Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  ‘Aiyoh, so pitiful!’ exclaimed the girl, in an easy swing from biting criticism to genuine concern and back. ‘The man so useless, spending money on drink, and the wife sick all the time, and five children to take care.’

  Miss Seetoh wondered how much Maggie had pieced together a picture of her marriage from clues inadvertently dropped during her talks and discussions in the creative writing lessons. The girl had eyes and ears that claimed the entire school as their territory, roaming it relentlessly, like a tiny, agile, quick-witted predator that knew when to pounce, and when to sit on its haunches and beg. She reminded Miss Seetoh of the lowly eunuchs and maids of old in the ancestral country, who glided noiselessly through the large imperial courtyards and chambers, sniffing out or initiating intrigues, rising to important positions through sheer cunning.

  Maggie knew which teacher was gay, which boy-girl pair was having sex. She dragged into the respectable orderliness of the school the private chaos of young lives: Bin Choo was always sleepy in class because she helped at her mother’s noodles stall every evening till past midnight; Gary copied others’ homework; Bina sometimes slipped into the classroom during recess and stole things; Hock Soon knew how to avoid paying bus fare on his way to school every morning by choosing only very crowded buses; Ah Leng belonged to a secret society and had a dragon tattoo on his right shoulder; it was the quiet Ravi who was responsible for the shocking incident, still unsolved by the discipline master, of the pubic hairs slipped between the pages of a library book.

  Maggie said, ‘Miss Seetoh, you know what? Everyone, they talk, talk about why you have drop the Mrs.’

  The girl was intensely disliked and distrusted by the majority of the staff and students. Miss Seetoh held in check her own deep aversion in the face of so much trust and adulation by a student completely isolated in a school of teeming hundreds. It was most embarrassing that the girl had actually taken the trouble to find out her birthdate and present her with a large chocolate birthday cake, probably bought at great expense, lavishly inscribed: ‘For Miss S, the best understanding teacher in the world.’ ‘Please,’ said Miss Seetoh awkwardly, opening her purse, but Maggie clamped it shut again, ‘No, Miss Seetoh. You are special. I’ll do anything for you!’

  At the wake of her husband, only a month before, she was startled to see the girl, dressed in full mourning black, present herself among the visitors and proffer the traditional gift of condolence money. ‘Oh no, Maggie, you mustn’t,’ she had insisted, and this time had succeeded in pressing the sealed white envelope back into the girl’s hand. How on earth had she got the money? There were rumours about her mother working as a lounge waitress in one of the city’s seediest districts.

  ‘I know they all talk, talk about me, but Miss Seetoh, it’s not true! One day I tell you everything, because I trust you.’ She could already be telling her stories in the submissions in the creative writing class.

  ‘Maggie,’ Miss Seetoh had said, trying not to sound too shocked, ‘don’t get carried away by your imagination. For the next assignment, don’t write about sex. Or rape.’

  To reject the already much rejected girl would be to bring upon herself lifelong remorse. As a child in primary school, she had one day pushed to the ground a classmate, a scrawny, scanty-haired little girl with a perpetual trickle down her nose, who followed her everywhere, and carried the guilt right up to secondary school.

  Every teacher was relieved at the thought that Maggie, who resolutely kept her strange family background impenetrable to the good work of the school’s corps of hard-working counsellors, would be gone once she finished the O Level exams and be fully absorbed into her dark world, dominated, it was rumoured, by a hard-drinking, abusive father who lived on the earnings of her lounge waitress mother. The complaints of some of the teachers, brought into the office of the principal, ended there, absorbed into the school’s benign mission of educating the young and preparing them for a useful role in society. The noble goal was announced in a motto in giant white letters above the school entrance.

  The formidable Mrs Neo had said to the principal as she barged into his office and he stood up to greet her, ‘For the good name of the school, that girl should be expelled!’

  The principal had replied calmly, ‘I’ll see what can be done,’ meaning nothing would be done.

  He already had a fearful picture of Maggie Sim taking her story to the newspapers, of the burst of publicity in the Chinese media ever hungry for sensational news, of the annoyance of the Ministry of Education at having to respond with a public investigation. A freakish presence in a noble institution of learning, the girl would be allowed to stay till she left of her own accord.

  Once or twice, the principal called Maggie into his office for a mild reprimand. ‘You were rude to Miss Pang, and again to Mrs Doraisamy.’

  Genteel man that he was, he left it to the lady teachers to deal with the surreptitious make-up, the vulgarisation of the school uniform by an undone shirt button here, a lifting of the skirt hem there. There was something that he had heard from one of the teachers which had deeply disturbed him: Maggie had once gone for an abortion.

  ‘Do you know anything about it?’ he had asked Miss Seetoh, possibly the girl’s only confidante.

  ‘No,’ said Miss Seetoh who did not want to know, and the matter was never referred to again.

  She suddenly had an image of the girl in a secret visit to one of the government hospitals where abortions were performed with utmost discretion and minimum fuss, so that the misguided teenager could get up, go home, and be in school the next day. She remembered Maggie once or twice excusing herself from class to go to the sick bay because of stomach pains from her very heavy periods, conspicuously taking out of her schoolbag a large wad of sanitary towels.

  Her world at St Peter’s Secondary School was a truly happy one, and Maggie was part of it. If she wrote a novel one day, the teenager, astonishingly shrewd in the ways of the world, might even be the female protagonist. Her imagination, ever active and on the alert to store potentially useful material for that dreamt-of novel, was already storing images of the girl, her large pretty eyes, her expertly plucked eyebrows, her impossibly large breasts, all in keeping with the hard opportunism of a Singapore-bred Lolita.

  When I was her age, Miss Seetoh thought with some wonder, I knew nothing about the birds and the bees. Her mother kept her in a protective capsule, still plaiting her hair every morning well into her teens and watching her recite her night prayers kneeling beside the bed they shared. Even then she was already responding to the cry for freedom deep inside that had begun with the smallest of wishes – ‘when I have a bed of my own’ – for her mother slept badly and kept her awake with much tossing, moaning and teeth-grinding. Over the years, as she grew into adulthood, the wish was systematically enlarged, from bed to room to house, and became the final longing born out of despair – ‘when I have a life of my own.’ She had panicked at the sight of her first menstruation, her mother explained that it wasn’t any injury, that it was natural and God-given, bought her the proper towels and took her to church for a special blessing.

  ‘Miss Seetoh, that poor Mr Chin, his heart broke when you got married, now he can try again!’ Maggie giggled and furtively looked around to make sure the maths teacher, hopelessly hanging around Miss Seetoh for years, tongue-tied and fumbling in her presence, his comically bulging goldfish eyes and stutter a perfect target of student impersonation, was not within hearing distance. ‘I want to tell him, ‘Hey, Mr Chin, give up! Where you got hope? You cannot pronounce English words properly. Suppose you say, ‘Oh, Miss Seetoh, I lub you so velly much!’, she will surely faint!’ ’

  The girl was a slick clown with a ready stock of jokes that could be manipulated to fit the occasion, the special target being the Chinese-educated speakers of English struggling with the intricacies of a foreign tongue. Storing up yet another comical episode for later sharing with friends, Miss Seetoh managed to suppress a laugh and say severely, ‘Ma
ggie, how many times have I told you to speak in correct English?’

  Maggie persisted and this time her eyes sparkled with the sheer piquancy of the new information, ‘Miss Seetoh, you know or not, even Brother Philip, he come to our class, pretend to ask about this or that, but really it’s all excuse to talk to you. We all notice! Miss Teresa Pang, she jealous as hell, because Brother Philip so tall and handsome with his ang moh brown curly hair and blue eyes! Like the Magnum TV hero. She so ugly with her Bugs Bunny teeth, no man will look at her and you so pretty, with no make-up even, they all want you. Miss Seetoh, you interested or not, my uncle he got many rich businessman friends, can introduce –’

  The girl was impossible, overstepping her limits. She could be dangerous.

  Miss Seetoh looked closely at her and said in as severe a tone as she could muster, ‘Maggie, you’re wearing eyeliner again. You know make-up is against school rules. I’ve told you that before.’

  The girl said airily, ‘Aiyah! Only a little bit. See, you never notice before. How come Sebastian Ong can come to class with powder on his face? That’s more worse!’ She saw Miss Seetoh’s eyes settle on the loosened button of the school white shirt, that allowed a peep at a lacy bra if she turned in a certain way, and quickly did it up. ‘Alright,’ she said resignedly and adjusted the waistband of the school skirt to let the hem drop to the obligatory three inches below the knee. ‘Alright,’ she said again, and removed the rhinestone clip partly covered by a large swatch of hair.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Miss Seetoh, sniffing. ‘Maggie, you know you’re not supposed to wear perfume to school!’ There was a list of regulatory don’ts for the girl students, pinned up in every classroom, that would not have been necessary but for one Maggie Sim Peck Ngoh.

  While the girl was petulant and defiant with the other teachers, she good-naturedly obeyed Miss Seetoh, upon whom had duly fallen the responsibility of holding her in check. The girl was to be feared, for her relentless probing of secrets as she chattered endlessly, ignoring Miss Seetoh’s diversionary strategy of scolding her for her bad English and her make-up. Miss Seetoh, who adroitly broke school regulations, was now using them, like a cane, to manage a difficult student. She even echoed the language of the regulations. She did not at all enjoy that role.

  Four

  Maria Seetoh went straight into her room, locked it, took out the celebratory circle of paper from her handbag and once more stared at it. She saw the story of her life in a full-length novel, reduced to a one-page synopsis, reduced finally to this amazing nine-word distillation that left none of the drama out.

  It was a three-part drama: her determined singlehood, followed suddenly by a marriage that the school knew about only when she returned from her honeymoon after the long December vacation, followed by widowhood, only three years later, that appeared blithe enough to invite the ‘Merry Widow’ label to be attached to it. Each part had its share of unsavoury speculations. Was she a lesbian? She seemed to be very close to two other conspicuously single women, a Miss Meeta Nair and a Miss Winnie Poon, both from the Palm Secondary Girls’ School that was rumoured to have a disproportionate number of teachers and students so inclined. When the news of her sudden marriage spread, starting from the school office where the clerk was the first to note the official change in name, the staffroom was caught in the grip of intense conjecturing for weeks, even distracting the mild and pious Sister Elizabeth from her preparation of lesson notes. Nobody dared to ask, because nobody dared invade Maria Seetoh’s lofty solitude, even as she moved in smiling amiability among the scores of students and teachers at St Peter’s.

  Had she found her husband through the services of the government matchmaking organisation that she had so disdained? Or was she already – ? The young male science teacher with the impish smile and crewcut who enjoyed entertaining the lady teachers, said, ‘Let’s see, she got married in the month of –’ and did an elaborate crude finger count.

  Soon there was another matter for speculative wonderment. Was Mrs Tan happy? A sullen-faced husband dropped her every morning at the school gate on his way to work, and she got out of the car, equally grim-looking. The first year of marriage should still be sunny honeymoon, and here were Mrs Tan and her husband, dark-faced and brooding, in their first month, clearly avoiding having to look at each other. The newly wed Mrs Jasmine Auyang and her husband exchanged effusive kisses at the gate each morning, oblivious to student stares and giggles. How could things have gone so wrong so early for a couple so obviously well-matched, he a senior civil servant, she a respected teacher, both practising Catholics, both good-looking?

  Mrs Tan, without the familiar bright smile of Miss Seetoh, was almost unrecognisable. Then as soon as she stepped into her classroom and started the day’s lessons, the smile was magically restored. If there were teachers who dragged themselves to school every morning, like poor Mrs Naidu of the endless headaches and Tiger Balm, Mrs Bernard Tan positively danced into it, like fluttering butterfly out of confining cocoon. What did it say of her married life that she escaped it every morning with such undisguised joy?

  The most avid whispers were reserved for the widow’s immediate dispensation with every sign of mourning and bereavement.

  ‘What bereavement?’ said Miss Teresa Pang, whose close observation of her rival’s strange behaviour was being well rewarded. ‘A red blouse. Screaming chilli-red. And yesterday a bright pink one that I’ve never seen before. A whole new wardrobe. A subtle re-arrangement of that ponytail. And the wedding ring gone from her finger from the first day. Advertising her new status, or what?’

  Mrs Khaw, the domestic science teacher, whispered back, ‘She was seen being dropped at Robinson’s by a guy in a Mercedes, only a week after the funeral.’

  Mrs Khaw, like many married women, lived in mortal fear of her husband falling victim to the special predatory skills of newly divorced or widowed women, and was herself the target of much racy gossip: she employed only certifiably ugly or virtuous maids, and even then, made sure that her husband, of the incessant roving eye and hand, was never alone with them in the house. When he was abroad on business, she called him at his hotel room during those hours she knew him to be out to test his fidelity. For a friend had told her about a cousin’s innocent call to her husband’s hotel room in Tokyo that was picked up by a woman with a sleepy voice.

  The rumours affected Miss Seetoh not at all, but the guilt did, guilt of the kind that disturbed her to the innermost depths of her being, because it had broken the most fundamental laws of human decency: she had rejoiced over the death not only of another human being, but one whom she was bound by tradition’s strongest sanctions to honour and respect. A wife was happy because her husband was dead. The guilt was the greater for the joy being so soon, so real and persistent. It was an unthinkable obscenity, yet to deny it would be intolerable falsehood. Till death do us part. It was bad enough if the widow bounced back to her normal routines too quickly. She had heard of women going back to work the day after the funeral, even remarrying within a year.

  A sudden frightening thought had occurred to reinforce the guilt, as she sat quietly reading a novel in her bedroom, in a first delicious taste of solitude: could husbands be wished to death? Could despairing wives’ secret wishes, if they were strong enough, cast a spell and induce an accident, a terminal cancer? Miss Seetoh had once watched a TV documentary about a certain aboriginal tribe in Australia; their leader met his death several hours after an enemy from a rival tribe ceremonially lifted his face to the sky in pouring rain and sang out a curse. Heaven forbid! Had her wish, secret though it was, resisted though it was all the way with every decent fibre in her body, been such a curse? Miss Seetoh, who from childhood would go out of her way to pick up wounded birds and kittens and nurse them back to health, was so horrified by the thought that her hand went limp and the book dropped to the floor.

  The thought – superstitious nonsense though it was – would not go away. This time it induced a slight shudderin
g which Miss Seetoh, sitting at the staffroom table ostensibly going over the lesson notes for the following day, hoped no one noticed. She was proud of her capacity for rational thinking, developed over years of serious reading and reflection, against the myth-sodden worlds of her upbringing, first of her ancestor-worshipping grandmother Por Por with its pantheon of frightful temple gods and goddesses, and then of her fervidly Christian convert mother, with its equally bewildering collection of intercessory saints, angels and martyrs. For a while she shuttled between two worlds in conflict, between church holy water and temple-blessed fire, between a gentle god who died to save mankind and a lightning god who directed his bolts against those guilty of filial impiety. Torn between her grandmother and mother, she was saved only by Por Por’s dementia which ended the tussle for her soul between the Tua Peh Kong Temple and the Church of Eternal Mercy.

  It alarmed her that in the sanity of adulthood, her sound mind could be invaded by the most outrageous childhood superstitions. The fear persisted with another example, much closer to home. She remembered an aunt from Malaysia telling her about a relative who visited a cemetery in the darkest of nights to conjure up the ghost of an ancestor to take revenge on her husband and his family for throwing her out into the street. The husband contracted some fearsome disease and died soon after.

  Miss Seetoh vigorously rubbed the sides of her forehead to dispel a headache that always came with bad thoughts, throbbing with vicious intensity. Her memory with its ready store of recollected images, like her imagination with its created ones, came to her rescue. A nun had taught her as a child to quickly picture a certain scene in times of temptation – Good Thoughts wearing white angelic halos fighting Bad Thoughts wearing black horns, and driving them screaming back to hell. The nun had meant the sinful images of sex that young girls were often tempted with; for Miss Seetoh, the one thing to be feared was fear, not sex.