End of East, The (16 page)

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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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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 damp 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.”
“I know.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
Susie thinks for a moment, screws her eyelids up. “You need to do something, honey. I know you’re not used to
doing things for yourself, but you have to change your life if you’re unhappy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t really know. I just think that you have to get out of the house or find something to do, you know? Your mother-in-law does everything, so you feel like you don’t own anything, not even your own daughter. Maybe if you had something else to do, you wouldn’t hate the baby so much. You could take a class, or learn how to manage the house on your own. Just take it slow—one thing at a time.”
Siu Sang sighs, dabs at her eyes. “I think I need to fix my makeup.”
Susie laughs. “Yes, and we need to go back to our table, or else our husbands will think we’ve run away together.”
When they walk back, a woman has started singing, her silver gown pooling on the floor around her feet. She sings an old, old song about a girl who dreams about her prince. Siu Sang closes her eyes and follows the sound of her voice as it rises and falls, floats through the air and settles over the well-dressed, cool-as-vodka crowd.
In the mornings, Siu Sang, in capri pants and a light jacket, walks to the park with Wendy in a stroller. When she returns home, she eats a lunch that her mother-in-law has cooked and sits in the living room that her mother-in-law has furnished.
As Susie told her,
one thing at a time.
Siu Sang has had a lot of practice at being quiet, at going unnoticed. It’s easy for her to creep around the house and watch her mother-in-law as she bustles through her day. When Shew Lin is in the living room, dusting the mantle and beating the furniture, Siu Sang sits on the stairs, half-hidden by shadows.
When Shew Lin is cooking, Siu Sang plays with the baby at the kitchen table, feeding her mashed-up fruit.
There are perfect, invisible reasons for her to be anywhere, anytime.
The house is all angles, with windows recessed deep in darkly papered walls. Dark corners are everywhere, in every room, even during the day.
Siu Sang sticks close to the walls.
At first, she watches her mother-in-law to make sure she isn’t reading Siu Sang’s mail or hiding food, but then she begins to see the cooking and cleaning, receipts and groceries, hundreds of small tasks, each an equal component in the running of a family. Shew Lin talks loudly, moves with hurricane-like energy. Everything she does is meant to be noticed and the centre of attention. And so it is.
Opportunity never comes to those who are impatient.
One day, Shew Lin drops one of the grocery bags on the front steps. Siu Sang emerges from the corner and picks it up, gathering the spilled fruit. She carries the bag into the kitchen and puts the food away.
Siu Sang pools all her energy, sleeps through the night like she never could before (strained and pulled tight like a violin string on the verge of snapping, she had spent most of each night immersed in her fantasies or, lately, crying into the sheets balled up in her hands). Pon Man seems relieved at the relative quiet and has not said anything about the change in her behaviour, likely afraid that any word will disturb the thin, fragile peace. She is glad for his silence.
Another day, Siu Sang heats up some leftovers for dinner when Shew Lin is late coming home from the dentist.
She visits Susie in the afternoons after her shift at the
sausage factory. Siu Sang walks briskly down the sidewalk with the stroller, thirty minutes there and thirty minutes back. Susie teaches her cooking shortcuts, how to knit and read a pattern, the right way to plant beans in a garden. Siu Sang asks her where she learned all these things.
“I don’t know. Some of it from my mother, I guess, and some of it I just learned from watching people or reading things.” Susie shrugs and goes back to beating the egg whites for her basic sponge cake.
Little by little, Shew Lin’s work is whittled away. One task. A second. Soon enough, entire sections of the house are Siu Sang’s to manage—the bathroom, the front deck, the upstairs hallway. Siu Sang can see her mother-in-law’s confusion: Should she be happy, afraid, suspicious?
I’ve got her off-balance,
Siu Sang thinks.
It won’t be long now.
The pain is bad. It’s not the pain of a paper cut or a sprained ankle, or even of a cramp from swimming just after you eat. It’s a deep, inner pain, the pain you think of when someone says,
My guts are twisted.
If you could close your eyes and forget the dimensions of your body, it feels like it’s coming from your very core, a hot place miles away from the surface, where only the deepest pain is felt. It’s almost good.
I look over at my bedroom door, where I’ve stuffed old sweaters in the crack by the floor. I put my hand over his mouth, hoping that my mother won’t hear us in her room down the hall.
In the dark, he moves like a white eel in deep water—fluidly, easily, with a faint, electric glow My body disappears in the dim and he is alone, moving around the room in a narcissistic dance, like a restless sleeper. He reflects what little light there is (the red hair burns in the night); I absorb it.
He’s beautiful, and my eyes ache with it. His skin is perfect. His body is tall, broad-shouldered. He is in control of his muscles, the integrated movements of his arms, legs and torso. And the rippling of bad intentions under the surface, somewhere beneath his smooth, cool skin, only makes him sexier. A black light shining behind a white curtain.
My legs ache from being over his shoulders and, from where I’m lying, they look like the legs of a mannequin—stiff, detached, not really human. Everything seems ugly now, and the pain is just pain. I feel like something inside of me has been shaken loose and is rattling around. A lost organ in a hollow body.
His eyes are closed, and he has forgotten, for the moment, that I’m watching him.
When it’s over, I stay in bed while he creeps down the hall to pee. “There’s no mistaking the sound of a man pissing in a quiet house,” he says, “so I hope your mother is still asleep.” He lets himself out, and I can hear his car start and then drive away. I wait until I can no longer hear it before I close my eyes. If I can’t see anything, then perhaps I’ll forget that I even have a body.
My sleep is shallow, and I feel thick, like I’m stuck, trying to run through mud. I open my eyes slowly, feeling sick with bad sleep but not wanting to wake up either. Through the window, a faint light. Five in the morning. Dawn.
I breathe in; his smell (beer, hair gel, acid sweat) sits heavy in my room even now, four hours later. I get up to pee, feeling that there’s something I need to be rid of. I stand up for a second, sway and fall down. My knees hit the floor and I wince. I put my hands on the bed to lift myself up again, and I feel something wet,
a little colder than lukewarm, and thick. I look, and there’s blood, a pool of it in the middle of the mattress, streaks of it on the quilt, drops of it on floor.
Whose blood is that?
It’s coming from me, and it’s still coming, inevitable and steady. The blood on my thighs is still warm, and I put my hands between my legs to try to stop it or hold it in. It comes out anyway, through my fingers, hot. I stand up again, and my feet slide on the slick puddle I’ve left on the floor. Something twists inside me and I start to fall again. I steady myself on the dresser. I leave a red handprint that starts to drip as I walk down the hall to the bathroom.
Water
, I think,
all I need is a little water
. The bathroom is mercifully cool.
“Mom?” I call out. “I need you.”

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