If I Could Tell You (7 page)

He looks at me now and says, it’s your hair.

What? I say.

Your aunt had the same hair, he says, and pats me on the top of my head. I move away a little too quickly, ashamed because I smell of cigarettes and grease, of used, wearied hands. I try to disguise the silence by rummaging around in my bag for the phone and when I walk out to make the call, I concentrate on the loud clicks my high heels make on the floor. Clear, commanding and sure.

I ALMOST LEFT YOU ONE TIME. WE HAD LOST EACH other, wandering around one of the shopping malls in town. I turned and you were gone. We were going to dinner afterwards, and then to the movie theatre to see if there was anything good on but first we went to the department store. To the part where they sold television sets and stereos. We might need a new TV for after we move, you said. I walked a little away, and then you were gone. I made to look for you, weaving through the aisles. There was the same movie playing on all the screens at once. The one based on a book, with that pretty, too skinny girl. It was like a maze, the way all the screens showed the same image so that I turned and then couldn’t figure out which direction I was facing before. I walked on until I was out of the building, walking like I had someplace to be, until I got to the bus stop a little away. I stood among the other commuters, in their black and white office wear, ignoring the faint tinkle of my phone from deep in my handbag and wondered about which one to take. Which one would be faster or if I should hail a cab instead. The buses came, stopping noisily with a tremendous huff and then rolling away again. I counted three of them before I walked back to the mall and there you were, waiting at the entrance, standing much too close so that the sliding doors stayed open all the while you were there. I remember being glad that you hadn’t been facing out. You would have seen me waiting at the bus stop, looking at my watch, checking to see if I had the right change on me. I tapped you on your shoulder and said where have you been, I was looking everywhere for you. But you just took my hand and asked if I was hungry. I asked to go home, for you to make dinner instead. You nodded and took my hand. Yours was clammy and warm but you linked your fingers tight through mine. Neither of us said a word all the way home.

You made dinner when we got back, then we watched something on TV until we got tired. That night, I lay on top of you, wanting to say I’m sorry and then not saying anything at all. You were deep asleep, breathing steadily when I thought, I should have let you go.

I WAS never one for many words but you made me talk, back when we were new and getting to know each other. You liked to ask about my childhood, knowing that I could talk about my mother and that it pleased me to, whether I dared admit it to myself or not. I would tell you about the way she played dentist to the children in our neighbourhood. How light and quick her seamstress hands were, flicking a milk tooth out with a length of thread so quickly that you had no idea it was out until she presented it to you in the palm of her hand, smiling, as if showing off a pretty stone, or a lone shell picked up from the beach.

After we went to bed for the first time, I brought out a box from my wardrobe, showed you the clothes that my mother made for me when I was little. Made out of need more than anything else. She would take leftover cotton and satin from the factory, bring them home and put them together so beautifully you could never tell they were made from scrap. And there were the only photos that I had of her, put away in the bottom of the box along with her old clothes, combs, bits of her old jewellery that she had given me turning green at the edges. Photos of her at the sea, dressed in a skirt that brushed her ankles and a button-up top. In them she is looking out at the waves or staring straight into the lenses, looking like she tried to smile but gave up because my father was taking too long with the camera.

You met her some time later, no more than a year after that. And although she still looked like the woman in the pictures, you shook your head, told me how different I was from her. I was glad you said that but I wanted to ask, are you sure, how do you know, how does anyone know anything like that.

MY mother started to fade away, not long after we married and Yang and I moved out, into our own place. First it was just the little things, a bunch of lost keys, forgotten sugar in their pot of morning coffee. All these, my father brushed off as mere carelessness on her part, teasingly said that she was getting old. I noticed nothing during our weekend visits, blinded by the fresh pleasure of living with you.

Then my father called one day, his voice pitched high, cracking on every other word. While you walked the whole of the neighbourhood with him in search of my mother, I sat in the living room, just in case she came home on her own. She did, eventually, an hour later, with the help of two policemen who rang the doorbell while I was halfway through my first cigarette in five years. I tried to imagine what they saw when I opened the door: the silent apartment, the cigarette turning to ash between my fingers, everything about my appearance, the wrecked hair, the bitten nails, betraying my frayed nerves.

Are you Madam Tan’s relative? one of them asked.

I’m her daughter, I said.

While I thanked the police officers, my mother said, Who’s that? repeatedly. I thought she meant me at first, but then I saw that she was looking at you, coming up the corridor with my father. She kept asking who you were and I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just pulled her to me, led her into the apartment, saying, it doesn’t matter, ma.

We had to put her in a home after a year. My father was ashamed to say it, but he was relieved. Before, he would get home from work and stand outside the apartment, nervous of what he would find once the door was open. I saw him like that once, gripping the door handle for a few moments, not wanting to know if my mother was gone, lost again outdoors, or simply sitting in front of the television set staring at the cold screen, at nothing at all.

I go to visit every weekend and every weekend, I tell you not to come along. There is no point since she can’t remember you anyway and will panic and ask to have you put out of the room. I said it and believed it at the time, but I just didn’t want you to see me bitter, unmoved by what was happening. I didn’t want you to think that perhaps it might be me in that bed, years down the line. And the way that my father was, alone and sitting around the apartment in the dark because he thinks it’s a waste of money, having the lights on when it’s just him in the flat, that was no way to live. I would call several times, an excuse to get out of the room — it let me know that you were still with me, the way you asked what was going on, how my mother was doing, even though I said little beyond a simple, she’s fine, or she’s not so good today.

It is what occupies our life these days. Sometimes, I start to apologise for all of this, but it would sound childish and absurd, next to everything that has happened so we talk about moving her to another home because I dislike the nurses at her current place so much, we talk about having my father move in with us after the move. It would be a bigger place anyway, you said, with one additional room, although I am sure my father would not hear of it. He has lived in his apartment for much of his life, there’s his tailor shop right around the corner and all his friends. He would never move. Still, you bring it up from time to time, letting me know that it would be okay if he ever changed his mind.

The rest of the week is a blur. There is work, of course, but the only thing for me to look forward to is the hour that I spend swimming at the nearby gym. I didn’t tell you because I know you would worry about me skipping lunch. I forget when I started doing it but it seemed better than picking at my lunch in front of the computer, and it became a habit. I liked the way I had to think of nothing else during the time that I was in the water. I would come out of it, feeling heavy and light at the same time and exhausted to the bone. Once, I took a bus to the coast instead of going to the gym. My swimming things were still in the locker so I left my heels and bag propped up in the sand, waded ankle-deep into the sea and looked out at the tankers waiting some way ahead. Then I noticed a little boat, heard it before I saw it, a little tugboat churning through the dim, murky water. I thought I had to find out where it was going, what the boat was for and who was steering. I was a good swimmer after all and so I went in, weighed down by my skirt, my cotton blouse. Eventually, I got tired and I stopped, treading water, watching the boat pull, westbound, away from me. I wasn’t even close. Whoever was in it had somewhere important to go. I sat on a wooden bench until I was only damp, then went home. I returned not because of an awakening, a sudden realisation of what I was doing to you. It just seemed something I had to do. To leave and just as easily go back again. I thought one day I might go far enough not to be able to do that. One day I might return to everything changed, changed and gone.

If you knew, you never let on. The only time I thought you might have an inkling was when we got home one day and there were people, neighbours and policemen, swarming around the foot of the building.

I looked at you and you said, this guy jumped. That guy from the
kopitiam
.

I know who it is, I thought. But even though the man spoke to me before, repeating the orders for coffee and telling me how much money I needed to pay him, I couldn’t summon up his voice in my head. As we walked past, you took my hand, as if you thought I might run away all of a sudden and become the soundless creature that man was, lying on the concrete, under the gaze of strangers, being touched by people he had never met before. A slight shift occurred that day in the space of our two-bedroom apartment and you would peer over your food, the newspaper, and into my face, looking for anything you might have missed. Later on, in the mask of night, you asked the questions you had been wanting to ask all evening. Questions which were easier to ask when you didn’t have to look at me and know that I was lying, questions about what happened that day, what I was thinking about. We both waited for the answers; it took me a second to come up with a phantom worry, about my mother and father, or work. You fell deep into sleep afterward, soothed, I imagine, by the thought that I cared enough to spin something out of nearly nothing just to fill up the quiet that your wide questions left behind. Empty words to fill the time before we both eventually fell asleep. The next morning, you came into the kitchen, watched me dab my spoon into the bowl of oatmeal porridge for a while before you took it away. Said you would make me something else, it would be good to have something new for breakfast, you said. Then you got eggs and bread and made French toast, put lashings of maple syrup on top of cut fruit. This is what you are doing now, pouring the coffee into mugs and arranging the fruit on top. All the while, your mouth is working, as if you’re practicing for a speech, or to ask an important question. You falter a few times over breakfast and I waited for the words to get to your mouth. I thank you for the breakfast and you are raising your mug to your lips when you say, Kim, let’s not go to work today. Let’s go out. Go for a drive, you said.

I KNOW THE WORDS FOR CHILD, MOTHER, SKY, RAIN, in the same way I don’t know the words for other things. Like the curve of moon-white at the base of my nails; that noise my husband makes in his sleep, clacking his teeth together as if he were chewing on something all night long; the dark patch which covers up skin scraped off in a fall. And words, written. All of them, for child, mother, sky, rain, hair, light. All these words and so many more, I have no idea about. What they looked like, how to even begin writing them. And there must be words that capture exactly how I felt when they brought my daughter to me, that pleasure and regret when I held her for the first time and saw that she was not a boy. There must be words, too, for how I felt when I went through our photo album for the first time in years and noticed the darkness of his face, a face that said he didn’t want to be there, not at all, and there was nothing he could do to hide it. And this: a mix of shame, anger, and something else when I see my child these days. A stirring that starts in my chest and rises up my throat, heavy, unwelcome.

It happened the week Mei Ling started school. She stepped off the bus one day, her face set in a manner that I had never seen before, kept quiet as we went up in the lift, as I asked if she had eaten her lunch and if she wanted a sandwich, questions to which she gave a nod, then a shake of her head. She remained like that all afternoon. I was plucking the ends off a pile of bean sprouts when she came to the table with her books and her pencil case, leaned across the kitchen table, and pushed an open book towards me.

Ma, she said, how to do this?

A few moments passed. I snapped the tail off a few sprouts, then swept it all into a bowl, mixing trimmed sprouts from the ones yet untouched. It would take ages to sort out, I thought.

Ma? she said again.

I had to at least pretend. I squinted at the page to let her know that I didn’t mean to brush her off, that I wanted to help. I squinted so hard that the words and squiggles on the paper started to dance in front of my eyes but it didn’t help. All I saw was a jumble of letters, thick and black and unrelenting.

Finally, I stood up and said, ask your father when he gets back. I got no time, got dinner to prepare.

I left the dining space, turning my face so that I didn’t have to look at her. I said that and went to hide in the kitchen, stopping at the window to catch my breath, as if I had just run lengths around the field below. A little later, I heard the key in the lock, heard the door open and shut, and him sighing deeply as he stepped out of his shoes. I heard Mei Ling say, pa, I need help with homework. I imagined the slow rhythm of his nod, the way he closed his eyes as he did it so it seemed like he didn’t want to, not really.