It is three o'clock in the morning and I am terribly late coming home. My boyfriend Jimmy and I along with our officemates have gone disco dancing.
I don't know why I go when I don't dance at all but because Jimmy loves to dance, I feel obliged to go. I take a taxi to go home, but our street is too narrow for the taxi to go in so I have to walk the length of our street. Our street is near the town church and around the church, there are already people who have set up shop and getting ready to ply their wares to people attending the early morning mass. I pass by a woman busy making rice cakes. Older women, devout Catholics are slowly walking their way to the church. I curse the fact that our house is situated at the very end of the street. The dogs wake up from the loud "clack-clack" noises my platform shoes make on the paved ground. They start to bark. I reach our compound of four houses, ours being one of the two behind. The house in front of us has a dog and this dog wakes up, too, and starts to bark which triggers other dogs to bark, too. The barking, if it lasts too long, would wake my father up, then he would find out I am just coming home.
My two younger sisters, Leng and Vivian and the children from the neighbors' attend the early morning Christmas masses. Leng, who is a deep sleeper, ties a string around her wrist and drops the end outside the window; it is long enough to reach just above the ground and the other children would pull it to wake her up. They turn this going to early mass like an excursion because afterwards my sister would treat them to the rice cakes and other sweets sold around the little market by the church.
Our door does not have a lock. Its "lock" is one of the chairs that we prop so that if anyone tries to get in, the chair will make such a noise that my father, or one of us would surely wake up. There is a hole on the wall, big enough for my arm to go through, reach for the chair and slowly remove it so I can open the door without noise. But the dogs continue to bark and for some reason the chair won't budge from its position. The neighbor's dog ambles near our house and I had to hit it with my shoulder bag so it would go away. That is when I notice the string. I pull it a few times until Len wakes up.
"Alright! Alright," I hear her say. I could imagine her arm going up and down as I pull the string. She opens the window and pokes her head out. "What time is it? It's too dark yet, are you sure it's already four thirty?"
"Shhhhh! It's me, I can't open the door," I say in a hushed voice. "Let me in, quick!"
Through the smokey glass of the louvre window, I make out the image of Leng after she turns on the light. She walks halfway across the living room towards the door then turns and walks back to the wall by the foot of the stairs. There we have a cuckoo clock that often stops running in the middle of the night. Not this night though so she has to turn the hands back. As she does this, she looks at me and I make a gesture by flashing my hand twice for "ten" and one finger. She sets the clock to "eleven and a few minutes".
As she takes the chair off the door, it makes a loud scraping noise. In an instant, my father is out in the living room, seemingly annoyed at the little commotion. The first thing he does is look at the clock. He sees it is a few minutes past eleven.
"You're quite late," he tells me. "Overtime again?" He refers to the fact that ever since my office started on a joint project with Mrs. Marcos, I have always been "working overtime".
"Yeah," I say, fanning myself giving him the impression that I am tired.
"Have you eaten?"
"No," I reply. I glance at the clock and say, "But I'm not going to eat now, I'm really tired. Goodnight." I walk up the stairs with my sister, and he goes back to his bedroom.
As I change to my sleeping clothes, my sister tells me, "Next time, you should only pull the string once and quite gently. For a moment there, I thought I lost my arm!"
In the morning, as he prepares to leave for work, my father notices the cuckoo clock. He checks his watch.
"Damn thing, it must've stopped again during the night," he says to no one in particular. He then pushes the hands of the clock to the proper time. The pendulum stops. My father pulls the chain and gives the pendulum a little nudge for it to start again.
My sisters and I look at each other and make funny faces until our father has stepped out the door. When he is out of our sight, we start to giggle.
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