by Tiffany Tsao
(“Frankly, I’m not surprised,” I said upon learning about the Angsonos’ enchanted self-rearranging house. “Your mother-in-law does act like she has an entire banyan tree up her ass.”)
My sister said the stifling orderliness extended even to the behavior of the family members themselves. Every weekday, Om Albert and Leonard, farewelled by their wives in the foyer, left for the office in their chauffeured black SUV at 9:30 a.m. Dinner was always served at 7:30 p.m. on the dot. The whole extended family gathered every Sunday at a restaurant in the Grand Hyatt for lunch. There were also guidelines for proper conduct and good living that were regarded as plain common sense: One dressed before coming down to breakfast. One showered before dinner. For good health, one ate a piece of fruit at least once a day. One always wore slippers in the house, but removed them before entering the bedrooms. There were thousands of other things, impossible to count, every convenience and comfort and ritual so discreet and regular that, in sum, they functioned like a well-paved road—indiscernible when maintained and jarring when disrupted.
Of all this, Leonard’s mother was the overseer, herself as discreet as any part of the great apparatus whose cogs she ordered polished and oiled. She was not its master, nor its inventor. As the sweet, pliant, and capable wife of the eldest son, she had simply inherited the responsibility of its running and become so fluent in it, so absorbed, that although her slender manicured hand seemed to gesture its continuance, it was doing the gesturing. It operated her.
Under her guidance, Estella learned what was “necessary,” what was “good,” what was “suitable.” Tante Elise’s tutelage also helped her to better understand Leonard’s outbursts, which had become more and more frequent since their honeymoon. The tantrums he used to have in California, while not excusable, had at least been comprehensible—triggered by jealousy, or fear of Estella’s waning affections. In Jakarta, his temper spiked seemingly for no reason at all. Several times, when they were still staying in his parents’ home, Estella had simply entered a room only to have Leonard sulk or storm out in disgust. Things worsened once they moved into the serviced apartment, which Leonard’s mother had helped her decorate exquisitely. Leonard hurled a plate of fruit across the room against the wall. Leonard emptied the closets of all his clothes and flung them onto the floor. Leonard left abruptly in the middle of dinner and didn’t return until three in the morning, piss-drunk.
Estella’s pleas for an explanation would go unheeded or else would receive a cryptic reply. “You’re my wife; learn to act like it.” “Can’t you do anything right?” “Where were you raised, in a village?” Or else, a sneer. In these moments, Leonard’s mother seemed a godsend, an angel sent down from heaven. Estella would call her and explain what had happened, down to the minutest detail. And like a doctor making a diagnosis, Leonard’s mother would ask a few specific questions and then discover the root of the problem. The maid had not cut the strawberries into halves. All button-down shirts should be hung, never folded. Soup served at dinner had to be almost boiling hot.
It bewildered her, she told me. Leonard had never had these kinds of expectations in college. If anything, both in his apartment with Ricky and at her place in Berkeley, his attitude toward all things domestic had tended toward the easygoing, if not the downright slovenly. He hadn’t much cared when he ate. He had never been too particular about whether beds were made or kitchens were spotless. In fact, the thought had crossed Estella’s mind once or twice that she was rather lucky that he wasn’t fussier. But this all changed when they began their life together in Jakarta, and the unreasonableness of Leonard’s new behavior was something that even his mother couldn’t deny. Together, Tante Elise and Estella came up with a likely explanation: Leonard was now married and settled; accordingly, whether conscious of it or not, he expected a life of the same quality that he’d enjoyed growing up. That was his mother’s word: “quality.” To her, there was nothing subjective or arbitrary about the laws by which their world was governed: They simply reflected life as it should be, at its best.
Stress was the other probable cause of Leonard’s moodiness—so conjectured his mother one afternoon at the Shangri-La. She had taken Estella to high tea to celebrate selecting the “right” marble flooring for the new house.
“Adjusting to working life must be very hard on him, poor thing,” Tante Elise had sighed before she’d bitten, teeth first to preserve her lipstick, into a jam-and-clotted-cream-topped scone. “Leonard’s father is determined to be strict with him, to make sure he can run the business properly. He is the eldest son, after all. But you and I, Stell. We must take care of them. Make sure they can at least relax at home. We have to reward them for working so hard. It’s the least we can do as wives.”
I’d never thought of our family as particularly progressive, but next to the Angsonos, we were practically radical feminists.
My sister had given up hope of our family intervening by then. Plans were in the pipeline for a partnership between Sono Jaya and Sulinado Group that would combine the Angsonos’ dominance in the kretek cigarette market and our family’s holdings in tobacco and cloves. It was a match made in heaven, even if the union between Estella and Leonard was just the reverse.
Yet my sister still found herself believing that she was reasonably happy. Marriage into the Angsono family had shot her into the stratosphere of the highest of high society. Our family was certainly wealthy, but not nearly as sickeningly rich as the Angsonos, or as long-established, or as philanthropic or social. As the wife of the heir apparent to the Angsono family fortune and enterprise, Estella now received daily invitations to charity balls and fund-raisers, innumerable ladies’ lunches, weddings and birthday parties, anniversary celebrations, and dinners by the dozen. It was her responsibility to discern which ones were important and which ones were unnecessary; which functions she could attend alone and which ones required Leonard’s presence as well; which invitations she could decline with a simple handwritten card or an apologetic phone call and which ones required not only written regrets but accompanying gifts—costly floral arrangements, a wicker basket of imported treats, a bottle of good champagne.
As her social obligations grew, so did her wardrobe. Leonard’s mother overheard someone at a lunch remarking snidely that she’d seen Estella in the same evening dress at least three times. Hours later, Estella received a considerate phone call from her mother-in-law suggesting they spend the next few weeks shopping. You’d think it would be every woman’s dream, being asked to buy new clothes on her husband’s credit card, no expense spared. But it was the dream of a poorer woman. Estella’s wardrobe was already enviable by most standards, and this multiday shopping excursion had the air of a forced expedition, fueled by a grim determination to succeed.
It was one of the awkward times in the fashion year when the boutiques hadn’t yet received new stock and all that remained were tired leftovers. In the company of her mother-in-law, who was still smarting from the wound of that overheard comment, shopping became a joyless gorging. Upon entering a store, Tante Elise would march over to the first rack she encountered, pick out a dozen items, and the shop assistants, like sharks sensing blood, would join in the frenzy.
My sister recounted to me how this continued until late afternoon, with a break for lunch. And it resumed the next day, and the day after. Clothes, shoes, bags, watches, jewelry, scarves—they left no category of item unpurchased. Estella’s new acquisitions were impossible to count and, upon arriving home, were ferreted away by the maids for unpacking, tag removal, dry cleaning, and storage in closets, drawers, and cupboards with the rest of her existing wardrobe. It was as if they had never been new, so she was even deprived of the elation she might have felt at the sheer volume of her purchases—not that it would have afforded her much. Estella felt somehow sick to her stomach about the whole affair. She couldn’t put her finger on why. It had something to do with condescension—and with excess, and with so-called propriety. But as Estella had nobody to art
iculate these feelings to or with, they remained unformed and, thus, unfounded.
* * *
Estella and I had always relied on each other, and so had never cultivated any deep friendships with schoolmates, or even our own cousins. The result was that she and I had people we could laugh and chat with, but no confidante apart from one another to whom we could pour out genuine sorrow or woe. Severed from each other, she drifted, as did I, in helpless isolation. Listening to Estella triggered memories of my own loneliness during that period.
I’d felt the loss of my sister most acutely during my late nights in the Essig. Technically, volunteers were only allowed in the collections during official hours. But I’d become such a fixture that I could stay as late as I liked, as long as I cleaned up after myself.
The museum always had more specimens than they could process, from faculty collecting trips and the occasional donation from a member of the general public. The storage fridges and freezers were always crammed: innumerable vials of insects jumbled together in ethyl alcohol solution, and containers of moth and butterfly carcasses, wings carefully folded and pressed flat. There they waited, with a patience only natural to the dead, for someone with the spare time to liberate them from storage, skewer them with a pin, and spread their legs, antennae, and wings in the name of humankind’s insatiable quest to catalogue nature’s treasures.
As I sat hunched over my mounting board, painstakingly manipulating tarsal segments into place with the aid of insect pins, or squinting through a stereomicroscope lens while gluing a staphylinid’s teeny abdomen onto a tiny triangular card, I would find myself thinking of Estella. We had developed our fascination for insects together, and it made sense that I would feel her absence most strongly when surrounded by the creatures that we loved.
The Essig functioned as a sort of chrysalis for me. If I were a pupa in midmetamorphosis, a soupy mess of organic matter in flux, then the Essig served as the hard-shelled covering that provided me with some semblance of structure, that prevented me from leaking out into a primordial puddle. Absorbed in the pleasurable monotony of adjusting antennae and teasing out little limbs, of printing out specimen data in a minute font and scrutinizing dipteran halteres, I missed Estella terribly—and enjoyed missing her because the loneliness gave me a faint idea of what it would have been like if she were there.
Years before, when the cancer was nearly done sucking all the life out of Oma, Estella and I had snuck into her bedroom and found her old housedresses. We’d burrowed our nostrils into them, trying to recapture her scent—the rose and talc and burnt butter of bygone days, not the antiseptic and urine and decay that she reeked of at the end. In the same way, in the feverish late-night pinning of insects, did I catch a whiff of my sister and thus glut myself on what I’d lost.
If only I had known how much Estella was suffering as well—that she too was lonely, deserted by Leonard, who, despite his continued possessiveness, spent less and less time with her. His weekdays he passed at the office, at business lunches and dinners, and, of course, on the road, visiting factories, making calls, and dozing in the dark-tinted, air-conditioned interior of a shiny black luxury car, a patient driver guiding them through the ever-sluggish and ever-worsening traffic of the city. Leonard’s newfound interest in golf took up a good portion of his weekends. At meals with his parents or extended family, he was attentive enough, but dining alone with Estella, he barely spoke. And yet he would throw a tantrum if she was unavailable when he sought her out, if she’d made other plans when he had decided on the spur of the moment to eat at home.
Furthermore, perhaps under the influence of his mother’s opinions, or the cookie-cutter notions of feminine beauty and style that so saturated Jakarta high society, Leonard began to find fault with Estella’s appearance. (When my sister revealed this to me, I could barely contain my rage.) After social functions, he would compare her to other women. Couldn’t she do her hair properly, so she looked elegant like Rita Salindo or glamorous like Jerry Santo’s latest actress girlfriend? Couldn’t she do her makeup so she looked as pretty as everyone else? Shouldn’t she hire a personal trainer to keep her in shape? Her face was getting fat, he complained, and she was getting chubby around the waist. To be honest, he stated, it was beginning to disgust him. Look at Coco Winardi—two kids and yet what a figure! It wasn’t like Estella didn’t have the time, and it wasn’t like they didn’t have the money. The least she could do was have the decency not to let herself go.
This, added to Leonard’s mother’s close attention to her wardrobe, left my sister bewildered. She acknowledged that she had gained a bit of weight, but it wasn’t as if she couldn’t fit into her clothes. She had never been fashionable, never worn much makeup, but she had never thought of herself as frumpy or unkempt. Then again, never before had her appearance been subject to this kind of scrutiny. Our mother, too absorbed in augmenting and preserving her own beauty, had always left our fashion and upkeep to us. And now, here was Estella’s husband saying that she should consider eyelash extensions, and her mother-in-law asking her politely (always politely) whether that was the same red silk blouse that Estella had worn just last week, or whether it merely looked very similar.
And it wasn’t as though Leonard was tending to his appearance or watching his figure. My sister watched him drink heavily in the evenings and suspected that he drank heavily at his “business dinners” too, which she suspected were not always business and not always just dinner. This she gathered from the remarks he and his friends would make during get-togethers that included their wives. The comments were seemingly harmless ones, but nonetheless, they’d set all the men giggling.
If any of the wives asked what was so funny, she’d receive only sniggers in response.
“Boys will be boys,” another wife would usually say with a good-natured shake of her head. And life would roll on: the “boys” growing red and sweaty from liquor and cigars, the wives exchanging gossip drenched in so much honey one almost forgot it was gossip at all.
At these gatherings, the women would exchange stories about their children, who were often playing together in an adjoining room under the supervision of several nannies. To make sure Estella felt included—for they were very considerate and took pains to bring her into the conversation—they would ask when she and Leonard were planning to have children. They would teasingly share tips for enhancing her fertility, and his. Herbal concoctions you could get from this Chinese sinshe or that Javanese bomo. Foods to eat and not to eat. Sex positions that would help the sperm reach the egg more easily. All of them agreed that it was best to lie flat for half an hour after intercourse so that gravity would work in favor of conception.
Estella would nod and titter with the rest and, over time, began to contemplate taking their advice. She had begun to yearn for a child, and not just because her mother-in-law had begun inquiring tactfully about when she and Leonard were thinking of having children. A child would love her unconditionally. A child would cherish the affection that Leonard now seemed to scorn. A child would be a worthy endeavor—a true and meaningful labor to compensate for the reduction of her life to this glittering hollowness through which she moved each day as if in a mirrored labyrinth.
* * *
The child didn’t come. They had sex often enough—thoughtlessly and drowsily, before bed or in the middle of the night or in the early morning—and still, nothing. Estella kept her misery and anxiety to herself. She had become afraid to discuss anything with Leonard for fear of setting him off. It was only when Leonard entered the bathroom afterward and found her lying on her back in the bathtub with her feet propped up against the wall that he realized she wanted to get pregnant, then turned as furious as she’d feared.
He wasn’t angry because he didn’t want kids; in fact, he’d assumed that a baby would come along as a matter of course. But here was his wife exhibiting clear doubts about his virility. As if he needed gravity’s help! They fought. As always, the conflict remained unresolved, addin
g another notch to the history scored by each new quarrel, each new fit of rage from Leonard or bout of sullen muteness from Estella. Indignant that his manhood had been called into question, he began actively trying to impregnate her. He never explicitly said so, but it was obvious: Sex became resentful and driven—a mad repeated motion to thrust into being something beyond their control. Months passed. He demanded she get her fertility checked, which she did, to discover that there was nothing obviously wrong with her except that she should try to relax. Too much stress could affect these things.
Estella said Leonard had snorted when she’d reported back from the doctor. “Yes, because your life is so full of pressure,” he’d said. “So much work to do.”
For the sake of maintaining peace, she hadn’t responded, but such silences, which had so long been her refuge, had also long ceased to demonstrate submission. Instead, they sprawled defiantly in the spaces allotted to them, eyeing him with contempt. The obvious suggestion about what Leonard should do, now that she’d seen a doctor, remained unvoiced. It was out of the question that she should bring it up, and out of character for him to do so.
And so Leonard did not get his own fertility checked (or, at least, he never told her if he did). And they kept on as if nothing had happened, except that Estella abandoned hope of conceiving and Leonard furiously continued to hope even as he furiously denied ever hoping at all.
* * *