by Sharlene Teo
“Put it away! You’re very beautiful, but you’re just not my type,” Iskandar said. “You are getting so much better, Amisa. But this is a strictly professional relationship, and I’d like to keep it that way. Besides, I’m too old for you, and I think your flavorless husband is good for your health. You’re a chilli padi and you need something bland. Don’t touch me, lah. Like I said before, I’m a happily married man.”
Amisa sputtered like a faulty engine and didn’t know what to do with her arms. Her breasts suddenly embarrassed her, as did the febrile arousal she could feel vaporizing off her skin. She put her clothes on, stung by the first sexual refusal she had ever received in her life. She had thought she was invincible. She had thought no man could resist her.
He drove her home that evening with his daughter buckled in the backseat. Amisa maintained a sullen silence, curtly ignoring Novita’s questions about what was that tree, what was that building? Iskandar sighed at the wheel and switched the radio on to Gold 90.5.
“It’s a balmy Friday, fifth of October, 1978. Temperature is thirty-two degrees Celsius, with variable clouds. There’s a traffic jam on the PIE owing to a road obstruction. I hope you’re all having a wonderful evening otherwise. Here’s a track to relax to, from Fleetwood Mac,” the presenter drawled.
Amisa wasn’t paying attention; instead she watched the city rush past her, grids of office lights and long rows of sea apple trees, onward towards Toa Payoh and her sulking husband. The song started innocuously enough: gentle chord progressions, subdued female voice in the popular folk twang.
But exactly thirty seconds in, when Stevie Nicks drew out the word “landslide,” Amisa recoiled as if she’d been hit in the face. She started to sob. She couldn’t help it. Every subsequent line and shift of the song took on an unbearable potency. The voice issuing from the dashboard speakers sounded so private and subdued, as if its owner was trying and failing to keep her grief to herself. Infected by the symptoms of this lilting American melody, how incurably sad Amisa felt. Didi, she thought. Didi, Didi, Didi. With each verse, Amisa’s cries jagged and amplified inside the car. Iskandar glanced at her and turned the volume up, up, up as Novita looked on, confused and fraught. At the traffic junction the drivers of the cars on either side of them glanced over at the baffling tableau: man blasting a folk song, beautiful woman crying, confused child in the backseat.
From then on, when the moment called during their evenings together, Iskandar knitted his eyebrows as he put the needle on the record and the black vinyl started to spin like a blade. “Landslide” vibrated from the walls of his study, that husky voice everywhere, the hurtful chords. He played it on set, too, when he wanted to break her, over and over until everyone was sick to death of it and said it made them bleed from the ears. But nobody could deny that the song did something. The actress’s cold eyes would darken, and Ponti began to embody this exquisite awful sadness. The change was immediate and apparent. He wrung her of every ounce of emotion until one day, finally, filming was done.
“That’s a wrap,” Iskandar said. “I have always wanted to say that.” The cast and crew clapped politely, sighs of relief all around. Amisa sat half in and half out of her stupid banyan tree, completely spent.
*
Iskandar had huge plans for the premiere. And the distribution. And for promoting the film. As it turned out, so did a Filipino director called Bobby Suarez, who had been shooting a movie at the same time. It was titled They Call Her Cleopatra Wong and starred a winsome girl named Marrie Lee who had feather-cut hair and a searchlight smile. If you put their headshots side by side, you would rather be friends with Marrie Lee than Amisa Tan.
Marrie Lee played Cleopatra Wong, a female Interpol agent who high-kicked and stunt-fought her way to the bottom of a conspiracy involving impostor monks. It was a Philippine-Singapore international coproduction and superspies were sexy and trendy. Nobody cared about pontianaks—so dated; superstitions were being sieved out; fewer people wanted to engage with ghosts. There was only room for one local film to be screened this year; not enough support and interest; financial decision; nothing personal or about the quality of your film, man. Those were the reasons the distributors cited, and the small, independent cinemas flatly refused to screen the film. Besides, there had recently been a film called Pontianak directed by Roger Sutton. Eventually they found one theatre that would take it: a two-screener in Bishan. At the premiere, Amisa wore a black bias-cut dress and grinned skull-like for the cameras. The auditorium was half empty. She sat in between Iskandar Wiryanto and Wei Loong, who fell asleep during the last half hour of the film.
They shot Ponti 2 shortly after, cast and crew dejected, but the Wiryantos paid them relatively well, enough to put food on the table. And that sufficed to make people put up with someone as difficult and deluded as Iskandar Wiryanto. The first film went nowhere, ditto the second. By the time they shot Ponti 3: Curse of the Bomoh in 1980, it was like watching a tree fall in the most distant forest in slow, laborious motion. Even the script was so terrible that it was as though Iskandar had given up on the writing process and knew it wouldn’t go anywhere. Filming it was like watching paint dry and slow-clapping at the end result. Nobody dared to say it, but the trilogy was a vanity project, an elaborate and costly present from Mrs. to Mr. Wiryanto, facilitating his wishes and the delusions of grandeur that seemed to slip further from realization with each successive attempt.
At home, Wei Loong and Amisa shared a bed but hardly touched. He was sore about Iskandar despite her protestations of professionalism; he didn’t believe that Iskandar had never entered her smooth, yielding body, not even kissed her. Why, then, did she go over to his house so often? The crew all laughed at him; he was a conscious cuckold. They shared meals in silence, filled the hours before sleep with television. It was hard to remember that any kinship or affection had ever existed between them.
The week after they wrapped Ponti 3 Amisa returned to the Paradise Theatre, now called the Everitt Cineplex. She asked for Rocky and was directed to his office upstairs. He didn’t look surprised to see her.
“Always knew you’d be back,” he said.
19
SZU
2003
It’s the final day of the funeral and I’ve had enough. I glance at the clock and try not to let it be too obvious that I’m watching the time. The white blouse I’ve been wearing every day has started to smell. Circe arrived an hour ago, uncharacteristically on time. Dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, she’s subdued, solemn.
The clock reads ten minutes to ten when my father comes down the driveway. I draw a sharp breath and my whole body feels limp and light. My father has been gone for nine years and as he gets closer he looks younger, not older, than I remembered. His hair is mostly black and slicked to the sides with pomade. He is tanned and wears a dark short-sleeved shirt and pressed trousers. Somehow when I imagined him in the present I always pictured him as scrawny and destitute, a castaway with crustacean whiskers and a balding pate.
“Hello, Szu,” he says. His voice is new, carroty. I remembered it all wrong.
I stand there and gawp at him for a second. I feel a prickle in my chest both expansive and painfully specific. I turn to Circe mechanically and stage-whisper, “That’s my dad.”
She is silent, just looks at me and back at him with checkout blankness.
“Szu Min,” my father says, like he’s testing out the sound of my name. He looks at me straight on and my jaw tenses.
I turn away and almost knock into Aunt Yunxi.
“How good of you to show up,” she says to him. Although her tone is even, calm, conscious of our visitors, people turn to watch us. Humans have this spectating instinct for drama.
“I don’t know what your purpose is,” Aunt Yunxi says in a flat voice, in Hokkien. “But it’s not the right time.”
Is it possible that my father disappeared into a time machine and has only now found his way back? He hasn’t aged a day; he looks well fed and well
slept. I press my toes into my canvas shoes and wriggle them out of reflex, just to check I’m not dreaming.
“I saw the obituary in the papers,” my young-looking father replies in Hokkien. “I want to pay my respects. I used to live here; this was my house.”
“Not anymore,” my aunt says.
My father lets out a long exhalation. He is holding a pair of sunglasses in one hand and he reaches up to place them on his head as he stares at my aunt.
“The obituary wasn’t put there for you,” Aunt Yunxi continues, arms akimbo. “Look, Ah Loong, why don’t you pay your respects? Then go. Now is not the time to make a scene.”
“Who are you to talk to me like this?” my father asks. “To act so high and mighty? What gives you the right?”
His tone thickens the air. Everyone stares.
“Does Szu know?” my father asks, looking at me like we’re on the same team.
My aunt just ignores him. Two of our guests have come to her side, burly men with oily comb-overs and thick forearms.
“Please go,” Aunt Yunxi says. Her tone is flat and polite.
“Please go,” I repeat. “You shouldn’t be here.” My voice catches on the last word.
“Don’t you think you should tell her?” my father asks my aunt. She just glares at him.
He turns to me.
“She’s not your real aunt,” he spits out, eyes afire. “Did your mother ever tell you? Did you guess? They just used to live together. She’s not even related—”
“Cut it out!” a man calls out from the side. “How can you be so disrespectful?”
“This woman is a scammer,” my father continues, gesturing towards Aunt Yunxi. “Always has been. She was a bad influence on your mother. She only moved in so she could live in the house and do her black magic here. She can’t be trusted.”
“Go away,” I say, in English. “Stop bad-mouthing my aunt.”
He looks at me, surprised, with his bulgy goldfish eyes and his Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat. I’m only a little shorter than he is. He’s half of who I am but I feel no more akin to him than I did to my mother.
“You shouldn’t be here,” another man says to my father in Mandarin. He comes forward and moves towards him, but before anything happens my father backs off and begins to walk away. It’s like a slow, embarrassing nightmare repeating itself. I’m eight all over again and keep expecting him to turn around. He walks speedily, with purpose, as if he’s on his way to an important meeting. I misremembered him kind. Cowardly but kind. Now I bore holes into the back of his head. My heart is thumping and I can hear the blood whistling around my ears as I watch him leave. The gate clangs; he’s left it slightly ajar. I consider running after him, but I don’t know if I would hug him or hit him.
Circe and I retreat into the house. She’s animated by the drama. I can tell by her jerky movements and the brightness in her eyes.
“Jeez,” she says. “Are you okay? So that guy was your dad? That was mega awkward.”
“Yep.”
“He looks so young.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.”
“He’s pretty inconsiderate turning up today. Of all days,” Circe says.
“Of all days,” I repeat, my voice catching. In my head I’m picturing how I should have shouted at him, had the courage to be brave. I should have yelled: Just leave, since you’re so good at it, and everyone would have applauded me.
Circe circles her left foot in one direction and then the other. “What do you think of that stuff he said about your aunt not really being your aunt?” she asks. “That’s crazy.”
“He’s probably right,” I say.
“Well—” Circe starts to speak.
“Szu, can you come outside?” my aunt calls from the patio. “I need you.”
*
Later on, the men from the funeral home show up. They pull up in the van and get out, a tumble of tired faces. Soon after, the monks arrive.
The presiding monk has liver spots across his face and on the back of his shorn head. As he performs his final rites around the coffin, chanting and singing sutras, I watch his orange robes sway. The younger monk joins in. Their voices are low, soothing. They commence the ritual of closing the coffin. Nobody is meant to look—bad luck—but while everyone’s eyes are shut I open my left, the way a giant whale would at the bottom of the sea. Submarine silence. Nobody sees me ruin the ritual. Six men lift the casket up, steady it on their shoulders. And then they proceed down the driveway and through the already-opened gates.
*
The rest of the afternoon passes in a flurried blur. In the viewing room at the crematorium we watch the incinerator hatch open. The coffin slowly slides in. It looks so small from the viewing gallery, as if it could fit a pet or a doll. When most of the coffin has slotted in, the doors close and my hand twitches, wanting to reach for my mother. The monks keep chanting. I wonder how many rites they do a week, how often boredom overrides devotion. I find myself holding Circe’s small, cold hand and I don’t know how to make my thoughts go quiet. I think about my mother’s downcast face and her uncommon smile. My eyes start to water and I can see distortions in the air, like I’m right up close to the fire.
*
The next morning Aunt Yunxi and I return to collect the remains. The crematorium assistant ushers us into a small room bathed in cruelly cheerful sunshine. I squint at the tray in front of us, set on the cement counter. My aunt passes me a pair of long brown chopsticks and tilts her chin towards the pile of gray. My mother’s bones have broken down so much in the fire that they look like they came from a bird. We pick up what we can make out and place it in a smaller tray, to be transferred to the urn. The more I search for pieces of her, the more my vision smudges.
“It’s okay,” Aunt Yunxi says. “We can take our time.” She puts down her chopsticks for a moment and pats my shoulder slowly.
When we have finished collecting the bones, the as-sistant places them in the urn. We follow a different assistant down the hallways of the columbarium, which has gleaming marble floors and ceiling-high niche shelves. It would be easy to get lost in here if we didn’t take down the location, so we don’t forget where to find her. My mother goes into the fifth row up, three down the aisle, her full mouth unsmiling, eyes clear and serious.
*
Monday morning is strip lit and overcast—the stuff of doomsday movies. Circe leads me through our school corridors like I’m famous and she is my po-faced security guard. My eyelids droop with the excruciation of Real Life. Everyone is watching us. After a week away, the Whampoa Convent of the Eternally Blessed has a penitentiary air to it. The sugar-plum pastel paint job is intolerable. Grilled windows and the hush near the staffroom, rounding down towards our classroom where girls in the hallway hang back and whisper in our wake. Priya and Elizabeth offer me smiles and “I’m sorry”s. Trissy and Clara look at me like I’ve just been dredged up from the sea.
“Where’s their sympathy?” I ask Circe. Not so secretly, I am relishing my force field of bereavement, the immunity from overt teasing, and the goodwilled attention and condolences from the kinder girls.
“Some bimbos are too dumb and shallow to feel anything,” Circe whispers. “They’re not worth bothering about.” But she’s the one who keeps glancing around as she puts her small hand lightly on my back and walks me to class.
In Geography Mrs. Lee gives out our continuous assessment scripts. I’ve scored 44 percent and I don’t bother to read any of the remarks in detail, just stare at the angry red ballpoint looping over my answers. “Keep trying, Szu,” reads the note on the final page. It sounds like a motivational card. Emptily hopeful. I look out of the door into the long, rectangular PE field. The dark-green trees sticking up behind it have lightened over the past few months and the fog has settled. Now some of the tips of the branches are light green, as if dried out. It’s the end of August. No more wild dogs. Just tender, ugly mud and earthworms roving underfoot. The haze coming
and going, inciting illnesses, clogging our lungs in our sleep. After class I tear off the final page of my script and scrunch it small in my palm. I throw it into the wastepaper bin on the way out.
After school Circe and I take the train to Bugis, but the movie we want to see is sold out so we buy giant cups of Diet Coke and sit by the giant pillars in the cinema lobby because this is habit even if the place seems warped and sullied in a tired, sorry way. Trailers for remakes of remakes play on loop on the screens over the popcorn stands. The explosions blast out of sync. When I look away the glare and flashes make my eyes hurt.
“Didn’t ask you how you did for Geography,” I say to Circe.
“Oh, I did okay,” Circe replies, rattling the ice cubes around her Diet Coke.
“How much? I got forty-four.”
“Hm.”
“What did you get?”
“Seventy-one.” She looks up at me from under her eyelashes.
“Wow! That’s amazing. Why didn’t you say earlier?”
“It’s okay,” Circe replies. “It’s no big deal,” she adds, even though it is: I thought we were failures together. She tilts her head away to gaze at a group of girls sailing up the escalators from another secondary school with orchid-purple uniforms. They are in hysterics, one loud, clear voice bubbling into breathless giggles. When people laugh hard it sounds like they are having genuine fun, especially if you don’t know what the joke is about.
“Their uniforms suck,” I try, but Circe doesn’t respond.
In the shadow of the pillar I feel like I’m pulling her down into the carpet with my mildewed, mushroomy weight. We sit there for five, ten, twenty more minutes. The explosions play on a loop. The orchid-purple girls file into a theatre, still laughing uproariously. I try to think of something interesting to say.
“Bugis is so lame,” I mutter.
“Is it?” Circe asks.