by Sharlene Teo
Before my mother passed away this would have been enough for Circe to start on a gleeful tirade. And I would nod and agree, and we would cackle. Now she turns towards me, purse-lipped, with a glaze over her face. Her eyes sweep down to my wrists and knobbly knees, sticking out under my dark-green skirt.
“Do you want to get a snack?” she asks. “I’m craving sweet corn. Or tau huay.”
“I’m good,” I say. My stomach rumbles. “I feel kind of bloated,” I add, which is true. My tummy makes a low burbling sound, and this time I’m grateful for the nearby explosions before the gravelly voiced trailer narrator drawls his lines.
“Let’s get up, my legs are numb,” Circe says. She dons her schoolbag without looking at me. I’m the one who gathers and bins our emptied Diet Cokes. I trail Circe to the snack stall. She orders soya bean milk and a red bean pancake.
“Can you hold this for me?” she asks, passing me the warm paper packet containing the coaster-sized pancake. She adjusts the straps of her schoolbag and sips the soya bean milk. “Have some,” she says.
I shake my head at the straw.
“Red bean?”
I shake my head again. When I pass her back the packet she exhales sharply and rolls her eyes, all this so quickly I can’t and anyway wouldn’t dare comment on it.
*
When I get home my aunt has just finished clearing out my mother’s room. The walls are shiny and it smells of bleach.
“Isn’t it unlucky to clean so much?” I ask.
“How was school?”
“I failed Geography.”
“Oh,” my aunt replies. “A test? You failed a test? You can retake.”
“No. It doesn’t work like that. It’s too late.”
“Why?”
“You won’t get it.”
“Hmm,” she says. “Never mind. Don’t worry, Szu. It’s bad for you. Worry until head ache. Still bad for you.”
My aunt has her sleeves rolled up over her skinny arms, and a bottle of glass cleaner in one hand. She sets it down on the table and turns towards me.
“Szu, can you sit for a minute?”
I slump my backpack down and take a seat opposite her. She watches me as I reach to take off my socks.
“We have not had a chance to talk about this,” she begins. “I was not surprised to see your father the other day. He was trying to pay his respects, but he did not go about it in the best way.”
There’s a pause. “Doesn’t matter,” I finally say.
“Are you sure, Szu Min?”
“Yes, Aunt Yunxi, I’m sure,” I say.
“Do you want to talk about it? Ask me any questions?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to see him again.”
Aunt Yunxi frowns and purses her lips. She sighs and shakes her head.
“I don’t care,” I say. My voice sounds feeble, wheedling. I hate it.
“Poor girl. I worry about you.”
“You don’t have to,” I snap. I gather my things quickly and get up. When I lock my bedroom door I listen as she moves about in the other room. She’s opening and closing drawers more loudly than she needs to.
*
It’s been three weeks since my mother died. Already Circe avoids the topic, or doesn’t really continue the conversation when she asks me why I’m quiet and I tell her the same thing: I’m sad. It’s getting boring to listen to, I can tell.
After school we run into some swimmers by the tuition center glued to their boyfriends. I spot them first, a cluster of perfect tans and gazelle legs, resolving into eight strong-shouldered superhumans with bright, inscrutable smiles. Rather than endure the indignity of being ignored by them, Circe and I break into an ostrich trot round the back of the building, and then we sit on the terra-cotta–colored steps.
“Do you ever think about finding your father? Tracking him down?” Circe asks. It’s the first thing she has said to me since we made our hasty retreat. We don’t discuss why or how we hurried away.
“He didn’t leave any details.” Sweat sticks around my shoulders and I’m out of breath, dizzy.
“Surely we can find him,” she says. “We can hire a private investigator. Don’t you watch TV?”
“I don’t have a TV, remember.”
“Oh yeah. Okay, well, I have the Internet.”
“Nah. Forget it.”
“What about that woman? Novita? She might know something. We can find her number and call her.”
“There’s nothing to know. She was just some crazy person. Making life hard for my aunt.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Don’t care.” I crane my neck in case the swimmers have followed us around the corner.
“You always say that,” Circe replies. “When you obviously do. It’s tiring.” What she means to say is: You’re tiring. What I want to say but don’t is: You’re not Nancy Drew; my family is not some mystery-of-the-month project, so fuck you.
The air between us is heated and pungent, like car exhaust. We look out at the main road with its endless stream of buses and taxis. When I glance at Circe she’s stormy faced, jaw set, looking at the dried-out leaves of the nearby tree swaying in the slight, selfish breeze.
“I still think,” she says, “that if I were you, I’d at least be curious.”
“It’s not so easy,” I say, and I can feel my blood rising. I speak quickly; the words come out faster than I can stop them. “You just think it’s easy cuz it’s not your problem. Things are so much harder from inside the problem than outside. There’s no quick, magic fix sometimes.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“You don’t get it.”
When she looks at me her eyes are furious.
“The first time he left,” I start, before she can say anything, “I told myself for ages that he was having a bad day. And I’d done something wrong. Or my mother had said something wrong. And he wasn’t a bad man. He was just too angry or embarrassed to come back straightaway. But to see him again like that, all of a sudden, and then he just went away. Didn’t even try to stay.”
Circe’s eyes are wide and dry; her mouth hangs open.
“What’s the point? Why even come back?” I’m shuddering.
Circe reaches into her bag for a tissue packet and hands me two pieces. “Here. I’m sorry, Szu,” she says. “I don’t know what to say.”
I shake my head and wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, flushed and furious. Circe looks to the right and then back at me again. I follow her stare towards the lissome flickers of ponytails. The swimmers stroll to the bus stop, armed with boyfriends and small pots of frozen yogurt.
20
AMISA
1982
Amisa fidgeted in her plastic chair by the theatre doors. It had been more than a year since they filmed Ponti 3. By now her life should have changed, but it was the stuck, drowsy same. She was twenty-four and could pass for younger. She had three films to her name, but her name didn’t matter. Pontis 1 to 3 were reels of film that could fit into the back of Iskandar’s car; they were things that had gotten made and now what? What next?
The Ponti 3 premiere was scheduled for tonight. Iskandar had hired out a screen in the Everitt Cineplex from 7 p.m. At 6:30 Wei Loong arrived.
“Your dress,” he said, handing her the rattan bag.
He wore a beige shirt with a starched collar. When she came out in her blue party dress he took her arm, staring ahead, his face smilelike. Over the next hour people started to arrive: friends of the crew, Wei Loong’s colleagues, Yunxi, and finally Iskandar, in a cream suit. He looked tanned and very old, his skin leathery, his eagle eyes wise and sharp. Mrs. Wiryanto followed close by, her hair in a stiff, hairsprayed updo, wearing a twinset the color of champagne. Novita was the last to enter the lobby, nine years old now, all skinny limbs and buck teeth. She was almost the same height as Amisa.
“Hello, Amisa.”
“Hello, little princess.”
“How come I haven’t seen
you for a long time? Why you never come to my house anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Amisa replied, pursing her lips. Even though she did know: filming was over, and so, it seemed, were the invitations to the Wiryantos’. She glanced at Iskandar and felt a swell and sink in her chest. He was talking to one of his associates. It seemed as if his back was angled conspicuously towards her. He turned and caught her staring. She smarted.
“How’s my star?” he asked, all cavalier lightness. “And how’s the proud husband?”
“We are good, thank you,” Wei Loong replied. She felt his hand drift to her waist.
The theatre smelt of stale popcorn and musty cushions. Amisa must have swept these floors hundreds of times. She sat stiffly between Wei Loong and Novita. Iskandar Wiryanto was a wife and child away. The lights dimmed.
“Bigger! Scarier! We’ve got to scale everything up,” Iskandar had said, insisting she wear a clunky mask of foam latex, applied by the nervous makeup artist, a girl no older than nineteen, who stippled the edges of the latex onto Amisa’s skin. She looked garish, barely recognizable, but in a way that seemed sloppy and unintentional. Just two eyes glaring from behind a rubbery mask with a hooked nose like a fairy-tale witch’s, nowhere near anybody’s idea of a Pontianak.
On the large screen, she popped out from a cupboard. Hands extended over her head, cartoonish. Novita chuckled beside her, and in that moment, Amisa hated the girl. That big reveal had taken hours to shoot. The titular Curse of the Bomoh was to make her even uglier. How her back ached from stooping inside that mahogany cupboard, waiting to spring the doors open, to howl. She had boils and welts painted and glued down on her arms and legs.
She peered over at Iskandar. He propped his elbows on the armrests of the plush chair and had his fingers bridged in front of his face, like a chess player considering his next move. Did he think the film was any good? Amisa could barely bring herself to keep her gaze on the screen. Finally the credits rolled. Wei Loong clapped and clapped when her name came up.
AMISA TAN ………………. PONTI
Her hands lay still and she kept a lidded gaze on the screen as other names followed. She wondered how many actresses all over the world had stared at their names in the credits and seen the hard, often horrible work encrypted in those lines of dots: the long shoots, the bad takes, the standing in the sun and rain. Very many, she assumed. She felt cowed by the unoriginality of her thought.
“You make a good monster, Amisa,” Mrs. Wiryanto said to her afterwards in the lobby.
“Thank you. I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” Amisa replied. Her cheeks ached as she smiled.
*
At the start of 1983, the Wiryantos moved to Hong Kong. Iskandar said the film industry was more virile over there and he could find better collaborators. He would call her, he claimed, once things were set up.
For the first year that she didn’t hear from him, she forgave him out of the painful habit of unrequited love. Such a love endures so much cruelty, is even fortified by it. The weakening of her spirit kept that bad grip strong. She knew the way he was, how he consumed ideas and discarded them at the drop of a hat, how when he was focused on a project everything and everyone else just fell away, even his own daughter. What chance did Amisa have?
She looked out for news of Iskandar’s films in the papers, but it never appeared. She tried dialing her birthday digits and then the foreign number he left her, but one line was disconnected and the other was either engaged or five long beeps promised an answer, before the connection cut out.
She turned twenty-six, then twenty-seven. Even though she still tried for auditions, no studio in Singapore or Malaysia would offer a leading, or even substantial, role to a woman pushing thirty with no star wattage, much less no experience besides three totally unknown horror films that had barely screened and, as such, hardly existed. Nobody had heard of her, nor of Iskandar Wiryanto, nor of the Ponti films; nobody cared enough to help her out. She tried lying about her age, but the industry was tightening its rules, and work permits required her IC or her passport, both of which bore her stubborn, damning birthdate.
She wanted so badly to be a somebody and an everything, not a nobody and a nothing, but the trench between the two states was deep and wide and a stubborn mystery to traverse. She went for a meeting with a man she found through the classified ads, who claimed he could get her an audition for a Hong Kong telemovie. He operated out of the back office of the yellowing, notorious Sandstone Plaza, already a bad sign. He was a Chinese man in his late thirties with a queasy, seasick face: darting eyes, greenish pallor.
“I’ll help you if you help me,” he said. At least he cuts to the chase, Amisa thought, as she looked up at him from under her eyelashes. She waited three seconds before nodding coyly.
He took her to the Fragrance Hotel and booked a room on the hourly rate. The air conditioner leaked onto her bare shoulders and the pilling blue pillow that reeked of old sweat and body lotion. The vent made an eerie keening sound and it masked her own flat, desultory moans as the man flipped and pounded her like she was a burger patty. This was sexless sex, a body performing its urgent, ugly motions; two strangers jarring and grifting for conquest. Amisa thought of her younger days lying down in the fields with the swarthy men and avid boys in Kampong Mimpi Sedih. She’d considered herself victorious then, possessing the upper hand. Not so now. She felt a twinge of fondness for Wei Loong and how meaningfully he still handled her. Too meaningfully, in fact, fixing her with a mushy, trustful look that didn’t flatter his features. But being fucked like this, the bedsprings tawdry and telling, didn’t feel good either.
*
Over the next few years she tried attending open calls for Channel 8, but rejected the two roles she was offered. She refused to put talcum powder in her chignon, to kowtow to concubines. She would not play the part of the frowning matriarch, the suffering mah jie, the amah, or the handwringing spinster sister. She wanted to be at the glowing center of each story, to love and hate and fight and win completely and without condescension, no concession to screen time, no expense spared. Why did getting older have to put a stop to her wanting? Surely it grew as she grew. Why did no one respect that?
One afternoon, she was at the box office staring at her hands and wondering if they looked soap-worn when Wei Loong came bounding through the double doors. He grinned widely.
“It worked. After nine bloody years, it worked!”
“What are you talking about?”
He waved a slip of paper in front of her: the Toto, embossed with the light-red Singapore Pools logo, receipt fonts printed with the number he had bought every week since the beginning of their marriage: 23081958, bonus numbers 190476. They had won.
“We can move out of our flat. We can buy a house, get a garden of our own. A fucking driveway. I’ve never had a garden. Have you?” Wei Loong was more attractive and enthused than she had seen him in years.
He twirled her away from the counter. Yes, the possibilities were opening up: fuck the film hall, fuck the ticket stubs, fuck the peanut shells she had to sweep up every evening, fuck the dirty toilets, fuck the ficus tree, fuck their noisy neighbors, fuck their beige bedroom.
They bought a house in a cul-de-sac at the end of a leaf-strewn driveway. It was more than they had ever dreamed of. There was a garden full of sagging trees and bug-filled plants. Everything awake, alive.
On the day they moved into the house they went out to the patio. Light came down in diagonal stripes on the dirty tiles. Rain- and mud-stained, brown streaks on yellowed cream, with a Nyonya patterning. Wei Loong lifted her up by the waist and his hands hurt her a little, fingers poking her ribs. He swung her around and held her in the air like a prize. And then he put her down and she laughed because that was what people did in films.
21
SZU
2003
After school I pass out in bed and only wake up four hours later, when it is dark outside. I blink open my body in its crumpled unifor
m. I feel that angry grogginess of hours lost.
As if she senses that I’m awake, I hear Aunt Yunxi’s room door open. She pads down the corridor in my mother’s slippers and blocks out the light in my door frame. I pretend to be asleep when she comes in and puts her hand on my forehead.
“Cold snap,” she pronounces in Hokkien, with her raspy stage voice. “It keeps coming back.”
I continue to feign sleep as she goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, the creaky cupboard, pours and shuts and comes back clinking a spoon against a bowl. Double-boiled soup to balance me out. Chinese pears, wolfberries, white fungus, snow peas, celery, piss-colored and smelling of death.
“Your heart is afraid and you have offended a spirit,” Aunt Yunxi says. “I can’t tell which one.” She puts her hand on my chest, moves it up towards my throat and down again, roughly, like she’s feeling for something foreign. Her palm is warm and calloused. In the frog-eyed dimness I study her knuckles and the way the veins protrude, so many decades of life running through her, all that pain and treasure. Now that I’m thinner we’ve started to look alike. Even if she’s not really family, the same way women living together sync their periods, I feel like I’m absorbing her features, and maybe in forty years I’ll be another version of her.
“You should stop spending time with your friend,” she says softly. “She is a spoilt girl with a weak soul. She’s bad for you.”
“Don’t talk about Circe like that,” I reply, even though I’ve started to agree with her.
“Szu Min. Szu. I’m worried about you.”
“I’m okay, really.”
“That’s not true.”
My eyes glaze. I feel her staring at me with her forehead all scrunched up, mouth a worried line. If I focus on how old my aunt looks, my soul softens. Right now I don’t want to be nice.
“If you don’t eat, you’ll lose your strength,” she nags. “And let bad things in. Like greedy spirits. Or a terrible cold. I know you’re still bothered. About your mother, about your father. A lot to think about for a young person like you.”