Miss Seetoh in the World (5 page)

Mrs Tan, without the familiar bright smile
of Miss Seetoh, was almost unrecognisable. Then as soon as she stepped into her
classroom and started the day’s lessons, the smile was magically restored. If
there were teachers who dragged themselves to school every morning, like poor
Mrs Naidu of the endless headaches and Tiger Balm, Mrs Bernard Tan positively
danced into it, like fluttering butterfly out of confining cocoon. What did it
say of her married life that she escaped it every morning with such undisguised
joy?

The most avid whispers were reserved for the
widow’s immediate dispensation with every sign of mourning and bereavement.

‘What bereavement?’ said Miss Teresa Pang,
whose close observation of her rival’s strange behaviour was being well
rewarded. ‘A red blouse. Screaming chilli-red. And yesterday a bright pink one
that I’ve never seen before. A whole new wardrobe. A subtle re-arrangement of
that ponytail. And the wedding ring gone from her finger from the first day.
Advertising her new status, or what?’

Mrs Khaw, the domestic science teacher,
whispered back, ‘She was seen being dropped at Robinson’s by a guy in a
Mercedes, only a week after the funeral.’

Mrs Khaw, like many married women, lived in
mortal fear of her husband falling victim to the special predatory skills of
newly divorced or widowed women, and was herself the target of much racy
gossip: she employed only certifiably ugly or virtuous maids, and even then,
made sure that her husband, of the incessant roving eye and hand, was never alone
with them in the house. When he was abroad on business, she called him at his
hotel room during those hours she knew him to be out to test his fidelity. For
a friend had told her about a cousin’s innocent call to her husband’s hotel
room in Tokyo that was picked up by a woman with a sleepy voice.

The rumours affected Miss Seetoh not at all,
but the guilt did, guilt of the kind that disturbed her to the innermost depths
of her being, because it had broken the most fundamental laws of human decency:
she had rejoiced over the death not only of another human being, but one whom
she was bound by tradition’s strongest sanctions to honour and respect. A wife
was happy because her husband was dead. The guilt was the greater for the joy
being so soon, so real and persistent. It was an unthinkable obscenity, yet to
deny it would be intolerable falsehood. Till death do us part. It was bad
enough if the widow bounced back to her normal routines too quickly. She had
heard of women going back to work the day after the funeral, even remarrying
within a year.

A sudden frightening thought had occurred to
reinforce the guilt, as she sat quietly reading a novel in her bedroom, in a
first delicious taste of solitude: could husbands be wished to death? Could
despairing wives’ secret wishes, if they were strong enough, cast a spell and
induce an accident, a terminal cancer? Miss Seetoh had once watched a TV
documentary about a certain aboriginal tribe in Australia; their leader met his
death several hours after an enemy from a rival tribe ceremonially lifted his
face to the sky in pouring rain and sang out a curse. Heaven forbid! Had her
wish, secret though it was, resisted though it was all the way with every
decent fibre in her body, been such a curse? Miss Seetoh, who from childhood
would go out of her way to pick up wounded birds and kittens and nurse them
back to health, was so horrified by the thought that her hand went limp and the
book dropped to the floor.

The thought – superstitious nonsense though
it was – would not go away. This time it induced a slight shuddering which Miss
Seetoh, sitting at the staffroom table ostensibly going over the lesson notes
for the following day, hoped no one noticed. She was proud of her capacity for
rational thinking, developed over years of serious reading and reflection,
against the myth-sodden worlds of her upbringing, first of her
ancestor-worshipping grandmother Por Por with its pantheon of frightful temple
gods and goddesses, and then of her fervidly Christian convert mother, with its
equally bewildering collection of intercessory saints, angels and martyrs. For
a while she shuttled between two worlds in conflict, between church holy water
and temple-blessed fire, between a gentle god who died to save mankind and a
lightning god who directed his bolts against those guilty of filial impiety.
Torn between her grandmother and mother, she was saved only by Por Por’s
dementia which ended the tussle for her soul between the Tua Peh Kong Temple
and the Church of Eternal Mercy.

It alarmed her that in the sanity of
adulthood, her sound mind could be invaded by the most outrageous childhood
superstitions. The fear persisted with another example, much closer to home.
She remembered an aunt from Malaysia telling her about a relative who visited a
cemetery in the darkest of nights to conjure up the ghost of an ancestor to
take revenge on her husband and his family for throwing her out into the
street. The husband contracted some fearsome disease and died soon after.

Miss Seetoh vigorously rubbed the sides of
her forehead to dispel a headache that always came with bad thoughts, throbbing
with vicious intensity. Her memory with its ready store of recollected images,
like her imagination with its created ones, came to her rescue. A nun had
taught her as a child to quickly picture a certain scene in times of temptation
– Good Thoughts wearing white angelic halos fighting Bad Thoughts wearing black
horns, and driving them screaming back to hell. The nun had meant the sinful
images of sex that young girls were often tempted with; for Miss Seetoh, the
one thing to be feared was fear, not sex.

The superstitious dread was soon gone but
the guilt of secret exultation, not so easily vanquished, returned again and
again. ‘I’m free! I’m free!’ continued the inward cry, and she continued to
beat it down as a shameful truth that must ever be hidden from sight. ‘If I
ever became a writer,’ she thought, ‘I could write at length about a woman’s
journey of guilt.’ Women had an enormous capacity for hate and revenge, also
for triumph and exultation, and most of all, guilt. Did it have to do with her
biology that wracked her body with the anxieties of child-bearing and
child-nurturing, or her culture that instilled in her, from the start, the
imperative of duty to everyone but herself?

The most frightening image, from a Chinese
comic strip that someone had given her as a child, was of a pregnant woman who
had gone mad with rage as she roamed the land, looking for her faithless lover,
finally killing her newborn and dying in a frenzy of guilt and sorrow.

She had a close childhood friend named Emily
who often called her on the phone to sob out the latest cruelty of a callous,
philandering husband. One day Emily invited her for lunch, for the sole purpose
of revealing yet another of the cruelties: secretly going through her husband’s
briefcase, she had discovered the receipt for a very expensive diamond pendant
from a shop in Hong Kong. In the ten years of their marriage, she said, the
angry tears filling her eyes, he had never bought her even the tiniest piece of
jewellery. Moreover, she suspected him of siphoning away a large part of the
profits from the sale of some jointly-owned shares in the stock market. As
divorce became the most likely solution to end her misery, she mobilised the
support of lawyer and accountant friends who could advise her on how to get the
best out of a financial settlement, how to pre-empt possible cunning ploys by
her husband and best of all, how to come up with some of her own.

Miss Seetoh’s help was co-opted for an
intricate scheme of pre-emption she hardly understood but sympathetically
cooperated in. She cheerfully put her signature as witness in an elaborately
worded legal document, to prevent the devious husband from laying his hands on
a joint property. Her adopted brother Heng, ever savvy about money matters, was
aghast. ‘You stood guarantor for something involving hundreds of thousands of
dollars? You could lose everything, you know, including what is not yours!’ He
was referring to the four-room flat owned by their mother which would go to
both of them upon her death.

Money, money, money – it became the
irreducible, rock-bottom reality, the ultimate bargaining chip of husbands and
wives, parents and children, siblings, best friends. There were regular reports
in the newspapers of family members suing each other over property, the
increasing number of cases correlating perfectly with the rise in property
prices. ‘You want to know what makes a woman stay in a marriage?’ said a
friend, and she demonstrated with the expert rubbing of middle finger and thumb
against each other, the universal language of the miser, the usurer, the
profiteer. Miss Seetoh thought sadly, if only money were the real problem in
her marriage.

Over steaming beef noodles in the open air
café, Emily launched the bitterest tirade yet against her husband who she now
suspected of having set up an apartment in London for his mistress, a former
airline stewardess who, Emily had found out, was formerly the mistress of a
Brunei oil tycoon. Suddenly she paused, her chopsticks suspended in her hands,
to listen to the drone of a plane overhead. She listened intently for some
seconds and said slowly, ‘If that’s his plane on the way to London to visit his
mistress, here’s a wish: may it crash this instant!’ Miss Seetoh stared in
horror at the look of grim relish on the tear-stained face already raised to
witness the fiery plunge from the sky.

And from that moment her guilt was assuaged:
never had any wish to be free of her husband included, or could ever include,
the wish for his death. Not even injury of any kind. It was just a general wish
to be free of her marriage, as understandable as a child’s wish to be free of
over-strict parents, a student’s wish to quickly graduate to the next level and
be free of an unreasonable teacher. That terrible image of the aboriginal
chief’s curse in the rain, of the woman conjuring help from a ghost in a
cemetery, would never disturb her again.

‘Maria, what are you doing?’ cried her
mother in alarm. It was odd that her mother, witnessing a clear return of good
spirits so soon after her husband’s death, should worry about her each time she
locked herself in her room. ‘Maria, I smell smoke! Open the door at once!’

It was only the burning smell of Maggie’s
tantalising band of paper, now curled around the rim of a basin. Maria Seetoh
watched with a little frisson of wonder as the small flame crept through the
first half of the band, leaving a tiny pile of black ashes, and then most
unaccountably fizzled to a halt at the second, leaving it intact and whole,
surely a foretaste of her new life.

Neither marital curse nor vengeance, thank
goodness, had been part of their world; it was too civilised to permit even the
raised voice, the crude invective. The husband’s clenched fist, the wife’s
desperate attempts to avoid it and hide her bruised eyes behind dark sunglasses
the next day – these would have been both alien and alienating to the world
they inhabited. They were the perfect couple, he the epitome of gentlemanly
courteousness and gallantry, and she of wifely gentleness and docility. They
were said to be inseparable, the ultimate tribute to marital commitment.

The word had a bitter flavour for her. For
he expected her to be with him everywhere he went; her physical presence by his
side was for him a solid reminder of his control, for her of her subjugation.
He liked her to hold his arm or hand tightly, to reinforce the reminder. Her
husband had obeyed, with perfect literalness, holy matrimony’s call to continue
to be joined in one flesh beyond the marital bed. If she got her artistic
student to do a cartoon of them, it would probably have the dark humour of
painfully conjoined twins. Bondage, not bonding. Marriage, mirage.

As he waved to this or that friend in
greeting, as he nodded to this or that fellow churchgoer in Christian
solidarity, he exuded husbandly pride. A mere inch taller than herself, he
towered with proprietorial satisfaction. If I wrote a book of short stories
about married couples, she thought, there would be several on the Owning
Husband. In one, the Owning Husband itemised his ownership: these beautiful
eyes are to look at me only, these delicate hands are to do my bidding only,
these beautiful breasts... In another, the Owning Husband staked his ownership
in a roundabout way: see these beautiful jewels that belong to my wife? Well,
the diamond earrings were a reward for her obedience, the jade pendant for
her...

There would be at least one story about the
Trophy Wife. The Trophy Wife cried out, ‘Hey, I’m alive, proud warts and all.
I’m not to be burnished and polished to perfection!’ The Trophy Wife cast
gracious smiles all round but looked surreptitiously at her watch to see how
soon each loathed outing by her husband’s side would end, and she could retire,
even if for a short while, to her private world.

He invaded it relentlessly. ‘Maria, where
are you?’

He made the maid look for her. He would pick
up one book after another, from her private store, and read out the titles
slowly and deliberately, making a show of mispronouncing the polysyllabic
words. Pe-dah-go-jeee, nooro-psycho-lor-jeee, fun-day-mental phi-lor-so-pheee.
Each book, taking time away from him, became an adversary. He knew about her
secret longing to return to the university, to do a postgraduate course.
Intellectual superiority was wifely treason. ‘Just what are you trying to
prove?’ She hated the question, loaded with suppressed hostility, unrelieved by
the slightest sense of teasing fun, as much as she hated his response when she
tried to tell him what each of the books was about: ‘So what do you hope to
accomplish with these earth-shaking, world-shattering ideas?’
Either by nature or a sedulously cultivated seriousness, he was incapable of
humour, except the biting, cynical kind.