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On my grandmother’s tukador there was an Avon blush-on compact, a jar of Pond’s Vanishing Cream, a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder, an Ever Bilena lipstick in a gold tube, a saucer of hairpins, and a rosary whose beads had darkened from the oil of her fingers.

The lipstick had its own authority. She wore it only for Mass, funerals, and visits from priests. But it was the blush I loved most. It came in a small red plastic case with a mirror inside the lid and a brush so thin it scratched more than it softened. The color had been worn down into a shallow crescent. Around the edges the pink powder had gathered into little hills.

My grandmother called it kolorete.

The tukador stood by the window in the room she shared with no one. My grandfather had died before I was old enough to remember him, though in our house he remained in photographs, in stories, and in drawers that were still not opened. The mirror had black spots at the corners. Tucked into the frame were two prayer cards: the Virgin in blue, with her eyes lowered, and the Holy Child with one hand raised in blessing, his cheeks painted pink.

I did not think of this then. I only knew that the Child looked prepared.

My grandmother readied herself every Sunday before Mass. She was a prominent woman in the parish, though nobody in Buenavista would have used that phrase. They said she was active in the church. They said she helped Father Dennis with the flowers. They said she led the Rosary when the woman assigned that week had a cough or a dead relative. They said she knew which family had not given enough during the last collection, which lector swallowed her words, which widow had shortened her skirt too soon after burial. She was called devout by people who meant obedient.

She had her place in Holy Child Parish Church because she had sat there for so many years no one would have dared take it. Third pew from the front, left side, near the aisle. Close enough for Father Dennis to see her. Far enough that no one could accuse her of display.

Every Sunday she rose before the first tricycles rattled onto the road. I would wake to the sound of the tabo in the bathroom, the scrape of her slippers, the soft slap of water. By the time I came to the bedroom door, she would already be seated at the tukador in her half-slip and blouse, her wet hair pinned away from her face.

She followed the same order each time. Cream first, rubbed upward with two fingers. Powder, tapped into the palm, then pressed at the nose, the chin, the forehead. Her brows darkened with a pencil she sharpened with a small knife. Then the kolorete. She would tap the brush against the compact twice, never once, never three times, and sweep the color high on each cheek, not on the round part, where I would have put it, but slightly under the bone.

“Para may buhay,” she once said.

The lipstick came last. Earrings after lipstick. Rosary only after earrings.

“The face has to know itself first,” she told me.

I believed her.

I was seven, or near enough. In some versions I was six. In one version, told by my mother years later to a cousin in Lucena, I was already eight, old enough to know better. That was how she put it. Old enough to know better. My grandmother never corrected her. She was dead by then.

What I remember is smaller. I remember the heat in the room though the window was open, and the rooster that made a sound like a rusty hinge. My white shirt was on the chair, my shorts folded beside it. My grandmother had gone to the kitchen to speak to the woman who brought suman on Sundays, or to check the envelopes for the church, or to scold my aunt for leaving the good basin outside. I do not know exactly. In my memory, she leaves because she must.

I went to the tukador.

This is where people later improved the story. They said I climbed onto the chair with purpose. They said I opened every drawer. They said I put on lipstick like a woman in a movie. None of that is true, or not true in the way they meant it. I did not yet have a purpose. I had only attention. I had watched my grandmother’s hands for so many Sundays that my own hands believed they knew the order.

The blush-on compact was already open.

This may also be false. I may have opened it myself. But I remember it open, the little mirror catching the white square of the window, the pink cake waiting in its pan. The brush lay across it.

I picked it up. It smelled of powder and, underneath, something sweet. I held it to my face longer than necessary. The brush was not soft. It scratched my cheek. I had seen my grandmother sweep upward, but my hand went in a circle. The color appeared all at once, a bright round patch, too low, too near the mouth. I did the other cheek and made it worse. That cheek came out larger. I leaned toward the mirror and smiled to see if the two sides would become equal when I smiled.

They did not.

I should have stopped there. I knew enough to stop. Instead, I touched the lipstick.

I did not use it. The town remembered the lipstick because the lipstick made a better story. The women at the water pump said lipstick. The men outside the sari-sari store said lipstick, in a way that made the word sound dirty. A girl who had not been born yet would tell me years later, in Manila, that her mother remembered me with a red mouth. I let her say it.

There may have been lipstick on my thumb. That was all.

The door moved behind me.

I saw my grandmother in the mirror before I turned. She stood in the doorway wearing her cream blouse and black skirt, her hair still in pins, one earring on, one earring missing. She had the envelope purse under her arm. Her mouth was bare. Without lipstick, she looked unfinished.

I was holding the gold tube. Neither of us spoke.

I remember the brush in my left hand, the lipstick in my right, my cheeks beginning to itch where I had rubbed the powder too hard. I thought she was looking at the lipstick.

She was not.

Or perhaps she was. I only know that her eyes moved from my hands to my face and from my face to the mirror. Her expression did not change. She did not have to speak. In the parish office women lowered their voices when she entered. At wakes children stopped playing cards. Even Father Dennis, I once saw, removed a cigarette from his mouth when she came into the yard.

She crossed the room.

I began to cry, but quietly. She took the lipstick from me first. She closed it and placed it beside the compact. Then she took the brush.

“Not like that,” she said.

She sat on the chair and pulled me between her knees. She took my chin in her left hand and turned my face toward the light. This close, I could see the lines beside her mouth and the brow she had drawn darker than it was. Her eyes were on my cheek.

“You put it where people will slap you,” she said.

I did not understand.

She dipped the brush into the compact, tapped it twice against the side, and blew once, softly, so that a pink dust lifted and disappeared. Her breath smelled of coffee. Her fingers smelled of Pond’s cream and the coins she kept in her purse for the collection.

“Too low,” she said.

With the corner of a handkerchief, she wiped one cheek, then the other. The cloth came away pink. My skin burned under it. She did not apologize.

She began again.

This time she held the brush lightly. She swept the color up, not around. Up and away. She leaned back. She turned my chin slightly. She did not smile.

“Again,” she said and gave me the brush.

My hand shook.

“Not too hard. You’re not painting a wall.”

I tried. The brush scratched. The color barely showed.

“Better,” she said.

I leaned toward the mirror and turned my face from side to side.

She opened the jar of Pond’s and put the smallest amount on her finger.

“Here,” she said, touching the dry place under my eye. “Powder catches if the skin is thirsty.”

Outside someone called her name from the road. She did not answer. The church bell had not yet rung, but the morning had begun to gather itself toward Mass. You could feel it in the houses: windows closing, children being slapped into clean shirts, the dry rustle of fans taken from drawers. Sunday in Buenavista did not arrive all at once. It was assembled.

My grandmother powdered my face. Not all of it. Only where the color had been ruined and restored. She did not make me pale. She knew better than that.

Then she took the lipstick and considered it. I remember this consideration more clearly than anything. The lipstick stood between us. It was a small thing, the length of her finger, but the room changed around it. Blush could still be explained. Powder could be explained. A boy’s cheeks could have color. A child could be made neat, lively, charming, ridiculous. Lipstick was another country.

She opened it.

The red-brown point had been worn into a sharp slope from the pressure of her mouth. She touched the lipstick to her own mouth first. One stroke on the lower lip, one on the upper. Pressed together. Blotted with the same handkerchief. Then, with what remained on her little finger, she touched the center of my lower lip.

“Do not lick it,” she said.

She put on her missing earring. She took her black veil from the drawer and pinned it to her hair. She gave me my shirt and shorts and turned her back while I dressed, though I was still young enough that she did not need to.

When she turned again, she examined me from my hair to my shoes.

“You will walk properly,” she said.

“Yes, Lola.”

“You will not hide your face.”

“No, Lola.”

“If someone greets you, you greet them.”

“Yes, Lola.”

“If someone laughs, you do not answer.”

I looked at her then.

She was putting the rosary into her purse. The beads clicked once against the compact. Her mouth was firm. The color on her cheeks was the same color as mine. On her it belonged to the face. On me it sat on top.

“If someone laughs,” she said again, “you let me hear it.”

We left by the front door.

Our house was close enough to the church that on clear mornings the bell seemed to strike the roof. I knew the road by the dogs under the steps, the stones near the ditch, and the people who sat in the same places every day. There was a house with open capiz windows and flowers on the sill. I cannot remember what kind. Below the windows, through the ventanilla slats, you could see a rocking chair that was always empty.

The first person to see us was Aling Siony, who sold pan de sal from a glass case and had a son in Manila who sent home towels from hotels. She was sweeping the road in front of her house with a walis tingting. When she saw my grandmother, she lifted the broom in greeting.

“Mass, Manang?”

Then she saw me.

The broom stopped.

My grandmother said, “Mass.”

Nothing more.

Aling Siony looked at my face for one second too long. It may have been less. Then she looked at my grandmother’s face and lowered the broom.

“You’re early,” she said.

“God is not late,” my grandmother said.

“Right,” Aling Siony said to no one. “Of course.”

She began to sweep again, harder than before.

We walked on.

At the corner a tricycle slowed. Two boys in the sidecar turned around until their mother pulled their ears. A man outside the store looked at my face, then bent to straighten the cases of soft drinks already lined against the wall. At the window of a house with blue shutters, a girl I knew from catechism stared at me with her mouth open.

I remember wanting to cover my cheeks with both hands. I remember not doing it because my grandmother had told me not to hide.

My grandmother’s hand found mine. She did not squeeze. She only took my hand as if she had meant to take it all along.

By the time we reached the churchyard, the bell was ringing. The churchyard was already full. Women closed umbrellas, though there had been no rain. Men smoked near the gate and killed their cigarettes when they saw my grandmother. Children in white shirts chased each other among the legs of adults until they were caught and combed with fingers.

Near the steps three women from the parish committee were waiting in navy dresses with white collars and white cuffs at the sleeves. Each wore a small pin at the throat. One held a folded sheet of paper against her skirt. I knew them as women who stood near doors, who knew where flowers had been placed and which envelopes had been returned empty. Their names came later, attached to illnesses, debts, marriages, and one scandal involving a raffle prize. That morning they were the women who stood between us and the door.

One of them said my grandmother’s name and made it sound like a question.

My grandmother stopped. She still held my hand.

“This is my grandson,” she said, though they knew who I was.

“He will sit with me,” she said.

The women moved.

That is the part I trust least in memory because it is the part I need most. Did they step aside at once? Did one of them smile? Did one make the sign of the cross? Did my grandmother stare at them until they moved? I cannot say. I know only that we entered.

Inside, the church smelled of wax and sampaguita. Women filled the pews around us, bringing the different perfumes they had put on for Mass. Two candles burned near the altar. The Holy Child wore red and gold. His cheeks were pink. His mouth was small and bright. I looked at him, then at the floor.

My grandmother did not take the side aisle. She walked down the center.

This, too, became part of the story. Some said she did it to challenge them. Some said she had always used the center aisle and saw no reason to change.

We reached her pew.

A woman sitting at the end moved inward so quickly her fan dropped. I bent to pick it up. When I handed it to her, she looked at my cheeks, then at the fan, then at my grandmother.

“Salamat,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” my grandmother answered for me.

She sat. I sat beside her. She opened her purse and took out her rosary, her handkerchief, and the church envelope. The compact came out with them by mistake and lay for a moment on the polished wood of the pew, its plastic lid showing a crescent of pink dust at the hinge. My grandmother looked at it. So did I.

Then she put it back.

Mass began.

I remember nothing of the readings. I stood when she stood, knelt when she knelt, sat when she sat. My knees were hot against the wood. My shirt stuck to my back. I wanted to touch my mouth and did not touch it. Behind us an old woman began to whisper. My grandmother turned her head slightly. Only slightly. It was enough.

At the Sign of Peace, my grandmother turned to me first.

“Peace,” she said.

Her hand was dry and cool.

Then she turned to the woman beside her, then to the woman behind us, then across the aisle. She offered peace to each of them. People took her hand. They had to.

When it was time for Communion, my grandmother rose and stepped into the aisle. I rose with her, though I had not yet made my First Communion and could not receive. She placed her hand on my shoulder and guided me forward.

The line was long. It moved one body at a time. The sacristan stood beside Father Dennis, lifting the paten under each chin. When he saw me, his eyes moved to my grandmother.

My grandmother’s hand stayed on my shoulder.

When we reached Father Dennis, he lifted the host in front of her and said the words. His eyes stayed on my grandmother’s face. Then, for one second, on mine.

My grandmother opened her mouth and received on the tongue.

The sacristan held the paten steady.

I stood beside her, close enough to see the lipstick faded at the center of her mouth. Her eyes were lowered. Her face did not change.

Father Dennis moved his hand toward the ciborium again.

My grandmother turned me gently by the shoulder, and we walked back to the pew.

At the pew, she knelt. I knelt beside her. I tried to pray but could think only of my cheeks. I imagined the color still there.

After Mass she did not hurry.

She remained in the pew until the aisle cleared. She folded her veil and returned the rosary to her purse. She took out her handkerchief and touched first her mouth, then mine. The cloth came away with the faintest mark. It wasn’t red. Not even pink exactly.

In the churchyard, the women were waiting without appearing to wait. Men stood near the gate. Children stared openly now.

My grandmother spoke to everyone.

She asked about a fever. She reminded someone about flowers for Wednesday. She told a man his mother needed visiting. She corrected a girl’s veil. She received praise for the altar arrangement and rejected it because the lilies had opened too soon. I stood beside her with the color still high on my cheeks.

No one asked.

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Years later people told the story as if it had happened to them. One woman said my grandmother had painted me fully, lips and all, and marched me to the altar. My mother said she had known from the beginning that I was different, which was not true.

The version I believe least is the kindest one. That she smiled at me in the street, and I smiled back and walked confidently beside her. I do not think it happened that way. It does not matter that it didn’t.

 

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ALFRED LUARCA is a Filipino writer and art director based in Denmark, where he lives with his husband. His fiction has appeared in Rooted Literary Magazine, AC|DC Journal, and Broad Ripple Review, with work forthcoming elsewhere. He received an Honorable Mention in Booth’s inaugural Susan Neville Prize in Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2026 Edinburgh Writing Awards. He studies creative writing at the International Writer’s Collective in Amsterdam and is working on a short story collection. Find him on Instagram @johnluarca.

Featured image by Laura Rivera, courtesy of Unsplash.