If It Were Up to Mrs Dada

by Carissa Foo

  Her concentration was interrupted by a stubborn rhythmic beep. It drew her gaze to the Casio watch on her wrist. It was precisely three.

  “Three!” she said. “My God, it’s three.” Cheryl Dada was alarmed by the number on her watch. The party! The party! She must stop dallying. She reached for the door handle and turned it.

  There they were! Lilies! White lilies!

  VI

  What is he looking at? Cheryl Dada thought as she opened the door and saw the man sitting in the guest room.

  She was not in the mood to play host, not after all that toiling in the sun. Cautiously, she approached the sofa, hoping he would not speak to her. Her arms were feeling the ache from carrying the flowers and her chiffon top was still wet from the jaunt. Cheryl Dada thought she could have some time alone and enjoy the cool air in the guest room. She wanted badly for the man to go away but he kept looking at her. Did she have pollen on her face?

  “How are you?” said the man.

  Do I know him? thought Cheryl Dada, trying to put a name to the ruddy face. The watch beeped twice; it brought no name to her. She was getting impatient and looked over to the man, willing him to leave. He looked uneasily back at her. His lips parted slightly to take a breath; he was about to speak.

  If he knows me, then I must know him, thought Cheryl Dada, as her watch beeped again and failed to derail her cycle of thoughts. But from where? Certainly not from here—there were no male residents. Where do I know him from? she asked again, her eyes preoccupied with a head-to-toe inventory of the man sitting on the sofa. The thicket of dark curls; the stubble; the left dimple; the strong jaw; the silver chain that wore no pendant; the red and blue checked shirt with stiff collar; the faded jeans; the unpolished and dusty boots; the faint lilt in the voice—

  “I’m Adam,” he said, his voice slightly trembling. She’s the same, he thought, rising from the sofa and stretching his hand out to her. His beeping watch said hello on his behalf.

  Cheryl was hesitant but shook the hand anyway, for she lacked the will to refuse. Formalities caught her off guard. Moreover, she thought she must know the man; she just could not yet remember exactly who he was and where she had seen him. She had no choice but to settle down beside him—the close proximity might jolt a memory.

  They sat quietly in the room. There were two large windows, two empty bookshelves, and the worn out sofa. On the coffee table was a copy of yesterday’s Straits Times and the Bible. The air conditioner made a whirring sound that filled the space between them.

  “Busy day, huh?” he said.

  “Everybody’s so busy. The staff are running around, and meanwhile, residents are just resting in their rooms. I mean, I would too, knowing how crazy tonight will be,” he laughed softly. “That’s why I’m here—chilling in the guestroom. You too, right? Stealing some alone time and enjoying the air-con. Gosh, it’s such a hot day. And they say there is no global warming. Isn’t it obvious that world temperatures are rising?”

  The question ushered in a series of news reports and National Geographic stories about sea levels and Singapore’s low-lying East Coast, the $1.2 billion that would be pumped into improving the country’s drainage system—“We can’t have that whopping one metre of rainfall again. Orchard Road would shut down!” he said, “One week it is raining cats and dogs, the next it is blistering hot. Do you know the average temperature for the whole of last week was thirty-two degrees?”; at this point, he took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the sweat on his forehead and said, “Do you mind if I blast the air-con some more?”

  The air conditioner was cranked up.

  Cheryl turned to peruse the man who had just recited his monologue. He was a disastrous blend of a weather pundit, civil servant and Captain Planet. Before he could notice, she looked down at her white Birkenstock sandals, discomfited.

  “Today is way too hot. It must be thirty, at least.”

  “Thirty-four.” Cheryl readily said her line, pleased to release the information that was at her fingertips.

  Adam smiled. “Woah, really? That is ridiculous. How did Singapore get so hot?” he said with unconvincing frustration.

  “Tomorrow will be thirty-four too,” she said. “Too fucking hot.”

  “Too fucking hot, indeed,” he said in a lilting voice that betrayed his delight. “I wonder if the air-con is escaping, and that’s why it is so stuffy in here. Maybe the door is not shut properly.” He got up and walked to the door.

  Cheryl raised her head to see him open and shut the door a few times. Then he patted the door, relaxed his grip on the knob and walked back to the sofa.

  “Well, it’s not the door. Glad to report that the door is a high functioning door, as tightly shut as can be.” Encouraged by her responsiveness, or the lack of hostility, he carried on, “The door is functioning better than the air-con.”

  His companion sniffed, which was better than a snicker. He was more encouraged than ever and decided to catch the wave of her interest.

  “Do you remember,” he said, “the doors in MPH?”

  “My God, they were fucking heavy,” she replied almost instinctively; and she recalled the towering glass doors with wooden panels. They had bruised her arm once.

  “Yes they were,” he said, on cue. They hurt me too, he wanted to add, but halted the words flooding his mind. He would sound too emotional, he would give away too much. He had learned from past experiences that intimate talks did not work as well as rambling soliloquys—which threw her off and made it difficult to form hasty conclusions, giving her more time to warm up to his presence.

  “Why did they have to make them so heavy?” she said, permitting her aching body to relax in the sofa.

  “Exactly,” he said. “How strong does one need to be to enter a bookstore?”

  Cheryl, catching on, began to laugh; Adam laughed too.

  Promptly the room expanded. The shelves were lined with books; the doors became weighty. There they were in the old MPH on Stamford Road: Adam behind the cashier and Cheryl queuing to pay for her book. When it was her turn, she pulled out from her cloth purse two crumpled one-dollar notes. One of them had a tear in the middle. He was at first hesitant to receive the money from her, for the store manager had just a few hours earlier briefed the new recruits to decline torn or pasted-together notes with tact and courtesy—“Remember to ask customers if they got other notes. Say we cannot accept torn ones. Say the bank don’t want to accept also.” But when Adam saw her soft doe eyes, helpless and tentative, as if on the verge of tears, he forgot the instructions and told her it was all right. She blushed; those eyes glowed with a hope that he alone had given her.

  He wanted to assure her again as he always did. He wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right. That he would be with her; that he was waiting for her to get well. Yes, they were older, and things had changed over the past few years. Yes, they were living apart—oh how he hated sleeping alone!—but it was common these days, wasn’t it? People in other countries get separated all the time, Adam reasoned to himself, thinking of his cousin Sonia, who had gone to Manchester to do a Ph.D. while her husband stayed behind and continued with his job at some medical college. Two-year-old Ayesha went along with her mother and refused to speak Urdu after that.

  “Who ask him to let her go study?” “Who ask him to sign the prenup?” Tongues were wagging, wagging outside Pakistan. Adam remembered that his father had a lot to say about Sonia’s decision. His mother too. But the crux of the matter, which everyone seemed to have missed, was Yasir had stayed behind in Lahore. Yasir stayed behind; he waited faithfully. He could not just pack up and leave, especially when his folks were old and sick. More importantly, there was no need for them to be in the same place because the separation was temporary. Sonia was going to come back—where else could she go? He knew for a fact she was coming back. He had to believe that. And Yasir believed right because Sonia came back four years later and they moved to Islamabad. Distance had not done anyt
hing to the marriage.

  People should think less of distance, Adam thought, stealing a glance at the fair hand that was reaching for the newspaper on the table. Long-distance is nothing, he thought. Although, how would we know that when we are spoiled by the luxury of spatial constraints? We don’t know what long-distance is, he lamented to himself; we don’t know what longing is. Two points are enough to establish distance, just like two people are enough to make love. They think they’re happy, he said to himself, looking briefly at the two smiling faces on the newspaper that had entered his view: “Sixteen-hour labour for local celebrity Odessa Lee with no painkillers”, which didn’t seem like a big deal to him. The baby knows better, he thought, its face cringing in agony, as if it had been advised of the barbarous truth of life.

  “The first-time parents say that they are relishing the arrival of their—” The page turned and the newspaper was back on the table. Adam had seen enough to know where the story was going. The young celebrities believed that their family was complete, that it was the best thing that would ever happen; motherhood or fatherhood or parenthood, it changed their lives. They’re too young to understand, he thought and shook his head. Actually, most people in this country regardless of age only understand one kind of family.

  But ours is a new kind of family, he said with a new confidence, trying to remember the show that Clare used to watch. The trailblazer kind of family. Mixed-race and religion-free. Nobody but themselves would understand this. It’s no longer the ’80s. Or the ’90s. The 21st century is a whole new world.

  “Modern Family,” he mouthed the words as they came together in his mind. His family was modern, indeed—it was nothing like the one his parents had given him, and he had learned to stop comparing one with the other. Ice cream at Swensen’s did not excite anyone. Family Sunday wasn’t a thing. Coming home for dinner wasn’t either. This was especially true after Clare had started university. The first year she stayed in hostel so her absence was reasonable; but when the absence became a norm, Adam tried to make weekend dinners a family tradition so that they could spend quality time together. In hindsight, he should have enforced this when Clare was much younger so she would understand the importance of having a real and loving family.

  It was one thing to be a modern family, another thing to be incomplete. Even the most modern of families must have a father figure, a mother figure and children, though some choose to have pet dogs and cats instead. The point is—and Adam had always believed in this—the family has a natural order and one must respect nature. To mix everything up, roles and responsibilities jumbled together until the point where the family becomes single-parent… How cruel! Adam thought. How cruel to deprive a child of paternal love! What would people think? What would she think about her father—a freelance journalist whose hobbies were travelling, organic farming and surfing—he even said he liked surf music, what nonsense was that?—a man who made the cut because he wrote an essay on some women’s march?

  Adam had deleted the screenshots of the profile that Clare had sent him, but the details of the donor, which seemed unreal and cartoonish, were seared in his mind: “I hopped onto the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Beijing with a ukulele and a Swiss Army knife,” wrote Donor Number 523HEI; the personal statement was accompanied by a photograph of a grey-eyed baby boy who had a dimple in the chin. The whole process was a farce and Clare was sucked into the vortex of it. But there was no use trying to talk sense into her; she would only go on and on with her theories about women and the patriarchy. She would not listen and Adam would not listen too; they had stopped talking for years. Adam did not reply to her messages and he did not attend the baby shower. He stopped trying. The baby girl, the baby named Cheryl, was a stranger to him. For no Dada ever had a dimple in their chin.

  Adam noticed his thoughts and stopped. An unexpressed emotion gushed up from inside him. His mind was spinning. How had things between Clare and him deteriorated so rapidly over the years? He considered himself to be liberal and open-minded as long as no one was hurt in the name of freedom. But now, a baby was involved. Was she ready for the world? Was the 21st century ready for her?

  Just then, as the questions turned over in his head, Adam understood that modern meant different things to him and to Clare. He was modern for his time but nowhere modern enough for her. There is a limit to how modern a person can be.

  Adam was modern in his own right. He would come home early to do the house chores, wash and iron the clothes, put up the Chinese New Year and Eid decorations and tear them down after the festivities, send Clare to school and ensure that everyone was fed. Most important to him were the family dinners. He would cook, even though his pilaf was not as fluffy as his mother’s and the raita lacked punch. The food was always missing something because he was haphazard about proportions. He thought if Martin Yan could pinch salt and toss whatever amount into the pot, he could too. Questions of how much or how little, how many grams and how many teaspoons, Adam did not care for.

  Needless to say, there were always leftovers at the table. Much food and money were wasted in those few years. They ate so little: the younger one would peck at the yellow rice; the older one would fish out the spices and chili seeds. His mother had taught him to leave nothing behind on the plate, that one must not waste food; Adam wanted to impart the same values to his daughter, but it was hard to set an example when Cheryl left those seeds and pods and whatnots on the plate, stalks of vegetables lying on the table.

  After his mother-in-law’s death, the dinner situation exacerbated. Some nights the plates of food would go untouched. In those months Cheryl grew thin. It wasn’t just the pale cheeks and thin neck, or the increasingly defined collarbones. Her gait was slow and stiff and she had become hesitant in her ways. Adam would find her hands clasping a cup, occasionally raised to nearly touch her lips only to be brought back to rest on her lap. They repeated the dance over and over until the tea was cold, then there would be a new cup of steaming hot tea; and it began again: the hands, trembling, rising and falling; the white cloud swirling above the cup; the lips pursed, disturbing the surface of the tea, quivering as the sinuous threads of smoke blew upwards. When she was dazed like that, it was as if she had lapsed into a state of nonbeing where her body was anchored in the moment and the rest of her adrift on a sea of memories whose mighty waters engulfed the fragile present. Wave after wave they carried her farther away from him. Then she was lost on the shores of someplace out of reach. On his lucky days, he would find her in the attic, sitting in the rocking chair, glassy-eyed for hours. He would call out to her but it was clear to him that she was in a world of love that was not his.

  It seemed strange to think that she would entertain a life without him, that they were ever without each other, that each was a self-sufficient person before this life of theirs together. For everything that had happened to him, everything that he thought mattered prior to meeting her—an Engineering degree, money, status and all the five Cs—turned out to be a series of empty and looping chases. In the beginning Cheryl wasn’t there in his life and then all of a sudden, it was as if she had always already been there, as if he had never been without her.

  Gradually, one day at a time, Cheryl weakened. Her emaciation outlasted the acceptable mourning period. It was a symptom of what Adam interpreted to be a midlife crisis. Such abnormal behaviour was called “acting out”, just like how Clare was “acting out”—as her form teacher had put it to him—when she shaved off part of her hair in secondary school. His wife was acting out so as to regain control. It was the only logical explanation for her refusal to eat. He thought Cheryl was trying to get her slender form back—an attempt to recapture her youthful days—and she was succeeding. Her pyjamas were slipping off her shoulders and the ring on her finger was loose. For a while she became skinny as she had been in university. Then she got smaller—as if her skeletal frame had contracted and her waist were corseted. The true extent of the loss was revealed when even her elastic belt could not
hold her jeans up any more. Her clothes no longer fit her and she had to wear Clare’s old shirts like they were dresses.

  Still Adam cooked on the weekends in hopes that what would entice the stomach could win the heart. Oh how Cheryl played with food, picking up the rice, grain by grain, with her chopsticks. He did not know how to put it across to her that it was rude and simply inefficient because she was holding the chopsticks the wrong way. “They aren’t supposed to cross like that,” he told her. “They should be parallel to each other,” he told Clare. But no matter how hard he tried to show his girls, they were obdurate.

  Cheryl eventually lost the desire and energy to finish anything, be it the rice on her plate or the part-time degree at SIM. She stopped coming to dinner, and Adam ate in silence with Clare who, like her mother, became very particular, only eating pastas and burgers and mostly Western food. (The Hawaiian pizza used to be her favourite. He tried to make that for her on her 12th birthday, kneading and rolling out his own pizza dough, adding sweet corn and red capsicum among the pineapples and tomatoes. But Clare spat them out, every single capsicum and corn. She said it was her worst birthday and from that day on hated Hawaiian pizza.) Family gatherings were often postponed because Cheryl was too tired to get out of bed. Their annual trip to Islamabad had to be cancelled and rescheduled twice or thrice before Adam gave up and went on his own. And there was that scarf that Cheryl was always knitting. Whatever progress made in the morning was unpicked and left entangled on their bed at night; the fraying wool between them.