Shadow Theatre

by Fiona Cheong

  Shak was looking at me, as if waiting for an answer.

  "What?" I asked.

  She shook her head and started smacking a pillow. "Mrs. Sandhu's been asking about you," she said.

  "Asking what?"

  "She just wanted to know how you were. She says she never runs into you. She was under the impression you had migrated somewhere."

  I watched Shak shoving the pillow wearily beneath her right breast, her hair falling like a wave over her face.

  "I'd forgotten how humid it can get." She sighed, pushing her hair back from her face. "Mrs. Sandhu's thinking of selling her house, moving into a smaller place. You know her husband's passed away?"

  I nodded, having read the obituary when it happened.

  "Remember how when we were in school, every now and then he would send a bouquet of roses with the chauffeur when the chauffeur came to pick her up?" Shak had lain back and closed her eyes, a smile on her lips.

  "You used to refer to him as Mr. Sandhu Charming," I said. "And once, Mrs. Sandhu heard you."

  "Yes, she did." Shak was still smiling, her face relaxing in a way I hadn't seen since she had come home. "Aren't you sleepy, Rose?"

  "I'm used to the heat," I said. "You go ahead and rest, okay?"

  She nodded, then asked, "Will you watch for the dragons?"

  "Yes," I said, as if we were still children. "I'll watch for the dragons."

  She patted her womb and whispered, "Rose will watch for the dragons," to the baby. (You know they say even in the womb, babies can feel the world around them, can pick up on feelings, that sort of thing.)

  I must have been sleepier than I realized, because I don't remember closing my eyes. One moment, I was watching Shak's face while she slept. The next moment, I was waking up with my right cheek resting on my right arm, my torso stretched out sideways across the blue-and-white paisley sheet, and she was watching me.

  SHAK SAID SHE had been awake only a few minutes before I opened my eyes. She was looking less tired as she sat at the dressing table, brushing her hair. I had moved up from the foot of the bed and was sitting near the pillows, watching her, trying to seize every minute, since I didn't know how long more she would be around.

  We hadn't talked about when she was planning to go back to America. When Shak had first arrived, she had said only that she wasn't back for good. But she wanted to see how things went, with her mother especially, before she thought about when to leave.

  So I didn't want to ask her about it, in case talking made it happen, somehow. And yet, deep down inside, I must have known she could never settle here. Not now. Because Singaporeans who go to England or Australia, they often return, you know, but the ones who've gone to America, they seldom come back. (With Isabella, it would have to be different, I thought. Because of her vows.)

  Shak's dress was aquamarine that afternoon, beautiful as a kingfisher feather. And the sun, I remember, was coming through the window on her left and flying off her hair.

  "So, what if Auntie Coco's sister left of her own free will?" she said, still facing the mirror. "Unless you're tired of talking about it. Are you?" Shak glanced at me, and I shook my head.

  "What do you mean?" I asked, although I could tell from her tone, she was thinking of Che' Halimah. So I knew she had heard a rumor that was only just starting, about how Che' Halimah may have coaxed Auntie Coco's sister over to her house. Because Che' Halimah was getting old, and it was time for her to start training an apprentice.

  So the rumor went. And as I've said, it was only just starting. Not even my mother knew about it, you know. Because being of her generation, my mother wasn't paying attention to certain conversations. And it's true. Some things, only those who are silent most of the time, only they can hear.

  "Do you think the police have been to Kampong Alam?" Shak asked, putting down her brush.

  "Probably," I replied, although I didn't know for certain.

  "But they didn't visit every house."

  Might as well get to the point, I thought, so I said, "You think Auntie Coco's sister is in the bomoh's house?"

  She could be. It's probably the one place nobody's looked."

  "Our police are quite thorough, you know. Anyway, how could Auntie Coco's sister make her way through the cemetery on her own?"

  "She wouldn't have had to do it on her own, Rose." Shak got up and stepped over to the bed.

  I moved back to my old position at the foot of the bed, so she could sit with her pillows again.

  "You don't think it's possible? Rose?"

  "You think the beggar was here to guide her to the house?" I was referring to the old fellow some neighbors were saying might be involved in Auntie Coco's sister's disappearance, but only because he was a stranger and had shown up in our neighborhood so suddenly. I myself hadn't seen him. Neither had Shak, as far as I knew.

  "Oh, I hadn't thought of that. But sure, maybe. That would be one way. But Che' Halimah has other ways, you know."

  But still, why would Che' Halimah have chosen a retarded woman? I pointed it out to Shak, as if she wouldn't have thought about it already. "Auntie Coco's sister is retarded," I reminded her.

  "What if she's really not?"

  "I'm sure she is, Shak."

  "You are?"

  es.

  That was when Shak reached for my hand, and I felt the smoothness of the emeralds as she slid the bracelet into my palm. "A close friend gave this to me," she said, out of the blue, just like that. "I want to give it to you. Okay?"

  All I could do was nod. I should have wondered then and there, why she was giving it to me. And also, why she seemed so certain the rumor about Auntie Coco's sister was true. But the way she had said a close friend was stuck like a thorn in my heart, and it was all I could think about at that moment.

  Which close friend? Was it Mahani? Isabella? Why didn't she want to tell me who it was? I wanted to ask, but now Shak was sitting there with both hands on her womb, fingertips to fingertips, and she was gazing down and smiling, as if she could see right through her hands, through her dress, through her abdomen, directly into her baby. As if she was smiling into her baby, to fill the baby with her whole self, that was how it was.

  So I didn't want to disturb her.

  Only I found myself wondering more than ever, what her baby was going to look like, since I still knew nothing about the father. And if the baby turned out to have blond hair and blue eyes, then what? Of course it mattered to me, whether or not the baby would look like Shak.

  Not anymore, but at the time, it mattered.

  ► is A SHRINE. Shak told me, when she showed me the red matchbox with the picture of a couple holding hands painted onto it. She had pulled out the matchbox drawer to show me what was inside also-a doll with long black hair, wearing a yellow dress, a plastic capsule like a big pill capsule, and a strip of white paper.

  "A shrine," I repeated, and then I asked her, "What religion?" since I had never seen a shrine like that.

  "Catholic," she said, smiling because she could tell from my expression, I didn't know whether or not she was joking.

  It was almost half-past five, the sun sloping gently across the bed. Shak was showing me some things she wanted me to see before I left that evening, and what comes back to me now is her voice. Shak's voice, the sound of it, even with her accent, making me think of ink flowing on rice paper. Of a whisper blowing on your skin, like that.

  Outside, there was a rattling in the lime trees, and we could hear birds squawking in the garden.

  "Really, it's Catholic," Shak said, with some amusement in her voice, and when I didn't say anything, she thought for a moment and then she added, "All right, it's not Vatican Catholic. More like folk Catholic. See this?" She pointed to the plastic capsule and I looked. Deja vu, the two of us like that, both examining something together, in those bygone days when the world used to be so fresh, and everything we collected from it was a novelty. "It's holy dirt. Sort of like holy water, you know? It's from a sanctuary in Ne
w Mexico, where they say miracles have happened for people who've gone there to pray."

  Shak could tell I didn't understand, probably from the way I didn't want to admit it.

  "It's Mexican-American folk religion, Rose. Catholic, from a Mexican-American point of view. Know what I mean?" She sighed, and I wondered if she was about to give up, so I searched for something to say. Sometimes what you have to do is just keep talking, right?

  So I said, "Mexican?"

  "Mexican-American. It's not the same thing, over there. I mean, it's not the same thing." She sighed again. 'There's a lot about American history we never learned, you know, Rose? Did you know the slaves used to kill their babies to protect them from the masters? The women. Can you imagine it? Killing your own baby to protect it?"

  "Murder is a sin," was all I could think to say, even though I had watched the whole series of Roots, you know.

  "Oh, Rose." Shak shook her head at me, eying me as if to say, Don't he a dnmkopf. "It's not that simple. Mothers have to protect their children. All right, think about this. What if your husband's abusing your child? Say, if he's a drunk and beats up on the child, or does worse things, and the police don't believe you, or if you live in a country where are no laws against something like that. There are such places, you know. What would you do?"

  I looked at the shrine that was from that sanctuary where miracles were granted, even if it was American. And I asked for something to say, but no help came to me. Obviously Shak was trying to get me to understand something very important to her, later when she showed me the other things also. Some postcards she had brought over from America, and her photographs from there. I knew she was searching for a way to explain why she had stayed away so long, why she had come back now, maybe even why I would never see her again after this, as if she could answer something like that. Of course I didn't know, yet, what was going to happen. All I knew was that Shak didn't fit in among us anymore. Of course I had noticed it, how she didn't seem as happy as when she had first arrived, as if her life in America was starting to call her back, her heart missing someone there in a way she had never missed me.

  There were no photographs of that numbskull fellow, only of Shak's apartment, and her tropical plants. All her rooms had plants in them, which was something I hadn't known about Shak before, that she loved plants. There was even a hibiscus, imagine, which her friend Celia was watering in the photograph.

  This was the friend who was taking care of her plants while she was away. Shak must have called out to her, "Hey, turn around," and her friend had turned around and smiled, quite impromptu. (She was very pretty, and also I noticed she looked mixed.)

  Shak may have been waiting for me to do it, but I couldn't bring myself to ask her who the baby's father was.

  The last thing she showed me that afternoon was a piece of her writing, which she said she had found while cleaning out the drawers in her wardrobe. The writing was on ruled paper, with the sentences not staying on the lines. The words had a blurry look because the ink must have melted a bit over the years. I recognized Shak's younger handwriting at once, her splashing loops and lanky, daring strokes.

  After I had read the piece, she said, "I don't remember it. I was probably still half-asleep."

  "You used to write down your dreams," I said, which was true. But she had never shown me the recorded dreams because her writing used to be very private to her.

  "Yes, I did." She smiled. "I still do, sometimes."

  I didn't ask her about the dream in the writing, and Shak didn't say anything else about it. All she did was ask whether I wanted to keep the piece.

  I told her yes.

  She didn't ask me why, and she never would. Nor would she tell me about the will she was making, or that she was going to more or less bequeath her baby to Evelina Thumboo, of all people. All that, I wouldn't find out until later, after everything was over, so to speak.

  I I I I S WAS W H Al Shak had written down:

  Violent sex dreams. I'm across the road. I hear two girls learning about sex? in the house. My parents are in the house. The girls come out because they made a mistake and got fired. My parents go on playing. Later I hear my mother screaming. My father wants to play the bye-bye game. My mother screams, begs, No. My father goes to the door, opens it, says bye-bye, closes the door. But he doesn't come out. It's only a starting point. Once he closes the door, there's no going back. My mother screams and screams. I rattle my fingers in my ears to drown out the screams.

  Something about two boxes. I think they put on these boxes over their heads and walk around the room. If they bump into each other, he fucks her. It's violent. He uses knives. One is a metal spatula. She has 28 scars in fo days. I'm crying. If she gets 28 more, she'll die.

  Outside the house, my father says we must talk. I follow him back across the road. I don't think he will hurt me but he's drunk. A policeman, a friend, a wimpy sort of guy, comes with us and tries to take my father to jail.

  Underneath the dream, she had added:

  My father in this dream looks different. Rougher. He doesn't look like my dad in real life.

  I couldn't make heads or tails of it at the time, and Shak must have known this. But she must have known also, when she gave it to me, that I would read it again and again. She must have known I would keep trying, because she knew me.

  TWO LISTENERS

  HAT MY MOTHER'S friends say about the widow Valerie Nair is that, for over a decade, she was brewing medicine with her husband's coffee, scooping the ground leaves into the aluminum decanter before adding coffee powder. And so morning after morning her husband had grown weaker, his bones wilting so slowly, he himself didn't notice until it was too late. By the time the symptoms of illness were unmistakable, his bones were almost hollow, his muscle barely attached, his blood a turbid brown like cheap ordinary tea, so that not even the smartest doctors could save him.

  This was what happened long before we were born, back when Che' Halimah was alive and living in the Chinese bomoh's house, which itself is about to go. (No one ever calls the Chinese bomoh by name, or understands why Che' Halimah broke the tradition of choosing a kampong girl to take over when she grew ill. ) My mother's friends say, the Chinese bomoh's medicine is only so-so, but my mother tells me it's good enough and that people have to stop asking for the moon. She says they'll all regret complaining when the bomoh's house gets torn down (the government's been warning for years that kampongs are fire hazards, what with all those atap roofs). Our kampong's the last to go, and who knows what will happen then? That's how my mother says it. Our kampong, she says, even though we don't live there, and I never have. But my grandfather lives there, and my mother and my Uncle Abdul grew up there, so I say it, too, because Maria tells me it's true-our kampong will be demolished soon. And she says your kampong because she and I are closer than sisters, and we know each other. We don't know how Maria knows what will happen before it does, but she's always right.

  It may he that Maria was born with a veil, although Auntie Eve says she wasn't, and Auntie Eve was in the room at the time. (Malika wasn't. Maria says Malika came to live with them a few days after, so she's not the one to ask.) My mother says there are women who believe babies born with the veil bring bad luck, and that Auntie Eve may not remember because she's superstitious and doesn't understand. But Auntie Eve's memory seems fine to me, and anyone can see Maria's the precious jewel of her heart. But it may he that Maria was born with a veil, and Auntie Eve doesn't want to say it out loud (in case a spirit passing by hears).

  We don't talk about this, Maria and 1. We don't talk about her birth, or about her mother. It's the only thing we don't talk about, the night of her birth the only closed door between us.

  So when the widow approached us at the church yesterday, I didn't know how to warn her. Maria doesn't know what I know. She doesn't know about Auntie Eve's old neighbors and their secret acts, or why Auntie Eve moved away, because when my mother's friends at the kampong talk, there are things the
y don't tell outsiders. And even though Maria and I have known each other our whole lives, she's still an outsider to them.

  "Girl, what's your name?" the widow asked, and when we turned around, she was looking at Maria, her irises dark and turbulent like a nightmare.

  That was how I knew it was her, the one who had gone so far as to murder her husband by the only untraceable means. I had never seen her before yesterday, because Maria and I don't live in that neighborhood and we don't go to that church. We don't go to any church, although Auntie Eve's Catholic and so's Maria. (Sometimes they attend Mass at a church near the Christian cemetery, when they visit Maria's mother's grave, but otherwise, Auntie Eve likes to keep priests and nuns and anyone holy at arm's length, as she puts it.) Maria and I wouldn't have been there yesterday if Maria hadn't decided to join the youth choir, if our classmate Lucinda Tan hadn't asked us, which had happened not because Lucinda wants to be friends, I know, but because Maria's voice is strong and sweeter than cotton candy in our mouths, and I should have guessed, too, what Lucinda didn't tell us but Maria knew, that Derek Ashley's in the choir.

  That was why we were in the foyer, at the bottom of the spiral staircase leading up to the choir loft, at one o'clock when the widow was there. There was no one else in the pews, and no sign of the other choir members because Lucinda Tan had given us the wrong time, telling us choir practice would start at half-past one, forgetting it was starting later yesterday because the choir mistress was dropping her friend off at the airport on the way.

  What Maria knows about the widow is what Auntie Eve's old neighbors tell anyone who asks, that there was once a falling out between the widow and her grown-up daughter, that this falling out was the reason the widow's daughter migrated to America in the first place. The widow's daughter didn't return for fifteen years, and when she did, it was to give birth to the widow's granddaughter, conceived out of wedlock and delivered dead in the widow's house. No wonder the widow lost her mind. This is how Auntie Eve's old neighbors put it. They never saw the widow's daughter again after that night, which is why some say she probably died, too, shortly after giving birth. Others say they're sure the widow's daughter's gone back to America, and is living in New York City and doing well, teaching in a university over there, all things considered.