by Tiffany Tsao
It was exhilarating. Too exhilarating. Caught up in the whirlwind of victory, I forgot entirely about checking in on my newly widowed sister. Despite the fact that Leonard had died only a few days before I left for Paris, I didn’t call, not even once. I returned to Jakarta, assuming vaguely that her health would have improved while I was abroad. If anything, it had worsened. All her flesh had melted away. When we were young, she used to joke that she didn’t have cheekbones—now they jutted from the sides of her face like the gill plates of a fish. Her hair was falling out in clumps. Her skin was so translucent you could make out every capillary. She never left her room; she hardly stirred from bed. Worst of all, an ominous serenity had settled upon her, suggesting she was on the cusp of migrating from this world to the next.
What had I been thinking, ceasing communication so entirely like that, at a time when my sister needed me the most? I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I really don’t know. The only excuse I can give for my lapse is that the freedom must have gone to my head, and, intoxicated by it, I had ungratefully forgotten the person to whom I owed it. Riddled with guilt, I visited her as often as possible after I returned from Paris. Whatever time I had to spare, it was hers. We would sit together in her room and chat; she propped up on pillows in bed, I in the mauve armchair by her side. She refused to talk at any length about the tragedy that had befallen her. If storms did indeed roil inside her, on the surface she remained eerily quiescent. Whenever I dared to broach the subject of Leonard’s death, she steered me away with a grace and tact that reminded me of a species of European gentleman I had come across lately in the world of high fashion—the sort who could guide a woman’s movements with nothing more than his palm on the small of her back.
She insisted instead on discussing Bagatelle—and not just the splash we’d made in Paris. Her interest extended to everything: How were sales going? What other cities would we open in? What improvements had our chemists made to the control serum? What new concepts did I have in mind? Her eyes glittered with an otherworldly feverishness—the kind that blazes most brightly when set in a withered frame. I told her everything, from the most trivial minutiae concerning the day-to-day maintenance of the company and its boutiques, to the larger-than-life visions in my mind’s eye that floated, like mirages, on the shimmering horizon of possibilities. I took on the role of storyteller, and she the eager child.
I explained that, if anything, the success of our Paris debut had put us under even more pressure to present a scintillating spring/summer line. Everyone would be waiting to see whether we could live up to our first collection. We already knew exactly where we were headed, of course. You’d have to be stupid to go to a war as big as this one without stocking up on ammunition. By the time the applause in Paris had ended, the relevant phone calls had already been made. When I’d stepped off the plane and into my office, prototypes were waiting on my desk.
On the one hand, our second line had to be completely different. We had to prove we weren’t a one-trick pony. On the other hand, there had to be just enough that was similar to establish the foundation, the essence, of the Bagatelle brand. That was how the Houri line paraded into the world: voluptuous Old World sex kittens with sensuous protruding snouts, clad in iridescent blues and greens. Again, bagatelles, not insects. Majesties, not butterflies. Houris, not weevils.
Our quarterly profits went through the roof. Houris were playful, curvy, fun-sized. And like all harem girls, they were best enjoyed in numbers. People wore them in long, triple-looped chains around their necks. They stacked them on their fingers. They wound them from ankle to calf like ballet shoestrings. You had to buy at least two dozen if you wanted to bagatelle well. “That’s right, Stell,” I told her with some pride. “We’ve become a verb.”
I told her that we were reasonably certain about our expansion plan as it stood, but still had some reservations. We were keeping it conservative. We’d started out in Paris, Hong Kong, and Jakarta—the first two to establish our credentials, the last because this was where our operations were based. The next few years would see boutique openings in the tried-and-true fashion capitals of the world—London, Milan, New York—along with the wealthier cities of Asia—Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, maybe Singapore. In the next few years, we’d expand our offerings: women’s clothing, leather goods, shoes, all designed for pairing or coordinating with specific bagatelles. After that, who knew? Homewares. Furniture. Carpets. A lower-end spin-off for the general public. A children’s line. The sky was the limit.
I divulged everything to her. When Estella asked me how the bagatelle worked—a secret so closely guarded that it had been developed in stages, with no one knowing the entire sequence of the serum’s recipe and application, or which chemist was working on other components of the sequence—even then, I told her what I knew.
“There are several species of fungi that prey on insects,” I began, clasping my cup of green tea in both hands and letting the breath of my tale waft the rising steam across the rim. (The air-conditioning in Estella’s bedroom made it feel like the interior of a fridge.) “Their tiny spores find their way into a host and there take root, multiplying, branching, spreading, but not killing right away. With ants, there’s one species that works its way into the host’s brain, driving its host to climb upward, higher and higher, and to clamp down on its new perch. Only then does the fungus put its victim out of its misery, bursting out of the ant’s head to fruit new spores, which from their advantageous starting point can drift away on the wind, much farther than they would have ever been able to if they’d let their host die on the ground. The common name for these fungi is Cordyceps, though the term encompasses several genera.”
Estella frowned. The word sounded familiar. I let her make the connection, which she did. “They sell Cordyceps in Chinese medicine stores. Ma takes it in the evenings.”
“Yes, that particular variety is good for strengthening the kidneys and lungs,” I affirmed. “But the fungi in their natural state are useless for Bagatelle’s purposes. We’ve had to do a considerable amount of genetic modification using several different species.”
I was no biochemist myself. But I’d picked up enough to know, roughly, how it all worked. And since I had access to all stages of the serum-manufacturing process, you could say I knew more than any of my scientists. I told her what changes we’d made to our version of the fungus to produce the exact kind of behaviors we wanted—either near immobility or certain movements in reaction to external stimuli (in the case of the climactic ending of our first show in Paris, fluttering up and down in response to a slight shrug of the shoulders). Most of our pieces were designed to be static, dormant except for a comely quivering of the body, or a flexing of the tarsi or mandibles to ensure they stayed put. But we were making new advances every day with regards to timing and precision, and who knew where we were headed next? I had plans for a collaboration with Chopard or Piaget—wrist-borne bagatelles that could tell the time with tiny diamond-encrusted twitches.
It went without saying that we had to modify the fungus so it never showed itself, never fruited, never destroyed. In fact, it did just the opposite of destroying, reducing a bagatelle’s life to a state of almost complete dormancy. Each bagatelle was guaranteed to last for at least five years if given proper care. As I anticipated, our clientele didn’t blink an eye. The finest of anything required care and maintenance: an Hermès leather bag, a Christian Lacroix gown, a Rolex, a Ferrari. A bagatelle didn’t need much: Each one came with a small ventilated case and a slim glass tube of odorless, colorless nutritive mist to be spritzed on once a week. After five years, we permitted a trade-in for the same model or a newer one, provided the old one wasn’t damaged.
The grace, the dignity, the humaneness of it all gave us the advantage when the inevitable protests from animal rights activists finally reared their head. This wasn’t mistreatment; this was pampering. This wasn’t destruction; we were caring for the bagatelles, improving their quality of life, prol
onging their existences. Weren’t there meatier bones to pick with real villains—the livestock industry, the furriers, the whalers? Except for a whisper in a few low-circulating magazines, the controversy never garnered any attention and removed itself to the furthest fringes of the collective environmental activist consciousness.
The way I tell it, it sounds as if I were composed, cool, a true soldier even in the face of my sister’s physical and emotional collapse. In reality, in the course of those months, I would find myself seized every now and then by feelings beyond my control. They reduced me to a blubbering mess. I implored Estella to get better, to fight whatever it was that was taking her away from the real world, from us, from the present. I begged her to revive herself and join me at Bagatelle, though she’d already said no too many times. Still, I found myself pleading, kneeling at her bedside: “Bagatelle is ours, Stell. I’m doing it for both of us.”
She would only close her eyes and smile faintly. “I’m so proud of you, Doll. Please. Tell me more.” It was like watching someone drown without struggling, sinking serenely to the bottom of the deep blue sea.
She did recover, obviously, and began to breathe the air of the world again, though she never quite lost that unearthly, melancholic quality. And much later, over a year after Leonard’s passing, I learned that my efforts to revive her spirits hadn’t been entirely in vain. In fact, she claimed that Bagatelle’s success had played a huge part in bringing her back to life, at which I snorted.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You still won’t leave the family business. You still won’t join Bagatelle.”
“I know,” she said. “But hearing about what you’ve done with Bagatelle was, is, more than enough.”
I snorted again and she gazed at me in earnest. “I’m serious. You have no idea what good I get from it. And anyway,” she added after the briefest of pauses, “I think it’s great that you’ve become so independent. You finally have a life of your own.”
I continued to be perplexed about Estella’s attitude toward Bagatelle—how obviously attracted she was to it, yet how adamantly she refused to come on board as my partner. But her words did confirm that my new way of life was far healthier than my old one. I was my own person now, separate from our family and no longer as dependent on her, even though I longed to bring her with me rather than leave her where she was. I was enjoying my autonomy, but I wanted to enjoy it all with her.
Only now do I realize that my desire to be with her was a weakness. It enabled Estella to pull me back in.
* * *
It began with her discovery of the photo, a few days after our visit to Opa’s house. I had just returned to my apartment after a long day at work and was sliding out of my heels when she called.
“Are you at home?”
“Just got back,” I said. Cradling the mobile phone between my chin and shoulder, I handed my two office tote bags to the maid.
“Wow, it’s almost eleven. Have you eaten?”
“My secretary ordered food in.”
“What kind?”
“Oh, nothing fancy. Beef ball noodles. Deep-fried wontons. You know, working-class cuisine,” I joked. I took the phone into my dressing room. From the way she was beating around the bush, I sensed she had something important to say.
“Do you have time to talk?” she asked.
“Why, what’s up?”
“It’s just… I’ve been looking through the photos I brought back from Opa’s place.”
“And?” I unclasped the bracelet of houris from my wrist, detached them one by one, and placed them on the velvet-covered perches in their case.
“And… it’s been more fun than I expected. Remember how much we loved going through the photos with Oma when we were little?”
“Did you find anything interesting?” I asked, prodding her toward her point.
“There’s one of us next to our ant farm. We’re wearing matching Minnie Mouse dresses.”
“And?” I placed the last houri on its perch and closed the lid.
“And I found a photo that seems kind of… funny.”
At last. I gave her another nudge. “That’s what you called to tell me?” I asked, slipping off my Chanel suit jacket. “You found a funny photo?”
“No, I called to tell you that the photo has Tante Sandra in it.”
“So?”
“It’s a photo of her after she died.”
There was no audience for it, but I arched a skeptical eyebrow nevertheless. “Well, then it can’t be a photo of her after she died because she was alive when it was taken, wasn’t she?”
“According to the date stamp in the bottom-right corner, it was taken in 1984.”
“So?”
“Tante Sandra drowned in 1981.”
At this I hesitated, but only briefly. “Date stamps can be wrong,” I reasoned. “The camera was probably misprogrammed.”
“Why don’t you take a look for yourself?” she said, obviously irritated. “Are you coming to Gregory’s birthday party tomorrow night?”
Gregory was our latest nephew. To celebrate his turning one, our cousin Marina and her husband, Yudi, were throwing a small celebration—just our family, his family, and our family friends the Sukamtos.
“I’ll make a showing,” I said. I knew that Estella drew a certain strength from my presence at these functions, even if she often encouraged me to avoid the clan as much as I could.
That night was different, though. I remember now how relieved she sounded to hear I’d be there.
“Wonderful,” she said. “We’ll talk more then.”
EVERYONE SAID OUR cousin Marina was the perfect wife and mother, not so much because she was but because she expended terrific amounts of energy trying to be so. At twenty-two, she wed her high school sweetheart, Yudi Handoyo (of the real estate Handoyos). The next year, they welcomed their firstborn into the world—a girl—followed by a boy, then another girl, then, most recently, another boy. Never ambitious in the professional sense—unlike her mother, Tante Margaret—Marina threw herself wholeheartedly into housewifery, supervising a small fleet of nannies, attending classes on baking and flower arranging, and shopping constantly for homewares and clothes for Yudi and the kids.
Unfortunately, Marina’s enthusiasm for domestic life was counterbalanced by the fact that she was bad at it. Sweet, scatterbrained, and nervous, she often issued conflicting commands to her nannies, which they learned over time to politely ignore (without any ill consequence because Marina always forgot what she had directed them to do in the first place). Her cakes, tarts, and cookies invariably turned out a delicate combination of underdone and overbrown. Her floral arrangements were expensive and ugly, and therefore stressful to behold. And her proficiency in shopping consisted solely of being able to purchase a large volume of items in a short period of time and have none of them match anything she already owned.
Gregory’s birthday party fell completely in line with our expectations. Marina had obviously gone all out. Everything was Hawaiian-themed—or at least, what Marina believed was Hawaiian-themed. The waitstaff she’d hired for the party were in charge of making sure every adult guest was garlanded with an orchid lei on arrival and supplied with either champagne or a piña colada. There was a suckling pig turning on a spit in a corner of the garden, which was dotted with flaming tiki torches. The tablecloths were printed with hula dancers and sailboats. And through it all blew Marina like a gust of wind, ordering a waiter in midservice to make more leis; herding children indoors for dinner, then herding them outdoors again upon realizing the tables were still bare; scurrying to the kitchen to ask why the food wasn’t ready yet, even though it was a full half hour before the time she’d told them to bring it out; scolding a maid for laying out blue napkins instead of green ones, and then scolding her for using green ones instead of blue.
Estella and I merely stood to one side and watched her: I with amusement, Estella with some distress. But as members of all three families con
tinued to arrive, distracting Marina with warm greetings and conversation, our cousin began to calm down and everything assumed a less frenetic, more orderly air. By seven, all the guests were present, including the eighteen children and grandchildren of Opa’s late best friend, Andries Sukamto. The garden and TV room were crawling with children and nannies. By 7:15, all the dishes were laid out on the sideboard in the formal dining room, including a traditional Javanese nasi tumpeng made, untraditionally, to look like a volcano. The cone of turmeric-colored rice had been dyed red at its peak and in dribbles down its slopes to simulate lava. Potato fritters had been arranged in a manner suggestive of boulders, and pieces of fried chicken tented with banana leaves to look like foothills. Plastic palm trees, hula dancers, and dinosaurs, for some reason, dotted the landscape.
We crowded around as Yudi, lifting little Gregory from the nanny’s arms, began his speech.
“This,” he said, gesturing with his free hand at the volcanic dish, “was all my idea.” Chortles rippled through his audience, and Marina smiled nervously. “I told my wife,” he continued, slowly and deliberately for maximum comic effect, “I told her, ‘We must have a tumpeng. My one wish for this special occasion is that we have a tumpeng.’ And you know what she said?”
Here he paused, then shifted into a nasal falsetto that sounded nothing like Marina: “ ‘Yu-di! Jawa banget!’ ” The guests roared at hearing Marina’s complaint—But Yudi! How Javanese!
Yudi had to raise his voice over the laughter to continue with the rest of his speech: “And I said, ‘Yes! My great-grandmother was Javanese! So what? And your father is Italian, so you are half bule. And our children are Chinese, part Italian, and part Javanese. We are a very diverse family, and I am proud of it!’ ” Here he seemed to flounder for a moment, as if he’d forgotten where he was going with all of this, but he pulled everything together quickly. “And we are also proud to have you all, our honored guests, here to celebrate our fourth child’s birthday with us. We wish you all the best in life: good fortune, health, and happiness!”