The Majesties

by Tiffany Tsao

“Then there’s Tante Sandra—wrecking that guy’s life, inadvertently ending it, clueless about what she was doing all the while; hiding out now in the Central Valley, dead on the inside but still leaking poison. You and I won’t ever recover from that visit, will we?

  “And Oma—” (Here, my sister’s voice faltered.) “Maybe it’s better that we’ll never know entirely what she really was. After all, she didn’t know it herself. None of us know ourselves. Perhaps you the least of all.”

  “You…” I echoed.

  She reached out and stroked my hair. “Yes, you. Actually, you’re not that different from Tante Sandra: she, taking refuge in Bakersfield; you, seeking sanctuary in Bagatelle. But as I said, it’s time you pulled your head out of the sand, Doll. You’re going to help me put an end to us once and for all. And by ‘us,’ I also mean the Angsonos, the Sukamtos—all the guests at Opa’s birthday party. They’re just as bad as us, make no mistake.”

  Despite my paralysis, the throbbing in my brain had escalated into a sharp, stabbing pain. An attempt to shake my head in refusal proved fruitless, as did an attempt to utter a horrified “No.”

  Estella understood me perfectly nonetheless. “My dear Gwendolyn, you hardly have a choice.”

  As she spoke, our surroundings began to change. The room was no longer gleaming white or state-of-the-art. The air smelled musty. Clutter appeared on the counters: papers and petri dishes, vials and pens strewn about. The room looked more—the word forced itself on me—real. Through a pain-induced haze, I recalled a snippet from a conversation long ago: We’re expecting a shipment for the new factory lab. It was what Estella had told Leonard one morning over breakfast. I made the connection, hardly believing it as I did.

  We weren’t in Bagatelle’s laboratories; we were in Mutiara.

  A peculiar sensation came over me—as if I’d been inhabiting a compartment designed to look like reality, and now the walls were dissolving, revealing what lay beyond.

  My face was wet. I was crying. I don’t understand, I thought.

  My sister was still talking, still stroking my hair, gently, lovingly. “I don’t know what I would have done without Bagatelle—having you dream it, plan it, then see it through to success. You of all people know the difficult times I’ve been through. Without you and Bagatelle, I’d never have been able to cope.

  “You were baffled about why I kept my distance the way I did, why I insisted on not getting directly involved. But you must see now that I genuinely couldn’t: To do so would have been to destroy Bagatelle altogether. No, no. It had to stay separate, well away from my disaster of a life. It had to be kept as a world all its own.”

  My memory, like our surroundings, shifted with my sister’s words. Scenes from Estella’s life mingled with scenes from my own. More than that—they merged, as if our colors had run and we’d bled together, until she and I fused into one. Our late-night squabble during college when I’d warned her to stay away from Leonard became Estella lying in bed alone, wrestling with her better judgment. My sister crying in the kitchen in Berkeley, telling me we couldn’t be together anymore, became Estella saying good-bye to the side of her Leonard hated so much.

  The altered memories came faster and thicker, in no particular order. Two sisters fleeing together to Monterey—a lone woman attempting to reclaim independence. Our family’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge Bagatelle—completely understandable given that Bagatelle didn’t actually exist. Those weeks in Paris immediately after Leonard’s death—Estella’s withdrawal into a fantasy realm, so severe that it left her flesh to wither on the bone.

  I found I could speak freely again. “I’m you,” I whispered, the truth finally breaking like dawn.

  “ ‘My better half’ might be more accurate,” said Estella, circling me where I sat captive in my chair. “The woman I’ve always wanted to be—speaking your mind, standing up for yourself, pursuing your dreams. I know you take the blame for letting Leonard come between us, but actually, I was the one who let you go. I felt I had to submerge you if Leonard and I were going to stand a chance.

  “How was I to know it wouldn’t make a difference? It was terrible without you, Doll. You recall what Leonard was like back then. I felt so helpless, so utterly alone. My only consolation was that I’d imagine you leading the life I wasn’t: doing well in classes; pinning insects; dating, even—before Leonard, I used to have a crush on Ray Chan.

  “Then you and I ran away to see the monarchs, and it felt like we’d never been apart. We came up with Bagatelle on that trip, remember? And you began drawing up plans. Daydreaming—that’s what it was when I was doing it. But when you did it, Bagatelle became not fiction but fact… at least to me. Then came Leonard’s decline—the decline of his whole family—and I was free again, or at least able to give free rein to you.

  “The family put me in charge of Mutiara, and I began tinkering with silkworms and Cordyceps fungi in this lab. It was my way of compensating for what I missed out on at Berkeley, and it’s just as well Mutiara didn’t require much attention from me. I spent a lot of time reading about silkworms, and when I found out that people use them in medicinal Cordyceps cultivation, I began doing some dabbling of my own—though not seriously, just in a childish, mad-scientist kind of way. But it was enough: It gave me the idea for Bagatelle’s serum, and you picked it up and ran with it from there.

  “Your world provided the escape I needed in order to tolerate what my life had become. Your strength was my strength—is my strength. And that’s why I need you to help me now.”

  I struggled to resist her. “I won’t,” I managed to gasp.

  My sister overpowered me as easily as someone brushing away a fly. “As I said, Doll, you don’t have a choice. We can’t be allowed to carry on in our diseased condition. Think of it as a kindness—to us and the world at large.”

  The throbbing in my head ceased. Something in me gave way. As it burst open, it engulfed us in a searing white light.

  * * *

  Estella and I are walking, no, striding down a long corridor, approaching a realm of clanking and clanging and terse shouts. A bespectacled man in a tuxedo—the manager—hurries over and we dispel his concerns with a smile. He beats a simpering retreat. There is smoke and steam and flames. There are woks swiveling and steamers puffing away in great sweating stacks.

  We pull the vial of poison from our collar—the “serum” we’ve developed in Mutiara’s lab. It doesn’t control insects or extend their life spans, but it’s deadly. And it’s even more concentrated than the one we used on Leonard.

  One flourish and the deed is done. We head back to our table, where we sit with our cousins, our parents strategically scattered throughout the ballroom among the more important guests. Opa and New Oma sit next to Om Benny and Tante Soon Gek at a table reserved for the most venerable of their fellow tycoons. Opa’s behavior these days is such that his children don’t dare to leave him unchaperoned.

  Ricky’s on our right, stuffing himself with buns—rehab makes him hungry, he says. If possible, he’s even fatter than when we saw him last. Marina on our left, ever the watchful mother, is glancing at the kids’ table. Ricky gives us a knowing wink, reaches across us, and steals a sip of her champagne. It’s been a while since all us cousins have had a chance to congregate like this. We all reminisce boisterously about childhood days, ignoring the puzzled looks of our spouses. The first course—crisp-skinned slices of suckling pig—is served and cleared before we know it, and soon we’re passing around the red vinegar to splash into our bowls of shark’s fin soup.

  The band in the corner stops playing. The emcee—a pleasantly plump woman in a sparkly cocktail dress—announces a special treat, and the photos selected by Estella and me play on screen to Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.” The show concludes with a series of family portraits, ranging from Opa and Oma’s wedding shot to pictures of them with their kids, to the formal photo Estella and I had chuckled about by Marina’s pool. Tante Margaret’s double ch
in is still there, along with Om Peter’s finger up his nose. We all look less than our best—our father’s slouch, and Tante Betty’s stray lock of hair; the empty space between our mother and Om Benny, as if someone is missing (Tante Sandra, of course); and the unflattering lighting that gives us all a shifty, sinister air. Even Oma, despite claiming this was the best photo of the lot, has a menacing gleam in her eyes. Then again, it’s hard to tell which of these things are visible only to Estella and me.

  The slideshow ends; the music starts up again. Our empty bowls are whisked away and replaced with braised abalone in pools of velvety brown sauce. Ricky sneaks some wine. Benedict rolls his eyes and hands him his glass, saying, “At least it’s not cocaine,” at which his sister Jennifer punches his shoulder, and everyone else laughs.

  There was a time when Estella and I might have been softened by this conviviality. “We’re not so bad,” we might have been tempted to say, our heart mellowed by happy memories and rich food. That time is past.

  Now my sister and I are united and clear-eyed and resolute. It’s nice that we can all share one last meal together, but it’s all an illusion and it has to stop.

  The Peking duck arrives, done to perfection, the flayed skins glistening atop translucent pancake rounds. The wails begin, and then the screams, followed by the retching and twitching and collapsing. The ballroom has been transformed into a sea of writhing, pain-racked bodies—our family and closest friends, and my sister and I, equally damned, writhe along.

  It is for this suffering that our contorted image, reflected in one of the enormous mirrors on the wall of the ballroom, asks forgiveness: not for what we have done but, rather, the violence of its execution.

  CODA

  I WONDER IF, with every stop on the journey, each pause on the way to the promised land, the monarchs have any inkling of remembrance: that somewhere along the ancestral timeline they have been there before; that it is not an arrival in strange lands, but a pilgrimage to the old country.

  I wonder how they must feel. Whether it occurs to them that the universe has played them for fools. Imagine: to settle at last on the branch of a tree and congratulate oneself on having gained fresh ground only to find oneself haunted by the faint impression—something in the muscles—that the neighboring twig appears very familiar indeed.

  Or maybe they are proud of fluttering in the well-worn flight paths of preceding generations, of weighing down in their vast numbers the very same branches from which their ancestors too hung like fruit.

  Or maybe they turn philosophical, pondering not just the purpose of this rite of passage but also the compromise inflicted on their individual selves. Is each of them merely a part incomplete? A fragment of a whole? Then what is one to make of the infinitude of one’s own memories, one’s own emotions, one’s being?

  I’m part of Estella. Yet she’s dead, and I remain—as do certain memories that refuse to be accounted for, that bear stubborn testament to my life as my own.

  The pounding of my seven-year-old heart as I sit knees to chest on the floor of our mother’s closet, waiting for Estella to finish counting to a hundred so she can come find me. It’s dark. The hems of the dresses tickle my nose. I hear her voice, distant and clear, “Ready or not, here I come!”

  Oma lets me lick cake batter from a wooden spoon while Estella lies in bed recovering from chicken pox. She’s making a chocolate sponge cake: my favorite. The batter gets onto my hands, so I lick them. I want to bring some batter up to Estella, but Oma tells me I shouldn’t disturb her. I get chocolate all over Oma’s housedress and giggle because it looks like poo.

  I’m sitting on Indian Rock in Berkeley, watching the sunset. I’m alone, but nobody else is. In front of me, I see a girl from one of my economics classes necking with someone I assume is her boyfriend. They remind me of Estella and Leonard, who are probably doing the same thing while watching a movie on our couch. The sunset starts pink, flames orange, and blazes out in violet. I graze my knee during my careless clamber down and wince in pain.

  It’s graduation day. The sweltering heat of the sun is made even more unbearable by the heat of the several hundred polyester-robed bodies hemming me in on all sides. Our row finally stands and shuffles to the edge of the stage. They call my name. I walk across the stage and catch sight of my parents sheltered bravely under a golf umbrella. Ma is waving. Ba is taking pictures with his free hand. I remember Estella and wish she were here as well.

  It’s our first trip to Monterey. I’m getting a little sleepy even though I’m driving, so I turn down the heat and lower the window a smidge. The cool air slides in and wakes me up. I look at Estella out of the corner of my eye and see that she is out cold. I note the trickle of spit sliding from her mouth onto her chin, then hanging off it and bouncing like a yo-yo. I snigger to myself.

  I’m in Paris. It’s the day after Bagatelle’s debut, but my breathing still turns shallow at the excitement of it all. I wake up at four because I’m so happy I can’t sleep anymore. I pull on my boots and my trench coat and go out walking. The birds are beginning to chirp. I sit on a bench across from a patisserie and watch the workers bustling about inside, shaping dough into baguettes and folding buttery sheets into crescents and rolls. I watch the empty baskets fill with fresh loaves and the cakes and pastries multiply row by row in the glass display case. And then I swoop in and seize my prize. As I walk back to the hotel, sucking my oily fingers and brushing the flakes from my scarf, I think about what the future holds and squeal out loud with delight. That morning, the world is new and the world is mine, all mine.

  You understand, then, why I find it so difficult to accept the truth of my circumstances. I’m Gwendolyn. I have to be.

  I hear footsteps now, followed by the swish of curtains. It’s a nurse, but there’s someone else as well. Whoever it is lowers into a seat at my side—I hear the chair creak. I wonder who it is.

  “Estella,” a voice sighs. It’s a woman. Tante Sandra.

  Not Estella, I want to say, but can’t. Despite everything, I’m touched that she’s come all this way.

  Someone else approaches. “Ma’am,” he says, addressing my aunt. “We need you to speak with the doctor about your niece first. Then you can sign the consent form. Please follow me.”

  The chair creaks again as my aunt rises and the two of them walk away. I wonder what the consent form consents to, though I can make an educated guess.

  I don’t mind that they’re going to pull the plug. Now that I’ve solved my mystery, there isn’t much purpose to life.

  I’ve been having dreams lately. All variations on the same theme: I am swimming through caverns half filled with water, sometimes floating on my back. It’s cool and the sound of lapping waves echoes against the rock. Every now and then, I take a deep breath and dive underwater and find I am not alone. Ma drifts past me, spritzing herself with perfume, followed by Ba, smiling his ironic smile. Ricky, his hands folded behind his head, snoozes away on a passing current. Leonard kneels, suspended in prayer, and I even see Tante Sandra with a man I imagine to be Jono. They’re picnicking on a plaid blanket that glides through the water like a flying carpet through the sky. Opa is there too, and New Oma—both watching TV—and a shadow soars over everyone’s heads. It’s Oma, her colorful housedress billowing out like the wings of a stingray, a tray of cakes in her hands.

  Something brushes against my arm. I turn. It’s Estella. She clasps my hand and we dive down. She looks so serene, I don’t think she remembers anything of what has passed, what she has done. And in these dreams, I too forget.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DEEPEST THANKS TO Boey Wah Fong, Carl Olsen, Keri Glastonbury, and Helen Mangham for taking the time to read an early draft of this novel. I’m not sure this book would have made it without their feedback and encouragement. Many thanks also to my agents Jayapriya Vasudevan and Helen at Jacaranda Literary Agency—for championing my work and reassuring me whenever I begin to panic. And to Daniel Lazar at Writers House, who hel
ped bring this book to the attention of publishers in the US.

  My gratitude to Cate Blake and Meaghan Amor at Penguin Random House Australia for their superhuman editing skills and patience. And for pushing me to make this novel into the best version of itself. I am likewise grateful to my editor at Atria Books, Rakesh Satyal, and my copyeditor Mary Beth Constant for helping me fine-tune this North American edition.

  For assistance in establishing various facts and historic details, I am indebted to my mother and father, Jan Getson from the Monash University Archives, and Peter Oboyski from the Essig Museum of Entomology.

  A thank-you to Julie Koh for helping me rework an extract of this novel for inclusion in BooksActually’s Gold Standard 2016.

  And last but not least, three cheers for those who stepped in to provide extra childcare so I could have time to write and revise: my mother, my father, Justin, Lian, my mother-in-law, and John and Judy Baker.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TIFFANY TSAO was born in San Diego, California, and lived in Singapore and Indonesia through her childhood. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children.

  SimonandSchuster.com

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Tiffany-Tsao

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