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End of East, The

Page 13

by Lee, Jen Sookfong


  Angry, she pushes herself off the bed, fits her fat feet into her quilted slippers. I cannot stay here. This place will kill me. She imagines herself dying of cruelty after giving birth to a stillborn baby, lying wanly on a white bed with white mosquito netting as Shew Lin weeps wildly in remorse. Siu Sang smiles. At least, she thinks, there is one scenario that might go my way.

  She leaves her bedroom, stands at the top of the stairs, her feet balanced on the edge and her hands placed protectively on her belly. Her eyes close and she feels the weight of her body tilting downward. The danger hits her like an odour and her eyes snap open, wide.

  She lives in a house with thirty-two steps.

  She walks down slowly, her right hand holding the banister, her left hand on her belly. Her head spins; she sees her hands, the stairs, the pictures on the walls swirling around her, her own pregnant stomach the centre of it all. She is nauseated.

  This baby feels like a lead weight tied to her body. She has had dreams in which it is born with her mother-in-law’s head, complete with knitted cap and yellowing teeth. Yet she is never surprised, only mildly annoyed that she should have such an ugly child. By the time she wakes up, she has torn the head off the baby and no one but her seems to notice.

  This may be your house, old woman, but this is my child.

  The sun is beginning to set outside and the hospital room has turned golden. Siu Sang looks at her daughter sleeping and watches the breath move in and out of her, her little chest rising and her fists clenched. In the fading light, the shadows are sharp and half of the baby’s face is dark, a line dividing it neatly in half.

  The flowers her husband brought from the garden are on the side table in a blue plastic jug, hanging over the edge, top-heavy, like women with their heads down. Yen Mei visited this morning, dragging along her eighteen-month-old son, a bug-eyed toddler who sucked his thumb and stared at Siu Sang unblinkingly. She left the baby a stuffed koala bear with a pink ribbon around its neck. It sits, bug-eyed as well, on the windowsill.

  The hospital is quiet at this time in the evenings. She can hear the soft-soled steps of the nurses pushing the dinner carts, the muffled cries of other babies in other rooms, the sick ones in the nursery. The rooms and hallway are all painted pink, and both she and the baby are wrapped in soft flannels that smell like bleach and talcum powder. An older nurse who speaks Chinese has been helping her, teaching her how to change diapers, feed the baby without choking her. Last night, just before her shift was over, she tucked Siu Sang into her bed.

  “Are you warm enough, my dear?”

  Siu Sang hardly remembers how long she’s been here.

  She walks into the washroom to take a bath and stays in the big tub for a half-hour. She watches the steam rise from the water and swirl upward, disappearing into a vent in the ceiling. Her body appears pale and deflated under the water, lifeless. Tiny wrinkles run up and down her stomach. She traces the white stretch marks with her finger, the dark brown line that runs from her breasts to her pelvis. I look used up, she thinks.

  When she steps into her room again, her face flushed and pink, her hair dripping water on the floor, her husband and his parents are waiting for her. Shew Lin has the baby in her arms.

  “Mother and I talked last night,” says Pon Man, “and we agree that we should give the baby a Western name so there won’t be any confusion when she grows up. If I had a nickel for every time someone called me Pat or Paul, I’d be a rich man. What do you think of the name Wendy, like in the Peter Pan story?”

  “Wendy?” asks Siu Sang, wrapping her bathrobe tighter around her body. “Peter Pan?”

  “Right. How would you know that story? Well, I think it’s going to be Wendy—easy to say for the old folks.”

  “Wendy,” Seid Quan repeats, nodding.

  “The doctor told us you can leave tonight,” Pon Man says. “Isn’t that great?”

  Seid Quan nods again in agreement, his hands behind his back.

  Pon Man continues, “I packed all your things while we were waiting, so all you have to do is get dressed.”

  Shew Lin looks up and takes in Siu Sang’s wet hair, bare feet and damp robe. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that you shouldn’t wash your hair for a month after the baby’s born? You’ll have dampness in your bones when you get old if you’re not careful.” She turns away and holds the baby to the fading light. Siu Sang stares, thinks, Wendy for such a wrinkled, wormy thing?

  In the new car (purchased exactly one month ago so that the baby would have some way of moving through the city besides a taxi), Shew Lin holds the baby all the way home. Siu Sang’s hair sticks to the back of the vinyl car seat. Her wool skirt scratches the backs of her thighs. The smell of gasoline drifts in through the open windows and she breathes it in, letting the burn spread through her lungs.

  Shew Lin sits in the living room, knitting something bright safety orange. Seid Quan listens to the radio and chuckles. The baby is asleep, and Pon Man skims over the evening newspaper in his bedroom while Siu Sang naps. All is quiet.

  It begins as a slight wailing—a quiet, high-pitched buzzing. Pon Man turns around, searches the room with his eyes. He stands up to go to the door. Siu Sang cries out louder, and he looks back and sees that the noise is coming from her.

  She is curled up in a ball on the bed, whimpering, her hands tucked between her legs as if she is trying to make herself as small as possible to minimize her pain.

  “Do you have a fever? Is it because we just had a baby? Tell me.” He stares into her wild eyes, but she says nothing, looks through him as if he is a window into another, evil, painful place. He places his hands on her shoulders and shakes her.

  She knows he is looking at her, that she is confusing and frightening. She can sense her mother-in-law in her knitted cap crouching outside the closed bedroom door, her ear pressed up against the wood. But she doesn’t care. If she did not cry, wail like a lost child, she would explode, and pieces of her would be everywhere, ruining the furniture, staining the walls.

  It’s like a splinter, this feeling that she hates the baby so much that she would rather reach into its face and pull out its brains than take care of it for one more day. This hatred started days ago, and she thought she could hide it, control it by ignoring it and letting it fade on its own. But then it grew, attracting all the other evil feelings she has ever had about this house, this family, this country, even her own husband. Tonight, as she rocked the baby to sleep (its hands like talons, nothing like the chubby baby hands she had expected and heard about), she could feel the bitterness like a tornado in her belly. The swirling, mad mass forced its way up through her esophagus, exploded into her lungs and, finally, spilled out of her mouth. She couldn’t stop it and didn’t want to, for as painful as it was now, it would hurt much, much more to keep it in.

  She can see it in his face, the little thought that is now taking shape: My wife is insane.

  He won’t want to believe it, she thinks loudly, trying to form thoughts above the roaring in her ears. But he will soon enough. She opens her mouth, intending to remind him of all the nights they spent whispering and giggling and touching, but instead, she wails even louder, and Pon Man sits back from the force of it all. He reaches out to touch her, and Siu Sang thinks that if he makes contact with her skin (her raw, raw skin, like a body turned inside out), she will have to kill him. She rolls away.

  “You’re going to wake the baby if you keep this up.”

  She stares at it, at the wrinkled face, the tiny pursed lips. It sleeps so peacefully, she thinks. This is hardly fair. If the baby wakes up, she will have to tend to it, feed its smacking mouth, change its shitty diaper. She would rather plunge her hand into boiling water than feed it one more time, so she closes her mouth and swallows.

  Siu Sang quiets down to a whimper, a high-pitched whisper of a scream like the squeak of wet fingers on glass. She lets Pon Man cover her with a blanket before he sits down in the armchair by the window. After an hour and a half,
Siu Sang is fast asleep—dried tears dotting the line of her eyelashes—and the baby starts to cry.

  Yen Mei stands by the window in Siu Sang’s bedroom and looks out at the schoolyard across the street. “Well, it’s not so bad, is it? The house is pretty nice, much bigger than the one we bought.”

  Siu Sang wants to laugh. “That’s because Ken’s parents don’t live with you. If we had a house that was any smaller, I’d have to share a room with my mother-in-law.” They giggle, but quietly, their hands covering their mouths.

  Yen Mei sits down and rests her hands on her pregnant belly. “I don’t believe how big I am already. The second one sure shows a lot faster.”

  The second one. Siu Sang swallows her fear and looks at the blanket on the floor where Wendy is shaking a rattle. “I can’t take it anymore.”

  “Take what?” asks Yen Mei.

  “Take this. I don’t love the baby. I think I might be going insane.”

  Yen Mei laughs. “That’s funny.”

  “No, really. Didn’t you ever feel like you wanted to just run away, leave everything behind?”

  “I don’t know.” Yen Mei looks confused. “I didn’t love the baby at first either. I mean, I was just so tired, and he wouldn’t let me sleep. But by the time he was Wendy’s age, that had all passed.”

  Siu Sang wonders if she should press on, if she should tell her sister what she has really been thinking (about the glorious crunch the baby would make on the sidewalk if Siu Sang were to drop her out a window, about how she wants to pour boiling water on her mother-in-law’s head as she sleeps, about the silence she longs for and wants to find, perhaps somewhere in the mountains, where she could sleep and dream and never come back) or if she should forget it, knowing that Yen Mei, chatty, gossiping Yen Mei, has never helped anyone.

  After Yen Mei leaves, Siu Sang sits down at the desk in her room and pulls a blank piece of paper toward her. She wants to write to her mother, tell her everything, but her pen will not move. In the end, Siu Sang knows, her mother will only urge her to stay.

  Instead, she writes a letter to Susie, filling the paper with densely packed words, back and front. When she is finished, she reads it over and then realizes that she has no idea where Susie lives. She holds the letter in her hands for one more moment, then tears it into little pieces.

  She tries to cry, but the sobs die in her throat and she chokes. Mucus collects in the back of her mouth until she cannot make any more noise.

  Siu Sang wakes up, her whole body jerking like a marionette. She looks at the clock beside her bed. Five thirty and she hasn’t even helped with dinner yet. She stares at the baby in her crib—wide awake and trying to shove her fist into her mouth. She takes her into the living room and props her up with pillows on the couch, where she can see her from the kitchen. Siu Sang ties on her flowered apron and stands by the stove, waiting for Shew Lin to tell her what to do.

  Her mind is still sluggish from the nap, and she has been feeling slow all week. Her feet feel like lead. Every morning, her daughter cries at seven and Siu Sang is forced to get up, her eyelids heavy with sleep. By the time Pon Man returns home, Siu Sang has just finished changing out of her pyjamas and combing her hair.

  Shew Lin has been spending most evenings remarking loudly on how lazy wives raise lazy children who grow up to ignore their parents and leave them to die.

  Shew Lin pushes past her to get to the fridge and mutters under her breath, “If you can’t be any help, at least get out of my way.”

  Siu Sang steps back into the corner and watches her mother-in-law move quickly from sink to stove to fridge, stick her fingers in boiling water and toss vegetables in hot oil. She feels overheated suddenly. She crouches down and rests her head on her knees.

  “What’s the matter with you now? Don’t tell me you have your period again.” Shew Lin stands over Siu Sang, her left hand still holding her long cooking chopsticks.

  “I think I just need to lie down.” Siu Sang stands up, sways and steadies herself with one hand on the wall. “Can you look after the baby?”

  In her room, she crawls under the blankets and pulls them over her head. She wants to be buried underneath the darkness, feel the weight of it on her chest, become flattened by it. She can see, in her mind, the white crib in the corner. It ruins everything, she thinks. How can it be totally dark with that white thing glowing like that? Frustrated, she cries, the cocoon of the blankets muffling the noises and hiding her from the rest of the house.

  She hears Pon Man creep into the room. His touch on her hip feels like a hundred tiny needles piercing her skin.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  Pon Man backs up and looks at her with confused eyes. She glares at him.

  “I’m not an animal. Stop looking at me like that. Why don’t you get out and whine to your mother?”

  Siu Sang turns away from him and buries her face deeper into the pillow. Even now, she can feel her husband’s eyes in their dark room watching her, the whites glowing steadily like neon lights in the street.

  “I’m taking you out for dinner tonight, so you’d better get dressed.” Pon Man stands in the hall, his hands on his hips, smiling.

  “What do you mean? What’s this all about? Wait—who’s going to look after the baby?”

  “Mother will take care of her. I have a surprise for you tonight, but I have to take you out for dinner first. Go—we have twenty minutes before we have to leave.”

  Siu Sang hurries into the bedroom and pulls her green dress off its hanger. She rushes through her makeup, polishes her black pumps with the bed skirt and runs to the car, where Pon Man is waiting in his chocolate brown suit.

  “Where are we going?” she asks, rifling through her purse to see if she’s forgotten anything.

  “The Palomar Supper Club, you lucky woman.”

  Siu Sang claps. “I’m so excited! Will we see any famous people? Maybe Frank Sinatra?”

  Pon Man laughs. “I think Frank is a little busy somewhere else. There’ll be other singers and dancers, though.”

  When Siu Sang walks into the club, her arm casually draped through her husband’s, she holds her breath (if she lets it out, who knows what she might say). She stares at the velvet curtains on the stage, the candles on every table, the twinkling lights hanging from the ceiling. Women smoke, holding their cigarettes delicately, their elbows resting on the white linens. Men laugh, swirl caramel-coloured drinks in crystal tumblers. I’m not dreaming, she thinks. I’m really here.

  As the hostess leads them to their table, Pon Man whispers into her ear, “And here’s your surprise.”

  Siu Sang looks through the dim and sees a young couple. As she tries to make out their faces, the woman cries out, “It really is you!”

  “Susie?”

  Susie wears a black satin cocktail dress and pearl-grey gloves. Beside her, her husband grins madly, pumps Pon Man’s arm up and down. Susie runs to Siu Sang and hugs her.

  “It’s just the most amazing luck! Jerry here went into your father-in-law’s shop to get his hair cut, and Pon Man was there, and they started talking and figured out who their wives are and look! Here we are. Sit down. Let’s get you a drink.”

  Pon Man lights a cigarette and leans over. “You didn’t see this coming, did you?”

  Siu Sang shakes her head and tries to laugh. She feels a thick dampness in her throat making its way upward, where she is sure it will explode on the air like a tiny bomb. She stands up again and looks around wildly. “Where is the ladies’ room?”

  “I’ll take you there.” Susie grabs her hand and leads her through the tables and into a narrow hallway. As they walk in, Siu Sang drops Susie’s hand and hurries to a stall.

  “I tell you, that husband of mine is full of surprises.” Susie shouts at Siu Sang through the door. “He’s a little short, of course. He reminds me of those toads. You know, the big warty ones.”

  Siu Sang, the full skirt of her dress puffed around her knees, cries silently. Shreds of d
amp tissue stick to her fingers.

  “But all in all, he’s not so bad. He didn’t want me to go out and work, but I grew so tired of sitting around all day, watching the dust collect just so I could wipe it off. Until we have children, I don’t want anything to do with being a mopey housewife.”

  Siu Sang pulls on the toilet paper, and the roll falls to the floor, disappearing underneath the edge of the door.

  “So I got a job at the sausage factory, you know, that one on Keefer? It’s not so bad, and I meet a lot of nice girls. Maybe I should have them all over for mah-jong and invite you, too. Look at that—did you drop the toilet paper? I’ll just pass it through the gap here. Siu Sang? Wait—are you crying?” Susie rattles the latch on the door. “Let me in. Are you hurt?”

  Susie bursts in. Siu Sang weeps into a wadded ball of tissue. The makeup around her eyes has run all over her face. She gulps.

  “Do you need to tell me something? What’s the matter?”

  And Siu Sang starts to talk. She tells Susie of the letter she once wrote to her, not knowing where to send it. She thinks that her words will never end, that her list of complaints is infinitely long and that she will die long before she gets it all out. But when it’s all over, she looks at the clock on the wall and sees, shockingly, that only eight minutes have passed. Even the clock knows that I am nothing but a complainer, that my problems are really so few that they don’t even fill a half-hour.

  “I never knew it was like that. I’m so glad I have no children yet.”

  “I’ll die if I have to live like this anymore.”

 

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