by Laura Furman
You’re early, he said, not turning around. It was a trick of his, knowing I was there while pretending not to. He was glossy, like the fish he’d just caught, and, for once, I was glad it was Gladys’s Sunday off and I couldn’t go up the coast with him for the afternoon.
Gladys would be waiting for me to come home, dressed already in her severe Sunday clothes. She was a sour, taciturn woman, with a way of clicking her tongue when she was displeased that had always unsettled me. If Ma upbraided her for this or for anything else, she just stood there, sullen, silent, until she’d been given the usual warning and sent back to the kitchen.
When I began to take over the running of the house, I thought that at last I’d be able to replace her with someone more tractable. But it was too late. Ma would consider no one but Gladys to help her out of the bath, or to know how she liked her eggs, or which dress she meant when she couldn’t find the words to describe it.
And so we were stuck, Gladys and I, with our mutual dislike. We both knew that the ease Ma and I enjoyed was due in large part to her. I knew too that in the long history of leisurely societies ours was young and fragile, and would not last. And if I didn’t know this already, there were the Moffits to remind me. One need only consider the way things are going in the country these days, James had said that morning, handing me the blueprints for a new security wall, new gates. And before you balk at the price, he’d added, just consider Aileen—voting for all the right things all these years, and now, three afternoons a week, learning to use a gun.
John and Aileen lived in the other half of what had once been her grandfather’s house. It was they who had divided the old place into two maisonettes, each with its own garden, they who had sold our half to my father a few months before he died. He’d wanted somewhere up on the ridge to lodge his pregnant mistress and her daughter. And Ma was proud of having been the mistress, proud of what he’d done for the three of us, for Gwen too, who wasn’t his, and who’d never uttered a civil word to him, not even on his deathbed.
Ma had always understood by what means she’d risen to that life of orders given, orders taken, and a bell in every room to summon the servants. Every now and then she’d reminded us of this, Gwen and me, and if Gwen didn’t want to hear it, well who did she think she was, Ma said. Her father was a Scottish soldier Ma had married during the war. Or thought she’d married. Only after he’d got himself killed did she find out that the real widow lived in Glasgow and had a Gwen of her own, both of them named after his sainted mother, also living in Glasgow.
Still, Gwen couldn’t help herself. At the mention of my father, she would draw her lips into a tight line, which had the same effect on me as Gladys’s tongue clicking. I longed to tell her that if she couldn’t change her attitude she could start looking for another job.
I did tell her this, but she didn’t find it funny.
—
I was thinking all this as I settled myself onto the couch that evening with John Moffit’s blueprints. Gwen was lonely with the future she’d made for herself in America, I thought, lonelier than she’d been in the life she’d left behind her. And just as I was considering whether to tell her this when she phoned, to say that Ma, too, was lonely without her old roué and the life that went with him—just as it occurred to me that once you have been happy, it is hard not to expect to be happy always—just then the doorbell shrilled, and I walked through to the hall and peered through the jeweled glass of the front door.
A black policeman was standing there, maybe two or three more just out of the light. “Police,” he said softly, respectfully. And thinking something must have gone wrong in the servants’ quarters—thinking that to question him through a locked door might seem like an affront, the way things were these days—I said, Just a minute, please, and slid off the chain to find out what the matter was.
Brenda Peynado
The History of Happiness
THIS WAS THE NIGHT I reached the end of my traveling money, and I had to move on from the Prince Edward Hostel and the sleazy backpackers who called to me, baby, querida, nushka. I thought of setting up tent on the East Coast beach of Singapore, the side of the island pointing toward Indonesia. I also thought of lifting a wallet or two, ignoring the fact that the previous year an American was caned for just spray-painting. I imagined the punishment for stealing would be cutting off my hands or something equally as drastic. I had been robbed before myself, when my boyfriend and I were still together, but that didn’t stop me from feeling some sort of karmic retribution was in order. I was angry at the boyfriend, for leaving me while we were in India, during an existential crisis that drove him to join the Hindu monks. I was angry at myself and doing things like couch surfing with strangers, stealing wallets, and lifting bank account passwords from Internet café computers, and I dared some terrible consequence to happen.
It was October, the month that Diwali—the Indian festival of lights—and the Chinese full-moon festival happened at once, so the Indian side and the Chinese side of Singapore bargained over streamer space. That month the harvests were over and farmers down in Indonesia burned hundreds of acres of the Borneo rain forest for new land because it was cheaper than reconditioning already-tilled soil. The winds blew the smoke from the burning jungles over Singapore, and it hung like curtains between the skyscrapers and tinfoil decorations.
I followed an American couple. They were in well-cut suits, the woman a blonde with downturned eyes, the man bald and stout, and they were not affectionate with each other. They wore white hospital masks to breathe through. I guessed they were traveling on business, so their company would reimburse them if I lifted a purse or a wallet or two. It was already dusk in the mall district down Orchard Road, so it was easy for me to hide in all the streamers and decorations and parades as I followed them.
The American couple stepped around a corner, right into the Hard Rock Cafe on Orchard Road. I took a seat at the bar to wait for an opening, for my hand to slip into the woman’s purse hanging from her chair. Two Indian men sat across the bar from me. A dark man dressed in women’s clothing and high heels emerged through the billowing smog and introduced himself as the bartender.
I ordered a drink called Potent Love, which the bartender told me was very strong. I brushed him off. It was my last few Sing dollars, and I wanted it to count. Onstage, a Mohawked Chinese teenager was finishing the last chords of “Tangled Up in Blue.” Across the bar, the two Indian men looked my way. I looked beautiful and I knew it. That night, I had dressed in green and I had done up my eyes, and I did this to cover the fact that I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I tried to remember what it felt like back in high school when I’d watched Great Expectations and first fell in love with falling in love. I tried to remember what I felt like the first time I’d been robbed, found my emergency phone, wallet, passport gone. But no feeling swooped in to overtake me as I remembered. A sweet voice crooned “Rocket Man” with a Singapore accent—the dropped Ks, the short Chinese vowels, the British words—crooning these normal American songs with me so far from home. The American couple sipped their drinks, fiddled with their utensils, ordered dinner. Another foreign couple held hands, laughed, looked straight into each other’s eyes, and I thought, what right did they have to happiness? The Borneo smog curled down into my throat, and I felt the buzz. I felt like I had reached the end of the world. The end of my money, the end of a previous life.
The two Indian men from across the bar still stared at me. The first: taller, stronger, with a face harsh and all angles and planes, the one who continued to stare after I caught them looking. The second could barely lean over his elbows on the bar he was so short, with a tiny belly, saucer eyes, full lips. I looked away.
I had debated earlier that week with a fellow backpacker why women looked away when men looked them down. I’d said, if you stared back at men, it was like you owed them something then, for looking; they hung around you and they wouldn’t let you go home. It was like looking into the abyss and the
abyss stared back. And how could anyone know the difference between a good man and a bad man; when you fall into a well, does it end in a bucket of water or the abyss?
I pulled out my journal, my favorite trick for looking busy and unavailable. Dear Jake, I wrote, Hard Rock Cafe in Singapore. Smog. Two men are looking at me and I am thinking of you. I hope you’re happy. You’re a coward. You sound like a mystical idiot. How are the monks?
At the time, when he had said he wanted to stay in India and find himself, what I had said was, what the hell did you think this trip was for? We were both computer science majors and once we got a job we would spend the rest of our lives in a five-by-five box controlling machines and we wanted to see the real, human world. Instead, we witnessed hostel after hostel of these backpackers on their own strange quests of self, throwing around terms like happiness and freedom in these hushed, self-important voices. I’d said I didn’t know who I was either. He had shrugged and looked toward the Himalayas like he was already gone.
The tall Indian, the one who was all harsh planes, tapped me on the shoulder and introduced himself. Satik.
Hi, I said, and turned back to my journal.
What are you writing there in your book?
A letter to my first love, I lied. I swiveled my stool to turn my back to him.
Satik tapped me again. Come dance, he said.
No, I don’t dance, I said. I glanced back at the American couple, and I thought I might miss my chance if this Satik kept his eye on me.
You don’t dance?
No, I said. The woman was finishing her food, but the man was still going.
I bet you can dance the Bhangra, Satik said.
I don’t even know what that is, I said.
Hey, Anil, why don’t you show her?
Satik’s friend, the shorter one with the full lips, appeared behind Satik. He grinned. He said, point one finger up in the air and lift your other foot. He did this and then jumped on one leg. His belly flopped up and down. He yelled Balé, Balé, as he danced.
You’ve got to be joking, I said.
Satik smirked. That’s the Bhangra, he said. Now you jump.
No, I said. I don’t dance like that. That doesn’t even look like fun.
The American man was almost done with his steak and the woman picked up her purse to go to the bathroom, and I knew my chance was over. I wanted to punch Satik and Anil.
I looked at Anil and his full lips as he ordered me another drink and signed his bill.
What the hell, I thought. I downed the drink. I moved toward the exit. I danced the Bhangra like I was stomping the ground. I jumped up and down. My hair flayed my back, and I fell out of the bar’s hazy lights, all the way into the din of Orchard Road and the sudden soft darkness. I felt like a fool, and I was angry.
That’s it? I said.
Oh, yes, Anil said. Much better than American dancing.
Satik shook his head. They were haloed in pools of streetlights. Most of the people walking to the bar were wearing surgical masks for the smoke, but we weren’t and I could see Anil and Satik smiling, and they looked like grinning angels. We’re going to the beach, they said.
That must be nice.
Come with us. They grinned like idiots, like angels, like angel sharks, and I knew then that I’d try to rob them instead.
It’s Diwali, Anil said, and he raised his arms, pointed his fingers up to the sky, and jumped the Bhangra.
Come celebrate, Satik said, and I said yes, and I thought they’d be the ones to regret it.
—
We lay on the picnic sheet far enough back from the lapping waves that the crabs couldn’t get to us. Mosquitoes pierced my bare soles. I had undone my heels in the sand, in case I had to run after I did the deed. The shores in either direction sweltered under the orange smog glow from skyscrapers, the premature dawn encircling the island like an uneasy smile. A little bit away, Chinese twentysomethings in hospital masks waved their cell phones as flashlights, barbecued barefoot, and ate mooncakes stamped with the Chinese characters for harmony and longevity. Their tents bloomed like little mushrooms in the dark. The moon, half empty, clung to the sky.
I had one hand behind my head, the other hand on the wine bottle they’d bought at the beach’s convenience store. The bottle lay close to Anil’s pockets. Anil talked about Hinduism and Happiness. His English was good but not that good. He worked for DHL, head of the delivery receipt department. Satik worked under him. They were speaking English for my sake.
Happiness? Satik said. He looked at me with the crook of my left elbow cradling the bottle and sneaking off to the left.
You are not happy, Satik said.
I am plenty happy, I said.
Happiness is making expecting low low and reality matches, Anil said. Lower expecting.
No one of us is Buddhist, Satik said, looking by the sneer of his lip like he was mildly angry.
Fah, I said loudly, gesticulating wildly, hand inching inside Anil’s pocket. I said, It’s our lack of damn love for the world, not our expectations of it, that’s at fault.
It is a pride of the backpacking class to be deceitful while talking deeply. It’s a pride of humankind. It’s the very nature of talking deeply, and I had perfected the skill. I let the bottle roll to its side then, jumped back away from it with the wallet in my hand, and put it underneath me. Both Anil and Satik jumped away from the rolling bottle. Satik picked it up.
I hope it didn’t spill, I said. I patted the blanket with my now empty hand.
No, nothing, Anil said.
Satik lay back down, this time resting his head on my feet, watching me with dark eyes. I stared him down, hoping he would become uncomfortable and move, but it was like looking into the abyss and the abyss staring back, his dark shadow blocking the hazy orange glow of the skyscrapers near the horizon. I would have to wait until Satik moved before I could inch the wallet out from under me.
Anil brought out his harmonica and butchered Indian songs in between sentences. Anil said that he had grown up in Punjab tending cucumbers, stealing the cool, spice-ridding tastes of them when it rained and the fruit got so heavy and fat that the stems gave way in his hands. While he was growing up, he had never seen the ocean. He had never learned to swim.
Satik remembered when he was seven, a family trip during a hot July day in Chandigarh, his whole family on one motorcycle, behind him his mother holding the baby in her arm, her right arm reaching over him to hold on to his father’s worn white, wind-billowing shirt. He held on to his father’s shirt against the black tar ground tempting him, just as dust, mosquitoes, mouthfuls of his mother’s sari, her hair, and the song he was trying to sing rushed back into his throat to force him to breathe. The dark, gunmetal allure of the furious, hurtling motorcycle. That night, his father would teach him to whirl a chicken around by its neck to kill it.
They told me all of this in their crazy English. Anil and all the brilliant things in the wavering of his lips and his breath trembling over the harmonica reeds. Believe it or not, I was having a good time. I got a little drunk off their wine. I hadn’t forgotten about the wallet underneath me.
Just wait you get older, Satik said, like us. Then you will know unhappy. Trust us. He put his hand on my elbow, on the arm palming the wallet underneath me.
I moved my arm. I don’t trust anyone, I said.
Interesting, Satik said. You don’t trust the person you love?
Anil shifted next to me, turned to watch the waves. The sky was beginning to purple as rain clouds crawled in under the night. I don’t love anyone, I said. I told them I had been to India before coming to Singapore, but not to Chandigarh or the Punjab area. I told them about that night in Rishikesh when Jake and I walked across a bridge over the Ganges, and he told me he wanted to go to the night prayers at the monastery. We were there at sunset. The monks in their orange robes, some of them looking only ten years old like orange-swaddled babies, began swinging great layered trays of fire and singing to the
river their thanks. We crouched over the cold, clear water trying to send downriver our little bowls of flowers couching tiny sparklers. As the night bled into the mountain, thousands of sparklers from all the pilgrims on the river drifted like stars slipping away from us in the black. This was the last time I was to feel alive for years. It was when a white woman, probably on drugs, danced her way through the procession, her wrists and her hands blending and flapping and swimming up to the sky, this was when Jake, Jake with his face angled and orange and smoky from the trays of fire the monks swung around us, told me that he’d be staying there in Rishikesh with the monks. He wouldn’t be moving on with me, he said softly, like he was entranced. He said he didn’t need anything else but that stillness. He didn’t need me, he implied. I rode a train to Delhi the very next morning.
Well, Anil said, you have to trust someone. For example, I scuba dive with a buddy out there. He pointed toward Malaysia.
I thought you never learned to swim? I said. While I said this, I finally managed to tuck the wallet all the way into the back waistband of my jeans underneath me.
Satik shifted, and I froze for a second, but it was just to put his hands behind his head.
Anil said, Well, I don’t really know how to swim.
You mean you don’t snorkel?
He said, I never saw the ocean in India. I dream of swimming. I dream, I dream, I dream. So when DHL sends me to Singapore, I take scuba diving lessons. And the test, I was supposed to be swimming, so I walked on bottom in the shallows and flapped my arms. I swim like fish.
He got up in the sand and flapped his arms around us. I laughed, thought of him as a ridiculous angel, one sent to help me keep on moving.
Anil continued to play the harmonica. I suddenly felt tired. I looked away from the deep purple sky threatening to rain. I turned my face toward the sea, arm over me to hide from the mosquitoes and from Satik’s intent gaze. The skyscrapers’ stacked pinpricks of neon blended into more lights across the ocean horizon, like a string of Christmas lights hovering under the moon. I thought it must be Malaysia, land, the opposite shore. I thought I might be moving on there the next day, taking the subway ride off the island to Kuala Lumpur. I thought, no twinkling lights like that could mean anything but good coming my way.
