Rhea Borja: CONDIMENT SANDWICH • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Rhea Borja
CONDIMENT SANDWICH

You are hungry when you wake up. You are hungry when you go to bed. But you are the most hungry after school, when you come home to an empty house.

First, scout the pantry’s almost-barren shelves. Look past the ancient, dented can of bamboo shoots and the jar of pickled okra and carrots. Stretch your skinny eight-year old arm and sweep the back of the cupboard; you may find a can of salmon or a stale box of Stovetop stuffing mix. That’s a whole meal right there.

No luck, but you do find a box of Ritz crackers your mother had hidden. Now, check the fridge. But forget the oven. Remember that time you opened the oven? Inside was a charred, half-eaten goat’s head, its eyes gazing balefully at you. Your parents had left it there after hosting a backyard barbecue.

That party did not win any points with your neighbors. Remember how they peeked over the fence and caught sight of the animal butterflied over an open pit? The barbecue smoke had carried the pungent odor into their leafy backyards, mixing with the scent of their overly chlorinated swimming pools. No wonder your friends won’t come to your house anymore.

But you liked it when your parents threw parties; that’s the only time there was enough food in the house. Aluminum trays of pancit canton, garlicky chicken adobo and pots of velvety sinigang covered the dining room table and kitchen counters. A heaping platter of lumpia lay on the coffee table, crispy spring rolls that you and the other kids grabbed throughout the night.

Outside was America, cookie-cutter suburbs with manicured grass lawns and aloof white people with judging eyes. Inside was the Philippines, hazy with cigarette smoke and thick with the chatter of adults, the latest boxing match blaring on TV, and singer Rico Puno on the turntable, belting out “Macho gwapito raw ako.”

After dinner, it was time to gamble. The kids played blackjack in the den, the aunties played mahjong in the living room, and the uncles played poker in the garage, the door open wide to the dry California night air, so different from the tropical languor of Ilocos Norte.

The men huddled around the green felt table next to your father’s tomato-red Porsche 914, their brown forearms flexing as they raised cold bottles of San Miguel and smoked Marlboro Reds. In the outside world, they are doctors, city planners, or accountants, like your father. Here, they’re just Boboy, Gardo, Jun. They laughed, their voices uncaged, so loud your neighbors could hear them a half-block away.

Your parents ignored you for the most part, only turning your way and smiling thinly when an auntie bent down and plied you with questions.

“What are you learning in school? Oh, yes? You like science? So smart, ang anak ko! You should become a doctor, like your Uncle Rufi.”

They looked on, nervous. Your clothes hide the bruises, the burns, the concavity of your stomach, but after a minute, your parents led her away lest you were to say something you weren’t supposed to. They needn’t have worried. You don’t speak up because you know help would not come.

Back to the fridge. There’s not much there—a few small, bony fried fish, a stick of butter, a quart of milk gone sour. Milk makes your stomach hurt, but your parents say you’re ungrateful when you don’t want to drink it.

The butter looks appetizing, its surface smooth and creamy. But leave it alone. Remember when you bit into a stick of butter? You were only five, so you couldn’t help yourself. Its cold greasiness coated the inside of your mouth, making you gag. Your parents thought it was funny that you left teeth marks in the butter.

Grab a stack of crackers and crumble them into a bowl. From the fridge, take out bottles of ketchup, mustard and relish; they will create the sweet and savory glue for your after-school snack: a condiment sandwich. If you have hot sauce, add it. Mix well. Whatever you do, don’t add your parents’ homemade bagoong, so salty it makes your eyes water.

Toast the bread but don’t use the oven. It still smells gamey from the goat. Spoon the crunchy mixture onto two slices of bread and dig in, preferably while watching Little House on the Prairie, a TV show you love because it’s about a pioneer family that doesn’t have much but always has enough to eat. Remember to clean up the kitchen and sweep away all crumbs.

When there is no food, you turn to books. You read hungrily. Voraciously. About buckwheat pancakes and apple pie with cheese in Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Seed cakes and lamb chops in David Copperfield. Salted peanuts and jelly beans in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. These passages feed you.

You read so much that your high SAT scores help you win a scholarship at a liberal arts college 1,500 miles away. Your parents become reduced to faint, staticky voices on your monthly phone calls back home.

You will be eighteen, in your first semester, when you eat three square meals a day for the first time in your life. Your friends like to complain about the food in the cafeteria: the overbaked lasagna, the vats of cream of broccoli soup, the sunny-side up eggs gone rubbery from the heating lamps. But you love all of it. Your stomach no longer hurts and the dark circles under your eyes disappear. And that headache you’ve had for as long as you can remember? Gone.

The other day, when your roommate found your emergency box of Ritz crackers hidden in your dorm room desk, you fought the urge to snatch it back. When she squirted Cheez Whiz on the crackers and ate them one by one, you just watched, fascinated, realizing that, actually, you hate Ritz crackers.

Today is Taco Tuesday. Tuesdays are always Taco Tuesday. On Fridays, it’s fish fingers and Sundays it’s fried chicken and pecan pie. You find the repetition and mundanity comforting. You never wonder when your next meal will be or where it will come from.

You look down at your overfilled plate and when your friends say grace before eating, clutching your fingers a little too hard in their midwestern Christian fervor, you too give thanks even though you do not believe in God.

Rhea Borja is a musician, writer, and non-profit communications and marketing director. A fellow in the Lighthouse Writers Book Project, she is writing a memoir on the influence of music on her immigrant childhood. She has also participated in the Community of Writers non-fiction workshop (2023) and the Rooted & Written conference by The Writers Grotto, San Francisco (2022). A former journalist, her news and feature bylines have appeared in The Washington Post, Education Week, and AARP.org, among other media outlets. She and her family live in Southern California. This is her debut as a memoirist. www.rheaborja.com.