Maid To Love

Maid To Love

- Jinny Koh

Recently, my sister texted me a photo she had taken on a train in Singapore.

“Do you think that’s Beth?” she wrote. I held my breath and waited for the image to load. The last time I saw Beth was at the airport ten years ago when we sent her back home. Her face, showing signs of aging, was streaked with tears as she waved goodbye from behind the departure gates. I squinted at my cell phone screen. The woman in the photo had the same thick black hair, olive skin and wide smile. For a moment, hope rose.

Then it fluttered away. The woman’s proportions were slightly off—the forehead was too high, the nose too long. Most of all, she looked too young. I texted my sister, “No, that’s not her.”

Beth was the maid my parents had hired to live with us when I was three. Her name was Elizabeth Alvaro and she was from the Philippines. She had introduced herself as “Beth” for short, but because of her accent, it came out as “Bird” so that was what we called her. She was twenty-seven, only a couple of years younger than my mother.

Beth took care of my sister and me while my parents were at work. She knew and cooked my favorite foods: spaghetti Bolognese, egg salad sandwiches and fried eggplant dipped in dark soy sauce. Once, it took her half an hour to cajole five-year-old me into the shower because I couldn’t stop crying after seeing earthworms that rainy day. I was afraid they had found their way into my bathroom. She slept on a mattress on the floor beside my bed, and would hold my hand whenever I was too frightened to sleep after watching The Swamp Thing on television.

“Bird! Bird!” I would call out to her in the dark.“I’m scared.” Sometimes, it took a few tries before she woke up. She knew what I needed without asking and, with a grunt, would throw her hand up like a life buoy. And just like that, I felt comforted.