by S. P. Hozy
Later in the rickshaw on the way back from the Botanic Gardens, Annabelle was feeling quite relaxed and almost at home as Francis chatted away about the gardens and how they would go there often and picnic in the years to come. Then, glancing past him, Annabelle saw an elderly Chinese woman lying by the side of the road, apparently dead. Annabelle turned her head and looked back to confirm that she’d actually seen what she thought she had seen. At first it hadn’t registered that the woman was dead, if indeed she was, and Annabelle wondered why she would be lying on the road in such a fashion. When it struck her that the woman must have either fainted or died, she thought of her own mother, dying in a hospital surrounded by white sheets and antiseptic, while the nursing sisters bustled about, attending to her needs and telling her she was going to be fine, even though it wasn’t true. Death, she thought, doesn’t care if you’re in a hospital or on the road. He takes you when he’s ready and damns the consequences. The indignity of dying in the road was embarrassing to Annabelle. She wished she hadn’t seen the woman and hadn’t stared at her in her private moment of humiliation. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than dying in the street. How long will the woman lie there, she wondered, before someone takes her away? An hour? A day?
Annabelle looked at Francis, who apparently had not seen the woman, and a shiver ran down her spine. I can’t protect you, she thought, and you can’t protect me. What will happen will happen and we will be at the mercy of strangers.
When they returned to the Raffles, Sutty was in the bar having a whisky. They joined him and Francis ordered a beer while Annabelle asked for tea.
“How was your day?” Sutty asked.
“Splendid,” said Francis. “Absolutely beautiful. It is such a lovely, peaceful place that I think it will be our own private sanctuary, even though we’ll have to share it with every Johnny, Mary, Chin, and Chan who’s also decided it’s his own.”
Sutty laughed. Francis had been in high form since Annabelle had arrived, and he was glad to see his friend so happy. But Annabelle, he noted, seemed a little distracted, even a little sad, and he wondered why. Maybe it was just the heat that was getting her down, but this seemed more like melancholy than fatigue. He hoped she wasn’t regretting her decision to come to Singapore and marry Francis. He had seen it happen before: young women joining their men, filled with enthusiasm and promise, only to slip into a kind of lethargy, sometimes within a few weeks. One such young woman he remembered in particular. Her name was Olive and she had arrived brimming with excitement at the prospect of marrying her long-time fiancé, Ted. She was an attractive girl with a pretty heart-shaped face, dark wavy hair, lovely round hips, and a bosom a man would want to rest his head on. But within weeks she had started losing weight until, after three months, she was as thin as a rail. The colour had gone from her cheeks and her thick, shiny hair was dull and flat.
Ted had taken her to doctors who had given her potions and powders, both to lift her spirits and bring her weight back up, but to no avail. Eventually she became too weak to travel back to England on her own and she was hospitalized. Sutty had visited the distraught Ted, who told him that nobody could figure out what was wrong with Olive: she had just lost the will to stay alive. It was as if something had punctured her surface and the vitality had gradually leaked out. In six months she was dead.
Sutty had seen others simply linger in a state halfway between vigour and exhaustion, slowly and imperceptibly edging toward the latter until, one day, they just gave in or gave up. Some returned to England before it was too late and maintained long-distance marriages with their colonial husbands. He rarely saw couples who shared the same enthusiasm for the expatriate life. One or the other always got the shorter end of the stick, whether it was the woman who was forced to make a home, deal with hostile servants, and raise a family in isolated and unfamiliar conditions, or the man who faced the drudgery of a dreary job in less than ideal circumstances, usually working under a petty tyrant or a mountebank who would never have reached such a position of authority at home.
Whatever the case, it usually started with a dream, a wish, a whim, or a desire for something different, something better in a faraway place filled with the possibility of adventure. How easy when we dream not to include the unpleasant parts: the heat, the unfamiliar food, the waves of loneliness and longing for home, the diseases that wait to infect the unwary, and the fear, always the fear. For Sutty, there was no end to the stories he could tell. And no need to make anything up, it seemed.
Chapter Thirteen
Maris and her mother were weeding the garden after an overnight rain left the ground soft and easy to work. It was a task that took Maris back to her childhood, when Spirit and Freedom Man used to round up the kids and go to the communal garden to spend the morning in shared labour. It had been fun. They were a family within a larger, extended family and it seemed as if it would last forever. That they would never grow up or grow old, and they would always be as happy as they were at that moment. Maris still blamed her father for bringing it all down, but now she realized that blaming him was the path of least resistance. Life was much more complicated than that. She knew very little about her parents’ relationship or what had led her father to make such a drastic change in his life. Had her mother seen it coming or had she been just as surprised as their children?
Maris looked over at Spirit, who was concentrating on digging up the root of a large dandelion. “Mom?” she asked.
Spirit grunted. “Hmm? What?”
“What happened?”
Spirit looked up. She frowned. “To what?”
“To us,” said Maris. “Our family. What changed it?”
“Oh, that,” her mother said, as if Maris had referred to something insignificant. She gave the dandelion one final pull and the root slid out of the ground cleanly. “Hah!” she said, as satisfied as if she’d painlessly extracted a bad tooth.
“Your father,” she began, staring at the dandelion root, “is a simple man who thinks he’s complicated. I didn’t understand that when I first met him. I’ll be kind and say he was searching for himself, but in reality he was a poseur. He wasn’t so much looking for himself as he was looking for the accoutrements of himself: the wardrobe, the car, the house. It was fashionable in the sixties to wear bell-bottoms and paisley shirts and have long hair. When he put those clothes on, he put on an identity. I found out too late that it had nothing to do with the person inside.” She paused and picked up a clod of damp earth, working it between her fingers.
“And I bought it,” she said, looking up at Maris. But she wasn’t really looking at Maris; she was looking back into the past to a time when the world was changing for women like her. “Freedom Man,” she continued, “seemed to be so not my father that it never occurred to me that he might not be what he pretended to be. Maybe pretended isn’t the right word. He wasn’t pretending as much as he was acting in a play that everybody wanted a part in. He bought into that play the way I bought into him. We needed to believe that the world was changing and that we were changing it.
“A person like your father doesn’t think too much about who he really is,” she went on. “He got caught up in a vision, an ideal, that excited him for a while, but he eventually lost interest in it.” She looked around her, taking in the house and the garden. “I guess, in a way, it was too static for him. It didn’t change into anything; it just stayed the same. He got bored with it.”
Maris thought about this. “How do you get bored with your own children?” she said.
“Oh, no,” said Spirit. “It wasn’t you he was bored with. It was the life, and, in part, I think it was me. It was the unchanging nature of it all. Arthur didn’t have that much going on inside of him, so he needed a lot of stimulation from the outside. He didn’t have the — let me call it substance — to make something out of nothing. He’s not a curious guy. He’s not a creative guy. I guess he didn’t realize — and to be fair, none of us did; we were young and inexperienced — that re
al life is actually about getting up every morning and doing the same thing you did yesterday. It’s about maintaining. And I guess when he figured it out, he decided that if he was going to spend his life maintaining something, it was going to be a life that had a lot of distractions, a lot of gadgets. Things that cost money and need to be replaced, with the latest bells and whistles that are better than last year’s bells and whistles.”
Spirit dug around another weed and worked her fingers into the dirt. Maris didn’t say anything. She waited for her mother to speak.
“You know,” Spirit said finally, “I never had a problem with who I was. I’m not a complicated person either, but I have instincts — you know what I mean, Maris? — I have something in my gut that acts as a bullshit meter, or maybe a truth meter, and it tells me whether I’m where I’m supposed to be or not. And I trust it. I can’t always explain it, but it keeps me centred.”
“Then why didn’t your bullshit meter go off the charts when you met Freedom Man?” asked Maris. “Didn’t you suspect he wasn’t sincere?”
“No,” she sighed. “I fell for him. He looked the part. He talked the talk. He walked the walk. And I was young. I wanted something different from the life I’d grown up with and Freedom Man was going to take me there. It was heady stuff, Maris. We were reinventing society. We were going to be the living embodiment of everything our parents were not. We were going to prove that people could live together in peace and harmony. We would throw off the shackles of conformity and get back to the basics of human existence. Live off the land. Educate our children at home. Share the labour and share the wealth. We really believed in that.”
“And do you still? Believe in that, I mean?”
“I do,” said Spirit, “but I also understand now that not everyone wants that. I’ve come to understand what I call the ‘principle of distraction.’ Meaning that most people, including your father, don’t live by a set of beliefs. They exist. They put in time. They play roles: husband, wife, employee, neighbour, father, grandmother. They move through a series of roles in life and they define themselves by those roles. ‘I’m Joe’s mother, Anne’s sister; I work for Blahblah Corporation; I’m a teacher, a butcher, a banker.’ But it’s not enough. We need excitement, so we root for the home team. We need passion, so we have an affair. We need to have fun, so we throw a party. We distract ourselves from the basic ho-hum sameness of our lives.”
Maris grimaced at her mother. “You really believe that?”
“Yeah, I do,” said Spirit. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I was angry at your father for a long time. And now I realize I was angrier at myself for being fooled by him. Why didn’t I see it? How stupid was I?”
“So you decided that everybody in the world was shallow and lived meaningless lives, pursuing superficial goals? That’s how you dealt with it?”
Spirit laughed. “Well, not everyone,” she said. “Just most people.”
“Get out,” said Maris. “I don’t believe you.”
“Okay, okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. I was pretty bitter for a while.” Maris snorted. “Okay,” said Spirit, “I was bitter for a long time. For years. And I was angry. And you have to understand, Maris, that anger is not an emotion I like to live with. He hurt me. He hurt me bad. I didn’t see it coming. And we had three kids we were raising. Raising them the hard way, without societal structures to fall back on. We were winging it, making it up as we went along. I depended on him for fifty percent of everything. We were partners. And then I found out that he didn’t have the faith. He wasn’t committed to what we had decided — together, I thought — and that nearly killed me. He just walked away.”
True to her word, Terra organized a weekend visit to Spirit’s place so they could all do the family thing together. They drove up on Saturday morning, Terra, her husband Josh, the two girls, Emma and Alison, and Ray, in a roomy minivan with stereo speakers and little video screens so the girls could watch their favourite movie. They chose New Moon because they were both in love with Taylor Lautner. Ray sat in the back and listened to his iPod, watching vampires and werewolves to the music of Coldplay, Amy Winehouse, and Robert Johnson.
Spirit had been cooking for two days. She couldn’t quite believe the whole family would be together; it almost never happened. Maris hadn’t been home in four years, and the others came only when she put the pressure on. Although Terra was a little more dutiful about bringing the grandchildren around, Ra (she refused to call him Ray) had to be gently reminded by his mother that it was time for a visit. This was special.
Maris had helped her mother prepare everybody’s favourite dishes, which meant peach pie for the girls, lasagna for Ray (who brought a bottle of Chianti), salmon grilled on a cedar plank for Terra, and scalloped potatoes for Josh. Spirit had even baked up a batch of her homemade granola — a favourite for breakfast and general munching. Maris and her mother decided to do up a load of mussels in white wine sauce with crusty French bread and an assortment of cheese and fruit for lunch. It was a long way from their days of eating brown rice, millet, and lentils. The weekend would be nothing less than a banquet. Maris thought of one of her favourite movies, Eat Drink Man Woman, in which the widowed father of three daughters is a master chef at a top Taipei hotel. Every Sunday he cooks an elaborate Chinese meal for his daughters, who dutifully attend but barely eat a thing. At the end of the meal, they pack all the food in containers and put it away. Each of the daughters has her own problems and the only way the father has of communicating his love is through the food he prepares for them — which they reject. It was the story of a dysfunctional family with a wonderful metaphor at its heart. In a way, Maris saw her own family communicating, or not communicating, through tangible objects, such as food and photographs, which Terra always brought, and furniture, which the kids always complained about and tried to persuade Spirit to replace. But it wasn’t about food, photographs, or furniture; it was about the relationships between seven very different personalities and how they acted them out.
“Maris,” said Terra, dipping a piece of bread in the mussel sauce, “how have you been? You almost never write, you know. And we worry about you, being so far away and so incommunicado. The girls are always asking about you, aren’t you, girls?”
Alison and Emma were spreading thick slabs of butter on their bread, avoiding the mussels and nibbling like little mice on bits of cheese. They nodded and looked at Maris. Please don’t ask us to talk, their eyes said. We’re not ready to spill our guts at the dinner table. Spirit, who had noticed their reluctance to indulge in the shellfish, had slipped into the kitchen and was making a couple of tuna sandwiches and opening a bag of potato chips.
“Whoa, Terr,” said Ray. “I don’t believe I heard the part where you say, ‘Hey, Maris, it’s great to have you back. We missed you.’”
Out of the corner of her eye, Maris caught Josh and the girls ducking their heads and trying not to smile.
“Oh, Ray,” said Terra. “Maris knows that. She’s my sister. She doesn’t need to hear it. Nor do I need to hear her say how glad she is to see me again. And the girls. And Josh. Right, Maris?”
“Right, Terr,” said Maris. “We don’t need to say it.” She mouthed the word “troublemaker” at Ray. Just then Spirit came back into the room with sandwiches for the girls.
“I’ve made you peach pie for later,” she said, “but for now, you can have a nice tuna sandwich.”
“Mom always cuts the crusts off,” said Emma, the youngest.
“What?” said Spirit. “Terra, you know the crust is the best part.” She turned to the girls. “Don’t you want curly hair?”
Alison gave her grandmother a strange look. “Curly hair? What’s that got to do with bread crusts?”
“Everybody knows,” said Spirit, patiently, “that bread crusts give you curly hair.”
“Well,” said Alison, “you’ll definitely have to cut these crusts off, Grandma. I really don’t want curly hair. And I especially don’t want frizzy hair
,” she said, looking at Spirit’s unruly mop.
“Me, neither,” echoed Emma. “No way.”
Terra gave her mother a defeated look and reached over to cut the crusts off her daughters’ sandwiches.
“Now you know why I wanted to raise you in the woods,” said Spirit, “away from all those ridiculous notions. Vanity, vanity, the curse of girls and women,” she sighed.
“It’s not just girls anymore, Mom,” said Terra. “Boys and men are getting facials, dyeing their hair, getting nose jobs, and becoming anorexic in order to be thin. It’s an epidemic.”
“Blame it on Barbie,” said Ray. “She started it, with that ridiculous body of hers and those impossible boobs.”
Alison and Emma giggled. The conversation was getting interesting.
“Well, it’s true,” said Ray. “Who do you know that looks like that?” he asked them.
“Miss America?” said Emma.
“I mean someone who hasn’t been surgically altered. And besides, you don’t know Miss America.”
“Promise me you won’t have breast implants,” Spirit said to Emma and Alison. “Promise me.”
“Oh, Grandma, of course we won’t. Don’t be silly.”
“Or nose jobs. Or liposuction. People have died from that.”
“Spirit,” said Maris, looking at her super-slim nieces, “I think we’re probably pretty safe with that one.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Spirit said. “I saw a documentary on plastic surgery that would turn your stomach. There was a woman on Oprah who had had something like twenty-five surgeries, and she said she wasn’t done yet. She was addicted to plastic surgery. It was horrible.”
“I saw that,” said Ray. “She started out being a pretty good-looking woman. And she ended up looking like Cher.”
