounces of vinegar. Two bottles of soy sauce. Two pounds of leg quarters. Rice, garlic, and ginger of course. Dry pasta and four bottles of sauce.

But depending on the whims of the conductor, the bridge swelled with exotic intrigue. Balut for her lolo. A handle and two scratchers for her tatay. Epsom salt for her tita’s back. Whatever the haul they could afford, the list always ended with the same post script: various bags.

“Very useful,” her tita would say as she pressed a mass of crinkled plastic into her niece’s unwilling embrace. “If you go to the buffet and you paid for the food, you make sure you take the leftovers. You paid for it, diba?”

To complete the ritual, her tita would always place the notebook back into its sacred altar and kneel down to pray. Her tita said a lot, but her prayers she kept to herself.

“I’m not sure how you say it,” she would reply if pressed. “The words wouldn’t make sense to you. But they make sense to the mangkukulam. They can’t get you without something of yours, and we are careful with what we have.”

Her tita was very careful. She had a list for it.