She was looking at herself in the dressing-table mirror, surveying with a smile the lustrous hair shaken loose from the ponytail now curled upon her bare shoulders. In a school camping trip before her marriage, as she sat with colleagues and students around a campfire, Maggie, always seeking to create diversion, crept up behind her back, and suddenly removed the clip holding her ponytail, unloosing a mass of hair that tumbled on to her shoulders in further demonstration of her natural beauty. Everyone cheered and clapped, including Brother Philip. ‘Please, Miss Seetoh, leave it like this, you look so-oo sexy!’ cried Maggie, holding the clip out of her reach. There were some minutes of childish fun as the clip was passed from hand to hand. It ended in Brother Philip’s, and he returned it to her, laughing.
Her husband was standing at the doorway and looking at her. ‘I see you’re changing your hairstyle.’ Just what are you trying to prove. What is this all about. What is in your mind. You think I am stupid, don’t you. She hated the questions loaded with the biting sarcasm, born of the endless suspicions. She had no idea that the small casual reference to the putative admirers at St Peter’s just a few days ago was rankling so badly. ‘Has it anything to do with that admiring Mr Chin and Brother Philip?’ She made a mental note never again to refer to any acquaintance so long as it was a male.
Once she was late home from school by a full hour. When his calls home went unanswered, he rang the school, and had to call again because the school clerk said Mrs Tan could not be found.
When he got her at last, he said sternly, ‘Where were you? I called home three times and the school twice.’
She had had an urgent, unscheduled meeting regarding some national seminar that her students were taking part in, called at the last minute by Brother Philip who of course she could not mention. ‘Then you should have called me at the office to let me know,’ he said.
Professing an indifference to literature, he had saved some of her favourite literary quotations to throw back at her. She had tried to explain at length the reason for something she had done – something so trivial she had difficulty remembering it – and he had turned to her and said with a tight smile, ‘My, my, the lady doth protest too much!’ He had turned her beloved Bard from tonic to toxic.
Silence remained the best option. I live in fear of my husband’s daily displeasure, she thought miserably. What sort of life is this? I am truly dying. That night he made love to her as usual, briefly and sullenly, and without a word. Then he turned his back towards her and remained in that position through the night. The spare bedroom called, but she was tied down on the marital bed by a hundred cords of fear tightening by the day.
The next morning, as usual, he dressed carefully to go to the office, again not saying a word as they had breakfast together. He took only a few spoonfuls of the hot rice porridge that was their breakfast every morning.
‘Are you aware,’ he said slowly, stressing every syllable, as he stood up, and she knew that another paralysing chill was about to descend, ‘that for the last few months I have had exactly the same thing placed before me every morning?’ Another truth about her unfitness as a wife and homemaker confronted her. She thought, I’m glad I’m not a mother as well. Zero out of three in her report card would be irredeemable failure.
The rice porridge with the pickled leek, the fried anchovies and peanuts, favourite traditional breakfast fare going back through revered generations, was now a symbol of a wife’s shameful incompetence and worse, indifference. The preparation of the breakfast was the daily duty of Por Por who took on this one chore in the household with great pride, being incapable of everything else through increasing dementia. The rice porridge, like so many other absurdly small things in their marriage, had become yet one more occasion for marital discord.
She had almost wanted to scream at him: well, dammit, let us know what you want, instead of keeping silent these long weeks and then coming out with all the accusations! The angry words were swallowed back as soon as they formed on her tongue. It was no use. He was sure to respond by referring back to a time when he had mentioned this or that wish, and she had nodded, only to forget it promptly.
Trying to remember each act of disobedience as he dragged it up from his unforgiving memory, only added to the confusion and bumbling which gave the impression of culpability, so that in the end, she always fell back, exhausted, upon a heap of futile words.
The devoted Mr Chin had once managed to persuade her to accept a lift home. She asked to be dropped at a point well away from her house. Days after that, her husband had asked her very casually as they were getting ready for bed, ‘What were you doing on Kiam Hoot Road?’ and he mentioned the day and hour.
A little tremor of anxiety gripped her, as her memory sprang into rapid recall and remained blank. One of his friends must have seen her and casually told him. Her confused look and hesitant answer confirmed his suspicions, and he said curtly, ‘We’ll not talk any more about the matter.’ What are you implying, she screamed silently. It was always the uncompleted response, locked inside her throat, increasingly charged with bitter anger.
In a dream that night, she taunted him, ‘Yes, it was Brother Philip!’ He asked, ‘Did he do anything to you in the car?’ and she said even more tauntingly, ‘Of course he did.’ Brother Philip became Mr Chin who became the principal who melted into Tony Curtis, in a mocking phantasmagoria of suspected lovers from St Peter’s Secondary School. She woke up with a start, to see her sleeping husband beside her, and took care not to make the slightest noise or movement, for even in sleep, a possessing arm would be flung upon her body.
She had made the supreme mistake, one evening, of talking at length on the phone with Brother Philip. School business ended as soon as she reached home; no student had her phone number. The call, about a camping trip that Brother Philip was organising for some students and wanted to consult her about, was actually a welcome diversion. She was aware that her husband was not only listening, but observing her intently. She told herself: remember, keep a straight face, no laughter, no smiles, no sharing of witty jokes or student absurdities, only focused business talk.
He asked, as expected, when she put down the phone, ‘What was that all about?’ She told him.
‘Why on earth would anyone want to consult you on a camping trip to Indonesia?’ Sometimes the sarcasm was allowed to end, sometimes it became the trigger for a larger accusation. He said, without looking at her, ‘You know the truth? Let me tell you the truth. You are too preoccupied with your schoolwork, your creative writing, your reading all those clever books.’ Taking on a life of its own, each favoured activity loomed as a hateful rival. If she lovingly nurtured a little plant in a pot, it would become a rival too.
In remonstrance, she would say, ‘But –’ and immediately recoiled before the confronting chill of his resentment. He never let the anger get in the way of the unfailing soft voice and civil language, so that her mother, listening anxiously outside their locked door, would think with relief that they had made up and fallen asleep together. In measured tones, his glasses glinting ominously, he reminded her of her persistent dereliction of wifely duty, citing a dozen examples in addition to the porridge episode, that she could not even remember, and she would be silenced for the rest of the day, left to her own vexed thoughts.
The most carefully rehearsed rejoinder to the accusations would be stopped even before the opening word by the sheer weight of the cold anger as he stood in judgement before her.
‘I had specifically told you to make out a cheque to Third Aunt. That was ten days ago. She called this afternoon to say she hasn’t received it.’ But, but. But it’s a huge sum, more than we can afford! Besides, you didn’t make it very clear. You said if she were to ask again, and she never did, and so I – The large sums he was magnanimously dispensing to his relatives and the church charities were an alarming strain on their joint, by no means substantial income.
Her friend Emily had said, ‘Every family has its parasites; you c
an be thankful you have only his Third Aunt in Malaysia.’ Not particularly interested in money matters, she was aware that they were spending beyond their means.
Her brother Heng, who tactlessly pried into her finances, had advised her more than once, ‘Have a separate bank account, your own money. You never know.’ He added, ‘Ah Siong is not a gambler or a womaniser, but he likes to act like a big shot, treating his friends and colleagues to dinners and drinks in fancy restaurants. How much do you manage to save a month, the two of you, without any children? Tell him you want to start your own account. I can get my bank manager to get you the best terms.’
He was involved in some businesses which he never spoke about except when he made money, just as he remained uncommunicative about his wife and young son who lived with his in-laws in Malaysia. Their mother had once mentioned that the boy was ‘not well’, then gestured with finger against lip that no more was to be said or asked about the matter.
Heng called a few days later to find out if she had taken his advice about setting up her own personal bank account. She hadn’t. ‘Well, don’t blame me if anything happens.’ His responses to his sister’s failure to act upon his advice ranged from a resigned ‘I tried my best’ to an angry ‘well, I wash my hands off you!’
It would be impossible for her to broach the sensitive subject of money with her husband, for his questions, always charged with suspicions, would escalate into a full inquisition that would wear her out.
It was simply amazing – the gap between the outward docility and the inward rage. She lived in a double-truth world. If one day I should write the story of my life, she thought, as she took out her husband’s shoes to polish, hating their very sight. She had been doing the daily polishing since he told her the maid didn’t do it properly. I never asked you, he would have protested. But you expected it, and would have sulked if I didn’t, she would have replied. There you are, unwilling to do such a little thing for your husband. You forget the many things I have done for you. Oh? Just name me one. Just one, he would have sneered. You are a heartless bastard, she would have sneered back.
Imaginary arguments went on in her head, endlessly, sometimes continuing into her dreams, because real ones were no longer possible. Imagination, wit, a sense of humour – all were sorely needed if she wrote her life story and described the negotiating of two such different worlds. If, like the meticulous author, she kept little cards to remind her of the incidents to go into her life story, they would bear the most absurd headings: ‘Incident of Porridge’, ‘Incident of (Un)Polished Shoes’, ‘Incident of Too-Transparent, Green Blouse’, ‘Incident of Wrong Telephone Number and Pathetic Indian Caller’. She had picked up the phone one evening; the caller had got the wrong number but pleaded with her to hear his story, a terrible one of loneliness and heartbreak, that lasted a full hour. Her husband checked the phone bills not for purposes of economy but for monitoring her calls, especially long outstation calls.
‘Would you have listened in sympathy to me for an hour?’ he had said.
She thought of wives whose energies were channelled, almost effortlessly, into streams of pure attention and devotion, while her husband stood in the aridity of her detachment and indifference. They were well-educated wives who could have had illustrious careers, like Dr Phang’s cousin’s wife, but chose to be at home to serve their husbands’ every wish. During attendance at mass in the Church of Eternal Mercy, sitting beside her husband, she would observe the other wives sitting beside theirs, and conclude they were as loving and compliant as she was indifferent and defiant. Their marriages were peaceful havens, as hers was a storm-tossed vessel far out at sea. It served her right to have embraced an institution for which she had neither talent nor disposition.
She had sworn to love, honour and obey her husband; true to all three vows in the eyes of the world, she had in truth broken them all in the privacy of her own. The outward pretence could not be long maintained; soon he, alert, proud, sensitive, would have to hold her to a true accounting: did you love me at all? Why did you marry me?
Six
The silence continued all the way in the car as he drove her to school, and was broken twice, very briefly, by a grievance that was mounting by the day. The car had stopped at a traffic junction that faced a row of rundown shophouses that would soon be demolished to make way for a shopping mall. In an unguarded sharing of secrets very early in their marriage, she had pointed out one of the shophouses as the scene of a silly girlhood romance, where a young man named Kuldeep Singh used to take her for ice cream after school. Her husband had said nothing then, but retrospective jealousy, summoning back the past for present accounting, could be even more fearsome. Thereafter, each time the car stopped at the traffic junction in full view of the offensive house, she would look down, to her left through the car window, into her handbag, anywhere but in the direction of the shophouse, aware of the sideways glance that he was casting at her. Every small act of hers became a test of wifely propriety, subjected to the merciless analysis of a love turned forensic.
That morning, her thoughts being very far away, her eyes inadvertently rested on the forbidden object of the shophouse; worse, the thoughts suddenly took a turn for tender recollection as in her mind appeared an image of herself and Kuldeep Singh in their school uniforms, perched on high stools at the ice cream bar, foreheads almost touching as they sipped, through two long straws, a single glass of ice cream soda. Kuldeep had confessed to being completely broke, but a riffling of the pocket of his uniform, and then of hers, had produced a small handful of coins that was enough to pay for one soda. Out in the bright sunshine, Kuldeep suddenly had an idea, his eyes shining with mischief. He pulled out a small penknife from his pocket.
‘See, I’m leaving a mark of remembrance of our happy day.’ He carved a large X sign on a corner of the wall near the bar entrance, and had another idea. ‘Come here,’ he said to her. ‘Here, hold the penknife. Like this. Now I’m holding your hand, and we carve together.’
He was duplicating the supreme wedding moment when, in smiling union, groom and bride cut the bridal cake together. ‘You’re crazy,’ she giggled but complied. ‘Look out,’ she hissed, and they fled. The sign could still be seen, twenty-three years later.
The tiny smile at the recollection had escaped too quickly for her to stop it. Her husband said, ‘What was that smile about?’
There was a vast stock of student howlers that she could resort to, and she said, ‘I was just thinking of that awful student I told you about, Maggie, and her atrocious grammatical mistakes –’, and hated herself for the lie. The stock was cooperatively inexhaustible but was rapidly losing its usefulness.
Her husband said again, more pointedly, ‘What was that smile about?’ and she lapsed into wordless misery which, in the few minutes before they arrived at her school, became large tears filling her eyes. She made no attempt to wipe them off.
‘What are you crying about?’ he said, in the closest to a snarl that his habitual politeness would allow. ‘One would think that it’s you who’s the victim in this marriage.’
At the school gate, as she got out of the car, the tears having been hurriedly blinked back, she made a feeble attempt at normalcy. She said, ‘There’ll be a staff meeting that will probably last two hours or longer. I’ll be late home. Shall I call you at your office?’ and he said, ‘You do whatever suits you,’ and drove off.
That night the lovemaking was horrible for the intrusion of the afternoon’s jealous suspicion which worked itself into what seemed like a manic reclamation of her body. It ended in a wash of self-pity, as he whimpered, rolling off her, ‘If I don’t satisfy you, you can go back to that Sikh boyfriend of yours.’ He was not done. He took the bathos of self-pity to the histrionics of desperate self-abasement, comparing his small build to the amazing, ethnic-joke proportions and prowess of the Sikh, then of the Caucasian male, and cried out, repeatedly and tearfully, ‘Tell me the truth; after your Kuldeep, after your Brother Philip, am
I a disappointment?’
If she feared a coldly judgemental husband, she was repelled by an abjectly whimpering one. Her marriage had become pure grotesquerie. She got up, rushed to the bathroom, closed the door and expelled her revulsion, which came out in a swift stream, into the toilet bowl.
The bathroom, scene of so many private miseries, had become her most dependable room. Affinity between a lost person seeking protection and an inanimate object offering it could actually grow: in the early hours of a morning, she had sat on the cover of the toilet seat for a full hour, frantically working on the setting of an examination paper due the next morning for the school typist to type and print out. On another occasion, still secure in her hiding place, she had gone through, for the second time, a marvelous story a student in the creative writing class had submitted, and written a whole page of encouraging comments. Both times, thankfully, her husband was still peacefully sleeping when she completed the job and climbed silently back into bed.
The accidental meeting with Kuldeep in a restaurant some weeks later could not have come at a worse time. They were sitting at a table, looking at the menu, and he was telling her about a special project that the admired Dr Phang was entrusting him with over the heads of at least two senior officers. He was in a good mood and summoned the waiter to ask if he could make a special order for his wife’s favourite pork rib soup that was not on that evening’s menu.
Then Kuldeep strode up to her, bellowing, ‘Hey, Maria Seetoh! Do you remember me? Imagine meeting you after all these years!’
Of course she remembered him, at once seeing the handsome beaming confidence superimposed upon the schoolboy’s scrawny limbs and untidy uniform. She greeted him joyfully, not daring to return the effusive hug, and instantly turned to her husband to introduce him. ‘This is my husband, Bernard.’
Miss Seetoh in the World Page 5