Moth Stories, page 17
“Yah, yah, go, go.” A plump hand reached for Agnes’s arm. Susie leaned closer and her voice dropped. “Remember girl. Choose well.” Susie’s brow lowered. “This fate thing-huh. I used to think everything is fate.” She wagged a manicured finger. “But it is not. Choose well. That’s what it is. Don’t trust too much, you young girls!” She gently patted Agnes’s cheek. “Ok, you late, bye, don’t forget us when you become even more famous!”
“Bye Auntie Susie,” said Agnes, conscious of a racing heart and shallowness of breath. She had 10 minutes. Her heels clattered down the corridor and caused Mrs. Choon, sitting by her grille gate, to look up, startled.
* * *
An anger throbbed in Agnes as she negotiated the stairs carefully, imperilled by her heels.
Susie had been their neighbour since their first arrival thirteen years earlier, a mother and her seven-year-old. Chatty, curious and gregarious, Susie regarded the shared fact of single motherhood as indicating some bond between herself and Agnes’s mother. Susie had had her widow’s grief but in a different form. Her husband had found another woman and left her with a son on whom she doted and quarrelled with. Ah Weng was her consolation and a reminder of a rash time. Her efforts to guide him away from the example of his father only made him more rebellious. Foiled of its natural and proper outlet, she adopted her neighbours and their children as an extension of her scattered family, sharing her food, her attention, her advice. Mrs. Kumar’s Arvin and Ravi, with Agnes, when little, were often the happy recipients of the sweets she bought from the shop next to her beauty parlour. Agnes, with her pigtails and a mother whose housekeeping ways were, at best, lackadaisical, brought out a protectiveness in Susie. This expressed itself in a vicarious maternal interest in the little girl, a bond that bridged the fact that Agnes’s mother, Sioh Cheng, and Susie Ho would have nothing in common, not even as middle-aged women and single mothers. This gulf was considerable.
Susie poured her considerable energies into her beauty parlour and the residue into her home with a discipline that was almost military. Her potted plants were as well-tended as her yorkie, and neither of them would have come close to the care Ah Weng would have received had he stuck around. Clearly there was a sense of self-esteem: cooking aromas would emanate from her kitchen, whether Ah Weng came home or not. Susie was never without a hair out of place, some vestige of the powder and lipstick that betokened personal standards, even on weekends. Agnes’s mother did not have a job and stayed home all the time, her hair now grey and unkempt, the TV on all day, whatever passed for housekeeping fitfully and carelessly performed. There was some source of income, it was clear, perhaps modest, but sufficient to exempt Sioh Cheng from the cares that Susie bore. But Sioh Cheng’s whole attitude made Susie itch to descend on her flat with detergent and brush and a deadly resolve, and to drag her to the parlour for free, just to tidy up an appearance grown slovenly.
Susie’s Ah Weng was not much older than Agnes but was already giving her grief, skipping school and hanging out with louts and occasionally coming home in a state that caused eruptions with his mother. Susie would complain about him, but would take umbrage if anyone sympathised with her. Susie’s sharp eyes sized up her neighbour’s daughter and saw what was to come. The little girl would one day outgrow all of this.
When Agnes won a place at the university, Susie realised how fatuous her secret hopes had been. Ah Weng by now had been kicked out of school and run off to become a seaman. Susie sighed inwardly. She had been foolish to think of possibilities. Susie had gone from pressing a bun, a fruit into Agnes’s hand, to watching her girl’s hips fill and her blouses stretch into curves. Her interest and affection in Agnes were abiding and genuine, as also, recently, a concern, especially after Agnes’s face began appearing on magazines for advertisements (face creams, slimming treatments, diet suppliments). Susie’s shrewdness sized it all up. A girl on a path like this with a mother like that would need more. And, when Agnes grew into uncharacteristic mannerisms and habits of dress so alien from that of the young girl she once was, especially after this modelling business began, Susie’s apprehension came to manifest itself in an unabashed disquietude that was impossible for her to withhold, not even her own philosophy of life.
It was Susie’s theory that a girl ought to make best use of her youth, which meant her looks. It was a philosophy springing as much from the personal inclination which had led Susie to her chosen métier, as from her professional experience, which allowed her a bird’s eye view. The kept, the desperate, the hopeful, they all fell into Susie’s chairs with gratitude and relief, and poured their hearts out as Susie snipped and curled and dribbled. From these endless sessions Susie confirmed her own experience and distilled an unshakeable theory: that a woman owed it to herself to choose a good man. Susie did not see the irony of such a belief in the light of her own situation—deserted and left to being a single parent. In fact for Susie, her misfortunes proved her theory: she had chosen poorly and had therefore to pay the price. She had gone from home to home, perming and cutting ladies’ hair, and eventually by sheer resolution, thrift and doggedness, acquired a following sufficient to sustain a shophouse unit on a lease, where she ministered to the estate’s women.
Her concern, in regard to Agnes, was in inverse ratio to her contact with her son. Ah Weng was now a seaman, jobbing wherever he could; his shore leave was a mixture of bliss and frustration for Susie as she cooked his favourite food for him and fought with him over his gambling, his drinking, his women. The stretches between his returns were getting longer and longer. Susie now did not care to ask where he went to or what he did anymore. But an innate generosity in her allowed her pride in Agnes’s accomplishments to bloom even as she sighed over and regretted her own Ah Weng. Agnes, whom she had seen progress from sweet-faced child to gawky teenager to young womanhood became the repository of her frustrated maternal devotion.
And, recently a certain garrulous urgency had crept into Susie’s tone.
Her keen worldliness noted the changes. An-An had shed all vestige of the ungainly teenager, with its awkwardness and uncertainty, and achieved the ultimate transformation into one of those women one read of in magazines, photographed at society parties, a fact confirmed by her appearance tonight. But to Suzie’s sharp-eyed observation, something else had come along with these slick changes: an air of knowing, a certain defensive edge to her speech, a guardedness, where once the girl had been open and confiding. Susie feared that Agnes would by some foolishness place herself beyond any chances she might otherwise have had.
And perhaps something of this had slipped out in Susie’s manner tonight, in her advice, in the wariness she was urging. Agnes, clattering across the void deck, felt her cheeks burn. An inflexion in Susie’s tone gave her a sense that Susie’s compliments were but the veil over her true opinions.
For Agnes picked something else up in the older woman’s wide, searching gaze—a tinge of irony that turned her sophistication faux and unwholesome. Tonight’s words of wisdom suggested that Susie was drawing conclusions inimical to her.
Perhaps Susie thought her an ingénue, a simpleton.
Agnes breathed sharply at this thought and felt the warmth persist in the back of her neck. Her innate affection for Auntie Susie tussled with something new tonight.
Agnes fumed. Had she not known Susie better she might have suspected her of trying to hint at odious things, and something in Susie’s gaze had made her want to hit back at Susie with an insult. What could Susie possibly know beyond the sad matrons and middle-aged women of their estate? Susie Ho administered advice as though giving a client a shampoo: briskly, energetically, mercilessly, oblivious whether the client wanted it or not.
And how weighty could Susie’s advice be when her chief experience of life consisted in having been an abandoned wife and mother? She, Agnes Yee, was the estate’s celebrity, modelling for face creams, hand wash and vitamins, gazing back at the viewer from the backs of buses and the pages of TV magazines. Would there not have been a dearth of experience acquired along the way?
“Ah An!” called Uncle Soon.
Agnes’s irritation subsided as she found herself obliged to return his greeting. Here on the ground floor the shopkeepers all knew her and were gratifyingly unabashed in their admiration. Uncle Soon pointed to a rack of magazines he had ranged along a metal rack beneath his bottled spices. “Ah Eng says you look very pretty!” Ah Eng his daughter, a plain and plump girl who helped him run his shop, looked up from her arrangement of a new consignment of dried herbs and blushed. She was 39 and would look that way for the rest of her life. Only in her wistful look could there be seen a glimmer of the secret hopes she cherished for herself, and which no torture would get her to admit, since her first glimpse of Agnes a year ago, advertising some long-forgotten brand of facewash. Who would have thought perfectly ordinary looks could be so transformed? She stopped from her tasks, smiled bashfully at Agnes. It was like being in the presence of a celebrity whom you just hoped would notice you. But Agnes just smiled and waved and moved on quickly.
The back gate of the neighbourhood primary school was still some distance away.
* * *
When they had first started seeing each other, Raymond had wanted to fetch her from the bus-stop not two minutes from her block, just in front of Uncle Soon’s shop and Auntie Hiok’s food stall; even then, from that first time, two years ago, an instinct had made her tell him firmly, No.
What would Uncle Soon or Ah Eng say to see a Jaguar drawing to a halt for her?
They would see unpleasant things, ugly things. They would fail to see that she had come into a different world. They could not be faulted, because their own world was so limited. They would feel judged, and envious that she, Ah An, who came from this same place, had the real possibility of better things.
But there it was, the fact, monolithic and unarguable: that you could get out of it. It was a matter of knowing what you wanted.
And seizing the moment.
* * *
For the Agnes who now stood waiting in the shadows for a Jaguar sports car was not the Agnes who bought duck rice and pressed her own dress and manoeuvred in that cramped squat-toilet with a leaking hand-held shower hose. In fact, it was not even model-girl, but another person altogether. Someone who was a stranger to the Sin Tong estate, to its wet-market and the smells of its canal at low tide, the hodgepodge shops, the fumes of the groaning buses—a stranger alike to the workaday world of the Cosmo Modelling Agency, with its deadly and petty rivalries, its striving, its futility. This Agnes now looked with detachment at the sight of a work-bedraggled world lumbering by on buses, yoked to an unremitting succession of days each one as dun as its preceding one. This Agnes knew one truth. That you could be freed from all this.
When had she formulated this? Agnes could not have said. But she knew there was no one here in the Sin Tong Estate in a position to question her goals, much less its methods.
Who would understand? Agnes’s khol-rimmed eyelids flickered. The aqueous light of fluorescent street lamps filtered through the tracery of angsana branches. Laden vehicles groaned past with sardine-compacted forms huddled in their rear, or swaying against each other in drudge-weary masses. At the depot ten minutes away they would alight, some for the estate to the east: some making their way back here, others destined for further buses that would take them onward to the nether regions of the island.
No, thought Agnes, her body tensing each time a reddish blur appeared in the distant view. No one was in a position to understand what she wanted, much less judge her. Certainly not Theresa, waiting on the decision of a man. Certainly not her own mother, imprisoned in her philosophy of an inexorable fate. And certainly not Susie with her well meant but terribly misplaced advice on how one circumvented it. Agnes’s gaze moved restlessly up and down the road. She, Agnes Yee, could not say any one of them knew anything about life.
The bigger life, where you yourself were its master, not a man, not fate, not chance.
She, Agnes, knew what this life was: the life you went out and got for yourself. And she knew better than anyone of them the sensible way to go about it.
* * *
A certain hopelessness permeated Agnes’s relations with her mother, the only family left to her.
Her mother’s people were from Malaysia. The cousins seldom ventured to Singapore now that the old people had gone, one after another. Agnes’s father had died of a heart attack when she was 7. He had brothers and sisters, but relations had turned sour after their parents died and family ties failed to survive the ensuing contretemps as to the apportioning of the family tailoring business.
Even then as a young girl, Agnes could not recall her mother as any other than indolent. This indolence had expanded so completely by now that her parent seldom spoke, unless in regard to her own concerns, which tended to be of a random nature: when was her doctor’s appointment? What boy did her cousin Li Sa marry? Was there bread in the house? Her sustenance comprised the TV, her naps and whatever might be left in the fridge. If there were nothing left she would open a tin of sardines and boil some rice and that would be it. She rarely ventured downstairs, preferring to leave things until Agnes eventually, unable to abide the state of affairs, remedied the want: vegetables from the wet market, a sponge-mop, tea-towels, soap from Uncle Soon’s downstairs. The most her parent exerted herself toward was the retrieving the clothes from the washing machine and hanging them along the poles to dry.
Agnes’s mother had been widowed now 13 years. This fact operated as a confirmation of her fundamental philosophy, which was that you could not fight fate. Fate had decreed that she would be widowed young, and this settled a fatalism in an already passive nature. Even though she daily offered joss-sticks to her late husband’s portrait, he was a figure detached from their lives, watching over them, disinterested and benignant, removed as heavenly presences were. Theirs had been a pragmatic, match-made marriage arranged though distaff kin on both sides. Unspoken was the fact that Ah Sioh, not exactly comely and not exactly bright, would be left on the shelf if nothing were done; as too would Beng Hian amongst his bolts of cloth and machines and chalk, too quiet and solitary to do much than allow the relentless years their way. The marriage was contracted with the usual rites, and Ah Sioh came to Singapore and settled in the tailoring shop that was her husband’s family concern.
The marriage effected a transformation in the way she was perceived in her own family. She became something of a marvel, a figure to be looked up to; she had done well, compared to her sisters, who were dispersed to the farms around Muar, Kuala Kangsar, Ipoh. Their Ah Sioh was “boss-lady” now in the big city. For them the shop with its red lettering “Hong Thye Tailor” proclaimed a huge step up on the social and economic ladder, compared with the sloth and smells and grind of farming, profitable enough, but hard work and hardly glamorous. And then, as proof, there was Ah Sioh herself at the counter, sitting daily before her pack of cards in nominal charge of the two emaciated girls peddling away furiously at the back of the shop, and in the front, her husband, dusty-fingered from tailor’s chalk, fastidious, careful, attending to clients with grave courtesy, taking measurements, doing the books, counting the takings, and writing out receipts. Their little girl, clearly, took after her father.
Agnes’s father’s sudden death of a heart attack did little to alter her mother’s state of inertia. Agnes’s uncles took the bus down for the funeral, and sat with their sister before the lawyers. Not that they had much education but they were industrious, possessed of that steadfast and plodding will of the uneducated who must survive by their wits. It was out of the question that Ah Sioh could run the shop. The place was sold and the proceeds allocated to a two-bedroomed government flat in one of the older estates, and the balance put in fixed deposit. The great blessing was a small space in a warehouse godown that Agnes’s father had the foresight to purchase, which yielded a modest rental, and was now the sole source of a monthly income. There was no reason why, stringently managed, living frugally, they, mother and daughter, would not be able to manage. All this, her brothers explained to Ah Sioh, and received in return her wondering gaze and absent nods. Thus did Agnes and her mother arrive in the Sin Tong estate, and in time, Agnes come to be enrolled in the neighbourhood’s primary school, at whose gates she was to wait to be fetched at a later time in her life.
Agnes’s mother accepted the change as she had accepted everything else: fatalistically, laconically, impassively. She did not concern herself with worrying much over anything else. She had no need to. Her daughter passed through primary school uneventfully, and as a teenager, exceeded her comprehension. The girl was quick, she could see, but also baffled her. She frowned with the effort of trying to understand the occasional piece of paper that Agnes might fish out from her satchel, registering little beyond the fact that it was a reward for something. As Agnes’s girlish ways dispersed, Ah Sioh resigned herself to the inevitable suitor, her simplicity making her transpose her own experience onto the present. It was just a matter of time before a man came along to claim An-An in marriage. She was not so naïve, of course, there were those other ways but they did not apply here, not to a respectable family.
She was only glad that Agnes had made the transition from school to university and now managed the home and her part-time jobs with seemingly few difficulties. There was a bridal salon, she knew; and now some fashion agency of sorts. She was more often out than in; she had acquired a briskness of manner and a sureness of speech, which was sometimes disconcerting. Her An-an was no longer a girl. That much Ah Sioh picked up. A change had taken place. But the inertia that had characterised her married life now ran deep in her marrow and placed it beyond her powers to probe further. It did not occur to her to ask: where are you going, what are you doing. The TV continued unabated; now and then a neighbour, ambling past, might stop at the grille gate, and they might speak of the latest 4-D number draw, a MP’s coming visit to the estate, an event at the nearby community centre. Now and then Ah Sioh raised joss-sticks to her husband’s portrait and thanked him for the gift of her uneventful days, sometimes fervently, sometimes absently.
