Miss Seetoh in the World (6 page)

He found a letter from a publisher politely
declining her request to take a look at her collection of short stories.
Refraining from open ridicule, he again asked, in a measured tone: ‘Just what
are you trying to prove?’ Any attempt at a life outside his wishes was an
intolerable defiance of those wishes.

Explanation or, worse, argument and
protestation, would shatter the already fragile atmosphere, requiring an
incredibly long time and an unbearably huge expenditure of energy to start
picking up the pieces, one by one. There were no small children for whom, for
the sake of a peaceful atmosphere, women readily opted for calm and stoical
submission. She had a girlfriend, an extremely intelligent and perceptive
woman, who stayed silent through her husband’s wild, noisy rantings when drunk
and cold, harsh criticisms when sober, for the sake of their four children, aged
ten to two.

The modern woman’s quandary was more acute
than her mother’s, or her grandmother’s, because being in the ambiguous
transition stage between the oppressions of the past and the uncertain hopes of
the future, she bore the brunt of both.

More than for herself, the peace had to be
maintained for Por Por, her mother and the maid Rosiah, three nervous women in
the house, tiptoeing around his dark moods, looking to her for clues as to what
to do next. They had to be protected from the fear, which, like a creeping,
strangling miasma spread to every corner of the house.

 Sometimes the strategy of silence paid off,
actually eliciting a sheepish kind of guilt from him. Incapable of saying
sorry, he would fidget around her a little, trying to make small talk which she
ignored. The worst possible exercise of reparation was a spree of expensive
dining and purposeless shopping, ending, as soon as they returned home, with a
wild bout of love-making. A man of small mind and large, extravagant gestures
alternating between the coldness of the first and the intensity of the second,
completely bereft of humour’s saving grace, he had, from the very start of
their marriage, shriveled up all her creative energies.

Thankfully, these could be brought back to
life in her classroom. She once read an article in an educational magazine
about overzealous teachers forgetting the real needs of their students; it had
the very captivating title ‘The Geranium on the Window-Sill Died, but Teacher,
You Went Right on Talking!’ The geranium on the window sill of her awful
marriage would do its own watering and never allow itself to shrivel.

There had been a single fearful moment when
that almost happened. When her husband one day said, very casually, about two
years into their marriage, ‘Dear, there’s something maybe we ought to talk
about,’ her own suspicions were sharpened into the quivering alertness of a
small animal poised for fight or flight.

For some time she had known it was coming. I
want you to quit your teaching job. He left the second part of his wish
unuttered. So that you can stay at home and concentrate on being a good wife to
me. There had been a long preamble about how he was expecting a promotion on
the recommendation of
Dr Phang, and they would be able to live on his salary, also about how Dr
Phang’s cousin’s wife who was a bank executive readily gave up her job to have
more time for her husband. Then he delivered the coup de grâce. With your being
so busy at your job, how can you have a baby? Her first reaction was an inward
screaming protest, for to all the oppressions of her marriage would be added
the supreme one of financial dependence, translated into the daily humiliation
of stretching out her hand for money to go shopping for groceries, to pay the
maid, to buy things for her mother and Por Por, to go for the occasional lunch
with her friends.

Without a word, she rushed to the bathroom,
locked the door, stood in front of the mirror, stared at the pale, stricken
face staring back, and then fell into uncontrollable sobbing. It was a kind of
wrenching, wracking misery that she had never experienced before. She was aware
of her husband pacing the floor outside the locked door, of his saying, ‘Come
out, there’s no need for all that.’ Apparently shocked at her reaction, he
never raised the subject again. That night, he made a few attempts to caress
her body which was resolutely turned away from him. She longed to go to the
spare bedroom, but that further act of defiance would create its own storm of
discord which she simply would not have the energy to handle. She had done it
once, not daring to lock the door; he had appeared in the middle of the night,
a dark austere figure in the doorway, and she had got up and returned silently
to their bedroom. In a comfortable, well-appointed apartment that he had
specifically taken out a huge loan to buy for her after marriage, the old
yearning was still there: if only I had a bed of my own, a room of my own, a
house of my own.

She remembered a scene in a movie in which a
weary wife, asked what she liked best about her husband, had replied promptly,
‘His absence.’

The witticism had at the time amused her
greatly, and was readily shared with girlfriends. Later, in the quiet of her
reflections, she saw the serious side of the ontological absurdity as it
applied to her own situation: her husband’s absence from home for a weekend, on
a trip with his boss for a conference in Jakarta, was a reality all its own,
claiming its own existence and presence. In her imagination, the welcome
absence became a solid gift, a magnificent ang pow of unending cash, enclosed
in the brightest of red gift paper, that she could spend as she liked.

On the happiest spending spree in her life,
she returned to the long girlhood walks in the Botanic Gardens, which he never
allowed her to visit unless in his company, read for long hours curled up on
the large king-size bed now all her own, and, best of all, made an appointment
with the reluctant publisher to try to make him change his mind. She made the
phone call for the appointment from Emily’s house, just in case the maid or her
mother let slip the information in her husband’s hearing, and there was the
whole tedious explanation to go through afterwards. The rare joy of the weekend
only emphasised the oppression of the days ahead. I’m not sure I can continue
living like this, she thought miserably. The Catholic woman, enjoined to live
with her husband till death did them part, could be condemned to a death-like
existence till the end of her days.

As a child she had hated the temple visits
that Por Por had forced upon her, and the endless visits with her mother during
the Chinese New Year season to the homes of relatives she had never seen
before, stiff in a ridiculous dress of lace and ruffles that her mother had
made on an old sewing machine, with large pockets to receive the New Year ang
pows which she promptly handed to her mother as soon as they got home, before
Heng, even then already on the look-out for gain, could lay his hands on them.
In a fit of bad temper, she would, halfway down the road, abruptly remove her
hand from Por Por’s or drag her feet along the ground as she walked beside her
mother. Sometimes she sat down resolutely on the ground and refused to get up.
Her mother would jab her forehead with a forefinger screaming, ‘Why are you
like that? Do you want to end up like Por Por?’

Por Por who was born and brought up in China
was the black sheep who was now paying, with her dreadful premature dementia,
for her sins of rebelliousness: there were whispers of her once running away
from home to hide in a temple. In a long line of docile females going back to
the ancestral country, the bad trait had surfaced in one member, skipped a
generation and was now threatening to show itself again. Her mother said, as
she would say many times, ‘Why can’t you be like others? Why are you so
difficult?’ A warm affinity with Por Por would grow with the years.

The reluctance and hatred were multiplied a
hundredfold in the forced visits to his office parties, the lunches given by
his boss, the visits to the hospital for his regular health checks, the Bible
study classes he conducted, where she sat at the back, squirming at his poor
presentation and feeling sorry for him because of the humiliatingly small
attendance of four, then two and finally one. It would be too much of an
ignominy for him to learn from her some of the skills she had honed to
perfection in the classroom. It was a draining, not cleansing pity, and she wanted
to run away and never come back. She had kept alive the girlhood hero of her
imagination: a paragon of strength, intelligence, high-mindedness, courage and
charm, he inspired breathless admiration and respect, never shamefaced pity and
embarrassment.

In a roomful of people, she was aware of her
husband looking around for her, of his suddenly looking very alert whenever he
caught her in conversation with a man. ‘How he loves you,’ laughed one of her
friends at a party. ‘My husband won’t even notice if I go off home on my own
now!’

Love carried its own burden of insecurities.
He had won her in marriage at great cost, and he intended that she should pay
for it.

St Peter’s School with its Christian
strictures should be reassuring even to the most jealous husband, but her many
hours there gave rise to any number of anxieties about what she could be doing
out of his sight.

She had once, in playful banter very early
on in their marriage, told him about her enormous charm, if the students were
right, for Mr Chin, the maths teacher, and Brother Philip, the moral education
teacher, for indeed, she herself was beginning to notice the many excuses each
made to talk to her. In the midst of a chuckle, she realised her mistake. She
stopped, suddenly looking very foolish, as she avoided the eyes now narrowing
in disapproval and the lips tightening in angry silence. With forced
jocularity, she went on to talk about something else. It had been a disastrous
blunder, calling for the greatest care in its repair. She continued chatting
about inconsequential things, she asked if he wanted his favourite Japanese
tea, she made a few desultory inquiries about his revered boss, the
high-achieving Dr Phang, who he once told her with undisguised awe, was being
considered by the Deputy Prime Minister to join the party and run in the next
general elections. Even that subject failed to draw him out of the sullen
silence. She was aware, with a sickening feeling, of her small voice now
reduced to helpless silence against the chill wall of his displeasure. The
silence continued and she made a mental note never to mention any of her male
colleagues at St Peter’s again.

She was looking at herself in the
dressing-table mirror, surveying with a smile the lustrous hair shaken loose
from the ponytail now curled upon her bare shoulders. In a school camping trip
before her marriage, as she sat with colleagues and students around a campfire,
Maggie, always seeking to create diversion, crept up behind her back, and
suddenly removed the clip holding her ponytail, unloosing a mass of hair that
tumbled on to her shoulders in further demonstration of her natural beauty.
Everyone cheered and clapped, including Brother Philip. ‘Please, Miss Seetoh,
leave it like this, you look so-oo sexy!’ cried Maggie, holding the clip out of
her reach. There were some minutes of childish fun as the clip was passed from
hand to hand. It ended in Brother Philip’s, and he returned it to her,
laughing.

Her husband was standing at the doorway and
looking at her. ‘I see you’re changing your hairstyle.’ Just what are you
trying to prove. What is this all about. What is in your mind. You think I am
stupid, don’t you. She hated the questions loaded with the biting sarcasm, born
of the endless suspicions. She had no idea that the small casual reference to
the putative admirers at St Peter’s just a few days ago was rankling so badly.
‘Has it anything to do with that admiring Mr Chin and Brother Philip?’ She made
a mental note never again to refer to any acquaintance so long as it was a
male.

Once she was late home from school by a full
hour. When his calls home went unanswered, he rang the school, and had to call
again because the school clerk said Mrs Tan could not be found.

When he got her at last, he said sternly,
‘Where were you? I called home three times and the school twice.’

She had had an urgent, unscheduled meeting
regarding some national seminar that her students were taking part in, called
at the last minute by Brother Philip who of course she could not mention. ‘Then
you should have called me at the office to let me know,’ he said.

Professing an indifference to literature, he
had saved some of her favourite literary quotations to throw back at her. She
had tried to explain at length the reason for something she had done – something
so trivial she had difficulty remembering it – and he had turned to her and
said with a tight smile, ‘My, my, the lady doth protest too much!’ He had
turned her beloved Bard from tonic to toxic.

Silence remained the best option. I live in
fear of my husband’s daily displeasure, she thought miserably. What sort of
life is this? I am truly dying. That night he made love to her as usual,
briefly and sullenly, and without a word. Then he turned his back towards her
and remained in that position through the night. The spare bedroom called, but
she was tied down on the marital bed by a hundred cords of fear tightening by
the day.

The next morning, as usual, he dressed
carefully to go to the office, again not saying a word as they had breakfast
together. He took only a few spoonfuls of the hot rice porridge that was their
breakfast every morning.