by Sharlene Teo
Five months into our friendship, Szu and I developed a manic obsession with Japanese skincare. Rather, I led the way and she followed. Some days, after our hospital visit, we made a trip to Wisma. We lingered in the tiny Sasa store that lay at the foot of a giant escalator, scrutinizing poorly translated labels until the shop assistant with the rebonded hair and false, spidery eyelashes told us to leave if we weren’t getting anything. Rolling our eyes but secretly glad of the excuse, we bought things. Even whilst taking out our wallets we knew these products wouldn’t work on us; they were geared towards Japanese girls from a cooler climate, fed on a diet of miso and sashimi, with fair poreless skin. In Singapore, three seconds is all it takes for a slick to form over the forehead. Szu and I dabbed at our T-zones frantically with oil blotter papers, and drew our hands away ashamed and disgusted by the film of oil on the previously matte-blue surface. The subtle scent of linen oil and fear. Would we always be like this, buying and worrying?
During teenhood all you know is all you know, which shouldn’t be discounted. You have this one narrow window on the world, the stakes smaller but no less deeply felt. Teenage heaven was marble shop floors and neon signs along the sides, behind glass railings. Perfumed, safe world. Things to buy with leftover pocket money. A blouse, a hair clip, a tube of overpriced lip gloss that I knew, even while unwrapping it, wouldn’t make me any more attractive. Just a strange glittery oil slick gluing my mouth.
“My mother has some amazing collectibles from the film sets, but she keeps them locked away, or I would show you,” Szu liked to say and I would nod; I liked to hear it.
It didn’t matter to me that Amisa was nowhere as famous as Szu made her out to be. Or that Szu was vague about which well-known admirers had bequeathed crushed-pearl compact mirrors and exorbitant jars of cream to her mother. At the time it didn’t even occur to me: what sort of admirer would give a woman night cream as a present? I didn’t want to actually watch the trilogy in case it was terrible, and shattered the illusion. The truth is Szu and I told half-fictions to each other. We were complicit in our mutual exaggerations. Besides, I was fascinated by Amisa’s brief but alluring movie star career, a frame in which to hang our fantasies of fame, the shared suspension of disbelief. Szu’s voice took on a reverential tone when she spoke about the three movies.
We lounged in her room looking at magazines and together we coveted expensive radiance creams and glimmering eye shadow palettes themed after black-tie balls we would never attend. When Szu and I weren’t spending money we dreamt about the things we would be buying to make us feel prettier, stronger, inoculated against the world.
*
When I leave the office it’s pelting, and I think of acid rain, and whether it is corrosive. Skin cells getting damaged. My worm within me recoiling. I’m five minutes away from the MRT when the sky gives way to a proper downpour, so punishing it’s personal. Thunderstorms scare the shit out of me. Slapped by rain, I quicken my steps. Without an umbrella, I have no choice but to scuttle like a chicken towards the station escalator. My feet are too close to the edge of the silver stair and I feel the sickly wet on the back of my calves. How many times a week do I imagine what it would be like to fall all the way down? Would I die or just hit my head in a damaging way? I board the train and the doors beep shut. Under the unflattering green glow of the carriage everyone is looking at their smartphones.
I must have the only stupid phone in the city because it’s been acting up lately, lying that I have missed calls, and sounding out notifications for nothing. I check the vibration in my pocket; another false alarm, no one seeking me. I rub my eyes and steady myself, gripping the handle on the train. A tiny somersault in my ribs. Cestoda, fluttering. I’m spacing out when I spot the top of her head. The shock feels like a mini heart attack.
Szu is standing on the other side of the glass doors. Rush hour blur of aunties and ah bengs around her. She has her hair in a low bun but she still has the same sleepy teenaged profile. For a moment I think I’m mistaken. But she turns towards me sharply just as the train is pulling away. We lock eyes for a moment. Dark-brown iris to dark-brown iris. That unmistakable, maddening look. And then she’s gone.
8
SZU
2003
After we have pumped Slurpee-blue sanitizer onto our hands and tiptoed down the corridor, Circe presses the lift button as if our lives depend on it, this hasty escape. I wonder for a second if she thinks that all this dying around us is infectious. But when the doors slide open I feel it too, the urgency and relief, as if a weight has been lifted. I am just as glad as she is to descend into the lobby, where an auntie with a red-curled perm is pushing a wheelchair. Any forward motion, however slow and however slight, seems hopeful compared to the bedside tableaux that we are now so used to.
Seated in the wheelchair is a man with liver spots on his face and milky eyes. He looks a little bit like an actor who used to play the angry patriarch in the 9 p.m. drama serials from the late nineties, a scheming gambler wreaking intrigue in some family business. His stare follows Circe and me out of the corridor and into the reception area.
As we step into the sunshine, Circe says, “The Land of No Hope was okay today. The machines were beeping peacefully. The air smelt like banana-flavored cough medicine.”
I don’t encourage her, just move my face into something like a smile. Circe insists on calling Ward 12A the Land of No Hope. We rewatched The Land Before Time in Circe’s living room the other day, on a scratched VCD. The frames froze and jolted sporadically and we pitied the baby dinosaurs with their faded pastel skin and dulcet voices, trying to make it safely across the treacherous plains to find their parents. That’s where Circe got the idea for the name. I don’t want to let it catch on, for these visits to become another ingredient to her anecdotes, even though that’s what I’ve started calling it too in my head.
That makes my mother the Queen of the Land of No Hope. Look at her propped up on her throne, surrounded by scratchy pillows, wearing a paper gown with an IV drip for a scepter. She’s reigned for three weeks. If she is Queen, isn’t it unlikely she will ever leave? I don’t want to think about it. All I can do is watch the monitor with its impersonal deet-deet-deet and the lines of her breathing. And when I leave the ward I can’t get her stretched, shiny face out of my head. Please just get better and look normal again. Just get better and let me hate you in peace.
Circe and I walk out of the automatic doors and the sun makes me squint. I think of how cold the ward is, and the mother I left there dozing in bed; that’s it, a perpetual half-doze, never a deep sleep, because of the beeping and her pain.
It’s almost 4 p.m. and sun reflects off the white concrete driveway straight back into my eyes. Maybe I’ll go blind. Part of me envies the depressed Icelandic postmen I read about in a magazine article in the waiting room, doing their morning rounds during the winter solstice. Having only four hours of daylight could drive you mad, cycling on creaking bicycles in the dark and the bitter cold. Imagine dreading life because you have a vitamin D deficiency, having the clarity of knowing that the only thing you are lacking is sunlight.
“Come on,” Circe says, beckoning me towards the bus stop. “You can’t keep standing there.”
Lately I have recognized that this is what I do: I freeze stock-still because it takes so much energy to steer my thoughts into something bearable, and I forget the basics of locomotion.
*
This weekend it is Valentine’s Day and our classmates are in a flutter of anticipation. The Available girls, ourselves excluded, fret and wonder if the mawkish boys they know will ask them out, last minute, in an artfully flippant text or meandering stream of late-night instant messages. The Taken daydream about their boyfriends with renewed fervor. Their ponytailed heads tilt like flowers dense with nectar. Faces pressed to palms during the midafternoon period, Geography or English Lit, nothing learnt, eyes blinking so slowly as if to close, with a sticky, sugar-glazed sheen to the lids. This peripheral i
ncrease in oily complexions is something Circe has also noticed, florid smatterings of acne across the flushed cheeks of the Taken.
Taken girls have the following other unmistakable characteristics: they wander about dazed, inattentive, in the always-throes of their rapture; they insert their boyfriends’ names, or the words “my boyfriend,” anywhere in conversation. Before assembly and after school they clump together and compare relationships. They let out a smug, secret sort of giggle, a tribal sound of a particular frequency that only their own kind can decode and appreciate. It irritates the ears of everyone else. Even the teachers and cleaning ladies whip their heads around in barely concealed annoyance.
Sarah Choo is the worst. From what I’ve heard she’s been with her boyfriend for all of a month. They met at church. She can’t stop talking about him. She puts her hand over her mouth and hunches up her shoulders, like a bad actress playing the part of Giggling Schoolgirl. Circe rolls her eyes at me, and I shrug. Overheard phrases: “How far?” “Everything but.” “Not yet.” “We agreed on soon. Very soon” (giggle).
At recess time the line for the drinks stall is slow and snaking. I rattle my small change in my pocket. The coins feel sweaty and meager in my palm. The girl in front of me keeps bringing her bracelet up to her face and biting the star-shaped charms on its chain.
“You can just smell the hormones. It’s disgusting,” Circe mutters behind me.
“Everyone’s so horny it makes me sick,” I reply, lowering my voice at “horny.”
The girl in front of us glances back with a slight frown.
“On Valentine’s evening that’s when everyone humps like dogs,” Circe continues, in a ribald whisper. “That’s when Sarah Choo will cook up excuses to go over to her boyfriend’s house. He will make sure his parents are out for dinner, so they can be as loud as they like. I bet she has some special panties she’s saving—”
“Ugh, stop it.”
“Frilly, fuchsia. Like a cliché.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Leopard-print pink,” Circe says, but she’s already losing interest in this routine, so clearly inspired by the bawdy, goading frat boys in the teen movies we’ve been watching. If high school in America is exactly like American Pie, then everyone is obsessed by sex, thinking about it maniacally, breathing it, dreaming it, bragging and plotting and speculating endlessly. The boys all have perfect teeth and chiseled jawlines. They fist-pump each other and whoop almost like they mean it. The girls flaunt tanned abs and honey-colored highlights, and proffer an endless supply of double entendres and witty comebacks. Everyone seems to have a more expert grasp of the performatives of teenhood than we. It’s depressing.
We turn to look at Sarah Choo, who is settling down with a tray at a crowded table nearby. We take in her thick ankles offset by that Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer button nose. We try to picture the fabled boyfriend. Is he a big fan of Buffy? Does she drive him crazy? Neither of us says a word but I can tell we are thinking the same thing: What has she got that I haven’t (besides that nose)? Simultaneously: What is wrong with me? Both of us know that the answers to these questions, if they exist, aren’t quantifiable.
Circe and I have never had boyfriends, have never had to construct elaborate ploys or rickety alibis to be alone with somebody in some shuttered place where we shouldn’t be. Circe’s parents pay only minimal attention to her and I would be touched if my one remaining parent made such a socialized assumption of me.
Circe told me she exchanged a couple of clumsy kisses with two underwhelming boys, one a year younger and the other the same age as us. She no longer talks to either; the kisses and fumbles took place within the pockets of two dreamlike afternoons. By 6 p.m. and the exeunt hiss of the 177 bus, all associations had ended.
“One of them smoked,” she said. “He tasted like lung disease.” I winced at her choice of words.
She met the boys in the dingy pool hall by Peninsula Plaza and on floor 2 of MultiLeisure Arcade respectively. I am 70 percent sure these boys exist. Like amateur criminologists, we have revisited the scenes of passion, scoping out the gel-haired ah bengs in a manner that we hope appears insouciant and charming, two intrepid French coquettes imported straight out of a Godard movie, instead of a pair of Singaporean convent schoolgirls with sweat patches on the backs of our uniforms and rings around our ankles from scratchy socks. The arcade smells of vomited popcorn butter and toilet bleach. Seduction tactic: we balance our spines against stained, sticky walls, breathing slowly, taking in every single thing. Isn’t this the mating call of seaweed, of anemones? No response, not even one glance at our chests or faces. No signs of feeling life—just the whirring of ventilators, the rattle spin of a cue. I try the charm machine twice, can’t win. I am a girl-ghost, an imitation of what a girl should be.
“There was something in the air, last summer, for me, and now I’m sixteen, and over the hill. Past it,” Circe says, joking in that half-gauche, half-worldly way of hers that, when I attempt it, only comes off as overly somber.
She calls it her Summer of Love. At the time I thought, I don’t know how much she can claim to know about love. But I can’t say I know any better. I am vague about my experiences. I told Circe I kissed a boy over the Christmas holidays, a visiting Indonesian, a friend of a friend. She’s never pressed me further (what other friend, for example), maybe out of courtesy. All the same, I told her he was very rich and very quiet. Oil, jewels. I said he complained that the great Sumatran haze that is still clearing from our shores clogged up his lungs and made him spit blood in his sleep. I knew that was a bit of a stretch, but Circe has never caught me out. If pressed I am prepared to mention some grave diagnosis, the smoke and copper tang of his tongue probing my teeth. And it’s the truth, if I think very hard I can sense that phantom kiss, the wet and reach of it.
Some days he is eighteen. On other days, an unimaginable twenty-three. He is taller than me, smooth nape of a neck to tuck my worrying head in. I modeled his face after Benson Chen, one of the Star Search semifinalists perpetually on television, hawking skincare. Benson Chen is pale as a snow-skin mooncake, and equally translucent. He has long dark hair spiked up like cake icing around his gamin features. Circe knows I’ve got a crush on him. What I never mention is how much he reminds me of her brother.
Leslie Low is two years older than us, which means that after he sits his A-level exams he will get conscripted for National Service. It is hard to imagine Leslie in army fatigues with a shorn head, wielding an assault rifle. He never seems to leave his room within the Lows’ spacious, parquet-floored villa. He is like a stalemate chess piece. He mumbles in his own lonely-boy language. I have run into him by the winding staircase four times.
Circe guards Leslie like a dagger. He calls her Sisi sometimes. Throwaway, but some ancient in-joke. She always refers to him by his proper name, Leslie. When she mentions him she bristles a little, with unmistakable pride.
*
The two pathologically prettiest girls of our level float by the canteen. Trissy and Meixi are their names. Everyone else screeches across that newly retiled stretch of floor, but their white canvas shoes make no sound at all. The midmorning light casts their long, smooth braids in a glow, graces their figure-skater shoulders. I cannot imagine them growing old, or any better looking. There is no limit to this soft sort of envy; it makes a wistful, gawping owl of me. I crane my neck to watch them leave.
Trissy and Meixi have nineteen-year-old boyfriends: handsome twins. Neither of the girls are virgins. In the Whampoa Convent of the Eternally Blessed, news like this doesn’t just rustle down the grapevine. What we have in place is a virile beanstalk, all errant stems and curling leaves. It’s impossible to ignore the whispered-down stories.
Trissy resembles a sexy Korean actress. She has a face that looks both knowing and like she doesn’t care about anyone or anything. Sometimes I think that she can tap into whatever power my aunt Yunxi has access to, only Trissy is instead some kind of social, cool-girl psych
ic. Fierce, kinetic secrets spark and spread from her like wildfire.
Lee Meixi has legs that go on and on, and a heart-shaped face made to be admired. I have never seen her sweat. I have never seen her look anything besides serene. What goes on in there? Something, her eyes say. But you’re not good enough to get it. Beauty is an armor. For as long as I’ve known her, my mother acted invincible because of it.
My mother and I watched a movie called The Bride with White Hair on TV once, when I was about eight or nine. In the film, a gentle, gorgeous woman gets falsely accused of killing people and her lover turns against her. Lin Ching Hsia, who has impeccably outraged eyebrows and a beautiful cleft chin, plays the woman. When she gets wronged and rejected she becomes so mad that her hair turns Marilyn-platinum and very long. She looks amazing in her new incarnation; “murderous” is a mode most becoming to her. She goes on a rampage. The clang of swords, the swish and grunts of choreographed fighting. I remember little else about what happens in the movie, only my mother clutching my arm until her nails dug in, leaving bloodied crescents on my skin. She was quivering. Her jaw was set, mouth pursed. Her eyes watered slightly, as if allergic to what she was seeing. I remember being scared to know exactly what was going through her mind, but being able to guess, even at that age, how she must have felt to see another much more famous, beautiful monster wreaking havoc across the screen.
*
I leave for home at that point of the day when I don’t have any choice left. Remedial classes are over. Circe is busy with choir practice. Two terms in, she’s gotten more involved with her choral section. She drops the names of the girls she sings with casually: Rong En and Angela. I know of them but I don’t know them. Late afternoon, the workday ending, cars pull out of the curved road. The concourse is almost cleared and the security guard at the gate gives me a disgruntled nod as I finally leave.