The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  Now I am certain nothing of the sort happened in her real life: the professor never approached her as she was sleeping, with that thoughtful, comforting shawl. She made it all up, to distract herself from the sting of the scorpion through her fingers.

  There must have been a time of secret raging against the cruel gap between dream and reality, before the calm clarity of that advice, for Charlotte Brontë once described herself as a ‘hearty hater’. I copied the words down when I first came upon them and then tested them upon the tongue, struck by the powerful mutual reinforcement of sound and sense. If you pronounce the words slowly, deliberately, you too will be struck by the effect of the repeated ‘h’ and ‘t’ sounds: they swell the already charged meaning of a hate that needs to be continually fed, like an appetite insatiable of food or sex.

  And then the anger must have subsided into resignation at last, not the confused, contemptible kind but the proud acceptance of destiny – ‘the great lesson: how to endure without a sob.’

  ‘Never mind.’ But the body minds, surely, when it is stung, bitten, poked, battered, invaded, infibulated, bound, burnt, burst. If it were not smaller and weaker, or continually convulsed and drained by childbearing and childfeeding, it could have fought back. But as it is, women have to endure by biological fiat.

  ‘Never mind.’ It is not the body only. The mind minds, too, and women grow mad from their fears and longings, for women’s mind is one fibre with her sensitive, convulsive, procreative, nurturative body. Perhaps the mind minds more than the body.

  I see them now and hear them, hardly images, rather fragments as from recollected dreams, and faint cries, like the ancestral voices calling from afar. The woman standing by a storm-lashed coast waiting on a promise that will never be kept; the woman ghost seen with her baby near the pond where she drowned 20 years ago; the four Korean sisters who took poison together because, as they said in their note, they were sad that the expense of their upkeep was depriving their only brother of a higher education; the battered Singapore housewife who went back again and again to her husband because he sobbed on her shoulder and told her he couldn’t live without her.

  When a friend of mine was frantic to get back her husband who had gone to live with a younger woman, her family took her to consult a fortune teller who advised her to do nothing rash but wait, for he would come back. She waited for eight years and true enough, he came back, and they said, “See, we told you.” When my marriage was about to break up, my relatives and friends counselled patience and waiting: it seems a woman waits all her life, she waits to get married, she waits for her first-born, she waits for the children to grow up, she waits for a husband or lover to come back.

  I walk into a bookshop and I see, in the section called ‘Inspirational’, books by women for women, with heartbreaking titles – ‘Women who love too much’, ‘Women who can’t forget’, ‘Women who can’t say no’.

  “But men are scorpion-receivers too.” This from a male friend when I told him of the stories I wanted to write. He being very dear, I did not want to quarrel, so I merely said, “Yes, but men are never told to endure. It would be unthinkable for men to endure.”

  “You know,” he said, not wishing to be put off, “that there are other ways in which you women receive the scorpions. Are you going to write about these too?”

  “I know,” I said, “and yes, I’m going to write about those too. We can fling the scorpion back at the giver. Or de-fang it and be comfortable with it. We can secretly fatten it and return it as a gift. We can domesticate it and make it serve us. But mainly we endure, with or without a sob. We don’t have much choice.” Life and literature are full of the superlatives of woman’s endurance, also of her revenge.

  “I don’t like you very much when you talk like that, and I don’t want to read your stories, they sound horrible,” he said. And was not the less dear for saying that.

  “That’s the trouble,” I sighed. “The stories you perpetuate of us are so unreal. You sing paeans to us; you put us on pedestals, in the shining clouds of myths and legends as your goddesses, warrior queens, glorious martyrs, virgin brides. They have nothing to do with the reality. Perhaps they are to compensate for the reality.” We were silent for a while, not wanting to risk a quarrel, the secret time of our being together being so rare and therefore so happy.

  “Are you going to write about women who receive the eggs?” he asked suddenly. “I should think you would want to write about the egg-receivers, too.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but not yet. Not yet.”

  The Enemy

  0 Woman! How should we even begin to extol your beauty that has kept us in thrall through the ages? I, Love’s humblest acolyte who have pledged myself to your service am, alas, wordless in the commencement of that service. But I shall not be daunted. I shall begin with the beauty of your breasts. And I shall make bold to borrow the words of the Creator Himself, for was it not He who inspired this loveliest of descriptions of a woman’s body, to culminate in the breasts themselves? ‘How beautiful are thy feet with shoes. 0 prince’s daughter! The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor; thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like roes that are twins. This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.’

  0 Woman!

  0 Woman nonpareil!

  (From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

  The girl hated her breasts because they were the cause of all her troubles. Confronting her now in the bright afternoon light in her bedroom, they shocked by their newness and rawness: two hard cones, pink-tipped, suddenly grown out of the flatness, and warning of a rampage of further growth by the little eager shooting pains inside them. She picked up a towel hurriedly and draped it over the mirror, blocking them out.

  The sweetness of her days was gone, stolen by the breasts. In the classroom she sat hunched, her chest drawn in, her shoulders pushed out to force a retreat of the enemy, and in the playground, it was the same, whether she was skipping or running. She watched for their bouncing and was relieved to find that as yet that was not happening, no matter how vigorously she skipped or hopped. Would they soon grow into a size and softness when the bouncing would begin and the skipping and laughter end?

  The thought filled her with dread. Oh, the innocence of flatness! Her flat friends, when they got hot and sweaty in the playing field, pulled up their blouses to wipe their faces. She could not do that now.

  They were defiant breasts, constantly defying the concavity of the hunched chest. She had an idea to defeat them. First, she slipped over her head a small singlet and unrolled it down over them, flattening them out. Next she slipped on one more such singlet and a sleeveless T-shirt that effectively erased them and finally, she put on her white cotton school blouse, carefully buttoning it all the way up front. She looked at herself in the mirror and was satisfied. Defeated at last.

  Thus barricaded, the enemy gave no more trouble. But the weather did. In the blistering heat of the cement-box classroom of 40 pupils and one weakly rotating fan, the sweat trickled down her face and neck and gathered in a hot pool at her breasts. She went on resolutely doing her work at her desk, a calm centre in a frenzied sea of fluttering paper fans and blowing cheeks. Her wet hair clung to her face and neck in sorry tendrils but she went on quietly working, aware that Mrs Tan’s eyes had come to rest on her and were studying her closely.

  “Pei Yin, I would like you to see me in the Counselling Room after school today.”

  In the Counselling Room, Mrs Tan made her take off each sodden layer, until the breasts, newly released, burst into view once more, and she hung her head in shame.

  “You could have been over-heated, bundled up like that in this weather, and got a seizure. Tell your mother to get you a proper bra. Young growing girls like you must know how to take care of their bodies. And don’t hunch again. I’ve been noticin
g.”

  The breasts, now snugly fitted and cupped, poked triumphantly through the thin cotton cloth of her school-blouse, and she took to carrying around a large paper file which she held, clasped to her chest.

  And then, through a happy discovery, there was no more need for the file and the embarrassment. She discovered that three other girls in her class had sprouted breasts and were wearing bras. To ascertain the fact, she had pretended to pat each of them on the back and then had surreptitiously felt for the bra strap: she was not alone! Shared misery was that much less misery; within months, breasts spread as in an epidemic and by the time the last girl to have them had them and came to class wearing a bra, Pei Yin’s misery had vanished completely.

  Mrs Tan singled her out from among all the rest for warm praise: “You look very healthy and pretty now, Pei Yin and how is the project coming along? I see you are working very hard at it.”

  A rare radiance broke upon the girl’s face. Yes, she told her teacher, the project for the School’s Family Joy Competition, was coming along very nicely, and she had got some new pictures to paste in the book and found a suitable poem to write under one of the pictures.

  No, the trouble of her breasts did not come from school; if not for the little pricks of pain shooting all over, even in the armpits, she could almost forget their existence entirely.

  Sitting in the bus, she was aware of a massive thigh pushed against her own. Staring straight ahead, she moved away a little, and the thigh followed. She continued staring straight ahead. A newspaper went rustling up and then fingers under cover of the newspaper, forced themselves under her thigh and began attacking her there. She held her breath. Somebody buzzed for the next stop, and when the bus lurched to a standstill, she picked up her schoolbag, stood up and tried to get around the massive legs determinedly planted to obstruct her way and jiggling up and down with menacing nonchalance.

  “Excuse me,” she said in a small voice. One of the legs moved, and again, under cover of the newspaper, the hand shot out a second time and touched her on the left breast, accompanied by a low brutal gurgle. She ran down the steps in the bus and found herself at an unfamiliar bus-stop, but no matter, she could easily find her way home. The pain of the touch was still there. She was not allowed to spit in a public place, but she would remember to do it when she reached home, spitting being, as she had observed in her mother and the women neighbours, a symbolic discharge of the enemy’s poison that would surely rebound on him. She hated the men in the buses who had pinched, touched, stroked or rubbed themselves against her ever since the breasts came, but no, the real trouble did not come from them, for it was in her power to remove herself from them.

  Weather and breasts again conspired. This time it was not the heat, but pouring rain. She came home from school, totally drenched. The rain reduced her thin white T-shirt and cotton bra to transparent cellophane against which her breasts now pressed forth in the full flagrancy of their size, shape and colour: she might as well be naked. She stood near the door, pinned to the wall by the intensity of her father’s gaze upon those breasts, as he came out of his room to meet her. His eyes roamed the exposed concentric circles of beauty, inwards from the smooth white roundness to the small light brown patches to the innermost pink tips, and then outwards, till the beauty was fully savoured.

  She felt a sickness deep inside her stomach.

  “Ai-yah, little Pei Pei! You are all wet! So you were caught in the rain? Why didn’t you take an umbrella to school with you this morning? Now you are sure to catch cold, little Pei Pei, ai-yah – ” The stream of niceties was a prelude only, to be got out of the way quickly, as he advanced upon her still standing helplessly against the wall, and the breasts – oh hateful things! – perfectly moulded to the transparent wetness of her clothes, continued to beckon and invite.

  “Ah – ” said the father in final advance, then stopped, turning round at the sound of a door being flung open and footsteps approaching. It was the other daughter and he said, affably, “See, Mee Yin, your little sister’s all wet. She should get a towel to dry herself quickly – ”

  Ignoring him, Mee Yin who called herself Debbie and sometimes Desiree, said sternly to her younger sister, “Go and dry yourself immediately. You may borrow my hair dryer. And next time don’t come into the house with your breasts all exposed like that. There are people around who are only waiting for this to happen!” She flung a contemptuous sidelong glance at the father who was still smiling, but a little sheepishly, as he rubbed the back of his neck and continued to say, “Ai-yah, you’ll catch cold!”

  Debbie/Desiree’s breasts were no enemy. She cultivated them for good purpose. At McDonald’s, where she worked, she wore a bra specially constructed to push breasts, no matter how floppy, into a startling twinning of perfect roundness. The waitress’ uniform of puff-sleeved, high-collared blouse did not allow for this round ripeness to present itself, but an undoing of the first three buttons down the front ensured a tantalising peek or two, especially when she bent over the tables with her tray of hamburgers and coke.

  She saw a hand shoot out towards her and was not in time to arrest its advance; in an instant, deft fingers had wedged something into the tight cleavage. She laid the tray carefully on the table before standing up to put her hand into her blouse, pull out a crumpled note and return it to its owner who was watching her, grinning. “For you, honey, you keep it,” he said with a wink and left. It was a $50 note. She put it in the pocket of her apron.

  She let her boy friend Salleh who worked in the same place, touch her breasts sometimes; often she pouted, scolded, screamed and pushed his hand away, aware that these, her greatest asset, were not for foolish squandering.

  Their beauty was strangely enhanced by the streaks of brown liquid that had splashed on them. This the father had not expected when he had knocked his mug of coffee against her as they passed each other in the kitchen, and he was able to take in the strangely compelling view of a delicately branching pattern of dark brown ribbons on perfect whiteness of breasts before snapping out of the awe to grab a kitchen towel, apologise profusely, and attempt to wipe off the stains.

  “You don’t dare touch me!” screamed Debbie/Desiree, pushing him away with such violence that he fell backwards and lay slumped against the legs of a table. “You did that on purpose, you dirty old man! I saw you do it on purpose. Wait till I tell my boyfriend about you. He’ll beat you up! Now you’ve dirtied my dress, and I’m late for work! You ‘re a dirty old man! I’ll get my boyfriend to bash you up!” And that was the last time he had tried to touch her.

  Pei Yin felt safe with Older Sister. She shared the other bedroom in the flat with her, and even if they forgot to lock the door at night, she was not afraid. Lock the bedroom door, lock the bathroom door. The bathroom door had a hole made by the rotting wood. She had stuffed that with a piece of rag; it had been poked off, and she had stuffed another, this time more tightly.

  “You listen carefully to me, Pei Yin,” said Older Sister with authority, although she was only three years older.

  “Yes, Older Sister,” said Pei Yin.

  “You are a big girl now and you’ve got to be more careful. Don’t be in the house alone with him.” Pei Yin noticed that Older Sister never referred to the father as ‘Father’. “We bear his name but he’s not our real father,” she sneered, “Stay in school as long as you can, and don’t come home before Mother or I do. Mother says she can’t come home before four. Why don’t you stay in school till then and wait in the void deck downstairs where you can do your work while waiting for her to come back?”

  The Family Joy Project which Pei Yin was now very much occupied with, would allow her to stay in the school library till well past five if she wished.

  “All right, but make sure you are never alone in the house with him. Why were you watching TV with him on the same sofa last night? I saw him sitting very close to you.”

  Pei Yin explained tearfully that as part of the Family Joy Project, the
girls had to watch The Cosby Show and comment in class on the happy family relationships they had observed. She did not tell Older Sister that at one point, as she was writing down an observation on a piece of paper on her lap, the father’s hand had suddenly reached up inside her blouse and touched the curved underside of her left breast; she sat totally still for a few seconds, staring ahead, while the fingers played and the pyjama-clad body shifted, moved closer and thrust itself outwards upon the couch. Then she jumped up and went into her room, and the father continued to watch TV, his arms now across his chest and his hands tucked in his armpits. She did not forget to spit when she later went into the bathroom.

  “You are a big girl now, Pei Yin,” said her mother who the month before had brought home a box of sanitary towels for her. Mrs Tan, Older Sister, Mother, they looked at her breasts, called her ‘big girl’ and took away the sweetness of the small girl years. She hated being a ‘big girl’.

  “You must know what to do now,” said her mother sorrowfully, the sorrow intensified by the prospect of interminable years of backbreaking work at the small food stall she ran at a school. Widowed with two small daughters, she had married a man who promised to expand the food stall into a thriving canteen business but who, over the years, had claimed a succession of small ailments and ended up idling at home.

  “Poor little daughter,” said the mother tearfully, stroking her face. “You are so innocent and ignorant, not like Older Sister who is so clever and knows how to take care of herself. Do take care, Little One. Your mother has been a great fool, but what is there to do now? Your mother does not want anything bad to happen to you. It is good that you are staying back in school in the afternoons. You are doing something that makes you very happy, Little Daughter? I see it is a big book with plenty of beautiful pictures and much writing.” And she took her daughter’s face in her hands and smiled proudly.