by Sharlene Teo
Aunt Yunxi explained what would be included in the package from the funeral parlor, the cosmetic work, but I wasn’t ready for the result. My mother barely looks like herself. Her skin has been lacquered yellow with two huge blush marks to lend her some color. Her mouth is painted a rose pink that she would have hated: too sweet. Her small, delicate hands are folded stiff.
My aunt is dressed in black, her mouth pinched into a half-smile, half-scowl. She keeps wringing her hands, and doesn’t mind if I notice, but if one of the men from the funeral home glances over she puts them down. She looks even skinnier than usual, as if she’ll snap like a twig if she moves too quickly. I feel skinny too. Secretly I am deriving a loose and tiny joy from feeling thin. I wonder if Circe and the other girls at school will notice and quietly agree that I look improved. I haven’t eaten much this week. Just a couple of slices of fishcake and the plain, clear bone broth in a huge vat in the fridge. My appetite has flown out of the window, the same way as routine. Right now our ex-istence is centered on my mother and the small squares of mourning cloth pinned to our right sleeves.
A car door slams and I turn to look. Two men are coming down the driveway: one tall, the shorter one hobbling. Their features are obscured by the shadows from the trees and when they get close I don’t recognize them.
Our new visitors pay their respects to my mother, bowing thrice. I parrot out my lines: there are refreshments in the cooler; plain water over there. Hot tea on request. Peanuts on that table.
“Thank you, Szu,” the taller man says. I’m startled by my name. “We’re okay.” He sits down and the plastic chair creaks. “Your mother was a good actress.”
“You worked with her?”
“Yes,” he replies. “And my brother also.” He gestures to the man on his right, who has lit a cigarette. “Ah Choon over here was the electrician. I was special effects. We worked with your ma for Ponti! and Ponti 2.”
Hearing him name the films I feel a drop in my chest. Somehow it was easy to forget it was a collaborative effort and not just all about her.
“Your mother was wonderful onscreen,” the first man continues. “Anyone who watched her can’t forget that face. She had real star quality, she was a ming xing. We loved working with her.”
“Thank you,” I reply, my voice tightening.
The second man smirks through his half-finished cigarette. His brother shoots him a look.
“Szu!” Circe calls out. She’s coming down the driveway, closely followed by Mr. and Mrs. Low. Just three steps behind them, shuffling his feet and with his eyes glued to his phone, is Leslie.
“Excuse me,” I say to the two visitors. I go up to Circe. We exchange a limp half-hug. I haven’t seen her in a day. She seems twitchy, excitable.
“Where’s your aunt?” Circe asks me.
“Somewhere close by. Probably busy.”
“I’m so sorry, Szu,” Circe’s mother, Magda, says.
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Low,” my aunt calls out in her clipped, accentless English.
“My condolences, Auntie,” Magda says.
Leslie looks up from his phone, glances at his parents busy talking and then at me. I can’t hold his gaze for more than a second.
“I never met your mother,” he mumbles. “But I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I reply. I can feel Circe’s eyes on me. Her stare is electric. Like one of those charged, humming insect killers I sometimes see in outdoor coffee shops. I’m filled not just with worry but the actual belief that she can read my mind. I cross and uncross my arms, shift my weight from left foot to right and back again. Time is taking time. More strangers shuffle up and then back down the driveway, a dreary conveyor of condolences and muted smiles. My aunt keeps collecting white envelopes. Why have I never seen any of these people before?
“Your mother knew a lot of people,” Circe says. “I thought she didn’t go out much.”
“All these people are from her acting,” I reply. “Actually, I just met these two men over there who were part of the crew—”
“But do you recognize anyone? And have you met, like, anyone famous?”
“Circe, don’t be kaypoh,” Leslie interjects. “Why are you interrogating her? It’s none of your business.”
“I’m just curious.”
“It’s cool,” I say, trying to be cool. “I don’t know anyone. They’re all randoms.” I sound apologetic, in spite of myself.
“Wakes are like that, I guess,” Leslie says. “Can I find any of your mom’s films online?”
“Nah, nothing online.”
“What were they about? Besides Pontianaks.”
“That’s about it. Just the one Pontianak.”
“Oh.”
I remember the first and only time I tried to show Ponti! to Circe, just nine months ago. She had started to fidget after ten minutes, checking her phone, and we stopped the tape when Josephine knocked and called us downstairs for dinner. And all the time as I chewed the Lows’ white rice and the Lows’ steamed pomfret and stir-fried garlic chai sim, I thought of how their food tasted brighter and saltier in my mouth, better-tasting but worse for me, even if my aunt had cooked with the same ingredients. I felt a slow, icky shaft of shame spread from one side of my face to the other and funnel down into my bad stomach as I recalled the part of the film we’d paused on: the village doctor shouting a warning, his mouth a dubbed, boring O. After dinner we went back up to Circe’s room and I took the tape out of the VCR. I never tried showing her the films again.
*
“Can we go to your room?” Circe asks. I shrug and look for my aunt. She’s busy talking to Magda, who has her arms crossed over her tummy, head tilted attentively. Mr. Low stands close by, eyes to the floor, with his hands in his chino pockets. I lead Circe and Leslie into the house, down the vanilla-colored corridor with its outdated geometrical wallpaper and the cracks in the ceiling.
We file into my bedroom and Circe pulls the door shut behind her. My room is too small for three people. Circe sits on my bed and the springs creak. I sit down beside her and the soft mattress makes our bodies sag into each other.
Leslie moves towards my green swivel chair but Circe gestures to the space on the other side of me. I feel a welter of disappointment and relief when he ignores her. I panic about whatever I’ve left exposed and scattered across my desk. Jotted-down lyrics. Pieces of foolscap paper, filled with inelegant, incorrect sums.
“Do you want water or something?” I ask them.
“Nah, we’re fine,” Circe says. She picks up a book from my bedside table and flips through it, squints at the blurb on the back.
“We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Sounds creepy,” Circe says. “Is it about knights and stuff?”
“Not really.”
“Is it scary?”
“Kind of.”
“Hmm.” She flips through it fast. It’s a thin volume and she is damaging the spine.
“Kor, have you heard of it?”
“No, Sisi, I haven’t,” Leslie replies. “Don’t be annoying.”
“I’m not annoying,” Circe says, but she stops talking.
Leslie sighs deeply and stares into the small, blank brightness of his phone. I wonder whom he’s messaging. I’ve never actually been in the same enclosed space as both of them before. I pick at a scab on my left arm, a tiny half-circle of dried blood from where a mosquito bite became unbearable. I wait for them to make conversation, but the silence drags on. Every few seconds I adjust the position of my feet or scratch my arms or the back of my neck.
I hear the faint murmur of people outside the window. Voices, new and low. Everybody is a solemn stranger, and they all seem to love my mother. Their worship and affection for her makes me uncomfortable. They are all too late. Where were they two, four, six months ago? Years back, when she stopped leaving this house on a regular basis? I want to wave my arms around and say, Look! She wasn’t even that nice or perfect! Where were you when she was in such agony she had to be inject
ed with morphine? And when she couldn’t even speak, or eat, or use her jaw, even though her eyes told me she was hungry, and she had so much to say? I’m a bad person because I haven’t let go of how she crumpled me up like a ball of paper my whole life, and now that she’s gone I don’t know how to get the creases out. I wish these people would stop pretending she matters so much. Stop acting is what I want to tell them. That’s what she did. Leave it to the professionals.
“Your mom and your aunt—” Leslie begins. He looks unsure of how to continue. Circe puts down the book and stares at her brother.
“Do they really do—spirit medium stuff—or is it, like, for show only? If you don’t mind me asking.” Leslie puts his hand to his neck, glances up at me sheepishly.
“It’s for real,” I reply, and look at Circe, but her eyes flick to the floor and don’t meet mine again.
“Ah, must have gotten confused,” Leslie says. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I say.
“It” is so many things I’m not sure I believe. “It” is the silence that descends upon the triangular space between us, thick as corn syrup, and just as artificial. Tucked politely away is a hint of judgment in the air. I can sense it. Circe sighs and brings her right hand to her mouth, observes her cuticles.
“So, uh. Do you believe in it? Spirits and psychic stuff?” Leslie asks.
“Sometimes,” I reply. “What—what about you?”
“Hm. It’s hard to tell. I don’t think so,” Leslie says. “But you never know.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I say, and nod.
Circe makes a sound in between a snort and like she is blowing her nose.
“Gotta go pee,” she says. She gets up so quickly that she knocks my knees as she goes past. And then she’s out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her.
Leslie glances around my walls, because there is nothing else to see besides my desk or me. My cheeks redden at the torn-out magazine page stuck beside my mirror. It’s a Neutrogena ad and the model looks possibly French and no older than nineteen. She has chestnut-colored hair up in a chignon and her two hands have come to rest on either side of her jaw. I stuck the advert up over a year ago. She stared out smack from the middle of the April 2002 issue of Seventeen magazine. I felt both sickened and arrested by her bare, impossible beauty. No amount of New and Improved! Deep-Clean Cream Cleanser could make me look like that. She faces the camera dead on with the steely boldness of a charmed being.
Leslie Low is another of the charmed ones. He is nineteen and glaringly cute, and next March he is getting conscripted for National Service. Circe says that he will vanish into the forests of Pulau Tekong for infantry training, and the trees will spit him out nine weeks later—near-bald, profane, and unrecognizable. The Internet at school tells me the word tekong means obstacles. Supposedly the island is filled with obstacles and hungry ghosts. Boys go missing, and the next day their remains are found bundled up neatly along the route-march trail.
Leslie clears his throat and stares out of the window. My palms are cold and I feel a strain in my neck. I’ve pulled the net curtains shut so all we can see is the blurry outlines of people, like shadow puppets, moving with dreary and orchestrated purpose.
“You got a cool house,” Leslie says.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, it’s got a lot of character to it. I like the garden.”
“Thanks.”
I could ask him about NS, I guess. How he is finding it, whether he’s ready, how he felt about his A-Level results, what he will study at university. (Economics and Accountancy—I know this already.)
“It’d be nice to have a—” Leslie starts.
“Do you like shoegaze?” I spit out. My voice crackles with the effort of bravado. I clear my stupid throat. “Sorry—what did you say?”
“Oh. It’d be nice to have such a big garden,” Leslie says. “What were you saying?”
“Just—it’s . . . Do you like shoegaze?”
“Huh?”
“Shoegaze,” I say, my soul wilting. “You know, shoegaze music. Like Ride and Slowdive and—” The blank look on his face stops me continuing.
“Dunno what that is,” Leslie replies. “Sorry. You and Sisi are always into the most random things. Like your cheem foreign films. Or all that old-school, old-man music from the seventies or whatever, way before we were born.”
“Then what kind of music are you into?” I ask him.
Before he can reply I hear a snigger just on the other side of the door.
“‘What kind of music are you into?’” Circe repeats, in a saccharine, modulated imitation of my voice. She enters the room with a smirk.
“Jay Chou and Taiwanese R & B,” Leslie says with not a trace of diffidence. Circe sits on the opposite side of me from before.
“You’re so cheena,” Circe says to Leslie. She turns to me with a sneer that makes her resemble an evil twelve-year-old. “My brother is such an ah beng. He secretly wishes he were a Taiwanese pop star. Just like Jay Chou.”
“What’s wrong with Jay Chou?” Leslie asks, unabashed. “I bet Szu doesn’t know about the crap you play when you think nobody is listening. All that indie is just for show . . . when you’re not around, Szu, Circe listens to Britney and tries out all the dance moves. . . .” He grins as he spills this and I notice his big, crooked teeth for the first time.
“Bullshit,” Circe replies.
“Phoney,” Leslie says.
Circe glares at him for a second, and then she shrugs and says, “So what if I like Britney? People are entitled to like what they like. Isn’t that right, Szu?”
“Guess so,” I mutter.
I remember all the times she’s made fun of Clara Chua for idolizing Britney Spears, because Britney is pure bubble gum and isn’t even the latest thing. Right now people are more into the punkier Avril Lavigne. Clara is steadfast in her untrendy adoration and Circe calls it pathetic.
It is so much harder to detest your only friend in the world when (1) it is like deciding whether to pick the sole option on the menu or to go hungry; (2) her hatefulness comes and goes like a rash or a fever; (3) the memory of her kindness is so fresh that it encourages forgiving; (4) sometimes her slights are so slight I wonder if I imagined it and I’m the one being mean, undeserving.
Just two nights ago I escaped from this house and Circe tucked me into bed and let me curl up against her back like the grandest snail. I don’t know what I would have done with myself, when the walls of my own bedroom seemed to bear down on me. Every tile and turning was a reminder that these spaces are the same but my mother wouldn’t be. I spent so much time detesting her. Now that she’s gone my sadness feels murky and unearned. How to make sense of it? Circe didn’t press me to explain. She patted my hair and put me to sleep. Now she’s like a different person, this hard little Grinch scowling beside me.
16
CIRCE
2020
By the time I finish my meeting and come home I’m starving. My flatmate Julius is still out and I’m grateful to have the place to myself. I change into my dreariest, comfiest pajamas. I’m too lazy to cook so I have four slices of Gardenia bread for dinner instead. One spread thickly with kaya and butter, two with strawberry jam, one with plain butter and white sugar. My tongue goes numb with too much sweetness and my gut will complain later, even without the treacherous worm. I hear the neighbors watching television through the left wall and I wonder if they resent me as much as I resent them for the noise of their living.
I glare into the bathroom mirror as I wipe off my eyeliner. It’s the same face, all right; I’m one of those people who has looked eerily unchanged since childhood. I’ve remained constant in my nondescriptness. I pull at my skin; the flaws I started noticing in flickers from my midtwenties have decided to stay put and pronounce themselves even more strongly on my face. There are three lines on my forehead, stretched across my skin like guitar strings. I try to smooth them and they disappear for a moment, but only
a moment. There are crinkles at the corner of my eyes, and shadows. Pigment spots where the sun hits.
Magazines, with their phony advocacy of self-love, say that you learn to enjoy being yourself the older you get. In spite of your decrepitude, your decreasing worth. Be a peacefully deteriorating woman; covet, but also accept your lot. Believe in cosmetic products and their promises of preservation. You are supposed to celebrate, not to complain; to ripen like a bottle of wine, not a banana; to thrive, not to rot. You are supposed to hold a hairbrush and lip-sync with gusto to Abba or Beyoncé with your sisters and girlfriends. You are supposed to buy tickets for movies that feature montages precisely like that. You are supposed to hand over your money and embrace the straitjacket of who you are and your ageing. Even in this stifling city, where so many interminably young girls on the street seem to be made of porcelain and no matter how many bowls of mee pok they wolf down in food courts, they still seem to fit into their blogshop skirts.
I’m too young to say I’m too old for this. I’m too pasty for someone who lives near the equator. I finish washing my face and turn to my hands. I can see and feel my worry all over, and it doesn’t make sense because I’ve built nothing valuable from this worry, and in my head I still feel as confused as I did at twenty years old.
The front door creaks open and then slams. It’s Julius, coming back from a work event at some edgy new bar in Jalan Besar. I wonder from the clumsy way he’s putting things down if he is a little drunk. I towel dry my hands and make my way to the living room.
“Hey, Circ,” Julius calls out. His face is a little flushed.
“Hi,” I mumble. Julius is standing in a radius of yellow light under the living room lamp and he too looks old. Bloated and faded at the edges. I wonder how much longer we will live together. Our lease runs out in November, and it’s already August. This year is already a leathery leaf curling out at the edges.