Tales From A Broad

by Fran Lebowitz

  Once we – including me – are all settled in, Frank leans forward. I figure he’s going to whisper something about you-know-who.

  ‘Do you like Singapore?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? I’m really happy we came.’

  And because he’s my husband, he knows it’s true.

  ‘Here’s to three more years, then.’ He raises his mug.

  ‘You mean months,’ I say, holding my glass (drained already) aloft.

  ‘Years.’ He stretches over, taps my tumbler and says, ‘I hired the only man I can trust.’ A beat. ‘Me.’ Clink.

  He smiles.

  My head is playing scenes from last night. It was filmed like the De Beers commercial – Ring silver bells, da da da da, calling away, for Christmas Day … da dada daaa da da da da da da … merry merry merry Christmas … merry merry merry Christmas … but targeted to the more diamond-chip-buying types.

  Here we are popping the champagne at Boat Quay; here we are toasting each other with glasses the size of Huxley’s head at the Marina Mandarin; here we are sucking on straws out of a ceramic alien skull at … at … some place where they have this sort of thing. Here’s Frank on his cell phone. Huh? Here I am doing a mazurka on the table at Esmirada’s, throwing dishes on the floor. Oh, look at us dancing … no, that’s not us … okay, there we are … I’m on the bar and Frank is chatting up a 14-year-old China Girl. Wow, look at how I land like a cat from that bar … Oops, steady on those heels, kitty. There he is again on his cell phone … Ah, I remember this one, kissing naked on our balcony, knocking over a litre of Tiger Beer.

  The first scene is at Boat Quay as Frank tells me the news about his job. He had negotiated an arrangement. There is a scrap of trouble when ‘had’ sinks in. It is past tense.

  ‘So, Ken had me make out a budget and I recommended …’

  ‘Frank, you’re talking past tense.’

  ‘Huh? Yeah, so anyway, I sent a memo to the Board of Directors …’

  Past tense. It means that I had better be delighted for Frank to have had already accepted the position he had generously offered himself while my back was turned.

  ‘So you’ve sent it?’ I double check.

  ‘Yes, and it was approved.’

  ‘Already, huh? What about checking with me?’ I start in on a ‘How dare you?’ harangue but, frankly, even with all the good ammo in my bunker, my heart isn’t into it like my head is. I am much too enchanted by the evening to let a colossal little shift of events ruin it. I vaguely remember praying for such a colossal shift. The drinks are good and they keep me busy, what with the stirring and the reordering and the cigarettes and the peanuts. Frank is looking awfully handsome here in the dark. And he’s doing a manly job convincing me he knows me better than I know myself. It is high time I lightened my load. Let him carry the weight of the world. Hallelujah, praise be. Except this means I’ll have to leave my job.

  ‘Aw, that? You don’t want it,’ Frank responds.

  ‘But I like it.’

  ‘Oh, right? Nah, you don’t. Take my word for it. You complain all the time. You could probably find a way to do a little here and there if you get bored. There’s always work at the American Club or The American Women’s Association.’

  ‘Come to Singapore and hang out with Americans,’ I answer dryly.

  ‘I don’t know, talk to some of your friends. What do they do?’

  ‘I don’t have any friends. Maybe I won’t do anything,’ I moan, but it doesn’t seem to touch Frank’s teflon of good cheer.

  ‘Sure, sure, that’d be great. Can’t imagine it, but I’d love it if you stayed home and took care of us. You can enjoy the kids, plan trips. Slow down for once.’

  ‘Oh, back to you again, is it? What you’d love!’ I turn up the burner. ‘This is your thing. Not my thing. I don’t want to do some thing. I had a thing. It was a good thing. I always had lots of things. I can find new things but … see … oh, what’s my point, Frank? I lost the thread. Oh lookee here, my drink’s empty. Can you order me something, anything, I got to go pee.’

  Clearly, the sober moment, suitable for discussing and making life-changing decisions, has already passed. But that’s never been the moment when we make them, only the moment when we regret them. I look at myself in the mirror of the ladies room and I like what I see. I like the shorts and tank top. I like my well-rested face. My hair is a little too responsive to the humidity, but it’ll calm down. Mostly, I just feel alive and excited by life. This is a good thing, yeah? Right, back inside, let’s party like it’s … what is it, anyway? March? April? All the damn months are the same here, same sunrise, same sunset, same temperature. Damn, I look good!

  After Boat Quay, we wander to Chinatown and into a karaoke club. The place is pretty deserted except for one other couple and a man by himself. There are tiers of booths done in plush black leather, black marble floors and tables, dim lighting. We are given a great big bowl of party mix – dried peas, chilli crackers, palm-oil-glazed nuts, toasted broad beans – and a loose-leaf binder.

  ‘Look, Frank,’ I say, ‘homework!’ I take out my pen and draw a heart on the front of the binder. ‘Frank loves Poon Tang.’ Ha ha ha.

  ‘Fran, jeez, what are you doing? You don’t write on other people’s property, especially in Singapore. This is the songbook, see it’s got about 12,000 tunes.’

  ‘Well, you’re a real model citizen now, aren’t you, Mr Flank. You’d have laughed yester –’

  All of a sudden, a lonely man a few levels behind us starts singing a song in Chinese. I don’t know what the words are but pain is in the room. The tune alone would make anyone jump on his sword.

  I wished he had a good song. I wished he had a style. But I had to see him and listen for a while. And there he was this fat guy, a strange look in his eye. Singing his song in a loud voice, full of whiskey and beer. Killing my straight face with his song, killing it softly with his … belting it out, sweat pouring down his sideburns, thin hair matting down, he croons out the final chorus with a Go-tell-it-on-the-mountain self-righteousness that absolutely sends me over the edge into hysterics.

  ‘Tell her, baby! Sing them blues away … go tell it to the mountain …’

  Frank yanks me up and out the door.

  ‘You do not laugh at karaoke,’ he says firmly.

  ‘Aw, why you so like that. Why you never laugh no more?’

  ‘Fran, they take it very seriously.’

  ‘Now maybe someone knows he shouldn’t,’ I toss. ‘Where to next?’

  As we wander around, I see ornate red and gold little cabinets, like birdhouses, tucked here and there on a front porch or a vendor’s countertop. On them joss sticks burn alongside oranges and little mounds of rice. Every now and then, I see piles of charred paper. These are all offerings for dead relatives. The paper is supposed to be money for the ghosts, and the rice and oranges are provided just in case the deceased would rather dine there.

  We come to Duxton Hill, a curvy side street that stands out from the old neighbourhood, shouting, ‘They took centuries off my life! I have been revitalised! It’s a miracle!’ The signage is doing its best to say, ‘This ain’t your uncle’s old Chinatown.’ We go into The Elvis Lounge first. There is a guy by himself at the bar and a couple behind us. The waitress gives us peanuts in the shell. A picture of Elvis hangs over the register and an Elvis lamp stands behind the whiskey bottles. We order from the bartender. Someone turns on a Chinese heartbreak song. A few minutes later, a girl approaches Frank and asks him if he needs anything else. He says he’s okay for now.

  ‘I could use another one of these,’ I tell her loudly, pointing to my glass.

  But her back is already to me and she’s walking away.

  Frank whispers, ‘She’s not a waitress.’

  ‘Ohhh,’ I say, all wide-eyed. My first encounter with a China Girl.

  We go on to the next place, Bongo Surf Bar. There’s a couple at the bar and a man by himself at the other
end. The bartender smiles, happy to see us, and we order. We get a bowl of chilli crackers with our drinks. The room is painted brown and decorated with business cards and a poster of a koi fish. I yell over the music, which is a Chinese heartbreak song, ‘See, it’s a fish. That’s where we get the surf theme, Frank.’

  Next door is Brew Ha Ha. We go in and the bartender tells us about the wine promotion. We leave because they don’t have any beer at Brew Ha Ha and we don’t like the look of the toasted broad bean snack. The other three people in the pub seem to be enjoying themselves, though.

  From Wild Pat’s Party Pad to The Dixie Chicken Bar, it is as if this street was built the second before we got there. The ‘boy are you gonna wish you weren’t hurting so bad tomorrow after all the fun you had last night in crazy, wild Chinatown’ pub names were likely picked out of a hat by the town fathers. The patrons are the same three people, out-of-work actors I presume, who just go round the back to the next bar and settle in before we get there.

  That’s the way things are done in Singapore. Come up with the slogan and then go out to lunch. Folks just don’t notice or care that they are living in a façade. Take the national emblem, the Merlion, a half fish, half lion mythical mascot, for example. Merlions can be seen all over the place here, on T-shirts, paperweights, cookies, shiny new statues situated in key tourist spots. But buying a Merlion souvenir isn’t like taking home an Empire State Building thermostat or a ceramic moo cow that squirts milk, or a hat with Mickey Mouse ears. The Merlion merchandise isn’t a response to years of public enthusiasm. The Merlion didn’t bubble up from history; it didn’t prove itself over the decades to be a defining element of culture. The Singapore Tourist Promotions Board was given the mandate to come up with an icon whose unique and attractive design would become the nucleus of a successful souvenir industry. Basically, a ‘Grandma went to Singapore and all I got was this Merlion’. The Merlion is nothing more than a concept, like a pet rock or a smiley face. Maybe there was a contest on the back of instant noodle packets: Draw something we can make into T-shirts and key chains, mould into cookies, make into chess-pieces, and the one who comes up with the best design gets a free buffet at the Goodwood Park Hotel. The Merlion is not unattractive, it’s just missing any possible shred of real meaning.

  Now the stores are left with quite an overstock of Merlion hats, socks, key chains, snow globes (who’s the genius behind selling snow globes in a place that has never and will never see snow?) and cookies. There really should be a contest for the person who can offload all this crap.

  The last place we go in this district is finally iconoclastic. We walk through an indoor waterfall, everything is blue, I am blue, Frank is blue, the drinks are blue. The place is called Reds (just kidding). Anyway, it’s a gay bar. They tell us we’d be more comfortable in the back room.

  ‘No, we wouldn’t!’ I bellow. ‘We’re from New York. I’m in publishing, for God’s sake.’

  Frank turns me to face him and says, ‘It’s against the law to be gay in Singapore. Give them a break, for Christ’s sake.’ He leads us out the door, but the night goes on and on.

  At Mushafah Dan’s, the owner says, ‘Stop! Stop! No one has ever had three Mushies!’

  ‘That may be true,’ I declare, ‘but tonight, I will make history!’

  Perhaps, one day, I’ll remember the rest of the evening, but for now, the little school marm in my biology is making me remember to pay. I have this condition called blepharitis. Not only is this an unsuitably named affliction for a sexy tart like me, but the symptoms insidiously undermine my perfection. Why couldn’t I have something called panther, meaning I’m always so cool. I have blepharitis. It’s when your eyes … oh, I’m so embarrassed to talk about it … but they get hideously sticky and incredibly painful. It feels like conjunctivitis only it hurts worse, lasts longer and you sometimes have to tell people to please focus on your lips and forget about the ooze-making machine under your brows. It comes out after bouts of bad diet and, okay Marm, bouts of drinking.

  I simply cannot open my eyes. Apparently, while I stupidly thought all face parts were having fun, my eyes came up with a plan to punish me. They invented a blepharitic adhesive so advanced, so insoluble, it is stronger than superglue. I am in misery.

  The first time I got it, I was about six. (Obviously, it wasn’t from too many cocktails.) I was naturally rather panicked. Until then, the worst experiences of my life had been coming second at Pammy Diener’s dress-up party, missing the school bus and getting yelled at by my dad for crying when he yelled at me about something else in the first place. (Dad could yell logarithmically.)

  I called out for my mom. ‘Mom! Help! Help!’ I waited for her to come charging into the room, as I knew she would, like the time I bit down on the thermometer, or when I got a nailfile stuck in my teeth or couldn’t get Barbie’s head off my thumb. She never even let a minute pass if the television picture went bad. But she sure was taking her time now. Maybe she was desensitised from all the times I cried, ‘I fell in the toilet,’ legs and arms pointing at the ceiling. Maybe she should have gotten me a special seat. Maybe she wasn’t such a swell mom.

  I knew that blind people had great ears and I’d have heard her galloping toward me even if she were across the road at Aunt Lois’s, which she wasn’t. And how did I know? Because I could smell her. I called out louder, more plaintively. Nothing. Blind and motherless, I turned to God, promising I would fess up to the hole in the wall I blamed on the housekeeper, I’d stop talking during Hebrew school (he’d like that one), I wouldn’t throw my apple away at lunch, please, just let me see again.

  Along with the supersonic hearing and genius nose, blind people are also more spiritual. Before – when I was whole – I only told God what I wanted and he silently took notes. Now, all of a sudden, he was handing out tests. Letting me know I was special. I thanked him and politely told him I would prefer to be especially pretty instead.

  I needed help. It wasn’t coming to me so I felt my way around the room, sliding my palms along the walls, bumping into furniture, loudly, slowly, painfully, making my way to the kitchen … seven paces from the bed to the door … nine paces from the door to the corner of the hallway … six steps down to the foyer. When the linoleum ended, I was there. I’d made it. And without a dog!

  Mom had closed the kitchen door so she and Dad wouldn’t wake us up. I bumped into it and heard Mom telling Dad that she was sorry she broke the egg yolk and would fry him up a new egg. Dad was still pissed off that the one he had been counting on, had already buttered his toast for, had tucked the paper napkin into his dress-shirt collar in anticipation of, was, in fact, not fit for human consumption.

  ‘Just look at it, Eunice,’ I heard him say. I imagined the microscopic droplet of yellow that was pale and chalky instead of incredibly, unexpurgatedly sunny. He scraped his chair back (a bloody cacophonous sound for me now that my other senses were making up for the one that died so young). ‘Forget it. I’m not hungry,’ he said through a mouthful of toast.

  Dad read egg yolks like the I Ching. ‘Puncture in upper quadrant: bad day for signing contracts … Heavy layer of albumen: best not to schedule important meetings …’ It wasn’t just eggs, sometimes it was the fat on a lamb chop, plain as day, forecasting this or that, or the temperature of the bread or the meaning lurking within a lemon slice, as opposed to the preferred wedge, with his Chivas.

  He thundered out and encountered me.

  ‘Hello baby doll,’ he said as he kissed me on my forehead.

  ‘Father? Father? Is that you?’ I asked, placing my hands on his face to ‘see’ his expression.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he asked.

  Mom’s slippered feet, her morning scent. ‘Harvey, don’t use that language. Frannie, what are you doing?’

  ‘I can’t open my eyes, Mommy.’ I started to cry and then, a second later, I could open them and see through some spiderwebs. I felt the urge to rub and soon enough I had balls of gunk all over my
cheeks and hands but my sight was restored. Either I was no longer special or I was forgiven.

  Oh, to be six years old again. It’s not that I remember loving being six, but I’m sure I didn’t have hangovers. So far, I’ve only discussed the upper tenth of my body. But, down to my digits, the cellular me was protesting. My throat was parched, my stomach was angry and my feet throbbed out a warning of what they’d do if I ever wore those shoes again.

  I’m sure we came home because that’s Frank’s shoulder I’m drooling on and these feel like my sheets. I’m sure we paid Pearl because she’d still be here ratcheting up the total if we hadn’t. Frank enfolds me in his arms and pulls me close, settling in, safe and warm. He sighs.

  ‘Frank!’ I shove him.

  ‘Whaa …’

  ‘You have got to turn your head the other way or just stop breathing altogether,’ I say.

  We both get up; I follow the sounds of his bare feet. We wash, brush and gargle. My eyes are burning and still fastened shut.

  We lurch back to the bed. Frank nuzzles again, a salve, a tonic, a shrine, a lily pad on a warm, gentle pond. I start to slip back into sleep and that can only mean one thing: yes siree, the kids are up and the demanding has begun. Not in a ‘when you get a minute’ kind of way, rather in a series of now sounds. Hoarse crying from Huxley’s room. Now! The banging on our door of Sadie’s small, determined fist. Now! Rattling crib wall. Now!

  Frank doesn’t move a single, solitary molecule in his body. He’s relaxed as a marshmallow. I’m blind and I’m angry. Furious that this is not an ‘up for grabs’ chore. This is my chore. Because he is working and soon I will not be. Because he is the man. Because that is what expat life is like. Because I better get used to it. I crawl out of bed but take the long way, over his body, traversing his midsection, my elbows and knees not missing a trick.