by Sandi Tan
“When you told me you saw little Rachel in the swimming pool, I realized we were kindred spirits. You see, some of us are born more sensitive than others.”
“Sensitive?”
“Yes. That’s what it essentially is. We feel things more deeply. We identify with those we have absolutely nothing in common with; we take on great causes, both noble and hopeless. We fall perhaps too willingly into love. Again, both nobly and hopelessly. To put it simply, some of us are compelled by what others like to dismiss as passion but that I prefer to call humanity.”
I could have kissed him. Here was somebody who understood me without me having to explain myself. I would have swooned if the music hadn’t slowed from andante to largo, and he relaxed his grip on my waist.
“In my case, it was hereditary,” he continued, “a fissure or a fault, if you will, passed down through the generations like a goblet filled to the brim with wine. Once in a while, there are spills along the way. My grandmother was a seer, but she always took it as a curse. It was important for her to not stand out. She grew up in old Russia, you see.” He laughed dryly. “They never much liked Jews there in the first place.”
A gong boomed, drowning out the orchestra, and the music stopped. The chandelier jangled from the vibrations, glass swords clashing above our heads.
“Short dance, wasn’t it?” He smiled. “Pity, I had so much more to tell you.”
Golden rods of sunlight now shot through pinholes in the walls, and as more and more burned through, the holes blossomed and merged. Bathed in light, the peacock room began fading and wilting rapidly, its decorative papers curling and crumbling off the walls, revealing a jungle of vines. I held on to Mr. Odell as the dance floor bowed under our feet, spitting out wood splints with each new contraction.
“No!” I yelled, defiant that my will—or his—would overpower whatever was causing this. “Make it stop! I don’t want you to go!” I clung harder to his arms.
And I kissed him.
His lips felt spongy, porous, and cold. Above us, the mammoth chandelier was disintegrating. Powdered glass poured down upon our heads like the most melancholy snow. His body, too, had turned spongy and porous, and soon my fingers were slipping right through him, as if he were made of sand. Tears of anger gushed down my face.
“Why aren’t you fighting this?”
He smiled. “Control your emotions, Pandora. This is all happening in your mind.”
My mind? “But how will I find you again?”
“As always.” His voice grew faint, though his eyes were as vivid and sincere as ever. “I have tea at the Metropole with my wife…The last Sunday of every month…”
Vines, thick and green, sped across the room from the far wall and snatched him out of my arms in one swift tug, whipping him in the air as if he weighed nothing at all. My friend didn’t struggle; he didn’t even shield his face. He simply martyred himself to the unknown. The placidity of his surrender took my breath away.
“Mr. Odell!”
The instant he vanished into the bleached-out horizon, the room went black.
The chiming of the gong grew deafening, its mournful vibrations pounding through my entire body and making my teeth rattle.
Suddenly, I was awake—really awake this time, with all the earlier layers of wakefulness peeled away.
I was indoors, lying on my bed in the servants’ quarters, curled on my side. I must have drifted off like this, staring at the fissure in the wall. Daylight had come, but only just, and the rain was gone.
The room was thick with the damp, monsoonal odor of mildew. It was an aggressive smell, one that seemed to crawl up my nostrils and down to my lungs. All of a sudden, I realized I was shivering. A chill ravaged me to the bones. I huddled under the bedclothes, watching my breath turn to mist and waiting for the tremors to subside.
Seconds later, the door opened: Little Girl. She stared at me with a mix of relief and cold suspicion.
“Mrs. Wee is dead.”
I was too shocked to respond.
“Did you hear what I just said? Mrs. Wee has died.”
She stomped toward me and yanked off my blanket, then leapt back with a gasp. “What happened to you?”
I looked down and was every bit as stunned as she. My arms and legs were clumped in muck, as if I had been crawling in a swamp on all fours. Mud coated the sheets like chocolate pudding.
“I was caught in the…” I couldn’t finish that sentence without sounding like a lunatic. That crack in the wall. I looked at it again. Had it grown? Could I really have…
The gears in Little Girl’s head shifted. “I tell you what,” she said, glancing over her shoulder to make sure nobody was at the door. “Go and clean yourself up. I’ll get rid of these filthy sheets. You have a major task before you this morning.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know her meaning.
“You are to clean Mrs. Wee’s body before the children wake up.”
Mr. Wee had in fact delegated the cleaning to Little Girl, of course, but she let the unwelcome task fall to me. It might have been blackmail, but I was thankful to be let out of my cell and given this opportunity to redeem myself.
When I had trouble lifting the pail of soap water and carrying it into the main house, I remembered I hadn’t eaten in days. It must have taken me ten minutes to climb up those stairs.
Someone had stopped the grandfather clock to mark Mrs. Wee’s passing. The house stood silent, suspended in mortuary time.
I approached Mrs. Wee’s boudoir, and seeing her on the bed where she’d always lain, I felt a twinge of déjà vu. I half expected her to sit up and start hurling accusations, but of course there could be no more scolding, no more phrenological exams, no more moldy sandwiches. Light fell on her face from the pair of alabaster lamps that stood over her like watchful cherubs.
It was clear why Mr. Wee didn’t want his children seeing their aunt—and stepmother—in this state. Her eyes were open and they stared skyward at the spot where her sister’s ghost had been. Her mouth was agape, the purplish lips cracked with dryness. Could she have died midsentence?
Her body formed the shape of a cross. During her final moments, she must have kicked off the sheets. Her hands dangled over the sides of the bed. These were the hands that had examined my face, yet I’d never taken a clear look at them before. They were puny, shriveled little things, like the talons of some helpless bird.
When I brought her hands to rest at the center of her chest, I discovered that she was not yet completely cold. Her eyelids, when I pulled them down like window shades, still possessed the elasticity of life. In a few short hours, the disfigurement of death would claim her, but until that time, when the last drop of her blood turned black, she still belonged to our world. I swabbed away the tears drying into a film on her cheeks, but my many attempts to secure her gaping mouth failed. Finally I propped up her lower jaw with a leather-bound Bible, hoping it would stay closed when rigor mortis set in.
“There wasn’t much pain in the end.”
I turned. Mrs. Wee was behind me, sitting in the creaky chair that had once so tyrannized me.
I braced myself for recriminations, but she looked strangely relaxed, if very pale.
“You see me, don’t you?” She clucked her tongue. “I knew I was right to call you Shadow.”
“Are you…” I was at a loss. “All right?”
“Although I didn’t choose the precise moment, it felt inevitable all the same.” There was no trace of bitterness in her voice. “In the end, it was very much like falling asleep. No doubt you’ve heard this countless times, but really that’s what it’s most like.” She stepped forward and looked down at her own body with the nostalgic tenderness of someone revisiting a beloved old doll.
“Mrs. Wee,” I said neutrally. “Can I explain about the earrings? I didn’t steal them.”
“Oh, don’t fret over those things. They’re nothing—nothing!” She smiled for the first time, and I saw that she looked nothing l
ike Mother.
She walked back to the chair and sat down, sighing, her face now bearing a sudden gravity for what I sensed was her imminent departure. Her eyes combed the room, taking in its contours for one last time, before returning again to her own lifeless form.
“Do you want me to convey any last words to your family?”
She mused for a second and said, with surprising finality, “No.”
“Nothing?” I looked back at the body and thought of the unfinished sentence that had tried to escape her lips. “Are you sure?”
“It’s all nothing!” She had already begun to evaporate. A twinge of regret crossed her features, but she waved it away. “None of it matters. None of it.”
And then she was forever gone.
“Apology accepted,” I said to the empty chair.
I turned back to the body. Her face seemed different—calm, even benevolent. I removed the Bible from her neck, and this time her mouth stayed closed.
The peace didn’t last long. A fly buzzed in from the doorway and landed boldly on my late employer’s nose. For some reason, this moved me to tears.
When Mrs. Wee was properly arranged, I went to Mr. Wee’s study as Little Girl had instructed and knocked on the door. The widower was eating a slice of toast at the desk as he listened to an ominous report being read on the wireless. I thought his hair looked whiter than before, but this was more likely a trick of the morning light. Listening to the news and eating breakfast—was this how he mourned his wife? He looked up as I entered.
“The forecast is not good. War is coming down the Pacific. I can feel it.” He spoke remorsefully, as if he had a hand in preventing damnation. He looked at me and sighed, perhaps about to apologize for my days of imprisonment. I cast my eyes away to make it easier for him, but he simply wiped the sides of his mouth with his napkin and stood up to hand me the breakfast tray. “I’ll wake the children.”
As he passed me in the doorway, he muttered, in a tone of sincere, if sublimely understated, gratitude, “Your help is very much appreciated.”
Later, while I was emptying the pail of soap water into the courtyard drain, Little Girl came up behind me, disgruntled, refusing to look me in the eye. I expected yet more bad news, but no.
“Mr. Wee says you’re free now,” she said, then added in a poisonous key as she strode away, “even though you may still be a thief, for all we know.”
My bitterness toward the old man vaporized. Once more I had the future to think about. I needed to speak to Odell: at the Metropole, on the last Sunday of the month! Why did it have to take a shocking hallucination for me to think of him?
“What’s the date today?” I asked Saudah, the washerwoman.
“Tuesday, the seventh.”
I dried my hands on my skirt and sprinted to my room. On my calendar, I marked out the special Sunday with a secret pencil dot. It was less than three weeks away.
That evening, after a full day spent making funeral arrangements, Mr. Wee invited me to join him and his children for dinner out. The news was again relayed to me by Little Girl, and from the way she spat the words out, it was obvious she had never been asked on such excursions.
To show my respect, I wore dark clothes and was startled to see that the Wee children had dressed exuberantly—not a stitch of black between them. Daniel shot me a bashful smile while his sister studied her unsightly, chewed-on nails, actively avoiding my gaze.
“I’m so glad you could join us,” Mr. Wee said, gesturing for me to squeeze into the Bentley alongside his children. “We’re going to my favorite restaurant.”
Mitzi’s was an unfussy eating house in Chinatown that specialized in boiled chicken and rice—food wholesome enough to be consoling yet not so extravagant that gossips could accuse Mr. Wee of celebrating his wife’s passing. It was a place even Father could afford to go—that is, if he hadn’t lost all his spare change to loan sharks and gangsters. Knowing that Mr. Wee liked eating at Mitzi’s humanized him in a way that his odd reticence could never do.
Issa the Bugis chauffeur drove us in the silence that seemed to be his trademark. I was wedged between Daniel and the car door and felt a spark of static when his silk pants rubbed against my nylon stocking. With equally swift reactions, we quickly pulled ourselves apart.
At the crowded restaurant, I watched Mr. Wee’s eyes scan the room. There was nobody here that he knew, and his mood relaxed. He sat back in the booth and sucked in the oily fragrance of chicken and ginger-garlic sauce that was swirling around us.
“In the grand scheme of things, what’s one pair of earrings, right?” he said, urging me to dig into the communal platter of chicken. “There are more important things in life, like family and food.”
I took the meal to be his apology.
Daniel kept shooting me little smiles when our gazes met. His sister, however, hadn’t softened a bit. She spent the evening studying my every move with narrowed eyes, ready to see nefarious intent in every little thing I did.
The strange thing was that neither Mr. Wee nor his children seemed particularly upset by the loss of Mrs. Wee. Perhaps they had shed their tears in private and were now putting on a brave public face as a group, or perhaps the woman had been ill for so long that her death had come as a relief. Which it was, I couldn’t tell.
I would later learn that this was how most upper-class Chinese—especially Island-assimilated ones—behaved in the aftermath of a tragedy; theirs was a cultural marriage between Confucian reserve and the British stiff upper lip. They had a pathological reluctance to show emotion in front of others and would sooner appear heartless than chance the smallest loss of face.
In spite of Mr. Wee’s insistence that I take the most succulent piece of chicken thigh, I gravitated to the boniest parts—the wing tips and neck—not out of deference to my hosts but out of familiarity. They were what I’d always eaten. Violet watched my choices, doubtless suspecting me of calculated modesty, while Daniel appeared charmed by what he took to be my provincial ways.
“There’s more than enough to go round,” he said, putting a plump drumstick on my plate with his chopsticks.
Violet began muttering about her exams. She hurried her father to finish so she could return to her books. Plus there was Agnes. The dog had been having trouble breathing since morning.
“Bad things are happening all at once,” she said, looking pointedly at me. “It’s as if a plague is upon us. The Black Plague.”
“Oh, stop it,” snapped her father. “Now you’re sounding like Aunt Betsy, God rest her acrid soul.”
“Well,” the girl replied, “you married her.”
We arrived home to see Subramaniam’s arm jammed down the throat of the whimpering, shuddering Rottweiler in the daredevil style of a lion tamer. Violet’s scowl melted into worry and her eyes pooled with tears.
“The dog wheezing all day,” Subramaniam told us. “I thought sure must be something stuck inside.” With the improvisatorial zeal of a former plantation worker, he had force-fed her a chalky cocktail of Saudah’s bleach while the family was out.
The poor beast had retched, and the first ruby earring materialized. Getting the other one was more work—its hook was caught in the flesh of her esophagus, and it was this that Subramaniam was now rooting for, his brows knitted in anguish as his fingers plumbed the mucilaginous well. When he surfaced with the second earring, hand and treasure both coated in slime, Agnes belched so loudly it even made me blush. Wearily, Subramaniam flung his find onto a white towel next to its vomit-encrusted twin.
Violet’s face crumpled. “Who fed these to her? Agnes would never eat them!” She lunged instinctively to embrace the dog, then stopped herself, clearly not wanting to display any weakness while I was present.
“Actually, I remember seeing Agnes run into the house one afternoon,” said Daniel. “It’s quite possible she went upstairs.”
“What? And rummaged through Aunt Betsy’s drawers?” The indignation in her voice returned. “Agnes never go
es inside the house. Even you know that.”
“Vi, you weren’t there, so you can’t possibly—”
“Daniel,” Violet growled, her eyes darting to me, “don’t you be a fool.”
“Vi, darling.” Mr. Wee sighed. “Nobody cares about the earrings. They’re back. No harm done. All right, my dear?”
“I’m not talking about the damn earrings, Daddy. I’m talking about the truth! Have you all gone mad?”
Her pride intact, Violet charged into the house, flinging off her patent-leather shoes like a petulant child.
“Don’t worry, it’s not your fault,” Daniel said, and gave my elbow a firm squeeze. “My sister always overreacts; it’s just her way. Aunt Betsy affected her more than she cares to admit. She’d been crying all afternoon. Besides, in the grand scheme of things…”
In the grand scheme of things, I had my reunion with Odell to look forward to—and the date was getting closer by the hour. But in the smaller, more immediate, scheme of things, my thoughts kept returning to Daniel’s fib about Agnes and the way he had touched my elbow.
It was no accidental brush but a surprisingly hard squeeze, as if he had no idea how strong his grip was, or else he did and was trying to convey more with one caress than propriety allowed. That firmness, coupled with his deep, gentle voice—the voice that carried a chivalric lie in my defense—proved to be a seductive combination. As he removed his hand, his fingertips had grazed my forearm, leaving in their wake a trail of tiny goose bumps.
That night in bed, I imagined Daniel with me, unbuttoning my top and fondling my breasts. I let his hands run down my belly to the core of my longing. I felt his phantom lips lock with mine, the both of us gasping in tandem as our tongues probed and clashed. I hadn’t had such craving in years; I’d forgotten how hungry I was, how starved for love. Li had been my first and only, and that misadventure had left me so confused that I tried to expel all such feeling, but it hadn’t diminished my desires. On crowded trams and buses, brushes against good-looking men would reignite it in me, but they were mere sparks, always extinguished by the next stop.