by Alice Pung
I looked at my own nails and decided I had some wrecking work to do.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
I remained silent.
“Oh. I see. You brought me here to tell me something.”
I finally looked at him.
“Then tell me.”
So I did.
It started with the three words that I was taught always to keep to myself, to expect from men, but never, ever to give away. The three words that caused my grandmother to fight all her life, the very three words that compelled my mother to leave her family and walk through three countries by foot to spend the rest of her life in an alien land that she would never understand, and that would never understand her.
And the consequences of the three words to me, for me, how real they were.
When I had finished, he didn’t look at me for a long while.
He looked at his hands, fingers curled towards the palm. Then he finally looked at me with … what? Disappointment? Hurt?
Perhaps even contempt, which I had never seen before. But one thing I did not see in his gaze, as hard as I looked, was surprise.
For that I was relieved.
“You think,” he told me, “that love is this ‘one true love for ever and ever’ kind of thing, don’t you?”
That was probably contempt I saw on his face.
“No, that’s not true.”
But perhaps it was.
Yet how could I explain how sometimes having the right feelings was just not enough, how it was never enough, for a “forever kind of thing” – a decision you make for life, for better and for worse, and how I did not want to make this decision at eighteen.
“But you don’t have to. Geez, it’s not like we are going to get married anytime soon or anything!”
Yet I knew that the dating was over, the honey in the honeymoon period was way past its expiry date. He would find other girls to adore him. If this went any further, I would be doomed because I would doom myself. Secondhand goods. I adored him. It was so easy to make him happy, I just had to be me. But time was running out, I was running out, there wasn’t much left of me to give. I didn’t want to give him faulty goods because he was the type of boy who would never ask for a refund. And the only thing of value left of me to give him would leave me valueless. Dented washing machine no one wants to use.
“I wrote you a poem,” he told me, “I was going to give it to you.”
I said nothing.
He looked at me. “Would you still have done this if I had given it to you?”
I looked back at him. He thought that a poem could change the course of things. It reminded me of that young mother in the fifth deck of the Titanic, who read her two little children fairytales as the ship was sinking.
“Yes. I would have still done this, Michael.”
I seemed to care bugger-all for lofty romance.
I seemed to care bugger-all for feelings. “I’m sorry.”
He began to cry. I had not expected this. I didn’t know what to do. I wiped his nose with my sleeve because there were no tissues around. This seemed to make him even more upset, so I had to use the other sleeve.
“Come on, it’s snot that bad.”
He stopped sniffing. He stared at me.
“My God, it’s terrible!”
“No …”
“Bloody awful!”
“No, come on …”
“Hell, that was atrocious! Never heard such a bad joke. You should be pun-ished for it!”
“Damn you! What about yours?” I retorted, and somehow those words had a tear-triggering effect because pretty soon I was in dire need of tissues or at least uncharted terrain on my sleeves. “Damn you, Michael!”
“This is worse than the time we ate raw chilli at that restaurant to see who was more stoic.” Of course we both remembered. Fanciest place in Footscray, with butcher’s paper on the tables on top of the white tablecloths, and there we were, not realising that our dates were numbered.
We sat in silence, and the sun set. It grew colder, and we wrapped our arms around ourselves, tacitly knowing that we were now already separate, that we could no longer allow ourselves to keep each other warm.
Finally, he looked at me. “Well, I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you, too.”
We sat like that for a long time, not speaking, knowing this was the last time we would be sitting together like this. We were just-ended lovers in a sense. Lovers in the sense that we loved each other wholeheartedly, with a sort of childhood faith.
“We’d better be heading off.”
We did not look at each other as we walked down to the station.
“I still don’t understand, Alice,” he finally said as we reached our destination.
But he did not doubt that I loved him, because I had wiped his nose with my sleeve. I waited for the train with him, and it soon arrived.
“Well, goodbye then.”
“Goodbye, Michael.”
And there I was, a solitary girl in a sales uniform, standing on Platform 1 of Footscray station watching the 8.43 p.m.
Flinders Street train leave and snake its way past the graffiti-covered concrete walls and into the grassy wilderness of no-man’s industrial wasteland. If this were a film, it would be about now that there would be a shot of a single extended arm out the window of the train, and then the close-up of the hero’s tearstained face would fade away and the credits would start to roll, perhaps accompanied by some poignant, bittersweet tune.
I knew that Michael would go home and unpack his carefully packed suitcases. He would find the little presents I had left him – photographs, books, toiletries, cards. He might even smile upon discovering what I had carefully packed between the pages of his copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Crazier than I thought,” he would think, and take out the four or so foil packages and throw them in the bin, because it’s not like he couldn’t buy them again. And in time, I hoped, he would think of me with a certain fondness, despite the girlfriends to come and the ones that had gone before.
And I would go home and continue the other play, the one that has not ended, the one that will never end, and I would resume my role as “dutiful daughter”, this time with more understanding and compassion.
I could see my mother at my same age, riding on the back of my father’s bicycle in Vietnam, her hands around his waist, the excitement and frisson of trying to evade the bicycle behind her – her sister Ly was always tagging along. I could see her trying as I did, as hard as I did, to get some time alone with the man she loved, to forget about the drudgeries of work and duty and let her hair fly loose and revel in her youth and beauty, and the fact that this man nine years her senior, her former boss for crying out loud, thought that she was the most incredible, delightful, charming creature to have graced the earth. So much so that he was willing to take her to a foreign country of which the only thing he knew was that it didn’t snow, and to live with her for the rest of his life and see their lives multiply into four new ones.
*
My parents were sitting at the dining table when I arrived home. I pretended that the pollen count was really high out there, on this wattle-scented summer night, and that my eyes were red because of that.
“Good to see you home not so late tonight,” commented my father. I rubbed at my eyes and moaned a little more about the curse of hay-fever as I slumped on our green leather living-room sofa.
From the couch, I watched my parents out of the corner of my eye. My mother was wearing her pink terry-towelling bathrobe over her green jumper, white tracksuit pants and brown knitted vest. On her head was her red, white and blue Western Bulldogs beanie with the pom-pom on the top. She didn’t barrack for any football team, she had found the beanie on special at Forges for ninety-nine cents. My father was wearing his flannelette pyjamas with his old brown leather jacket over the top, the same one he wore to work every morning instead of a suit jacket. I watched my mother cut up a mango, with one of our two kit
chen knives. She handed half of it to my father. He took it and I watched them both sharing a mango, the messiest of fruit, with no sense of delicacy whatsoever. It had taken over twenty years of marriage to achieve this familiarity, the same kind of unselfconsciousness of children sharing a snack, the complete ease and abandonment of self.
I watched my parents for a little while longer, and then headed upstairs to bed. I knew that tomorrow I would have to tell them about tonight, but it could wait until the morning. Let them eat their mango in peace.
EPILOGUE
“What are you doing, Alice?”
My sister Alina’s face peered down at me, with her eyelashes that pointed down towards her cheeks, just like my grandmother’s.
“I’m looking at the sky.” The sky was as clear and blue as a child’s new crayon, as it had been the first time we visited this park, the second time, and every other time.
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Lying on the grass is going to make you itchy, Alice.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What are you looking at?”
“Just the sky.”
“I’m gonna look too.”
“Okay. Lie down on your back.”
“Okay.”
A few moments later: “Hey Alice, what am I supposed to be looking at?”
“Up.”
“But what?”
“Just up.” I thought she should discover the pictures in the clouds herself.
Soon, three other little cousins trotted over and wanted to lie on their backs too. They blinked at the sky for a while.
“I’m bored.”
“There are no good clouds.”
“Why are we doing this?”
“’Cause Alice is.”
The clouds moved, and I imagined a mirror in the sky, reflecting the world back in reaffirming white whorls.
“Ay!”
I heard a piercing yell from behind me.
“Agheare, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” My mother.
I turned my head to one side, towards the direction of the sound.
“My holy sacred Buddha, look at her, nineteen and lying flat on her back on the grass like that! With no shame. And look what’s happening, now all the little ones are following her!”
I looked back up at the sky. I could hear her telling my father what I had been doing. I knew he would just look at us and laugh. I turned my head towards the party assembled in front of the only pink and orange grave among the black granite ones in Lilydale Memorial Park.
Aunt Que set down her vat of mixed bean soup on top of the grave. Aunt Samso set down her fried noodles. Aunt Anna set down her Continental pasta bake. And Aunt Jasmine set down her huge pot of chicken curry, grinning at Uncle Frank because even though they were well into their sixties, they were still in love.
The rest of the food was laid out on the polished pink and orange marble – as fine as any marble you would find on any table at any one of our mock-Georgian houses. “Eight thousand dollars,” grinned Uncle Frank, knocking his knuckles on the shiny surface. “I helped pick it out. Beautiful hah?” Aunt Jasmine beamed up at him.
I sat up as Aunt Anna handed me five bunches of plastic flowers to arrange. Shoving the stems of fake flora into a real china vase, I tried in vain to match the opal blue poppies with the magenta gerberas. No flowers were ever that blue in real life, nor did they have black plastic stamens that stuck out like big-headed nails. Since trying to achieve realism with these specimens was as likely as painting a Renoir with half a dozen textas, I opted for a striking Ikea-catalogue effect instead.
“Wah!” cried Aunt Que, “what a miserly effort! They’re all going to blow away with the wind!” And before I knew it, she had shoved in at least three more bouquets, including a dozen neon-green and white roses with glue-dew-drops. She plugged in every possible breathing space at the neck of the vase, and it choked out a few leaves before becoming completely still. The breath of afternoon breeze couldn’t even stir a petal, they were jammed so close. “Now it’s much better. Look at all the colours!”
I looked. The flower arrangement was at least five times larger than the vase itself.
“That’s enough with the flowers. Now let’s light the incense,” said Uncle Frank. We all lined up to collect our stick of incense, and to bow down in front of the HUYEN THAI embossed into the granite in gold letters.
“Buddha bless our mother,” mumbled my parents, aunties and uncles.
“Buddha bless our grandmother,” mumbled my siblings, cousins and I.
The incense was slowly burning down, swirls of smoke drifting up like silk kite tails towards the sky. I sat on the grass and watched. In the centre of the tombstone was our surname PUNG written in gold with the sweeping strokes of Chinese calligraphy. On the right-hand side was my grandmother’s picture with the dates 1911–2002 underneath, and on the left was my grandfather’s picture – 1907–1975. The rest of the Chinese I could not read.
“Is Grandpa also buried in there?” asked Alison, peering at the headstone.
“No.”
“Then why is his picture there?”
“So that we remember him.”
I knew that the grave was housing a mere empty shell, that my real grandmother had left before her burial. Probably off to find my grandfather and resume that argument they were having a quarter-century ago before Pol Pot separated them.
“It’s so deep!” my sister Alison had exclaimed when she tossed her handful of rice and grains into the open grave at my grandmother’s burial three years before. “I can’t even see the bottom.” I wondered now whether things were growing with the grains we tossed in, like the life that grew above my great-grandmother, all that rice and abundance on top of the killing fields. All that growth that grew all that produce that created all that life that made all that food on top of my grandmother’s grave. The food in steaming pots. Two little bowls of rice and two little bowls of tea arranged on either side of the incense pot with perfect symmetry – even when the souls have sighed out of their bodies, you still must accord your parents equal respect. Suddenly, my eyes caught something unexpected, something quirkily out of place amid all the plastic tofu-containers and steam-breathing mounds of food. Behind all the pots and plates, the grapes and geraniums, there were four shining gold Easter bunnies. Where had they come from?
“My sister bought them,” Cousin Tammy told me, “for the little ones.”
I remembered how, at my grandmother’s burial, before the earth was levelled on top of her plot, lucky red candies had been handed out to everybody, the same ones that Little Brother had yearned for all that time ago. Some things never change. We had unwrapped our brown and pink caramels and watched the bulldozers slowly come in. When we walked away from the grave, we were told that under no circumstances were we to turn and look back. We were to keep walking forward, sucking on our lollies.
We still believed in silly superstitions and sweet endings after all.
*
When I was seven, Granny was living with us, in our old house, along with kind Uncle Wilson, Auntie Anna and cousins Andrew and Angela fresh from the Fragrant Harbour. They had a partitioned portion of our living room separated by a curtain my father made out of bedsheets. One day Granny came back from Coles supermarket with a white plastic bag, and from her wrinkled hands emerged wonders never before seen by my seven-year-old eyes. Four little solid eggs, two medium-sized eggs and one small Easter bunny for each of us. “Don’t eat them all at once,” she told us.
My four-year-old brother set to work at once, unwrapping his first little egg. I set to work with my paper and stapler, making a box in which to put my little polished gems. Cousin Andrew lasted two days, and then he couldn’t help himself.
“They’re empty!” he cried, after he bit off a part of his bunny’s ear and could see through the hole.
“Yeah? So?”
“Back in Hong Kong bunnies are filled. All of it’s
chocolate.” He felt gypped but I didn’t care, I expected the hollowness. While everyone else’s sources of joy were rapidly depleting, the remnants adhering to their sticky faces, I still had my six eggs and a bunny. They were hand-boxed, wrapped in a grey plastic bag and hidden in my bottom drawer where no prying family members could ever find them.
I wanted mine to last as long as I could, I wanted a collection. After four days, I did not even think about eating them. The besetting temptation was no longer there, or if it was, I muffled it. Eat me! Eat me! the Bunny pleaded with its crayon-blue eyes and Red Tulip lips. I glared at it. Be quiet. Then I wiped away its tears – for an edge of the foil had mysteriously ripped – with my sleeve, and put it back in the box, back in the bag, back in the bottom of the drawer.
Every day, my brother and cousin would ask whether I had eaten any, and every day I would smile and give them the same reply. After two weeks, they stopped asking. After three weeks, I stopped the daily check on my hoard, my nest eggs. I knew they were still there. I knew I had self-control, and I knew soon I would be the richest girl in the whole of Bliss St, Braybrook. Dedication, preservation, reward – I had it down pat.
Then, four weeks later, I decided that one of the little ones had to go. It was time. I imagined they were quivering in their cotton-wool padded prison, I was so excited. But when the drawer was opened – horror of all horrors, worse than finding my fortunes furtively stolen – ants spilled out and the bunny had melted and the goo that gushed from the eggs had wrecked my box. I didn’t care about the ants that would crawl up my arms, I pulled the whole drawer out of the cupboard and dug my hands in deep. While Alexander and Andrew watched, I started pulling out each egg one by one – or what was left of them – trying in desperation to find one that was not insect-infested, trying to sort through the foil and frustration, not wanting to believe that these squished tragedies were once my pride and joy, the things I had looked forward to most in the world for more than four weeks.
“Don’t cry,” said my grandmother, kneeling down to have a look herself. “I will buy you new ones, don’t cry.” But I wasn’t even going to cry, crying was the last thing on my mind. I was beyond tears, I could not believe that one little tear in a bunny’s ear could lead to this devastation.