Ministry of Moral Panic
Page 16
They’d spent so much of their life avoiding each other’s family members, it was difficult being in the same room. It had never been conclusive, whether their Chinese-educated parents, both sets in their seventies by this point, understood the relations between Arlene and Nelly. Flatmates and childhood friends, they would say. Arlene’s sister, seven years younger, duly married in her early twenties, had eased the pressure valve on Arlene when she delivered twin boys. The old woman’s face was crumpled, the old man holding a trembling arm around her. No one spoke to Nelly. She excused herself to the bathroom, pulling down the lid of the WC and sitting there, wiping her eyes with toilet paper.
When she came back out, she saw the anguished huddle before the operating room, Arlene’s mother clutching her husband for support. From afar, she saw the doctor shaking his head; Arlene’s mother crumpling. Nelly’s legs were giving way as she joined up, her movements mechanical. The doctor, in scrubs, was explaining the terminal condition and the complications in the surgery to Arlene’s family.
I want to see her, Nelly said in a flat tone, splicing through Arlene’s mother’s sobs and the doctor’s jargon. They turned to her in silent surprise. Arlene’s sister was the first to regain her composure, snapping: How come you didn’t know anything was wrong with her! You see her every day! The doctor was holding up his hands as if to say, I’m done here. He was untucking his shirt, gesturing to an attendant nurse to take over.
Was there a specific moment when, indeed, Nelly should have known that something was wrong?
Before they got into the kidney-shaped pool in the Galápagos, they were reclining in deck chairs, soaking up the Carribean sun. For once, Nelly wasn’t obsessively reapplying sunblock to her pigmentation spot, or angling her visor to shield the most of her face. They were languid and laughing when Arlene said, I could die happy here, right now. Nelly looked over at Arlene and said: I wish we never had to leave.
What if we didn’t?
You can’t be serious.
Well, what if?
We’d need jobs.
We could teach English here. Or sell I Love Boobies souvenir t-shirts on Avenue Charles Darwin.
I’m sure the paperwork and permits are more complicated than that.
Yes, but I’ve never been happier.
Me too, Nelly said, and then she splashed some water onto Arlene with her foot. Arlene bent over and tickled Nelly till she couldn’t breathe, they were both gasping with laughter, and then they went into the pool.
When Nelly thought back about it, she knew there was no point in blaming herself. These were things people said on holidays. What she did regret, though, was not asking Arlene what her bucket list was in turn, that evening at home on the couch.
The accompanying truth to this, though, was that, had she asked, Arlene would have told her that her—Nelly’s—bucket list was, in fact, her—Arlene’s—bucket list. That is to say, Arlene was happiest when she could service Nelly’s wants. Arlene was happiest when Nelly was happy.
What happened after Arlene died?
It took half a year.
For?
For Nelly to reconnect with her ex-husband. It started non-descript and easy, the ataraxia of email, progressing on to the natural gratification of catching up over coffee, once they’d both ascertained that the other was no longer with the alleged previous lover, for whatever reasons, a point of conversation they fudged copiously, complicit. It’d been seven and a half years; it was easy to let things slide, to find graceless yet intransigent comfort in that old, disenchanting familiarity. Nelly was fifty-three and her husband was fifty-five, neither held the illusion that they had better long-term options. Neither spoke about the gulf of the seven and a half years—Nelly kept mum about Arlene, and her ex-husband never once-mentioned the ex-mistress’s name. They regarded each other, from separate far ends of the impassable gulf, comfortably. They re-married in a quiet civil ceremony and remained childlessly, placidly together till the end of their days.
Why would anyone title this The Ballad of Arlene & Nelly?
They would do so for Arlene.
For Arlene?
The deaths—tiny ones, false ones, real ones—we undertake in the name of love are the closest that we ever come to greatness.
Amanda Lee Koe is a 2013 honorary fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program. She is the fiction editor of Esquire (Singapore), editor of creative non-fiction magazine POSKOD.SG, communications director at studioKALEIDO, and co-editor of the literary journal Ceriph. She co-edited Eastern Heathens, an anthology subverting Asian folklore. Her short fiction has been published in Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany and the United States.