Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  The superstitious dread was soon gone but the guilt of secret exultation, not so easily vanquished, returned again and again. ‘I’m free! I’m free!’ continued the inward cry, and she continued to beat it down as a shameful truth that must ever be hidden from sight. ‘If I ever became a writer,’ she thought, ‘I could write at length about a woman’s journey of guilt.’ Women had an enormous capacity for hate and revenge, also for triumph and exultation, and most of all, guilt. Did it have to do with her biology that wracked her body with the anxieties of child-bearing and child-nurturing, or her culture that instilled in her, from the start, the imperative of duty to everyone but herself?

  The most frightening image, from a Chinese comic strip that someone had given her as a child, was of a pregnant woman who had gone mad with rage as she roamed the land, looking for her faithless lover, finally killing her newborn and dying in a frenzy of guilt and sorrow.

  She had a close childhood friend named Emily who often called her on the phone to sob out the latest cruelty of a callous, philandering husband. One day Emily invited her for lunch, for the sole purpose of revealing yet another of the cruelties: secretly going through her husband’s briefcase, she had discovered the receipt for a very expensive diamond pendant from a shop in Hong Kong. In the ten years of their marriage, she said, the angry tears filling her eyes, he had never bought her even the tiniest piece of jewellery. Moreover, she suspected him of siphoning away a large part of the profits from the sale of some jointly-owned shares in the stock market. As divorce became the most likely solution to end her misery, she mobilised the support of lawyer and accountant friends who could advise her on how to get the best out of a financial settlement, how to pre-empt possible cunning ploys by her husband and best of all, how to come up with some of her own.

  Miss Seetoh’s help was co-opted for an intricate scheme of pre-emption she hardly understood but sympathetically cooperated in. She cheerfully put her signature as witness in an elaborately worded legal document, to prevent the devious husband from laying his hands on a joint property. Her adopted brother Heng, ever savvy about money matters, was aghast. ‘You stood guarantor for something involving hundreds of thousands of dollars? You could lose everything, you know, including what is not yours!’ He was referring to the four-room flat owned by their mother which would go to both of them upon her death.

  Money, money, money – it became the irreducible, rock-bottom reality, the ultimate bargaining chip of husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings, best friends. There were regular reports in the newspapers of family members suing each other over property, the increasing number of cases correlating perfectly with the rise in property prices. ‘You want to know what makes a woman stay in a marriage?’ said a friend, and she demonstrated with the expert rubbing of middle finger and thumb against each other, the universal language of the miser, the usurer, the profiteer. Miss Seetoh thought sadly, if only money were the real problem in her marriage.

  Over steaming beef noodles in the open air café, Emily launched the bitterest tirade yet against her husband who she now suspected of having set up an apartment in London for his mistress, a former airline stewardess who, Emily had found out, was formerly the mistress of a Brunei oil tycoon. Suddenly she paused, her chopsticks suspended in her hands, to listen to the drone of a plane overhead. She listened intently for some seconds and said slowly, ‘If that’s his plane on the way to London to visit his mistress, here’s a wish: may it crash this instant!’ Miss Seetoh stared in horror at the look of grim relish on the tear-stained face already raised to witness the fiery plunge from the sky.

  And from that moment her guilt was assuaged: never had any wish to be free of her husband included, or could ever include, the wish for his death. Not even injury of any kind. It was just a general wish to be free of her marriage, as understandable as a child’s wish to be free of over-strict parents, a student’s wish to quickly graduate to the next level and be free of an unreasonable teacher. That terrible image of the aboriginal chief’s curse in the rain, of the woman conjuring help from a ghost in a cemetery, would never disturb her again.

  ‘Maria, what are you doing?’ cried her mother in alarm. It was odd that her mother, witnessing a clear return of good spirits so soon after her husband’s death, should worry about her each time she locked herself in her room. ‘Maria, I smell smoke! Open the door at once!’

  It was only the burning smell of Maggie’s tantalising band of paper, now curled around the rim of a basin. Maria Seetoh watched with a little frisson of wonder as the small flame crept through the first half of the band, leaving a tiny pile of black ashes, and then most unaccountably fizzled to a halt at the second, leaving it intact and whole, surely a foretaste of her new life.

  Five

  Neither marital curse nor vengeance, thank goodness, had been part of their world; it was too civilised to permit even the raised voice, the crude invective. The husband’s clenched fist, the wife’s desperate attempts to avoid it and hide her bruised eyes behind dark sunglasses the next day – these would have been both alien and alienating to the world they inhabited. They were the perfect couple, he the epitome of gentlemanly courteousness and gallantry, and she of wifely gentleness and docility. They were said to be inseparable, the ultimate tribute to marital commitment.

  The word had a bitter flavour for her. For he expected her to be with him everywhere he went; her physical presence by his side was for him a solid reminder of his control, for her of her subjugation. He liked her to hold his arm or hand tightly, to reinforce the reminder. Her husband had obeyed, with perfect literalness, holy matrimony’s call to continue to be joined in one flesh beyond the marital bed. If she got her artistic student to do a cartoon of them, it would probably have the dark humour of painfully conjoined twins. Bondage, not bonding. Marriage, mirage.

  As he waved to this or that friend in greeting, as he nodded to this or that fellow churchgoer in Christian solidarity, he exuded husbandly pride. A mere inch taller than herself, he towered with proprietorial satisfaction. If I wrote a book of short stories about married couples, she thought, there would be several on the Owning Husband. In one, the Owning Husband itemised his ownership: these beautiful eyes are to look at me only, these delicate hands are to do my bidding only, these beautiful breasts... In another, the Owning Husband staked his ownership in a roundabout way: see these beautiful jewels that belong to my wife? Well, the diamond earrings were a reward for her obedience, the jade pendant for her...

  There would be at least one story about the Trophy Wife. The Trophy Wife cried out, ‘Hey, I’m alive, proud warts and all. I’m not to be burnished and polished to perfection!’ The Trophy Wife cast gracious smiles all round but looked surreptitiously at her watch to see how soon each loathed outing by her husband’s side would end, and she could retire, even if for a short while, to her private world.

  He invaded it relentlessly. ‘Maria, where are you?’

  He made the maid look for her. He would pick up one book after another, from her private store, and read out the titles slowly and deliberately, making a show of mispronouncing the polysyllabic words. Pe-dah-go-jeee, nooro-psycho-lor-jeee, fun-day-mental phi-lor-so-pheee. Each book, taking time away from him, became an adversary. He knew about her secret longing to return to the university, to do a postgraduate course. Intellectual superiority was wifely treason. ‘Just what are you trying to prove?’ She hated the question, loaded with suppressed hostility, unrelieved by the slightest sense of teasing fun, as much as she hated his response when she tried to tell him what each of the books was about: ‘So what do you hope to accomplish with these earth-shaking, world-shattering ideas?’

  Either by nature or a sedulously cultivated seriousness, he was incapable of humour, except the biting, cynical kind.

  He found a letter from a publisher politely declining her request to take a look at her collection of short stories. Refraining from open ridicule, he again asked, in a measured tone: ‘Just what are you try
ing to prove?’ Any attempt at a life outside his wishes was an intolerable defiance of those wishes.

  Explanation or, worse, argument and protestation, would shatter the already fragile atmosphere, requiring an incredibly long time and an unbearably huge expenditure of energy to start picking up the pieces, one by one. There were no small children for whom, for the sake of a peaceful atmosphere, women readily opted for calm and stoical submission. She had a girlfriend, an extremely intelligent and perceptive woman, who stayed silent through her husband’s wild, noisy rantings when drunk and cold, harsh criticisms when sober, for the sake of their four children, aged ten to two.

  The modern woman’s quandary was more acute than her mother’s, or her grandmother’s, because being in the ambiguous transition stage between the oppressions of the past and the uncertain hopes of the future, she bore the brunt of both.

  More than for herself, the peace had to be maintained for Por Por, her mother and the maid Rosiah, three nervous women in the house, tiptoeing around his dark moods, looking to her for clues as to what to do next. They had to be protected from the fear, which, like a creeping, strangling miasma spread to every corner of the house.

  Sometimes the strategy of silence paid off, actually eliciting a sheepish kind of guilt from him. Incapable of saying sorry, he would fidget around her a little, trying to make small talk which she ignored. The worst possible exercise of reparation was a spree of expensive dining and purposeless shopping, ending, as soon as they returned home, with a wild bout of love-making. A man of small mind and large, extravagant gestures alternating between the coldness of the first and the intensity of the second, completely bereft of humour’s saving grace, he had, from the very start of their marriage, shriveled up all her creative energies.

  Thankfully, these could be brought back to life in her classroom. She once read an article in an educational magazine about overzealous teachers forgetting the real needs of their students; it had the very captivating title ‘The Geranium on the Window-Sill Died, but Teacher, You Went Right on Talking!’ The geranium on the window sill of her awful marriage would do its own watering and never allow itself to shrivel.

  There had been a single fearful moment when that almost happened. When her husband one day said, very casually, about two years into their marriage, ‘Dear, there’s something maybe we ought to talk about,’ her own suspicions were sharpened into the quivering alertness of a small animal poised for fight or flight.

  For some time she had known it was coming. I want you to quit your teaching job. He left the second part of his wish unuttered. So that you can stay at home and concentrate on being a good wife to me. There had been a long preamble about how he was expecting a promotion on the recommendation of

  Dr Phang, and they would be able to live on his salary, also about how Dr Phang’s cousin’s wife who was a bank executive readily gave up her job to have more time for her husband. Then he delivered the coup de grâce. With your being so busy at your job, how can you have a baby? Her first reaction was an inward screaming protest, for to all the oppressions of her marriage would be added the supreme one of financial dependence, translated into the daily humiliation of stretching out her hand for money to go shopping for groceries, to pay the maid, to buy things for her mother and Por Por, to go for the occasional lunch with her friends.

  Without a word, she rushed to the bathroom, locked the door, stood in front of the mirror, stared at the pale, stricken face staring back, and then fell into uncontrollable sobbing. It was a kind of wrenching, wracking misery that she had never experienced before. She was aware of her husband pacing the floor outside the locked door, of his saying, ‘Come out, there’s no need for all that.’ Apparently shocked at her reaction, he never raised the subject again. That night, he made a few attempts to caress her body which was resolutely turned away from him. She longed to go to the spare bedroom, but that further act of defiance would create its own storm of discord which she simply would not have the energy to handle. She had done it once, not daring to lock the door; he had appeared in the middle of the night, a dark austere figure in the doorway, and she had got up and returned silently to their bedroom. In a comfortable, well-appointed apartment that he had specifically taken out a huge loan to buy for her after marriage, the old yearning was still there: if only I had a bed of my own, a room of my own, a house of my own.

  She remembered a scene in a movie in which a weary wife, asked what she liked best about her husband, had replied promptly, ‘His absence.’

  The witticism had at the time amused her greatly, and was readily shared with girlfriends. Later, in the quiet of her reflections, she saw the serious side of the ontological absurdity as it applied to her own situation: her husband’s absence from home for a weekend, on a trip with his boss for a conference in Jakarta, was a reality all its own, claiming its own existence and presence. In her imagination, the welcome absence became a solid gift, a magnificent ang pow of unending cash, enclosed in the brightest of red gift paper, that she could spend as she liked.

  On the happiest spending spree in her life, she returned to the long girlhood walks in the Botanic Gardens, which he never allowed her to visit unless in his company, read for long hours curled up on the large king-size bed now all her own, and, best of all, made an appointment with the reluctant publisher to try to make him change his mind. She made the phone call for the appointment from Emily’s house, just in case the maid or her mother let slip the information in her husband’s hearing, and there was the whole tedious explanation to go through afterwards. The rare joy of the weekend only emphasised the oppression of the days ahead. I’m not sure I can continue living like this, she thought miserably. The Catholic woman, enjoined to live with her husband till death did them part, could be condemned to a death-like existence till the end of her days.

  As a child she had hated the temple visits that Por Por had forced upon her, and the endless visits with her mother during the Chinese New Year season to the homes of relatives she had never seen before, stiff in a ridiculous dress of lace and ruffles that her mother had made on an old sewing machine, with large pockets to receive the New Year ang pows which she promptly handed to her mother as soon as they got home, before Heng, even then already on the look-out for gain, could lay his hands on them. In a fit of bad temper, she would, halfway down the road, abruptly remove her hand from Por Por’s or drag her feet along the ground as she walked beside her mother. Sometimes she sat down resolutely on the ground and refused to get up. Her mother would jab her forehead with a forefinger screaming, ‘Why are you like that? Do you want to end up like Por Por?’

  Por Por who was born and brought up in China was the black sheep who was now paying, with her dreadful premature dementia, for her sins of rebelliousness: there were whispers of her once running away from home to hide in a temple. In a long line of docile females going back to the ancestral country, the bad trait had surfaced in one member, skipped a generation and was now threatening to show itself again. Her mother said, as she would say many times, ‘Why can’t you be like others? Why are you so difficult?’ A warm affinity with Por Por would grow with the years.

  The reluctance and hatred were multiplied a hundredfold in the forced visits to his office parties, the lunches given by his boss, the visits to the hospital for his regular health checks, the Bible study classes he conducted, where she sat at the back, squirming at his poor presentation and feeling sorry for him because of the humiliatingly small attendance of four, then two and finally one. It would be too much of an ignominy for him to learn from her some of the skills she had honed to perfection in the classroom. It was a draining, not cleansing pity, and she wanted to run away and never come back. She had kept alive the girlhood hero of her imagination: a paragon of strength, intelligence, high-mindedness, courage and charm, he inspired breathless admiration and respect, never shamefaced pity and embarrassment.

  In a roomful of people, she was aware of her husband looking around for her, of his suddenly loo
king very alert whenever he caught her in conversation with a man. ‘How he loves you,’ laughed one of her friends at a party. ‘My husband won’t even notice if I go off home on my own now!’

  Love carried its own burden of insecurities. He had won her in marriage at great cost, and he intended that she should pay for it.

  St Peter’s School with its Christian strictures should be reassuring even to the most jealous husband, but her many hours there gave rise to any number of anxieties about what she could be doing out of his sight.

  She had once, in playful banter very early on in their marriage, told him about her enormous charm, if the students were right, for Mr Chin, the maths teacher, and Brother Philip, the moral education teacher, for indeed, she herself was beginning to notice the many excuses each made to talk to her. In the midst of a chuckle, she realised her mistake. She stopped, suddenly looking very foolish, as she avoided the eyes now narrowing in disapproval and the lips tightening in angry silence. With forced jocularity, she went on to talk about something else. It had been a disastrous blunder, calling for the greatest care in its repair. She continued chatting about inconsequential things, she asked if he wanted his favourite Japanese tea, she made a few desultory inquiries about his revered boss, the high-achieving Dr Phang, who he once told her with undisguised awe, was being considered by the Deputy Prime Minister to join the party and run in the next general elections. Even that subject failed to draw him out of the sullen silence. She was aware, with a sickening feeling, of her small voice now reduced to helpless silence against the chill wall of his displeasure. The silence continued and she made a mental note never to mention any of her male colleagues at St Peter’s again.