Till K do us part

NOTHING like a pandemic to shake up the marital tree. 

During enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), the husband unexpectedly returned home for his forgotten pass. He rushed inside our home, only to stop abruptly and sniff the air.

What have you been up to? His slitted eyes already condemned me even before I could cover up my mistake.

The man I married has a nose that any K-9 species would envy. If anyone can smell illicit love in the air, that’s the husband. This department, though, skipped me in their recruitment.  

Did I fart? Married this long, we are intimate with each other’s odors. 

Did I eat kimchi directly from the jar again? Without taking my eyes off the husband as I’ve seen Indiana Jones freeze in a pit full of rattlers spitting with anger, I returned the lid and closed the jar.  Tightly. Grimly.

Marriage IS enhanced couple quarantine, without presidential extensions and absolutions. Close friends still wonder what the husband saw in me, or I in him, given our swerving passions. 

We managed to sleep in the same bed for 29 years because it is too narrow for us to bring baggage. I don’t sleep with books; he doesn’t bring in power tools. 

ECQ put our complacency to a test. Our half-a-duplex home became suddenly too small for personal space.

We step gingerly around the marital minefield of enforced togetherness. We appreciate the bubbles of domestic quiet and placidity, rewards of long-time companionship. We know, too, how bubbles work. 

The Great Puncture came with kimchi. Tolerant of the health benefits from this side dish of fermented vegetables, the husband bought a jar for a wife who eats anything she does not have to cook.

Love, even one that comes with a contract witnessed by God and family, has limits called the Chinese cabbage or the Korean radish. Or the cabbage AND radish.

Instigated by a third party—say, fish sauce or shrimp paste—an innocuous vegetable can engage with another plain green leafy creature to release a reek of unholy pungency.

To keep olfactory peace, I promised to finish the kimchi while keeping the lid always in place and sealing the bottle in a zipped bag.

And then the day our home smelled familiarly like a sewer. How did we reconcile the irreconcilable? 

Kimchi bombs pale to the time I chose our budget date on the strength of this restaurant’s wall-sized TV playing “Train to Busan” (our pork steaks were anorexic compared to the flaps of skin hanging from the zombies trying to nibble at Gong Yoo), and the unmentionable period I aspired to imitate the NoKor women collectively making kimchi in giant basins on “Crash Landing on You”.

In marriage, the poison becomes the glue. Or exchange the partner.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 8, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Girlfriends

MY marriage may not survive without my girlfriends.

The good Father who counseled us before the boyfriend and I tied the knot 28 years ago never anticipated a pandemic and lockdowns as potential storms threatening the safe harbor offered by marriage.

Yet, like lighthouse keepers obsessively watching the scudding of clouds for a clue to shifts in weather, the spouse and I, during the past three months when our place shifted from enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) to general community quarantine (GCQ), have seen rising levels of intolerance as our eyes clash across meals or over laptops.

It began as a squabble over the charging bay when our gadgets needed to be simultaneously charged. It is not that the house did not have other outlets; the contested bay just happens to be the closest to our common working area and requires no relocation for the victor.

Victor? Domination and conquest? Power play over power?

Time to defuse the inner hellcat. Before quarantine became a way of life, I remember meeting up with friends, who are invariably women. We may not see each other for years or weeks. We may have planned only to meet for coffee and then, still having untouched topics, move on to early dinner.

Marriage demands monogamy. Friendship—thank God—not.

Notwithstanding differences in age, status, temperament, and even politics, it is easier for me to hang out with another woman.

Women are expressive, with a loquacity that sinks deep into genuine expansiveness and kinship. I find myself spontaneously unspooling with my girlfriends about what is on our minds and in our hearts, as well as what we had for breakfast.

What quarantine has made me appreciate most is that while my girlfriends and I still chatter through Messenger about the children who grew up while our backs were turned, the diets we know will not work again, music for our souls and prayers for our bodies, pets and gardens we baby, and the ageing that makes us enter and leave and enter a room without accomplishing anything, I can also talk with my girlfriends about politics in these impolitic times, without fear of a rape joke pouncing from nowhere.

Social media tethers us to the essential relationships that have to remain virtual while the pandemic rages on. Yet, a treacherous undertow of intolerance singles out and pulls down many navigating online.

Much of this small-mindedness is gendered and misogynist. To counter this tendency to shut down and silence expression, I hum this Beatles ditty, with a bit of my rephrasing at the end: “What would you think if I sang out of tune?/ Would you stand up and walk out on me?/ … Oh, I get by with a little help from my (girl)friends…”



Lifeline (Source of image: shutterstock.com)


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 21, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”