Travails of a Trailing Spouse

by Stephanie Suga Chen

  “Uh, seriously? That sounds a little craaa-zy,” Ashley said, the last word drawn out.

  “Yeah, well, he really wanted to camp outside, and I didn’t. So he booked the hotel for three nights, and the middle night, he went out on his own,” Sara explained.

  “He just left you alone, in the hotel?” Even laid-back CS was shocked.

  “Well, it was weird, but, I mean, it wasn’t a big deal or anything.” Sara shrugged.

  “OK, but let’s get back to now.” Sarah paused, thinking. “You mean to say, that John, your husband, father of two, gets to go away a week on his own, for fun, the day after Christmas, even after he’s gone three weeks a month for work normally, leaving you to watch your two children on your own?” Sarah was getting agitated, and perhaps more assertive than usual due to the two glasses of wine she had already drunk.

  “Well, he works so hard, and sometimes he just needs to… decompress, you know. I mean, I need it, too,” Sara said, clearly on the defensive, her voice faltering a bit.

  “Oh, so you get to go away for a week, too, by yourself?” Ashley asked.

  “Well, maybe not a week. But a couple days, maybe? Although I haven’t done it since the boys were born,” Sara admitted. “And sometimes John just adds a day or two on to his work travel, like earlier last month, when he just stayed in the Philippines to bridge the two weeks that he was working there. And he spends, like, no money, just goes to the beach, picks a random hotel, goes kayaking for a few days.”

  “WHAT?!” Now everyone was shouting.

  “I thought he had to stay for work! OK, that is totally sketchy, Sara, you have to see that!” Sarah said.

  “That lucky mo-fo!” CS said, in an exaggerated American accent. “How do I get me some ‘me time’?” He winked at Ashley.

  “Don’t you even think about it, Chad Graham Sanders. If you went up and left me here alone, while you go partying in the Phil-ah-ppines, by yourself, you’d have a bigger surprise waiting for you when you got back – an empty apartment, mister,” Ashley said, not the least bit joking.

  “OK, I guess it is a little weird,” Sara admitted, nodding her head.

  Jason quickly said, “But if it works for you guys, I mean, whatever, good for him.”

  Sarah could see that Jason was trying to smooth things over and not make it seem like they were jumping all over her. “Yeah, to each his own,” she said. “And I guess your mom and brother will be here, right?”

  “Yes, exactly. I told John that around that time would be OK since they would be here,” Sara justified.

  The conversation shifted to what Sara had planned for her family while they were in town, to which Chad suggested that they go to a nearby private island, where his parents had visited recently, and had highly recommended. Sarah was half-listening to Jason saying something about not realising how much he had missed root beer until he had some tonight, when she overheard Chad saying to Sara, “You drive up to Malaysia and then you take a boat, not like an Asian boat, but a proper boat.”

  Sarah couldn’t help herself from cutting in, saying half-jokingly, “An Asian boat? Uh-huh, and what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I just meant that it wasn’t a crazy, crowded, general boarding, Malaysian boat,” Chad said, digging himself into an even deeper hole.

  “Oh, so now it’s a crazy Malaysian boat? So racist!” Sara said, shaking her head.

  “Yeah, totally racist!” said Jason, who had caught the last part of the exchange, but probably hadn’t really heard what had been said; he just liked to chime in sometimes.

  “How is that racist?” CS asked, genuinely surprised.

  “It’s racist because you are associating a description, in this case a negative one, with an ethnic group, in this case, Asian,” Sarah-the-lawyer explained.

  “OK, well, I didn’t mean it like that!” CS said.

  “Yes, well, a lot of people who are racist don’t mean to be,” Sarah said, lightly. She didn’t want to get into a debate tonight about expat attitudes towards locals, although she did find it baffling how oblivious some people could be, even while living in a foreign country.

  Jason, playing mediator again, said, “It’s OK, we do it all the time. As in, ‘There was no way our kids could have competed with those giant Aussie kids at the Tanglin Mall foam party’. See, racist!”

  CS laughed and went off to grab another beer from the fridge. The rest of the evening proceeded without incident, with Sara leaving early to get the boys to bed and Georgia beating Auburn, 13-7. After the game was over, Jason struck up a conversation with another man who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a University of Illinois logo, where Jason had gone to undergrad. After chatting for a few minutes, he came back to Sarah and confirmed that, yes, they had gone to the same school, but the other guy had graduated a full 15 years after Jason. “Well, there’s a bit of a generation gap here,” Jason said.

  Unable to feign any more interest in the other guests – CS had also disappeared to give Lucas a bath – they decided to make a quiet exit, thanking Ashley and saying goodbye to everyone else.

  In the lift by themselves, Sarah asked Jason what he thought about John’s “me time” trips.

  Jason shrugged, and said, “It’s weird, obviously. I mean, guys’ trips, I get. But a week by yourself? I would go nuts.” Sarah knew her husband well and agreed; Jason had been coddled by his mother straight through to adulthood and couldn’t even eat a meal on his own.

  “But I don’t think we need to rub it in. I mean, how is it going to help her, all of us telling her it’s messed up? She’s just going to feel bad,” he continued.

  Sarah admired her husband for staying out of it, as her first instinct was to cry foul and force Sara to confront John, but after hearing Jason’s point of view, she had to admit there was probably nothing that they could do about the situation. She was about to respond to him that she agreed, when the lift stopped, the double doors opening at the sixth floor.

  In walked Ian with a woman, someone Sarah had never seen before – she was Asian, hair and make-up done up professionally, wearing a black sheath dress and patent leather pumps.

  “Oh hi, Ian,” Sarah said, surprised. “I thought you guys had left for the holidays already.”

  Ian, looking a bit caught off-guard himself, responded, “Oh, Carys got off school last week, so she took Noah back first. I’m joining them next week.”

  Ian started motioning to the woman next to him, but just then the lift doors opened – it was only one floor after all – and Sarah and Jason got out, barely squeezing out a “Happy Holidays” before the doors closed shut.

  Sarah looked at Jason.“What do you think that was about?”

  “Hmm, looks like ‘Yi-An’ might have a new lady friend,” Jason said, one eyebrow raised.

  chapter 7

  MOULD,

  MOULD EVERYWHERE

  THE LEES LANDED back in Singapore after three weeks in the US, taking the same route they had taken on their initial trip over, a flight from SFO that left in the afternoon, connected in Hong Kong the following day, and arrived at SIN past midnight on what was technically the third day. After clearing immigration, thankfully a speedy affair as usual, they collected their luggage, which included an oversized suitcase that they had brought to the US empty that was now filled with all the comforts of home that they had been unable to buy in Singapore, either due to unavailability or sheer cost.

  When Jason unlocked and opened their front door, Sarah was hit with a smell of mustiness and mould so strong that she sneezed three times in a row. Though she had carefully instructed Patricia to run the air-conditioner in each room one hour a day while they were gone, it appeared that had not been enough to stave off the growth of the dreaded fungi. After turning on all the air-conditioning units on full blast, Sarah put the kids to bed, bundled up in the thick pyjamas they had just worn a week ago in Detroit, where the temperature outside had been below freezing.

  The trip had been a whirl
wind; they had started in Chicago to see Jason’s parents, spending the first week battling jet lag, with Eric waking up at 2 and 3am, wide-eyed and ready for the day to start. The first night, Jason’s mother, hearing Eric’s little voice, had woken up as well, wanting to let Sarah and Jason sleep, but Sarah, already up, had quickly urged her back to bed; it didn’t make sense for everyone to be up in the middle of the night.

  To say that Jason’s parents were overjoyed to see the kids would have been a massive understatement; they were amazed at how much they had grown, how well they spoke Chinese, how tanned their skin was. They showered them with toys and clothes they had been collecting over the past six months, making up for lost time through a parade of lovingly cooked meals on the part of Jason’s mum and endless games and piggyback rides from Jason’s dad. On the day they had to leave, Eric sobbed hysterically as Sarah pulled him from Jason’s mother’s arms, telling him gently that they would see A-Ma and A-Gong again soon and strapping him into the car seat of the SUV they had rented to drive to Michigan, where Sarah had grown up and where her parents still lived.

  In Detroit, Mother Nature blessed them with a white Christmas, affording Eric and Ruby the opportunity to play in real snow, as opposed to the bubbly foam they had been calling “snow” the past few weeks in Singapore. The real thing was “much colder”, Ruby wisely reported, as she stamped her feet on the mat outside the side entrance to Sarah’s childhood home.

  Sarah’s parents probed Jason on the progress of his lab, wanting to know if they were still planning on coming back in five years. Not wanting to fight with her mother, which was not uncommon between the two headstrong women, Sarah dutifully drove her around to half a dozen furniture stores in the falling snow in search of a new kitchen table (later, her mother would email her that she had found an inexpensive but nice table at a new store that had opened recently near the airport; had Sarah heard of it? The store was from Sweden and called something that sounded like “idea”, she said).

  From Detroit, they had flown to San Francisco, seeing as many friends as they could, but the conversations were mostly the same – people asked politely about Jason’s job, but really wanted to hear about expat life, the travel, the parties, their helper. Sarah grew tired of it quickly, and regretted setting up so many lunches and dinners, apologising to Jason after what seemed like the hundredth time she had to describe what Singlish was. He, of course, took it all in his stride, happy to repeat the stories of his new-found respect as a professor in Singapore, with everyone calling him “Prof” and “Dr”, a stark change from his lowly status as a postdoc back home in the US, where start-up founders and software engineers carried much more sex appeal.

  The morning after they arrived back in Singapore, in actuality just a few hours from touchdown, Sarah sent the kids off to school, knowing that getting into a regular rhythm would help them get over the jet lag faster. She turned off the air-conditioners, opened the sliding doors, and the musty smell from the night before quickly resurfaced. She walked back into the bedrooms and realised that Patricia had closed all the closet doors, which Sarah had deliberately left open in order to allow the air-conditioned air to permeate the contents within.

  When she slid open her and Jason’s closet door, she immediately saw a thin layer of greenish-white mould dusted over almost all of the shirts and dresses that were hung there. The guest room closet was even worse; it contained heavier jackets and her old work clothes, which had not been touched in months. The mould there was thicker and greener, clearly evident even through the plastic dry cleaner bags that most of the garments had been wrapped in.

  Sarah and Patricia spent the rest of the day checking every piece of clothing, emptying the drawers and opening every box, categorising what had been affected and what had been spared. The mould was everywhere, including in the photo frames and even, to Sarah’s horror, growing on the side of Ruby’s wooden platform bed. The leather and suede goods took the worst of it; Sarah eventually gave up and threw away several pairs of boots and a few old handbags that just weren’t worth the effort or money to clean.

  Sarah cursed herself; friends who had been in Singapore longer had warned her about the potential for mould and she had been told to put moisture absorbers – plastic containers that contained a sheet of calcium chloride – in her drawers and other closed areas to prevent the spores from growing. But she hadn’t listened, and now she was paying for it.

  She spent her first week back in Singapore concurrently fighting the mould and jet lag. She bought a dehumidifier, one with a tank capacity of five litres, setting it up in the kids’ room and watching in amazement (and a little revulsion) at the pace that it filled with water. She set all the air-conditioner units on dry mode, which removed moisture from the air instead of cooling it, and kept them running all the time, electricity bill be damned. Jason brought a humidity sensor home from the lab; Sarah had read that they needed to get the humidity level down to below 50% in order to prevent mould growth, but this seemed like an impossible feat – even with both the air-conditioning and dehumidifier running on high, the gauge never dipped below 60%.

  Without a regular programme to stick to, Sarah woke up and slept when she wanted to, usually collapsing just before dinner, after Jason got home, and sleeping until around midnight, then waking up ravenous. This continued well into the second week, even as Jason and the kids were already back on schedule. One night, when she woke up at around 1am, Sarah discovered tiny bugs crawling on the wall of their living room; after taking multiple zoomed-in photos and doing a bit of searching online, she found out they were called mould mites, tiny creatures that fed on the mould that was growing, imperceptible to the human eye, on the surface of the wall. Sarah added yet another task onto her growing mould-related to-do list: to wash all their walls with a bleach and water solution.

  While in San Francisco, she had stopped by her old office to say hello, spending a few minutes in each of her senior partners’ offices and catching up on legal news and cases. In truth, she had not stayed on top of anything; for the past 10 years, she had been a restructuring lawyer, faithfully reading The Wall Street Journal and bankruptcy news every day, but since the day she walked out of her office, she had not checked any of her usual sources, not even once. The morning of the planned meetings, she had quickly glanced through the trade rags, and had been surprised to see that one of her biggest clients, an oil and gas company based out of Houston, had filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganisation again, the second time in less than four years, a “Chapter 22”, as people in her industry called it.

  She had also gone to lunch with a group of female lawyers, an informal collection of women who were young partners at major law firms in San Francisco that had been formed over the past few years. It was a select group, only eight on the email list and five or six showing up at any given time, a testament to what a rare breed she had been in her prior life. It was nice to catch up with everyone, of course, but the conversation felt distant, covering topics that were no longer relevant to her. She had hoped to hear more about harried mothers, neglected children, marital infighting about who was picking up dinner – complaints that would make her feel better about giving up her career to be a trailing spouse.

  She was already an outsider, she thought again, as she was sorting through a pile of her old suits and shirts, deciding to throw away the whole lot, rationalising that if she did end up ever needing professional dress again, her old clothes would be badly out of style anyway.

  chapter 8

  ‘ME TIME’, EXPLAINED

  THE FOUR WOMEN – the two Sara/hs, Ashley and Carys – were gathered at the restaurant in the hotel adjacent to the condo, sneaking away for a late lunch while the kids took their afternoon naps. Sarah sat across from Carys; she had not mentioned seeing Ian with the mysterious woman in December. They had been out with Carys and Ian together after returning from the holidays, and the two had seemed fine, but of course one never knew. Sarah hadn’t been able to keep the inf
ormation from the other Sara, though; they had chatted about it for a couple of days, but it, like most pieces of juicy gossip, lost its lustre after being repeated a few too many times.

  Sarah relayed the experience of returning to her old office over the holidays, lamenting that she was feeling a bit useless, with Ruby in school and their helper doing everything else at home. While she was loath to return to the law, there was definitely a big part of her that missed being associated with something, anything, that was worthwhile and important. Ashley said she sympathised, although she had only worked for a brief year before getting married and having Lucas, and found being a mother quite enough, at least for now.

  Carys pitched in, saying that to her, it was a question of perspective: on her worst days, she taught second languages to snotty international kids, kids whose parents she could never tell what she really thought about them – for a school that charged over thirty grand a year, having a teacher tell a parent that his or her child was below average simply wasn’t an option. But, on better days, she saw her students in fact learning quite a bit, some even impressing her with their self-motivation and enthusiasm, and when Noah turned two the following year, she could enrol him in the school’s nursery programme at a significant discount. It was a trade-off she was content to make.

  Sara-without-an-H then surprised them when she said she was planning on starting to look for a job, earlier than the one-year break she had been “granted” by John. Apparently, the Hendricks had spent more in the first six months living in Singapore than they had budgeted for, and John’s contract was such that they were given a supplemental bonus the first year to help them settle in, but going forward, he would be bringing in less income. The other day, John had made her return a set of swimming lessons she had bought for Ethan, Sara said.

  “What do you mean, you had to ‘return’ them?” Sarah asked.