Bad Fruit, page 2
I know exactly who to be when Mama gets like this. Fights with Daddy are rare—this one about the poems is as serious as it gets—but Mama fighting is not. She loves to fight, she gets paid to fight, she fights with Julia all the time. I thought it would stop when Julia left for university, but Mama is still paying her rent and tuition fees and likes to wield it over her. With my brother, Jacob, it’s different. They don’t fight because he lets her say what she wants, she calls him every day to “catch up,” otherwise known as berating him for every instance in his day where he’s failed, every opportunity he’s squandered.
I’m putting on my makeup when I hear the attic stairs, then a knock—Daddy? I swallow my surprise; he hasn’t been to the attic in years. The garden has long been abandoned to him but inside the house, his territory measures a half-meter radius around his easy chair where he sleeps, eats, reads, walled off from the rest of the living room by waist-high columns of the Journal of Forensic Sciences and The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. Those won’t survive the next few days. Incursions have already been made: the scattered journals I saw yesterday, rubble from Mama’s shelling, her evening strikes.
“Hi.” Threads from the bottom of his brown gardening trousers trail over his socks, and his hands flutter around him as if they’re lost. “Listen, Lily, I’m sorry about all of that. I mean yesterday.”
“For the poems?”
He nods.
I shrug. Mama knows about the poems, but she doesn’t know about the porn. If she’d kept tabs on Daddy’s little collection, she could have chronicled his obsession in pixelated print. It was always Asian—he was faithful to Mama like that, but five years ago, the images shifted from plump women with blooming pubic hair to thinner, shaved twenty-year-olds, their vaginas prized open like oysters. Then, one month ago, a new image appeared in the wipe-downable plastic wallet of Daddy’s ring binder. A photo of Francie in a green bikini, my two-year-old nephews eliminated into cutouts.
“And for the fight with your mother,” he adds quickly.
This is interesting. Daddy has never acknowledged that there’s anything wrong between him and Mama. For a second, I consider reaching across the Mama between us and talking to him, just to feel what it would be like to be on another side, for there to be another side. I would say I understand. I would tell him to leave her. But Mama’s timing is impeccable. Water gurgles in the pipes beneath us. Daddy blinks. I shake my head. It’s too late for new allegiances, and he is too fledgling an ally.
“Lily, I—” he starts.
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Lily—”
“I’ll see you downstairs.”
“I wanted to say—”
“—I don’t want to talk to you about this, Daddy. Not without Mama.” It comes out a hiss.
His face crumples in on itself. For a moment, I think he might cry.
I change tack and play nice. “It’s just that you haven’t got long. You’ve got half an hour at most before she starts again.”
His eyes flick from the tube of foundation to my bare face and then he looks away, ashamed, as if he’s seen me without clothes on. I dig my nails into my palms. What? I want to ask. You know about this. He squints at me as if to locate the daughter he wants in the daughter I am, but we both know she’s not there. I turn my back to him and put on my Mama-face.
* * *
THE ORIENTAL SUPERMARKET in Greenwich looks, from the outside, like a dodgy used-car outfit. Set in the middle of a concrete car park, it’s surrounded by a high metal fence strung with spikes that, instead of guarding secondhand cars, protects lines of sticky-wheeled trolleys and delivery lorries emblazoned in lucky calligraphy red. The only sign that it’s Asian are the two giant golden cats flanking the sliding doors, their paws mechanically beckoning us in. We step into the supermarket and are blasted by a wave of air-conditioning—freezing, stale, smelling like dried goods. Mama, hypersensitive to temperature changes, zips up her pink hoodie.
We’re shopping for food for my eighteenth birthday dinner. Mama likes to cook at least one Asian dish for our birthdays, although I don’t let her do it alone; she’s actually a pretty bad cook. We each have our theories about the birthday cooking. Jacob says it’s the one day of the year Mama shows she loves us. Julia says it’s to torture us. I don’t think it’s about us at all. Birthdays are an opportunity for Mama to prove she’s a perfect Asian mother, despite her utter failure to keep house any other day of the year.
The timing, however, is dangerous. The dinner will be less about how great Mama is, and more about the poems. She’s already told me she’s going to find out “if that little whore’s been plotting against me. Who knew what.”
I told Julia about Daddy and Francie over two months ago. It was the change in evening sounds that alerted me—the tapping of keys from Daddy’s laptop instead of the flick of pages. I braced myself, hacking into his account, prepared for a dating website, even an escort agency, but not for “top 100 poems,” “top 100 love poems,” “poems about love and passion,” “100 favourite love poems of Britain.” It took two minutes to determine he’d sent the poems to Francie, another five to convene Julia on a video call. The decision to do nothing was unanimous. We comforted ourselves with conflicting platitudes—it’s nothing, it’ll burn out—never daring to consider the fallout if Jacob found out, if Mama did. Who knew what? We’ve both known. We’re both guilty.
Daddy insisted on driving us to the supermarket despite Mama’s protests. “For Lily. Let’s go together for her.” I tried to ward him off, but he refused to meet my eyes, climbing into the car and turning on the ignition before Mama and I were out of the front door. His new play is to act as if everything is back to normal, better even, as if after an evening of Mama’s wrath, he’s learned to be a considerate husband, a loving father. He’s the same in the supermarket, nodding to the K-pop blasting through the loudspeakers, lagging behind us to consider this jar or that packet, brazenly putting items in the trolley. Every time Mama hears an item clang against the trolley bars, she clamps her teeth together.
She’s chosen to make pineapple tarts for my birthday, but she isn’t shopping for ingredients. She drifts through the supermarket, landing on anything that takes her fancy—an enormous bunch of rambutans, a tin of white rabbit candies, frozen pork buns. In the snack aisle, she goes wild, throwing in Japanese rice crackers, sheets of roasted seaweed, mini fried prawn rolls. The dried squid is a new low, sheaves of desiccated orange rolled into tight cylinders and heavily sugared. Mama rips open a packet with her teeth and pops three into her mouth. The smell of the sweet fish mingled with her crunching turns my stomach. I ask if I should fetch the ingredients for the tarts. She nods. The aisles are suddenly broad and open, invitations to elsewhere. I check my watch to make sure I’m not away for too long; I could get lost in this kind of freedom. I wonder how much time I have.
Turns out, one minute and thirty-two seconds. A scream peals through the supermarket. My rucksack slams into my back as I run toward it. Mama and Daddy haven’t moved from the snack aisle but, in less than two minutes, there are already marked differences: the aisle is two deep with open-mouthed shoppers; the spine of a Kit Kat chocolate multipack is scrunched under the front wheel of the trolley; black bean sauce glugs from the shell of a jar. Mama stands with her legs hip-width apart, bouncing slightly, holding a glass bottle of cola wrenched from a cardboard four-pack. She rotates her shoulder, extends her arm back, and pitches. The bottle cuts an arc through the air before shattering at Daddy’s feet, the top skittering across the floor, the contents spuming up and drenching his gardening trousers. “You think you can tell me what to do? What to eat? Why don’t you go to your whore? Take your shopping with you!”
A shop assistant approaches Mama, pleading for her in Mandarin to stop. Mama rounds on her. “You know what he’s doing? He’s masturbating over his daughter-in-law. My son’s ex-wife!” The shop assistant confesses that she doesn’t speak English, so Mama sums up my father’s transgressions in one, unmistakable phrase. “Hum sup gui, horny devil!” For effect, she grabs a tin of tomatoes from the trolley and jerks her hips backward and forward over it. She is enjoying the supplicative hands of the shop assistant, the appalled stares of onlookers, until a click distracts her from her canned phallus—some jackass has taken a photo. Mama blinks. This is my moment.
“Mama!’ I shout to shock her. I wait until her gaze turns from Daddy to me, and then I launch myself at her, hugging her tightly, one arm flung around her middle, the other across her back. She drops the tin of tomatoes. Her heart thunders against my ribs, a pair with my own, both storming in their separate cages and then quieting together, but I don’t let her go. I turn to look back at Daddy, clutching the shelf. “Go. Don’t take the car.” He nods, and then he’s gone. The crowd, more interested in displays of insanity than its management, dissipates with him.
“He tried to stop me,” she says, her lower lip trembling, “from eating before the tills.”
“He shouldn’t have done that, Mama.”
“I was hungry. I was going to pay for it.”
“That’s fine, Mama.”
“As if he’s better than me. He’s not! He’s not!” She shovels strands of damp hair away from her face.
“No, Mama. He’s not. You can eat whatever you want.” Her body is slack against mine, so I release her, but her breath is still ragged. “What would make you feel better? More squid? A cracker?’ I open a packet of rice crackers and hold up a caramel-colored circle so the glaze catches the strip light—a cheap trick but it works. She crams it into her mouth. The slab of her arm judders. I’m responsible for those arms, for the roll that overhangs her leggings, for the thickened underside of her neck. I imagine all the food and drink I’ve plied her with lined up in front of me—trollies of snacks, barrels of spoilt juice—and I know I’m a bad person, that there is something coiled and rotten in me, because I don’t regret a single cracker. I would buy this peace over and over.
Her focus shifts to me after five crackers, eyes roving to my hands. “What happened to the ingredients for the tarts?”
Careful now, careful. I didn’t get any ingredients; I didn’t even pick up a basket. I just stared at the baking products until I heard Mama. I put on my innocent/stupid face. “I dropped them when I came for you. When I heard you scream.”
“You came for me?”
“I came for you, Mama. I’ll always come for you.”
The tears come then and I’m thankful, she’s much more manageable sad. I hold her in my arms. When we come apart, she touches the side of my arm. “You’re freezing. This supermarket is always so cold. Wear this.” She pulls the hoodie off the trolley seat and opens it over my shoulders, like a cloak. It smells like her, masculine scents of leather, musk, and sandalwood. I bury my nose into the shoulder. Mama used to wear this beautiful navy coat with a shearling lining in the winter; sometimes, she’d open it and let me into the fur.
“What about you?” I ask. “You’ll be cold.”
She slips her arm into mine. “You’re my daughter. There’s no question.”
I sink into Mama’s hood as we walk to the till. She bought the hoodie from a yoga boutique in the village, pretending to the shop assistant she’d started classes, asking for tips. I nodded along even though it was one of her pointless lies—she’s never exercised in her life. The only time I’ve seen Mama engaged in any kind of sport was today when she took aim at my father. Holding that bottle of cola, she had the absolute focus of an athlete with a discus, a shot put. A javelin.
* * *
AUTUMN TERM AT Oxford University doesn’t start until the beginning of October, eight weeks away. Eight weeks of apologizing to store managers for fights I didn’t start, of avoiding the pitying stares of shop assistants, of enduring car journeys like this one, Mama’s drama purring above the sound of the engine. I close my eyes and imagine myself crossing at the lights in front of us, glancing through the windshield at a Chinese woman reclipping her hair and a girl pressing her fingers to her lips. They are no one to me. No one but strangers.
In the kitchen, Mama starts mixing the ingredients for pineapple tarts before I can measure them out, hacking chunks of butter, pouring in flour and icing sugar. Raw egg slides down the outside of the mixing bowl and pools on the counter. Mama slops it back and takes up the whisk. “When I was a little girl, I didn’t use electric mixers or cookie cutters. There was no premade jam.” She catches me checking the recipe on my phone and snatches it away. “I knew the recipe by heart. I made the jam myself. It showed you were from a good family. My father said the matchmaker was outside listening for the sounds of cooking in the kitchen—chopping, pounding spices, gossip. He said if I didn’t learn to cook, I would never find a good husband.” She inhales. “Tell me, was he right?”
“Why don’t we pretend to be real nyonyas, Peranakan girls?” Playing nyonyas is one of Mama’s favorite games. She’s Chinese Peranakan, an ethnic group originating from the rumbles of Chinese traders and indigenous Malays, with its own distinctive creole, ceramics, and food. Mama’s frittered away whole weekends telling me stories from her childhood while we recreate elaborate Peranakan desserts—kueh lapis, tu tu kueh, sugee butter cookies. Even these pineapple tarts can kill hours. Without cookie cutters, each flower and dough lattice needs to be individually shaped, trebling the preparation time. Time she isn’t at Daddy’s throat. “We don’t need cookie cutters,” I say brightly. “We can do it all ourselves.”
“Takes too long. If we were going to do it properly, we should have started days ago.” She throws herself into a chair after kneading the dough and massages her palms.
I climb onto the kitchen counter to get the box of cookie cutters. On top of the cabinets is Mama’s tingkat collection—rows of jewel-bright tiffin carriers, the tiers fastened together with catches on either side of the handles. Most have four layers—the top for curry or sauce, the bottom for rice, the middle for vegetables and meat. Mama buys them for hundreds of pounds from Singaporean antique dealers every year, preferring the ones with positive affirmations, slamat pakkey, happy using, slamat angkat, happy carrying, slamat makan, happy eating.
“Bring that one down, we can put the tarts in it,” Mama says, and I know which one she means. It’s the porcelain tingkat, three tiers with a snowy white background and Delft blue flowers, the handle and catches pure gold. It belonged to my great-grandmother, one of the few things that wasn’t sold after her parents died in the car accident. She says it’s worth thousands.
“Careful!” she gasps as the ceramic lid scrapes across the top layer. The sudden metal in her voice startles me; I flinch.
She snatches the tingkat from me before my feet are on the floor, hugging it to her chest before separating the layers. The faraway look in her eyes reminds me to deploy a familiar tactic. She’s lost in some memory of her emerald shophouse, her wealthy family. If I can keep her there, we might be able to make it through this afternoon without mentioning Daddy once. “What was it like cooking in your kitchen? I bet it wasn’t like ours. I remember when we went to see your emerald house, it was beautiful.”
Mama runs the cloth along the handle of the tingkat and smiles. “In my house, the kitchen was just beyond the courtyard. It wasn’t closed between four walls like this,” and even at seventeen, I’m caught up in her alchemy again, her strange power to vanish the red metro tiles and black stools and to conjure up something else. “It was open on one side, straight onto the skywell. In monsoon season, the skywell held the rain and cooled the house, but in the dry season, the jeweler would set up his trestle table in the courtyard and show us what he could make.”
I want to shut my eyes and lie down, but I force myself to focus. This landscape, devastatingly lavish, is riddled with mines—how loving my grandfather was compared to Daddy, how wealthy her family was compared to ours. I sprinkle more flour onto the rolling pin and keep her focused. “What was the kitchen like?’
“Much nicer than the one in the blue house.” We visit the emerald house in Singapore every year. We can’t look inside, it’s privately owned, but we always visit the other Peranakan shophouse painted ultramarine that’s open to the public. “Ours had many more things. Meat safes hanging from hooks to keep meat fresh, lesong batu, mortar and pestle for pounding belachan, shrimp paste, batu boh, granite mills to grind rice into rice flour. We even had an ice-cream maker.” She inspects her work against the light.
“An ice-cream maker?” Mama hasn’t mentioned she had an ice-cream maker before. “How did it work?”
She glances up from the tingkat. “Why haven’t you made any flowers?”
I push a cookie cutter into the dough but when I pop out a flower, the petals crumble—something’s wrong with Mama’s recipe. I want to add another egg but her eyes track me. I cobble the pieces together and keep her talking. “Tell me about the tingkats.”
Mama starts drying the layers. “My grandmother’s collection. She had a whole cabinet full, many more porcelain ones like this one.” She pauses and takes off her glasses. “I wish I’d kept more of them, not sold so many. I’m always looking for those tingkats. What if I see them and don’t recognize them?”
I brush the flour off my hands and put an arm around her. “You will. You can’t feel guilty about selling them. You had no choice; you were all alone.” Mama was my age when her family was in a car accident. She broke her leg. Her parents died.
“I still feel alone.”
At work, they call her “The Pink Bitch,” because she’s impossible, combative, a calculating careerist; she’s exactly the same at home. But rarely, perhaps only with me, she cracks open and someone very different peers through: an aging woman on the edge of self-sabotage, waiting for someone to pull her back. And I do. I take her hand. “You’re not alone. You’ve got me.”
“I’m not a traditional nyonya. I didn’t do what my father wanted me to do. I should’ve married a man who could take care of me, instead of me looking after him. I shouldn’t have spent so much time away from home. Maybe it’s my fault, what your father did—”
