Unpolished Gem

by Alice Pung

My mother said nothing, but I knew that my irrepressible desire to clean the house would be reported to my father. She left shortly afterwards without saying a word to me, to drive my sisters to their maths tutor. She didn’t even yell at me, but her look said it all. It was as if I was doomed, and she was leaving me to complete whatever prurient business we were up to, because it was all too late.

  And now Michael was trying to fix it up for me, feeling the burden of guilt that was with me always.

  “Just tell her,” he said slowly, like a benign philosophy professor with the best of intentions but so removed from the practicalities of this world that I could weep, “that you just wanted to kiss me.”

  I looked at him and didn’t know what to say. The sheer ridiculousness of his suggestion astounded me. “I’m not even supposed to be kissing you, don’t you understand? They think – or they like to think – that the most we get up to is hand-holding. So what do I tell her now, I took you upstairs because I wanted to hold your hand?”

  I wasn’t being fair, and I knew it. I was asking him sarcastic rhetorical questions when none of this was his fault at all. He would never understand, and not because I was a cynic and overwhelmed by the futility of it all. No, I was a realist, and I had choices to make. One of them was to keep silent about certain things, so that he would never understand, because what he did not know could not hurt him. How could I ever tell him that before my mother left us both home alone, she took me upstairs to her walk-in wardrobe and whispered, as if he could hear up a flight of stairs, a room and a wardrobe and understand Teochew dialect, “Is it safe to leave you here with him?”

  “Yes,” I groaned, because she was irritating me, but she had to ask me the question a couple more times, each time stressing the word “safe” with greater intensity, until my annoyance was starting to make her anxious and she thought that if she asked me anymore it might just incite me to get it on with him as an act of rebellion. She then hissed in my ear, “Don’t you ever let him upstairs, you never know what he could get up to.”

  And he hadn’t got up to anything, in fact it was me who initiated it, who invited trouble, who could not be content with innocent stolen kisses between classes but had to pose him like a doll on my purple bed, like a little girl playing with Barbie and Ken dolls.

  “I’m just going to stick with my story,” I said to him slowly and firmly. “We were upstairs vacuuming.”

  He looked at me as if I were mad. “You reckon they will believe that?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then why are you telling a lie?” He couldn’t understand it. “We weren’t even doing anything wrong!”

  “The truth, Michael,” I said, “would be worse than a lie.

  The truth would be a threat. It would torment them forever.”

  “But we didn’t even do anything!”

  “I know.”

  “You’re going to get into trouble.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You’re shaking,” he commented. Way to go, astute observer.

  Once the shakes started, it would be a while before they stopped.

  If I was only good for one thing, it was creating the first human seismograph. Michael didn’t like to touch me when I was in this state, maybe he thought I was fragile, or maybe he thought that I would find it patronising. But it distressed him. The next thing he said was, “Tell her I told you to go upstairs.”

  That put a sudden end to the trembles because I was too stunned to move. I stared at him.

  “No, no,” he corrected himself. “Tell them that I made you go upstairs.”

  I thought the shakes had damaged my eardrums. “What?”

  “Tell them I made you do it. Tell them you’re not to blame.

  Tell them I’m to blame.”

  The consequences of my vacuuming lie were calculated to be miniscule and to protect all parties. It was nothing but a little see-through white lie, it was threat-minimisation, it was to stop the torment on both sides. But the consequences of this other lie he wanted me to tell were monstrous, earth-shattering. The consequences for him – how could he even consider that? Did he think I would really tell such a huge monstrous black falsehood? What on earth was he thinking?

  How could he take responsibility for such a thing?

  “But you didn’t make me do anything! We didn’t do anything!”

  He raised one eyebrow, as if to highlight that this was what he had been trying to tell me all along.

  This made me think about my own stupid story about vacuuming, and to realise with devastation that I had probably instilled in him the need to lie, except that he was sincere and he did not understand the nuances of untruths, the different levels of diplomacy, the different degrees of fake. He probably thought one lie was just as good as another, and so long as you knew the truth, that was all that mattered. So why not come out with one that would get your beloved out of the most trouble? You would be unscathed because you knew the truth, and the truth would set you free. He did not understand this complicated sense of self based on others’ perceptions and how one little lie about your honour could mark you down, make you a pariah or psychologically pock-mark you forever. His sense of ignorance was unwittingly brave and inadvertently defiant, and it was for this innocence that I loved him.

  In the end, as I knew from the beginning, the vacuuming story worked. During dinner my father didn’t say anything, because he was too embarrassed, and he could not dispute my story because to do so would be too awkward, and who knew what sordid tales could emerge. There were some things he was better off not knowing, as far as my father was concerned.

  *

  When I was at home, I was wearing a mask. I could not be flippant or funny or laugh too loud lest my parents thought me an uncontrollable flirt, or worse, smitten. The worst thing about our relationship was the being watched. We were putting on a show. He was trying as hard if not harder than I was to be acceptable – to be the obedient prospective son-in-law. He drank the herbal medicines my father made, and adopted what he thought was a manly reticence. He offered to help me with the dishes, and I responded automatically, “No, no, it’s alright, Michael, go sit down and watch some telly.”

  “You know,” he whispered to me one day as I was at the sink, “if we ever … errr … live in a domestic-type relationship, you can’t do this. It unbalances things.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to live in a domestic relationship with him, but if I did, I would have done anything to make his life easier. I owed him the world for his persistence, for his understanding. I felt guilty that he was even coming here at all. It was a one-and-a-half kilometre walk up the hill to Avondale Heights, to meet up with mediocre me, to be with me while I went about my daily duties. He was with me while I cooked and cleaned, and collected my sisters from school, and he carried my sister’s purple backpack on his back.

  This isn’t me! I wanted to yell, I am more exciting, there is more to me than these menial tasks, there is more to my life than what I do! I am sorry there is not much more you can see, but it’s all there. You probably feel gypped. I felt so much guilt and stress that it put my stomach in knots. My intestines had probably already macraméd a stringy bag, waiting for my heart to drop no less.

  How could I compensate for wasting the youth of this unassuming boy? He was so easily made content but I still wanted to make it up to him, even though he did not expect compensation. So I washed his clothes. I made him meals. I packed his stuff when he was about to move out of college back to Perth for the summer holidays. He could have done it himself, shoved all the washed and unwashed shirts and socks into cardboard boxes, little did he care about neatly folded squares of clothes and carefully ordered cartons. It was then that I began to have my doubts, and realise the truth: that this packing, this cleaning, this fussing, was not what he appreciated about me. Anyone could have done it for him, and many girls were probably willing. Many girls were probably willing to do more.

  *


  But still, I drove him home every evening, and my father would want to come with us if it was getting too late – that is, past 10.30 p.m., in case I ended up twisting the car around a telephone pole. We had to weigh up the value of time – him staying longer at our house with my father accompanying us on the car-ride back to his college, or me driving him back early so that we could have the car-ride alone together. We opted for quality, not quantity.

  That night, Michael looked at me with sad-labrador eyes, feeling sorry for both of us. “Now you’re going to have to drive home in the dark alone. I wish you could stay over. It would be so much easier.”

  Easier?

  He meant with him, in his bed.

  His bedroom was always a mess, clothes strewn over the toughened wooden furniture that had belonged to generations of students, and socks spewing forth from every corner. Books lined his shelf – Plato, Mill, stories by Borges, drawings by Escher, and some hardcover Sesame Street books from childhood.

  Cleaning his room, I found remnants of a life I barely knew. It lay there exposed for me, budding forth from his drawers. Photographs from an ex-girlfriend, artistically done and mounted on black cardboard – black-and-white landscapes with him in a big woollen jumper sharing the scenery with some sheep. Talk about stereotypes, I thought, you don’t see me posing in photos with my homies from Footscray in a dimly lit alleyway. But in reality, I was insecure, and I was jealous because someone had looked at him from all those angles. I carefully wrapped the pictures up in a jumper, because I could tell they were precious to him, the way he looked at them wistfully. I couldn’t even bring myself to look through his yearbook. There was a picture of him in there, at the college ball, with a black-haired big-bosomed girl. Another ex-girlfriend? At the very least, his date for the evening. I couldn’t look at him any more. I became awkward, shy, shoulders forward, eyes downcast concentrating on what I was putting in the boxes. He had, after all, let me go through all his things. “I have nothing to hide from you,” he said, and I had to honour that honesty, because I wouldn’t have let him go though my stuff, never in a million years, not with my cupboard full of diaries dating from age twelve plotting Armageddon against various people who made me miserable, and a new updated will stuck at the back of every edition. I didn’t want him to see all of that. This was a girl who had never travelled outside Melbourne, who lived in the same western suburbs all of her life, who spent her spare time knotting up her insides like ropes. I was a fake, and sooner or later he would find out.

  I tried to tell him things. Unpleasant things, but unless I made a nice anecdote out of them it wouldn’t register. I knew he liked to hear the stories about the Janome sewing machine I got for my twelfth birthday, but not the story about the pills I had to take at seventeen. As an insider, my life wasn’t interesting and quirky; I was only a good storyteller, and I was running out of quirky anecdotes. I was meant to be the stoic little survivor, an everlasting fount of energy and optimism. “You know, Alice, sometimes I wish you would cry,” he told me, but I thought that if I did, I would be like all other girls, and I liked to think that I was different, that I was special. But in actuality I was just a better scriptwriter.

  And pretty soon, I realised that the script was running out. Pretty soon he might decide to tune into new romantic comedies on other channels, and it was with this realisation that the paranoia started kicking in. I would wonder about every attractive young woman I met at parties, even when he was not there. Why me, not her? Why why why? He could probably get sex out of that one. He could get easier parents out of the other one. I knew the paranoias were mine and mine alone, demons I had to reckon with, that arose through no fault of his. Once in front of friends he made a joke about being with other girls, and I went morbidly quiet.

  “Why would you get upset? Unless of course, you think it would actually happen.”

  He had a point there.

  I found four little unopened foil packets in his room while I was packing for his journey back to Perth, and I hid them between the pages of a book I found on his shelf – 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was no need to confront him or make a big deal out of it because of course I knew he had had sex before he met me, otherwise he might not have been so calm about waiting and waiting, and that thought didn’t make me feel jealous in the way the photos did, but it did make me cautious because sooner or later being me would not be enough, and there would be no sex to keep us together, and it would be the end.

  *

  What would happen when I told him I didn’t want to have sex? He would be understanding, and kind, but I bet he would think, this is all your parents’ doing, all these stigmas, and if you could only overcome them, you would be free. It was either rebellion or no rebellion. We had just watched Pleasantville at my house after dinner, a movie about a 1950s Brady-Bunch world existing within a television screen, where everything was black-and-white and placidly “perfect”, until some kids from half a century later enter the scene and introduce some colour into Pleasantville, and life is no longer as pleasant, but more exciting.

  “I wish your parents would stop seeing in black-and-white,” Michael had commented before he climbed out of the car.

  But Michael, I wanted to say, it is not the matter of sex or no sex that liberates a person. I would never spend a night in your room, and you will never understand the reasons why, because you will think that it is only to do with my parents. I only get one go in this lifetime, Michael, and I don’t want to screw up, literally speaking. One chance, do you understand? But he did try to understand, to the best of his ability, because he knew the limitations, and worked carefully within them, until “We’ve got to be careful not to make your father aggro” became his refrain. The difficulties we faced were seen as kind of exciting, kind of heroic. Proof of our love, how much we were willing to suffer. I supposed he was suffering for the idea of love, but why would you suffer for someone so banal?

  After a while, it probably began to dawn on him that this was not a game, that it was a series of rules and regulations, as strict as the army. He probably began to see me as a series of dos and don’ts. Once we got caught in the rain, and he said, “Oh no, what is your father going to say when he answers the door and sees that I’ve brought you home all wet and dishevelled?” as if it was his fault that it had rained. In order to help me maintain my independence, while simultaneously appeasing my parents, he had to tread a fine line between being overly solicitous and grossly negligent. I knew it was hard on him.

  We spent a lot of time in the small, dark uninhabited rooms in the attic of the Old Law Library at Melbourne University. It was our secret place, and I would block the window on the door with my shawl while we were together. I asked him whether I made him happy, which was something I had never doubted before, but now I was losing faith in my own capacities. He laughed, there was no doubt about it, he gave me his answer and I knew he meant it. He had laughed because it was a stupid question with one obvious answer, and he meant the answer.

  “Do I make you happy?” he asked me in return, and I knew he expected the same honesty. But the only answer I could give him was a white lie, and then I started to cry. He probably thought that this confirmed what I had said, but actually I was crying because I was a liar, and the truth was that being with him made me miserable. No longer did I feel the urge to share my observations of the world with him. He could see my world for what it was – a set of rules and finely drawn lines and fraudulent erasures.

  AND so when his bags were all packed and he was heading back to Perth, it was the end for both of us, although he did not know it yet. He had waited for me to finish work so that he could say goodbye. I had never in my life so adored him, and my stomach had never felt so knotted.

  “Where would you like to go?” I asked him, although I knew he would let me lead. That was what I loved about him. This suburb was my turf, he let me show him everything through my eyes. In the end, I decided to take him to the park where Chinese New Year was he
ld every year. It reminded me of a few childhood days spent with my family, before the little sisters were born, when my brother and I ate barbequed corn-on-the-cob and ran away from the dragon as it approached. Our disbelief was suspended for those few moments when the dragon came to face us – we forgot that there were merely four sweating young men underneath, thrashing their limbs about to make the material move. The creature seemed to take on a life of its own. People clamoured to be near the dragon, but I shrank from its noise and violence and glaring bulging eyes.

  But this was not New Year. It was dusk in summer, and the park was quiet and clean. We found a bench and sat down, facing the flowerbeds. We sat in silence for many moments. I was growing cold, and I wrapped my arms around myself. After a while, when neither of us had yet started to speak, I realised that Michael already knew. He knew that this was not a silence of ease, of familiar companionship, because he did not tell me that he was going to call me from Perth, or tell me that he was going to miss me when he left. We did not look at each other. He hummed a waiting-in-the-lift tune. He was probably trying to annoy me out of my reticence, so that we would at least have a starting basis on which to fight. “I hate it when you hum that goddamn stupid tune!” “Well, I find it soothing and meditative.”“It’s crap, and you’ve left me with no choice but to leave. This is the end!” “You’re leaving me over a tune?! No! Wait, I have more in my repertoire!” If only it were that easy.

  He sighed and picked at his fingernails. When he had produced a result that would keep a manicurist in business for the next two weeks, he put his hands away and turned to me: “You didn’t bring me here so I could just say goodbye to you, did you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Because now I can’t seem to say it.”

  I remained silent, and could not look at him.

  “Because if I do, I have a feeling it is going to have more significance than just being away from each other during the summer break.”