by Alice Pung
I flicked off the switch because my mother’s eyes were sunken and the skin around her sockets was like crumpled parchment paper. She had just woken up from her sleep. “Aiyyyah,” she sighed, deep and slow. “Time to pick up the kids. Time to make dinner.”
No, I wanted to tell her, it was not time to pick up the kids. That was over forty-five minutes ago. And it was not time to make dinner. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, for crying out loud.
“What time is it?” she asked me.
I told her.
“Bloody hell! 4.37! Why didn’t you tell me? The kids are still at school waiting!”
“No, I picked them up on the way home.” It was a one-and-a-half kilometre walk for them back home, because no buses ran up the hills of Avondale Heights. When I arrived at the school, my sisters were the last ones there – waiting outside closed office doors. Bobbing down beneath the grey sky in their green uniforms and brown socks, they dug small sticks into the dirt of the curb.
My mother’s shoulders loosened, but they also slumped. Another failure on her part, she thought. Firstly she could no longer work, and secondly she could no longer look after her kids. All the things that my grandmother had predicted – or cursed – were coming true.
My mother had stopped working on the gold a few weeks ago. The chemicals were getting to her and making her cough, she told us. The coughs never seemed to get better. So no more familiar wax smells wafting from the other room to mingle with our toast and decaffeinated coffee in the morning. The room next to the kitchen, where my mother grew her wax trees, was dark. An old bedspread covered her work-table like a shroud.
*
“Your father told me to sell all my tools and machines, and live my life looking after the children and taking care of the house,” she would tell me, as I sat in the study which also doubled as my mother’s workroom. I was trying to write essays for my final-year high-school assessment. She sat slumped in her torn vinyl work-chair. “What do you think I should do?”
“It is so terrible,” she continued. “I feel like a useless useless person now. Should I sell all my machines? Should I?” She looked deep into my eyes, something that Asian parents never do to their children – but she was desperate.
“I don’t know.” I tried to get my mind off the “Multi-tiered System of the Australian Judiciary” for a little while. I tried to be reasonable. I tried to put myself in her place. “Could you be happy not working?”
“No.” Of course not. A stupid question.
“Then maybe you could just continue working.”
“But Agheare, I am getting old! Getting old. I can’t do this forever. How long will it last? Three years? Five years? I am too old to go running around Footscray and Richmond and Springvale with a bag filled with gold, always scared that someone will snatch it. I am too old to be working late into the night. My eyes – they are getting weaker and moh-moh blurry. Getting old, getting old! And this job – it will be the end of me! My end of days will come sooner than most people’s end of days.” My mother worked with dangerous chemicals – sulfuric acid, ammonia, gold-potassium cyanide. “Look! Look at my hands!” She held them out in front of her, fingers spread. They were cracked and blackened at the tips, almost as if they had been burnt. They were a coal-miner’s hands, I realised.
“So much cleaning in the new house!” she cried, even though it was not the house that needed cleaning, it was her mind. “And no one ever helps!”
“I wish I could be like your aunties and work at the shop counting money. But I don’t know the English!” she cried. And then she really cried, heaving heavy honking sobs. I sat still, my back straight. I had tried to comfort her once by putting my arms around her. She pushed me away. I learned never to do it again, so the only consolation I could offer was silence.
“What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I am a useless person!” she wailed. Alina stuck her little head around the door to see what was going on in the study.
“Go watch some TV,” I commanded. “Go watch George and Martha.”
“But I can’t do my maths,” she said.
“Go ask Alexander.”
“But …”
“Go now.” I had learned to speak in orders. No other seventeen-year-old I knew, unless they were terribly spoilt, spoke in orders.
My mother wanted to stand in front of the shop and work at the till too, but she was shy, felt she did not know enough English, and always felt herself small against my father’s family. After all, she had worked at their plastic-bag factory when she was thirteen, and thought she would be in their eyes forever thirteen and scrambling for scraps. This was a woman who knew at least five different languages fluently, yet who had not studied beyond Grade One when they closed down all the Chinese schools in Cambodia. She worked harder than anyone else I knew, but now that she had stopped working, everything was shattering around her – and with this force-field gone, she could also see all the lives happening around her. Inspiring things were happening to them, interesting things, things of hope and progress, and yet her own life was static. There was no going forward, except to be carried down by others, down down down deep and dark and forever. It was scaring the living daylights out of her.
She would drive her car to Dr Cheng’s office and tell him, “Doctor, my heart is jumping out of my chest! I think I may be having a heart attack soon!” Dr Cheng listened to her, because she had nobody else to speak to. And doctors were meant to have answers. Dr Cheng told her that feeling this way was not uncommon, that she was not going crazy. He told her that it would be okay, from what little she revealed.
Depression, the doctor called it, but my mother did not know what that meant. “Scattered thoughts,” she told Dr Cheng, “that’s all they are, these crazy scattered thoughts. I think about all our money disappearing at the shop. I think of losing everything, and my heart thumps like crazy and it is unbearable!” Sickness in the heart, she said, a sickness in the heart that she needed to get checked out. It was physical, she reckoned, and once the doctors could give her some medicine for her heart thumping much harder than it should, then she would be closer to recovery. So the doctor gave her little white pills in a cardboard box with bold red writing. ZOLOFT. Take these twice a day, he told her. And wait. Be patient and wait. They will not work straightaway.
She could not stand to be in the house, in the house she could not stand still. It was so hollow, so many hours to fill, how could she fill them all by wiping down the fridge or washing the sheets? She would drive to the supermarket and do what she had always done – buy food on sale, look for the green fluorescent stickers; and at the register count out the exact amount in notes and coins. Our Asko side-by-side fridge with the ice dispenser would be packed with fast food that came two-for-price-of-one. But after a while, she did not even know what she was buying. She walked into the supermarket stunned, not because there was so much to be had, but because none of it made any sense now, or brought any happiness. She operated like an automaton – first she would go to the trolley filled with broken CLEARANCE items, then she would find the SALE bread, or the discount day-old bread, and then any other miscellaneous things on SPECIAL. Once she brought home twenty 250-gram blocks of Nestlé chocolate in different flavours. “A dollar-fifty a block,” she said. “Never seen such a price before.” Without the energy or thought to hide them around the house, she left them in the cupboard above the oven rangehood. My siblings and I went though one and a half blocks a day each and she didn’t even notice.
The only thing she became obsessive about was the house and the cleaning. A tiny little scratch on the wall or a splattering of oil on the granite would drive her to madness. Every muscle in her chest would tense, she would have no self-control. The furniture was driving her mad, we were driving her mad, my father and his sisters were driving her mad, the whole world was out to torment her. Sit down or stand up, make dinner or wash the clothes, go to sleep or stay awake. All this uncertainty was enough to drive anyone crazy.
&n
bsp; *
My father knew what she needed if she were ever to get better. And it was not the shifting of incense urns or the digging up of hidden pots of gold. She needed to work again.
He held a special general meeting of the directors of his company. The meeting was held in our living room, and the directors were my aunties and uncles – his siblings. The meeting was to decide whether to employ my mother at the shop. My mother could not attend, and after hours of deliberation it was finally decided: my mother would start at the shop on trial. She would start in the weeks of the school holiday break. Both my parents came to consult me. They asked if I would be able to balance my schoolwork with looking after the kids during the break, so that my ma could go to work. Would I be able to look after my siblings? For two weeks? What kind of question was that? Of course! Of course! No worries at all. I was exuberant. It was the best thing that had happened to our family for a long while. I was going to do the best job ever. I would have a working mother again, and I would spend the two weeks making the house look spick and span for when she got home. And then everything would be good again.
My mother was hired as an ordinary employee, a salesperson. She had a time card in which she had to record her hours. She was also put on the toilet-cleaning duty roster. My father brought home copies of invoices and taught her how to fill them out. “Crap, I can’t do it!” she cried, because they were all in the English, and there were spaces for model numbers and serial numbers and product descriptions and all the letters and words were just scribbles and dots and where there were not scribbles and dots there were blanks. My father spent his evenings teaching her how to write “washing machine”, “hair dryer” and “toaster” – a dozen times, two dozen times. She filled exercise books with the names of electrical goods, and promptly forgot them the day after. What use are five languages when you can’t even fill in a simple docket for two metres of three-dollar speaker wire? “Persevere, persevere,” urged my father, and told her about my second auntie from Guangzhou, who never spoke or wrote a word of English but was now working in an office in Myer. “She persisted,” he told my mother. “She stuck words all over the house, even on the back of the toilet door. And your uncle grew annoyed with her, because she was always ranting in English as if she were operating a train timetable service, but still she persisted.”
I watched my mother persist. She wiped down the glass counter, swept the floor, tidied up the shelves, spoke in three different languages to customers, closed sales – and then when it came time to type out and print the receipt, she was stumped. She could not follow what was on the screen, all the shapes and numbers which made words she could not understand, let alone read. She didn’t know which buttons to thump. She punched in model numbers and letters, but sometimes model numbers would be difficult to locate on the computer system. In such cases, she hit the keys randomly. Sometimes receipts printed, sometimes not. When they did, and it seemed the correct amount, she was ecstatic.
When she came home, she would tell us, with pride, “I printed a receipt today.” We were all very happy. I made a shopping list and my father drove me to Safeway in the evening and we bought the items. Vegetables. Pasta. Pastry. Flour. Milk. Continental Sauce. Salami. Ham. Potatoes. Tomato Paste. It was a sensible list, no junk, no nonsense food, but no Chinese food either.
Alina sat on her high chair, and I rolled out some dough for her. I rolled some for Alison too. “Play Doh!” clapped Alison.
“No, it’s real food,” I said. “We’re going to make sausage rolls.” All lunches were homemade, right down to the pizza bases and pastry dough. “You can make any shape you want,” I told them, and provided an example by making a pizza shaped like a morbidly obese cat. All meals were three-course, even breakfast – a bowl of Continental Cup-a-Soup, an egg on toast and a banana and Milo.
I made up games, too. Ice-skating with Mr Mop. My siblings and I slid him around the entire house on the wet floors with drying cloths tied to our shoes. Cleaning the deck of the Titanic. A visit by Mr Mop to the back patio. Taking down the sails. Laundry off the line. And when they were thoroughly bored with all of this, I turned on the television, right in time for the three-o’clock kids’ shows.
I would sit down at the clean granite table and spread out my schoolwork, happy in the knowledge that the house was shining. And a few hours later my mother and father would come home, and my mother would be smiling. “Wah, look how good the house looks!”
Alison would come running up with a souvenir of our day’s work: “Look! Look! We made sausage rolls!” And the mood seemed to have changed somewhat, the energy in the house. My mother would even say the unnecessary – “How good!” I knew I was doing a good job, I was doing an excellent job.
But this was only for the first three days. On the fourth, my mother came home and the dark clouds had returned to her face. I braced myself for rain, for hail, for thunder. “Getting me to cut up cardboard boxes at the back!” she yelled, “what kind of job is that?” Her face did not turn red, it turned black.
“You should have said no!” My father was exasperated.
“Then what else could I have done hah? There were no customers, and I had already wiped the floors. I would be standing around like a useless person on the shop floor in front of your family! Then I would be a real joke!”
“You could have learned how to use the computers to type out invoices.”
“And who is going to teach me hah? No one! Everyone is too busy doing their own thing, or avoiding me like leprosy! And you’re always in the back office. So I stand there, like a dumb idiot. What am I to do hah? I can’t speak the English, and no one will teach me anything!”
My mother turned on me: “What do you think you’re doing? It’s time for dinner!”
Then she looked at my sisters. “And they haven’t taken a shower yet! Look at them, all dirty like that!”
They had been mopping the floors, for crying out loud!
“Wah,” started my father, grabbing Alina’s curled little hands. “Look how red your hands are! You must be freezing!” A piece of mashed-up pie dropped to the floor.
I didn’t know what was happening. Suddenly the control I had seemed to evaporate, leaving behind a raw vision of myself – I was seventeen again, and the responsibility was not mine. It was to be taken away! NO! But the house was clean, the sisters were happy, my brother had learned to bake and the schoolwork was still being done. What more was there to do?
On the fifth day it got better. I made sure my sisters wore their padded jackets all the time, even in the house. We made tacos. They loved tacos. “Come on, come on, let’s go for a walk to 7-Eleven!” 7-Eleven was one-and-a-half kilometres away. They came back with their hands filled with Pick ’N’ Mix chocolates.
My mother had the weekend off. And because she had the weekend off, so did I. I wrote in my diary, I crammed in schoolwork, I floated around the sterilised house thinking up next week’s menu and plotting games. It was going to be the best holiday I ever had, the most productive. Meanwhile, my mother distractedly scrawled “Micro-Furnace Micro-Furnace Micro-Furnace” and “Sunbeam Iron Sunbeam Iron Sunbeam Iron” in her notebooks. I could tell her heart wasn’t really in it because her handwriting tumbled down the blue lines like Kamikaze pilots.
“How long do you have left of your school holidays?” she asked me.
“Oh, don’t worry, a long time to go,” I reassured her.
On the Monday of the second week I took my sisters to the park – yet another long walk – and to the river. We went on a mission. We went on a secret quest. We had to collect three stones along the bike path and toss them over the bridge to quell the trolls. Then we had to stand on the magical rock and ward off the evil spirits before we could progress. We had to reach for three gum-leaves to feed to the creepy-crawlies, and then walk down the hilly slopes down to the sacred Weeping Willow of the Maribyrnong River. “We did it!” cried Alina, “we did it! What do we do now, Alice?”
“The
Wind in the Willow tree tells me that we get our reward.”
“Yay! What is our reward?”
“A present.”
“What sort of present?”
“This!”
They looked at what I proffered in my hands. “Aww, but that’s just the Mars Bars we bought yesterday from 7-Eleven!”
I pressed down on them with my thumbs. “These are special Mars Bars. Feel them, they’re warm.” Little hands reached out for them.
“And they have been flattened by the good spirit of the Wind in the Willow tree.”
“But you squashed them.”
“The tree told me to.”
“What’s going to happen if we eat them?”
“We get new energy for our journey back. And we can carve our names on the rock!”
“Yay!”
When we returned home, as we rounded the corner to our crescent, I noticed something incongruous. Ma’s car, parked in the driveway, in the afternoon. I looked at the time: 3.48 p.m. What was my mother doing home at this time? “Shh, Ma’s home,” I warned my sisters. They shoved their Mars Bar wrappers in their pockets. Alina’s left a brown smear, but there was no time to wipe it off. I took the house keys out of my pocket and opened the door.
When I walked into the kitchen, my mother was there, just as I had feared. And she was accompanied by the black cloud.
“They gave me wrong money at the bank,” she told me bluntly.
Wrong money at the bank? That was no reason to leave work early!
“What do you mean?”
“I was given wrong money to take to the bank! One hundred dollars short. I panicked. I came back to the shop. They want me gone at any cost!”
“Would you like some coffee?”
“No.”
I boiled some water for Milo, for my sisters. When I had handed them their hot drinks, I sat down at the table with my mother. I didn’t know what to say. Was she leaving, or was she coming back? Would she ever come back?
She started to cry. “Agheare, I can’t work there any longer! I can’t do it! I can’t work there and I can’t work at home and I can’t work anywhere!”
