Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  THE GENESIS OF CHRONIC CONSTIPATION

  Madam Tay ambushed the lovers and hijacked the wedding. She had done her best to prevent it, to steer Jonah’s interest in some other direction suggested by the matchmaker she had consulted back in the village. A number of wealthy, cultured, beautiful Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese girls had been brought to the North Bridge Road house and displayed like heifers, but Jonah wasn’t interested.

  To her bewildered annoyance, he was bewitched by the shopkeeper’s daughter. He was entranced by Pandora’s rowdy family, mistaking the volume of noise for the depth of familial affection. Denied contact with his own family, he basked in his acceptance by hers. He loved the laughter, the silliness, the anecdotes of daily life Pandora shared with Daphne and Percy-phone. He was amused by the rough teasing and swaggering machismo of Winston and Henly. He enjoyed the volubility of Mei Ling and the gossip of the mahjong aunties. He wanted to share all that with Pandora. Compliant to his mother’s wishes all his life, he was suddenly intransigent on the choice of his bride. Scoldings, tears, cajolings, disavowal of family ties and threats of suicide made no difference. He was firm on this point. He would marry Pandora.

  They got engaged in her second year of university. She was reading Walt Whitman and discovering her own sensuality. He came to find her in the library one evening, long after everyone else had returned to their homes or colleges for dinner. She looked up at him, her eyes dazed and unfocused, With the quick proprietary stab of a lover’s pity, he scolded her gently for working too hard and forgetting to eat.

  ‘Let’s go. I’ll buy you some Hokkien mee. You’re not doing yourself any good by starving your brain of protein, you know. And you need carbohydrates to give you energy.’ He pulled her up and peremptorily swept her books into her bag, hefting the strap over his shoulder, already taking charge of her life. He sat her on the back of his new bicycle and pedalled to the nearest hawker centre. He found a free table under the swinging coloured lanterns and made her sit down on one of the plastic stools while he went to order a plate of steaming Hokkien egg noodles fried in thick black soy sauce with salted fish, sliced pork, prawns and vegetable pieces. He brought it back to the table, together with two glasses of the black grass jelly drink that he didn’t know she disliked intensely because he’d never asked.

  ‘Come on. Eat,’ he bullied her kindly. ‘You need to build up your strength to study for the exams, you know.’

  She felt light-headed and exhilarated, scarcely in need of food. Still, obediently she ate, paying scant attention to him as he talked about a difficult root canal case that he had seen at the dental hospital that day, about the coming exams, about his mother’s poor health—about the minutiae of their everyday lives that had long ago ceased to interest her with its repetitious banality. She looked up at the gaily bobbing lanterns and beyond them to the star-dusted skies.

  She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes . . .

  Pandora looked at Jonah, utterly stunned that he had just voiced the fragment floating in her mind. For a moment, she felt connected to him; a sticky web spun between her heart and his. Why, he does understand after all, she thought, and love devastated her. She looked down at her half-eaten plate of Hokkien mee and felt overwhelming gratitude for his constant solicitude. And she loved him because suddenly, in that particular moment, she realised that he really loved her; that finally, in her life, a man had chosen her, wanted her, adored her, needed her. She closed her eyes and hugged the moment to herself. She let go and flailed helplessly in the awed revelation of their love for each other.

  ‘Jonah,’ she said as she leant over and kissed him on the lips impulsively—the first time she had ever done so. ‘I love you.’

  He flushed brightly and gripped her hands. ‘I love you too, Pan. Let’s get married.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, drunk with love and lyricism. And then she heard it again.

  And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

  So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

  The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

  But tell of days in goodness spent,

  A mind at peace with all below,

  A heart whose love is innocent!

  Slowly, Pandora turned around. A young Eurasian man with light brown hair and a ragged beard was perched on a stool directly behind her, a giggling Chinese girl squirming on his lap. She recognised him from her English literature classes. He had open a book of Byron’s poetry and was reading it aloud to the woman, feeding her spoonfuls of sweet yam soup in between stanzas.

  The spider web snapped. It hadn’t been Jonah after all. The Eurasian man looked up and stared into her eyes. A perfect split second pregnant with impossible possibilities, swiftly followed by the intrusion of reality.

  ‘Pan, you’re not eating. What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?’ Jonah demanded.

  Pandora turned her back on the Eurasian man and gave Jonah her full attention. She loved him, yes she did. She loved his many kindnesses to her family, his patience with Daphne and Percy-phone, his gentleness towards her mother. She loved his generosity, the way he was always bringing bags of tah mee for her mother, brown paper packets of char kway teow for her father; the way he would go hunting for the biggest, ripest durians during durian season and lug the smelly, thorny fruit to her house for Winston and Henly. She loved the way he never opposed her dream to be an English teacher like Miss Liu. She had made the right choice; she was sure of it. She had made the only choice she could make after ‘going steady’ with him for nearly three years. Unless she wanted to gain a reputation like her eldest sister Lida Lim. She was sure of that too.

  Once the engagement was announced, Madam Tay concentrated all her efforts on salvaging this disastrous turn of events. She summoned Pandora to her house and, for her son’s sake, instructed his future bride on how she was to behave and what would be expected from her. At the same time she made it clear that, in her opinion, Pandora was sly and opportunistic, taking advantage of Jonah’s infatuation to connect herself to a wealthy family with a silver Mercedes, four rubber estates, and as many business interests in Malaysia. Then she proceeded to plan her son’s wedding without consulting the Lim family. They were surprised and mildly insulted, then resigned and indifferent.

  ‘Be a good wife to Jonah and always obey your mother-in-law. Then we will never be ashamed of you,’ Mei Ling told her daughter before she went back to her gambling. The shopkeeper appreciated the fact that the meticulous routine of his life had not been disrupted by wedding preparations. His only irritation was that Percy-phone, on whom the nightly daughter’s duty now fell, still could not cook soft-boiled eggs properly.

  Strangely enough, it was Wendy Wu—the Lims continued to call her either that or Miss Telecom to the end of her life—who objected to Pandora’s marriage. Wendy Wu fell in love with Pandora after her marriage to Donald Duck. She came round to the shophouse at least once a week to visit, even when she was pregnant, and she often took Pandora and Percy-phone shopping at the more expensive department stores. She invited them over to her house, taught them how to put on makeup and bought them MaidenForm bras to shape and lift their small breasts. She’d been the one to introduce Pandora to her passion for Hollywood films. They nourished their love affair with MGM musicals by swapping fan magazines. She persuaded Donald Duck to help put Pandora through university, and she was deeply upset that Pandora was getting married.

  ‘I’m telling you, you’re throwing away your life, lah,’ she told Pandora. ‘Look at you, so pretty, got so much brains and so many opportunities. Not a dummy like me. What for you want to get married to that skinny dentist, ah?’

  She had met Jonah and Madam Tay, and she realised that the son bent only to the mother. Towards all others he displayed, kindly but firmly, the conviction that his was the right way, the only way. Though he clai
med to hate it, he had spent too long being the centre of Madam Tan’s attention and devotion; he would demand the same from his wife. Wendy Wu was the only one who recognised that Pandora would be too weak to stand up to Jonah. She was also the only one who guessed that, at times, Pandora privately thought she was making a mistake but didn’t dare to break off the engagement.

  After a while she gave up trying to dissuade Pandora from getting married and turned her efforts to counteracting the effects of Madam Tay. She decided that Pandora should at least have a bit of fun before she was sequestered in marriage. Under the vague pretence of preparing for the wedding, she whisked Pandora away from Jonah’s side. She taught Pandora how to dance and flirt a little, then she took her to various tea dances and nightclubs. They cha-cha’ed and rumba’ed and giggled and felt like both sisters and best friends.

  ‘Make him wash your panties,’ Wendy Wu advised Pandora as they listened to the latest Platters album in the Cathay music store. ‘That’s how I trained Donald to mind me, you know. I told him that if he wants to keep messing up my silk panties with sex, then he has to hand-wash them for me.’

  But they both knew that Pandora wouldn’t do that. Pandora had spent her life in service to the Lims. She was the one who hand-washed soiled underwear and scrubbed out toilets. She would continue to do so in the Tay household after her marriage.

  In the end the wedding was a combination of two bizarre ceremonies—one Chinese and one Christian—followed by an enormous banquet. On the night before the wedding, Madam Tan came over to the Lim’s house to act as the ‘good fortune’ woman, combing prosperity, longevity and happiness into Jonah and Pandora’s hair. Pandora, fresh from her bath, sat by the window and stared at the moon.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Pandora,’ Madam Tan said as she ran a red comb through her niece’s long wet hair four times. ‘Good girls get good husbands. I told you that a long time ago.’

  The wedding day began early the next morning, when Jonah—dressed formally in a grey wedding suit—and his best-friend Beng Chee arrived outside the Lims’ terrace and began the traditional bride-bargaining process.

  ‘You pay how much for Pandora?’ Winston hollered jovially through the padlocked grille bars of the shop. ‘One million dollars or what?’

  ‘You got to be joking,’ Beng Chee exclaimed. ‘Where anybody got that much money?’

  ‘Make him do something to show how much he loves Pan-Pan then,’ Daphne said, enjoying the game. ‘And maybe we lower the price. Make him eat ten really hot chilli puddies or do push-ups in the street to show how strong he is. Or make him sing a song. Blueberry Hill.’

  So poor Jonah stood out on the street, slowly simmering away in his wedding suit, wailing out how he’d found his thrill on Blueberry Hill. Eventually he satisfied Winston and Daphne’s desire for sophomoric pranks and was allowed inside the terrace. He distributed the lucky red envelopes, stuffed generously with wads of money, to the Lim siblings, then Pandora came out and they both served tea to the proudly smiling shopkeeper. Finally, Jonah picked up Pandora, frothing away in white tulle, and staggered out of the house with her in his arms. She flung out her left arm to scatter rice and nearly bashed Winston in the nose before Jonah managed to dump her inside Beng Chee’s car. He then hurried to his own car and drove to St Andrew’s Cathedral, where the Christian marriage ceremony would take place.

  Pandora’s wedding banquet would remain a blur in her memory, a confused collage of buzzing conversation, dress changes (she had to change three times from white wedding gown, to red Chinese wedding garments, to formal evening dress), endless dishes of food, blinding flashbulbs going off and drunken shouts of ‘Yum Sing!’ as guests toasted their health and happiness. The one thing she remembered quite clearly was the sight of Winston, chopsticks stuck up his nostrils, belching with laughter as he undid his belt to drop his trousers. She closed her eyes, gripped Jonah’s hand tightly and turned away to smile at her new Tay family.

  Many of the Tay relatives had come down to Singapore from Malaysia for the wedding, and there was not enough room in the North Bridge Road house to accommodate them all. Bedrooms had to be shared. Madam Tay and her husband squeezed into the newlyweds’ bedroom, together with two of Jonah’s sisters. Madam Tay looked at the bed, fitted with new sheets of lucky red.

  ‘Ai-yah, we better sleep on the floor,’ she told Mr Tay. ‘My bones are not troubling me tonight.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense, Mama,’ Jonah said tiredly. ‘You’ve got arthritis. You and Papa sleep on the bed. Pan and I will sleep with the girls on the floor.’

  ‘But the lucky sheets,’ one of his sisters objected.

  ‘Never mind, lah. We don’t believe in that sort of thing anyway,’ Jonah said.

  ‘Jo, got room for you on the bed,’ Madam Tay said. She huddled up to her husband and patted the narrow space beside her. ‘Come.’

  ‘No, lah,’ Jonah said uneasily, looking at his wife.

  ‘Come on, Jo,’ Mr Tay said, rolling over and closing his eyes. ‘We’re all tired. Don’t make a fuss. Just do as your mother says.’

  And so it happened that on their wedding night, Jonah slept in the marital bed with his parents while his wife, stuffed with supper and suffering from the first pangs of dyspepsia and constipation that, like her husband, would plague her all her life, slept on a mattress on the floor between two of his sisters. In the dark, she listened to soft snores and gnawed on her knuckle to hold back the groans of stomach pain.

  BOUNDARIES AND BLACK HOLES

  In her first year of marriage Pandora became pregnant accidentally and was forced to drop out of her final year of arts at university. They were staying with Madam Tay at the time, three individuals packed into unbearable proximity in the small semi-detached house on North Bridge Road. Pandora discovered that by accepting Jonah’s proposal, she had also married his mother. Madam Tay fell easily into the time-honoured Chinese tradition of bullying her daughter-in-law.

  Jonah was the alpha and omega of Madam Tay’s life; the beginning and the end. On the finely balanced scale of her calculating affection, her love for stick-like Jonah preponderated over the combined weight of wifely duty to her husband and maternal feeling towards her six other children. This was the one that mattered. She might have to share him with his wife (not of her choice), but she would ensure that she had the largest share, the greatest dividend of his attention.

  ‘Ai-yah, where have you been? Why you so late?’ she demanded when they stepped in the door just after seven o’clock one evening. She got up from the rattan chair, fanning herself and flapping the pea-green patterned top of her samfoo to whisk the heavy air around her flabby body. ‘I ordered Ah Lan to have dinner on the table by six-thirty and now it’s all cold. After all the trouble she took to cook your favourite dishes too, you know.’

  On the round glass lazy Susan were arrayed a number of roasted pork dishes, glass vermicelli fried with lotus flowers and black clouds’ ears, a glistening, russet roast duck, and a tureen of turtle claw soup. Bowls of now-cooled rice squatted accusingly at each elaborately set place, red lacquered chopsticks laid neatly beside them.

  ‘Be a good wife to Jonah and always obey your mother-in-law. Then we will never have any reason to be ashamed of you,’ Mei Ling had told her. The one piece of advice passed on from mother to daughter in a lifetime together. So Pandora murmured soft apologies to Madam Tay and sat down at the table, waiting for her husband to help himself to the meal. Then it was her mother-in-law’s turn. Sighing gustily in unspoken and implacable grievance, Madam Tay picked out the smallest, stringiest pieces of pork and scraps of duck where the crisp skin had torn away.

  ‘Ai-yah,’ she sighed again, drawing their attention to her meagre portion of food.

  ‘Ah Bu, please let me help you to some more food,’ Pandora said. ‘You shouldn’t be taking those pieces. They’re not good enough for you.’

  ‘Never mind about me,’ the poor martyr said. ‘As long as you two eat well, that’s all
that matters. I already took out the pieces. Can’t put them back on the plate now.’

  ‘Let me have them, Ah Bu.’ And the dutiful daughter-in-law transferred the old woman’s bony bits and gristly pieces to her own rice bowl. She plucked up succulent pieces of meat and heaped them into her mother-in-law’s bowl, taking care to help her to most of the clouds’ ears as well; she knew the old woman loved them.

  ‘Ai-yah. No need, no need,’ Madam Tay protested. ‘You young people should eat these good pieces, you know. I’m just a nobody in my own house now. You come and go as you like and I’m all alone in the house all the time. I may as well not exist. I’m not wanted here. Maybe I should just leave the house and live out my last days in the Longevity House. Ai-yah.’

  She sighed again and pushed her gold-framed glasses above the ridge of her nose to dab at her eyes with her mothball scented handkerchief.

  Pandora ignored her words even as Jonah clucked soothingly to assure his mother that she was indeed a necessary part of their lives. She shouldn’t mention this nonsense about the Longevity House, not when she had a perfectly good home in Singapore and another mansion back in their Malaysian village. And look how blessed she was to have lots of children who would all welcome her to stay with them. She had good sons and daughters who knew their duty to their mother. He ended by promising her he would be home on time for dinner the following night.

  ‘Ah Bu, chiak,’ Pandora said. Mother, eat. Eat and shut the hell up.

  Soothed and petted, the mother-in-law picked up her chopsticks and began shovelling rice and roast pork into her mouth. Only then did Pandora pick up her own chopsticks and choke down the fat, gristly portions left for her. She felt her bowels constrict. It wasn’t just the diet but the proximity of her mother-in-law. So much needed to be tamped down, sucked in and kept inside in front of the old woman, and her presence pervaded the house always. Pandora sat on the toilet and kept her ears pricked for the sound of her mother-in-law climbing and sighing her way upstairs to use the toilet, so that she could make quick preparations to flush the loo and vacate the room.