by Sharlene Teo
“I’m ready,” Amisa said, and her parents looked up at her from where they sat at the wooden table, and both nodded.
To be seventeen, and so beautiful. Sloe eyed, fine nosed, glistening pink mouth like an ang ku kueh. Her father thought, Who is she? How did this terrifying goddess come from me and my sweet but plain pudding of a wife? What is she doing here? Over the past three years, frankly, Amisa had made him nervous, and he hadn’t been able to protect her from her lascivious uncle and the leering, oily boys from the charcoal factory.
Or maybe he hadn’t been able to control her. She had joined a dance troupe at thirteen, and they performed during Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival. Amisa moved with a sinuousness and sensuality that harnessed the spotlight and made the older women in the crowd unintentionally draw their hands to their mouths and the men’s eyes dart away and then furtively back, flick up and down, oh yeah. Late at night Amisa would slip back into the house smelling of grass and sweat, with charcoal stains all down her arms and up her legs from who knows what, and even her beauty-queen smile felt like a failing. He didn’t understand how she could be so unlike her good sister or seven strong brothers who worked hard and laughed easily.
The family borrowed Khim Fatt’s open-top truck and her siblings rode in the back with her.
“Do you have everything you need?” Jiejie asked. She had brought her youngest daughter with her. She was never on her own these days.
“Yes, Jiejie,” Amisa said. “You don’t need to worry.” Yet as she spoke she felt a wiggle of fear in the pit of her stomach, the sick certainty that she had really decided to leave them. She didn’t know how to phrase her selfish, valid, various reasons. In the house, she was outnumbered. The atmosphere had grown unbearable. Her parents looked at her every day like she might murder them.
As the truck rattled over a bump, Amisa rested her face on her palm and stared at her favorite person. Didi blinked back with an expression of rare focus, tender concentration. His mouth curved into the end point of two neat dimples. Some day soon my Little Ghost will be a heartbreaker, Amisa thought.
He still had that cheeky capuchin demeanor from childhood. Her gaze fell to the vicious laceration on his right leg, a long, raised mark. Didi was the wildest boy in the kampong, and this spring he became obsessed with a used motorcycle, its fender and gas tank a chipped kingfisher blue. How Didi took to it, this sprayed-bright hub, revving the engine till it panicked the chickens. His puckish face lit up over the cowboy saddle. Amisa acquiesced to one ride in the pitch dark. She screamed in his ears and held on to Didi, felt the thrum in his ribs as he whooped and laughed at her.
One week later, Didi swerved to avoid a giant monitor lizard and crashed his motorcycle into a pole. The accident opened his right leg from hip down to knobbly knee. It took six agonizing weeks for him to walk properly again, and now he acted like he had never been injured, despite his telltale hobble.
The journey passed too quickly. The last stretch of road, Didi kept his eyes on the trees, gritted his jaw. Jiejie smoothed her daughter’s hair and smiled at Amisa.
At the bus terminal Amisa hugged Jiejie tightly, her brothers one by one, and Didi last of all. She could barely look at him without wanting to cry, so she kept her eyes on the ground. When she looked up, he grinned at her like they were in on the same joke. Maybe I can’t go, Amisa thought.
“You’ll write and call?” Jiejie said. She was smiling, but still there was a lovelorn shadow, worry tucked in the corner of her mouth. Jiejie’s seven-year-old daughter tugged at Amisa’s arm. She patted the little girl briefly.
As she boarded the bus, Amisa turned to her family standing by the curb: her parents with their graying hair and stern expressions; her sun-stroked brothers in their khaki slacks and singlets; her wonderful, serious sister in the gray dress with her lookalike kid. Didi smiled and waved. Amisa took her seat and waved back from the window, her palm coming to rest against the glass.
It was only after the bus crossed the highway and the island shrank to a small green glimmer that Amisa reached into her pocket and closed her hand around its contents. She peered around to make sure nobody was looking before taking out the red cloth pouch, tilting it on her lap so that the jade bangle peeked out. It had been her great-grandmother’s and was her first sister-in-law’s by right, but her eldest brother hadn’t married yet, and it didn’t seem like he would anytime soon. Her mother had always said she was a thief, not to be trusted, and Amisa felt it was almost expected of her to take her mother’s most prized possession, tucked at the back of the second drawer, right where she knew she would find it.
When the causeway snaked into Singapore she looked out into the concrete expanse, the tall buildings clustered like rows of crooked teeth, HDB flats in stucco textures and half-constructed office buildings. She realized that besides wanting to leave Kampong Mimpi Sedih, she had not given this new place much thought, had not allowed it to occupy any space in her idealizations. And perhaps because of that, she would be impossible to disappoint.
Yellow-top taxis zoomed past along the wide roads, painted with their orderly white stripes; cars and trucks moved in obedient rows. Amisa felt steeled, not alarmed, by the scale of the city, the rubble and scaffolding everywhere.
In Geylang her mute, bald landlord led her up a flight of narrow stairs that creaked underfoot, as if the wood would molder away at any moment. The shophouse smelt faintly of urine and vegetable oil. At the top of the stairs were two doors so close to each other that they could only open inwards. Up here the air reeked of incense and the sour, bodily smell of sickness. The square between the two doors would hold only one human at a time. The landlord unlocked the yellowed door to the left and Amisa followed him into her new home. The room was tiny, with a bare bulb and water-stained walls, but nobody could enter without a key or a knock. This place was truly hers.
In the early mornings she worked in the wet market, helping Mr. and Mrs. Lim sort cockles, clams, and prawns. Mr. Lim was an old friend of her father’s, with white bushy eyebrows and an accosting stare that slipped into a barefaced ogle when his wife turned the other way. Amisa did a little wriggle when Mrs. Lim wasn’t looking, and winked at Mr. Lim, kept him sweet on her but didn’t allow any touching. She was the cynosure of all eyes in the market, even at 4:30 a.m. wearing a fish-stained apron, with a face scrubbed of sleep and her hair hidden underneath a white plastic cap.
On her long walk home, men leered and sucked the air through their teeth. Sometimes she didn’t even know they were there until they followed her. To distract herself, Amisa filed the leerers into racial generalizations, feeling very much like her own mother as she did so. The Malay men mostly winked and nodded at her. The Chinese men called her mei nu and shouted out rude come-ons in every dialect, getting increasingly agitated as she ignored them, and the Indian men stared at her with a leonine intensity, but at least they said nothing. She jutted her jaw and tried to walk quickly, keeping her own eyes trained safely ahead. This city was worlds away from the susurrating shoreline of Kampong Mimpi Sedih with its promise of turtles, its lowlands and marshes, but it seemed that men everywhere were alike in their swampy intentions, no matter how well they disguised it. They wanted to gobble her up. Their hunger was rote.
In the late afternoons and some evenings, she worked in the Paradise Theatre, a small cinema at the junction of Jalan Ubi and Everitt Road. It had only two screens: one that showed Hindi and Chinese films, and another that showed second-run Hollywood movies. Some days she cleaned the toilets and other times she ushered and sat on a hard-backed chair at the back of the theatre.
In front of her unfolded a screen the size of a small world.
Whirring countdown: ten beeping numbers and the final fidgets before the long, darkened room became as hushed and vast as the bottom of the sea. Peace at short last. It was a whole way of being, and for her, it felt completely free. She loved the kung fu movies with their mind-boggling choreography and mulleted young men who never
tired; or the Hindi musicals with their fluttering romance, lush intriguing girls, and stirring scores that surged in and out of bass and bongo beats. Saris swished vivid color across the screen, every frame pulsing with life that was so much better than life. She even adored Jaws with its stupid-looking shark and the choppy threat of American waters. Hollywood seemed incredibly unreal: everyone so blond, buttery, strong thighed, and somehow cruder. She could have watched films all day, and even without the visuals the sounds themselves were calming: nothing but the soft puttering of the film reel through the projector, the rustle of snacks, and the labored breathing of an audience either aroused or half asleep. She could live right here, behind them, dwell always in this darkened kingdom of muffled dialogue, muffled intrigue; and she felt a rare kinship, a shared humanity with the silhouetted heads tilted upward, chewing kachang puteh or watermelon seeds.
The young couples amused her. They entered the auditorium primly and, once the lights dimmed, necked with slurpy passion, creaks challenging the folding seats. Sometimes they left a sticky residue, a snail trail of indeterminate bodily origin that she wiped away with bleach. Her manager, a permanently scowling man in his thirties called Pok Hian, instructed her to tap politely on the shoulders of such canoodlers, even granting permission to hit them lightly on the head with a wooden fan if that would make them cease. But, mess and all, Amisa let them be.
There was one particular Chinese couple in their early twenties who came in for the Sunday matinees. The girl was ponytailed, plain, and slightly pudgy, and the man was of medium height with sloping shoulders and a mildly pockmarked face. The couple would turn up to the theatre holding hands, the girl beaming, nakedly and radiantly in love. The man would stride up to the counter and buy a pair of tickets for the back-stall seats, and as Amisa tore the stubs and handed them to him she felt unsettled and annoyed by the way he stared at her, all the while holding his girlfriend’s hand. His gaze always lingered for at least two beats too long.
By the time the lights came on and the crowd emerged from the theatre the ponytailed girl almost always had reddened eyes and glistening cheeks, although Amisa never actually caught her crying. Perhaps she was easily moved even by the ridiculously slapstick Hong Kong comedies. Perhaps she had an eye or sinus condition. But Amisa noticed the couple’s silhouettes one time, conferring furiously in inaudible whispers during a fight scene in Dong kai ji. Theirs seemed like a terrible and especially boring courtship, doomed to failure. She wondered why the ponytailed girl even bothered, why anyone bothered really with the rituals of love, why they didn’t just get down to it the way she had back in the village, barebacked animal fumbles in the tall grass with any handsome body, undeterred by what she might catch or what risked growing inside her. If it happens, it happens, and I’ll handle it, she thought, with the same clear-eyed abandon she felt all those years ago. Striding into the forest with no ammunition or protection from the darkening green except a plastic bag containing a dishcloth and a half-eaten watermelon. Maybe her mother was right and she was lucky, charmed even still to exist.
So life went on this way: fondling seafood in the small hours, whiskery gray prawns slipping from her grip, shucked shells and wet floors and the rush and furor of the market before it opened. When her job was done Amisa strode like a samurai past the bucket mountains, the reams of belt noodles and cloth and extravagantly violent, gushing cuts of beef and pork, to go home and shower and take it all off. And then she would have a nap, and turn up for her shift at the cinema. Rinse and repeat.
Mr. and Mrs. Lim were agreeable enough bosses, although they disapproved of her living in Geylang.
“That whole area got prostitutes,” Mrs. Lim said, and shook her head. “Dirty place. Stay away from the red numbers.”
The numbering of the shophouse where Amisa lived looked like it had once been red, but was now scratched off.
7
CIRCE
2020
Over the next few weeks it feels like a can of Amisa-shaped worms has been opened. I hadn’t seen her face in years, but now she is hard to avoid. I get her image embedded in emails. Printouts of her accost me from walls and tables. I get bombarded with Amisa and my thoughts return to Szu. But the memories are time-fogged, static, and badly formed. I keep getting snapshots of Szu’s stick arms and her long, dolorous face. I wish I could swipe them both away, clear them permanently from my brain’s bin.
Gordon dispatches our team to the Somerset offices for “Initiative and Leadership Skills-Building Training.” I usually hate these sessions but this time I’m relieved to have a Ponti-free day. The instructor is a chubby, oily man named Clarents Goh Bok Tin with a cowlick of greasy hair and a vague lisp. I am paired with Jeanette. We sit on white plastic chairs that resemble the play sets in kindergarten. Every time I shift in my seat my thighs squeak against the plastic. Jeanette is chipper today: newly in love, the rumor goes. Some people are so good at moving from love to love. They make a charmed, easy habit of it. Jeanette’s like that. It helps that she is so good-looking. And when she decides the guy isn’t working for her, she dusts the relationship off like lint on her shirt and tries on the next new thing.
When Clarents comes round to our table he is all eyes for Jeanette and I might as well not exist. He instructs us to think of a vegetable, any vegetable, except for a carrot. That old mind trick. Of course all I can think of is a damn carrot.
The bright orange carrot in my mind morphs into Szu’s face. She makes me wince. She clouds my vision on the bus home, on the toilet, the next morning waiting in line for the cashier, the evening after, when I’m in dark tunnels willing the taxi uncle to hurry me home. The next day, at lunch hour, Szu’s scared and sullen face floats around my brain and I force a song into my head and keep walking forward. I’ve preserved her as a teenager. Szu floats in the murky brine of my memory, with pimples scattered across her forehead and that furtive, worried look in her eyes that used to both reassure and annoy me. Because it is comforting to know that there is someone similar to you in the world, it helps a person to feel less faulty and alone.
But past a certain point, when there are too many commonalities, this comfort shifts into unease. Copycat. Imitator, I used to think. I try and walk her off. I tell myself I will take as long as I need; I will lie that I was stuck in line at the bank. I keep walking. Beyond the lunchtime ambit of my colleagues, past coffee shops and electronics megastores. I head towards a row of perfumed shops that smell like nouveau riche housewives, tai-tais. Luxury comforts me. It reminds me of what I took for granted when I lived off my parents. Tai-tais smell like laundered blouses, pomade, and three sprays of Chanel No. 5 on pampered but underloved skin. The clichés exist because they are true. In a display window I see a brown Marni bag haloed in sunshine. Something in me tickles. My worm finds this beautiful. Cowhide and handsome handles. It costs S$3,600.00 including GST. It would take me two and a half months of an instant-noodle-only diet to afford this.
Back at my desk I spend twenty minutes daydreaming about how much that beautiful leather bag would improve my existence. If I slung it on my arm I would become a better person. Life would steady itself. Although by the time I paid for that bag all my hair would have fallen out from the preservatives in the noodles. And my nails would have grown chipped and yellowed. And maybe my Cestoda worm would be poisoned to death from monosodium glutamate, rather than my medicine. I would have nothing to keep in my new bag except credit card bills and a nonrefundable feeling of disappointment.
Gordon appears at my shoulder. This afternoon I’m meant to be composing a mailer for Jolene. He peers at my screen.
“Very interesting,” Gordon says, which is Gordon-speak for “What the hell are you doing?” I glance back at his pubic-looking stubble and his striped blue shirt, deliberately unbuttoned in a deep V at the collar.
In the compose field, all I have written is: The beauty of capitalism = to covet. Too obvious? Marni bag = S$3,600. Rent = 2,600 Misc. = 900.
“I�
�m trying out a new angle . . . for Jolene’s comms campaign. Moving forward,” I say, feeling stupid even as I keep speaking. “It’s a game changer. Going from good to great.”
“Can’t wait to see the results, then.”
“I’ll action that!” I reply, with saccharine gusto.
“Right,” Gordon replies, which really means Wrong. I wilt inside in a way that I haven’t since secondary school. As he walks away the cloud of his disapproval lingers over me.
*
The week after I first visited her home, I invited Szu over to my place after school. We waited by the concourse for Mummy. Szu fidgeted beside me, a twitchy beanpole. Our silhouettes in the visitor’s office window reflected our whole-head difference in height. We made quite the duo: I the small one with the frizzy bob, Szu the tall one with the lifeless ponytail. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the Badminton Girls shooting derisive glances our way. I pretended not to care.
Mummy’s Porsche pulled up. Everyone noticed. Szu got into the backseat and I took the passenger seat up front, slamming the door for emphasis.
“You’re late, Mom,” I said.
“Sorry, Sisi. Traffic. Hello, Szu! Nice to meet you. I’m Auntie Magda.”
“Hello, Auntie.”
“How was school, girls?”
“Going from good to just great,” I replied.
“You and your funny sayings!” Mummy chuckled and shook her head.
I got out my phone and started to play Snake. I heard Szu still struggling behind me with the seat belt: the polyester shift and stir, four fails and a click.
When we got home, my maid Josephine brought out a tray full of orange slices and peanut cookies.
“Take it upstairs, thanks,” I said. I followed the torpid turn of Szu’s head as she took in our reception area: the peach marble floors, double cupboards full of Swedish glass ornaments, and the Persian carpet Mummy sent for immersion cleaning every year.