by Sharlene Teo
I go over to Circe’s house and flop down on her bed. Circe puts the Kinks’ album on really loudly even though I am getting sick of them. When I tell her this, she ignores me for three songs and then switches to The Velvet Underground & Nico. The CD has a graphic of a banana on the cover that we both want flattering T-shirts of. We love this album. We want to wear our love for it across our chests and for imaginary indie boys to think we are cool and datable because of it. But today the chords and gentle voices coming through the computer speakers sound far too wistful and mellow, at peace with an airbrushed sort of world. I don’t want music but I can’t stand the silence, either. We sit in her yellow room willing the afternoon to melt away, flipping magazines and trying to make it seem as if nothing is different.
That night, I have a terrifying and obvious dream in her Ikea double bed. In my dream I am strapped to the deck of a sinking ship and my mother appears at the prow looking younger and more hopeful than I have ever seen. She’s far away and everything is rocking but I can hear her perfectly.
“It’s not your fault I am me,” she says. “And it’s not my fault you are you.” I want to reply but I can’t speak. I wake up shivering and with wet eyes and cheeks. Circe snores lightly beside me.
Just then it starts to storm. I wriggle on the sheets, feel my cold toes uncurling. Above us, slow rumbles. I picture thunderheads spread out across a stark raving sky. I think about how big the sky is, how it enfolds all of us impartially.
A gust of wind rattles the steel pipes on the roof. I remember the mynah birds that Circe, her maid Josephine, and I watched hours earlier, just before dinnertime. Bobbing creatures perched on the telephone wires, so delicate and small.
“The littlest ones get eaten by cats,” Josephine said. “No hope for them.”
I worry where the mynah birds are hiding. I get a sinking dread about their well-being. I open my eyes and peer into Circe’s face. She looks calm, almost beautiful. The darkness in her bedroom is inky and tinged with cobalt blue. The air fizzes like television static. Circe mumbles and draws me towards her. She breathes on me, my mouth no more than three inches away from hers. She smells like Kodomo lion toothpaste and Gardenia bread. I know from this moment that these two things will always remind me of her, with a flinch, an ache. And maybe because of this, over time I will learn to avoid them.
Her perfect, unknowable brother Leslie is in the other room. Just six feet away, this quiet boy right now probably dreaming with his mouth open. Half-asleep, I wonder if to kiss one sibling is the same as kissing the other; if my love for them both will be revealed if I kiss her, like an inkblot on a white card, a marking, a patternation. I can’t pin down the nature of this tangle in my chest. It could be good, or bad, or in between. Maybe one day it will mutate into something deadly, and there will be nothing I can do about it.
I hold my breath and lean forward. But just then Circe turns away and pushes her back to me, almost forcefully, like an admonition. I roll over onto my back and stare at the ceiling. The wind howls hurried nothings at the roof. At every fidget the mattress creaks with my treachery, my cowardice. From the wall beside me, Leslie’s mattress also creaks. Perfectly naturally, and with no shift in her breathing, Circe hooks her legs into mine so that we are loosely tangled at the knees and shins. It feels both uncomfortable and calming. My skin is hot and sticky, but every time I try to move she keeps me in her grip. Eventually I fall asleep.
When Josephine switches the light on at six fifteen, our legs are still half tangled but the cover has fallen off the bed. From the corner of my eye it looks as if a poltergeist has swept through the room and flung off the pillows and blanket. The crumpled pastel pile looks like a discarded Sesame Street costume. All the blood has drained from my lower body and my legs are entirely numb. A thin film of sweat clings to my clammy forehead and under my arms. Circe and I are like Siamese twins conjoined at the legs. I don’t mind my immobility. My mother is dead. It’s still hard to say it. It feels good to be held in place, to be anchored to earth.
*
I’ve got four more days off school for bereavement. So I put on a tatty T-shirt and shorts while Circe grumbles and buttons up her uniform. After breakfast of kaya toast (I watch, too sick and shy to eat, as Leslie and Circe wolf their bread down, and end up giving her my untouched square), we get into her father’s shiny Lexus. He’s giving me a lift home after he drops Circe at school.
On the way there’s a traffic jam snaking along the Pan Island Expressway, a veil of residual haze settling over the lamps and treetops. The air conditioner blasts on my knees. Circe frowns out of the window. I guess she’s jealous because I don’t have to go to school and there is an e-Maths test at 11 a.m. that we both haven’t prepared for. She acts as if everything is normal but also slightly my fault. I can feel her irritation in the stuffy car air. She’s good at this, these pendulum shifts from warmth into unkindness.
When we drop her off she slams the car door and doesn’t look back. I crane my neck and watch her shuffling through the school gates. She lingers half a step behind a trio of girls sleepwalking in tandem, with their French braids and linked arms. As the car pulls away she hitches her blue backpack up on her shoulders. It is so disconcerting to really need someone, is what I think. My only friend gets smaller and smaller until I can’t pick her out in a sea of uniforms. For once I wish I was joining her, partaking in the horrible comfort of routine.
Driving me home, Circe’s father doesn’t quite know what to say. I’ve never been in the car alone with him before, now that I think about it. It’s mostly Circe’s mother, Magda, who gives me lifts. He switches the radio on to YES 93.3 and we sit there acutely aware that the DJs are speaking too cheerfully. After one intersection he switches the station to classical music. Somber strings replace chipper Mandarin. I picture Victoria Concert Hall and elegant girl prodigies from the SSO, dressed all in black with violins balanced under their focused jawlines.
We’re driving through Queensway. Big green trees and shoals of schoolchildren by the roadside. Circe’s father met my mother once when he came to pick up his daughter from our house. My mother smiled at him as he stuttered his name. Low Ghim Teck, the import-export businessman.
“How wonderful,” she said in her actressy, Channel 5 English. “Well, I’ll know who to call for imports and exports.”
He didn’t seem to notice that she was being sarcastic. She had that effect on people. I don’t think I ever met a man of any orientation who didn’t find my mother beautiful, who wasn’t affected by her in some way. It was always harder to read what women really thought of her. Cashiers and shop assistants used to back away, as if cowed by her beauty, or simply put off by the disdainful way she asked for things or ordered them around.
After I get dropped off, the day blurs out into its corners like a watercolor painting. It starts to rain and the overcast sky makes the house go dim. Aunt Yunxi has instructed me to “generally tidy” the reception area, kitchen, and toilets as we will be having visitors for the wake. I’ve never been good at tidying. I lack thoroughness. I flit around with the brown feather duster, smudge every surface with my fingerprints. I swirl dust around with the wet rag. Dust and dirt beget even more dust and dirt. There are long strands of hair all over the place. My own, Yunxi’s, my mother’s. Aside from the front room that the clients see, the rest of the house has always been pretty grimy. Behind the sink, I find two dead cockroaches the size of ministaplers. They have one antenna entwined, almost braided together, and as I tip their bodies into the bin I imagine they are an incarnation of immortal lovers who have passed on into yet another doomed, doubled life. So long, Romeo and Juliet, Yang Guo and Xiaolongnu, Sid and Nancy.
That night, Aunt Yunxi doesn’t come home. I feel strangely unworried. I go to bed listening out for movement in the walls, something bigger than the lizards. Now that she is gone I think of my mother constantly. She preoccupies me so much that it seems inevitable that she will reappear. Hasn’t my mother’s young
face been scattered across my dreams for years? It seems impossible that she is gone for good.
I peer out of my window before I go to bed. I stare through the curlicued grilles into the garden with the bird’s-nest ferns and clusters of dark trees. The long, wet grass doesn’t move. I listen out with senseless superstition for the sound of a baby crying. If you can hear a baby crying loudly from somewhere in the vicinity, the Pontianak is far away, willing you to get nearer to her. If the crying is distant, that means the monster is close.
But if my Pontianak is now a ghost, she is a very shy ghost. She doesn’t want to make herself known. I wake late at night supernaturally sure there is a flutter by my ear, only to find the insistent normality of my bedroom. Warm air and the crickets in the garden reminding me they are out there. But not here, not her.
*
The next morning I get woken up by the big, insistent beeps of a lorry reversing. Aunt Yunxi comes in just as I’ve sat up in bed. She’s holding a mug for me.
“How are you, ah girl? The lorries are here to set up for the wake,” she says. “I’m closing the business for nine days. No clients. Just visitors.”
I nod and rub my eyes. My aunt offers no explanation for her absence the night before, and I don’t ask. She passes me the mug. It is full of steaming Milo. I think of the milk solids and sugar inside this chocolate malt, comforting and corrupting. I take a small sip and set it on the table beside me.
Aunt Yunxi gets out a square of white cloth from her pocket and hands it to me. The badge of mourning, of being felt sorry for, of being sorry. Something so small that makes it all so real. For a moment we sit opposite each other dazed, parched, and wordless. In this light my aunt’s skin looks wan, veiny, almost translucent. Grief makes ghosts of people. I don’t just mean the ones lost, but the leftover people. After a while my aunt pats my hand and gets up.
“Szu, you must be prepared,” she says on her way out of the room. “Think about what you have to say to your mother. Hold it in your head. Don’t tell anyone. Especially not your friend with the big mouth. This is for you. It’s important.”
What do I have left to say to my mother? We never arrived at what we really meant to each other. When she was well I was so sloppy with my ill feelings. I slapped my anger around my forehead in bold, crude strokes. She was only forty-five. Right now her body is being drained and filled with chemicals.
On my thirteenth birthday, my mother told me I was a happy accident. I had just gotten my first period the day before and I was inconsolable. My mother, Aunt Yunxi, and I were sitting around the marble table. My mother held a knife that wavered like a question mark over a small green cake.
“Your stupid father and I aren’t like other parents,” she said. “We never needed or wanted a child. And I was getting too old for that, even by the time I had you. So you weren’t really meant to happen, but look how far you’ve come. It’s great, Little Bunny. Happy thirteenth accident!” she said, and sliced.
She hadn’t called me Little Bunny for a long time. It was an expression of endearment, and she had long ceased to be fond of me. That’s why this moment stuck out for me. I knew she meant to be comforting and maybe even funny, that the word “happy” matched “accident,” but all I could focus on was “accident.” Its syllables stung like freshly scraped skin. I ate in silence, masticating the pandan chiffon until it was a flavorless mush in my mouth. I tried to think of other happy accidents but all I could picture were cars careening into balloon stands, clown bouquets exploding, cartoon figments of the imagination: unwelcome, abstract, implausible.
*
The wake will be held in our driveway. There is so much to do today. Soon I’ll have to leave the messy safety of my room. I look out of the window and watch a white van and a blue lorry pull up. Seven men pile out, all wearing the same ugly purple polo shirts. They bring out folded chairs and tables from the back of the truck and pile them against the wall. Two of the men haul out steel poles and start putting up a striped yellow awning. One man calls out directions to another in Hokkien. They start positioning a row of buffet tables.
I suck the air through my teeth and my stomach makes a sound like rolling rocks. Nowadays I feel lighter on my feet. I pin the square of white cloth to my right sleeve. The wake will last for three days. I have no idea who will show up. As far as I know, my mother had no friends. My grandparents are all dead, and I don’t know where my mother’s other siblings are.
I met my maternal grandmother only once, eight years ago, just before she died. I remember a small, stooped shadow in the doorway, and my parents’ surprise. They invited her in, my mother shuffling about the narrow hallway, suddenly ungraceful. Grandmother was very old and very scary. She reminded me of the Empress Dowager. She wore her years resplendently—decades of bobby pins stuck around her head, holding her thin white hair up in an imperfect bun. Even her hands, which fidgeted on the teak curve of the sitting room chair, were ancient, speckled with liver spots and textured as tree bark. She eyed me suspiciously, beady eyes finally settling on indifference. I was eight years old and ugliness had already found its way into my features. By then, my face had started to lengthen and narrow, growing from hamster-cute into rat-gross. Regardless of how I looked, I didn’t matter. What mattered was whatever lingered between my mother and her. Grandmother seemed to drain the sitting room of sunlight, leaving it airless and eerily calm. She didn’t even give my father a second glance. He dithered by the door frame before retreating into the wild, scorching garden outside.
My mother sat opposite my grandmother with her mouth pursed. I didn’t know that this would be the first and last time in my life that I would see them together. There was little to no family resemblance. The only thing they seemed to have in common was anger. They were like two cats with their backs arched and their fur raised. And then they began, hissing under their breaths, spitting out occasional phrases. They were arguing in Hakka. I understand Hokkien but not Hakka, so I had no clue what they were saying. Both of them sounded mad and sad. It seems to me that except for a select few, people only ever felt one of two things about my mother: livid or in love.
At one point my mother got up and went to her bedroom. And then she stormed back out to the sitting room. When I peered around the doorway I thought I saw her throwing something at my grandmother. It looked like a small red pouch, but I couldn’t be sure. Grandmother left shortly after that, before my father could perform the hospitality of offering her something to eat or drink. She hobbled down the driveway in a hurt huff, and that is the last I ever saw of her.
By the point that I met my grandmother for the first and last time, my parents had already started their own blazing, tired battles. There seemed to be neither end nor purpose to their continuous disagreements. It was plain ugly habit.
One morning in early September, even the air seemed to flinch. I woke up with a bad feeling in my brain and ribs. An awful silence filled the house. I cowered under my peach-colored blanket. I heard my mother slam the door to the master bedroom. And then my father called for me. His voice sounded strangled and subdued. When I met him in the kitchen he looked all pallid and googly eyed, like one of the cling-filmed pomfrets that stared from the second shelf of our fridge. I followed him to the front door, where he turned around and hugged me gingerly.
“Daddy’s got some things to do in Ghim Moh. I’ll pick up some fish porridge if the stall is open. I’ll be back soon,” he said.
I didn’t believe him, even at eight years old, and he knew it. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He slung a heavy duffel bag over one shoulder, adjusting its weight as the strap slipped. I followed him to the gate, though no farther. He walked stiffly all the way out to the battered Honda Civic with my Little Twin Stars and Lisa Frank coloring books strewn across the backseat. He started up the ignition and kept his eyes on the dashboard and the Courtesy Lion charm hanging off the rearview mirror. That ugly lion had started out as a shared joke, a free gift that became a fixture. I watched him
maneuver the car out of the cul-de-sac. It swerved left and then joined the everlasting, anonymous conveyor belt of cars and lorries along the main road. As if on cue, my mother barked for me to come in.
“Szu! Szu! Szu Min!” She had a sore throat from arguing and her voice sounded monster-harsh. By the time I reentered the house she had retreated into her bedroom again and shut the door. She didn’t even want to see me, she just wanted to make sure I was still there. I stared at the peeling wallpaper in the hall. We were marooned together, my mother and I, but for the first time in my life I felt truly alone. It was an aloneness that seemed greater and more grown-up than my body, even bigger than a country could hold. Oh, this solitude was continental. I went into the kitchen and made myself a cup of Milo.
Days passed. Weeks. Months. Not a phone call. Not even a scribbled word. It was hard to believe that my father had quit us and hightailed it to some untraceable pocket of the island. I didn’t think he actually meant it when he threatened my mother with that. I thought I was the one who should have done the running away—me, the restless eight-year-old, not him, forty and knowing better.
“Your father is a crook,” my mother said. “Nothing better. He’s an ah goon, an ah seng. He comes from a long line of crooks, nobodies, and nothings and he’s gone back to the rubbish dump, right where he belongs.”
I couldn’t swallow her bitterness. My father was better than trash, even if he couldn’t stand us any longer. Maybe we were truly insufferable, and he’d had enough. My mother, an occasional smoker from her acting days, now took up the habit full-time, rapaciously. She started drinking like a cliché, favoring dark liquors that made her breath smell like an old, cantankerous man’s. She was always hung-over and in a horrible mood. I forgot what she looked like when she smiled and how to enjoy her company, although I never lost the pathetic desire to please her. I loved her so hatefully; around her I felt disloyal, disgusting. Secretly I wondered if it would be more fun to live with nobodies and nothings than with a former horror movie actress. Maybe being somebody and something was overrated.