Tales From A Broad (13 page)

They have a totally different idea of marketing over here. They think it's sheer brilliance to have slogans like: ‘Make it a Hock Toey night!' or ‘Buy Chow Wang and you'll never go back!' The guys who thought up these bon mots are probably promoted to Grand Poo Bahs of their agencies. ‘Yu Xin, you are like tiger,' says Goh. ‘These ads are the lizard's gizzards. They do “the bump”.'

I don't want to get sardonic so soon after landing, after seeing how happy my new husband Ernest is, after committing to three more years. I tell myself to shut up and enjoy. I assemble my mirror in the kitchen, position the microwave on the counter and watch myself nuke. I look pretty good. I get so far into it that I even think, ‘Gee, if I get two, I'll look twice as good and nuke up twice as much.'

After a while, Frank finally leaves to check in at the office. We only landed yesterday and life feels out of focus for me, like I'm acting it out but missing my cues. I get tired of pulling boxes apart and trying to catch those wily little grains of styrofoam. I grow weary of figuring out where to put things and identifying their usefulness. Even dreaming of sweeping through my home in a white silk gown with rabbitfur cuffs, flipping stuff on and off, fails to thrill after a while.

But I'm determined to make the place homey and get rid of the boxes. For something different, I turn my back on the new gizmos, begin hacking away at the containers sent from home, and start taking things out, beholding them as if for the first time. ‘Oh, I remember this potato peeler … Yes! I am so glad I didn't leave the masking tape behind …' And then, as I line it all up, growing soft and nostalgic, I see the little bonus: every bowl, fork, knife, spoon, masher, peeler, grater, candlestick, cheeseboard, piece of linen, towel, toy, book and CD is covered not only in old grease and old crud but also carpets of brand new mildew. I open a box marked ‘Sadie's Toy Chest' and scream. A dozen dolls stare up at me. These are not the faces of innocent childhood playthings. Each lovingly named, cherished, treasured doll, from the American Girls to the Barbies, has turned sickeningly mottled – as if painted for jungle warfare, or worse – with mildew. I can only see the whites of their eyes. Evil is in that box. I kick it over. Their chanting dies down, but the magic eight ball rolls out, telling me: ‘Whatever you think, is right.'

It will take forever to get all this stuff cleaned. I see my bunny fur balding and my silk greet-your-husband dress stained and smelly. I see my rhinestone heels getting caught up in a herd of rusty Brillo pads. I see my breezy new lifestyle turn skeezy. I must attack this mess … I must attack this mess … I walk steadily, slowly. My eyes are unblinking as I advance, chisel in hand, poised at ear level, ready to chip away at a five-month-old blob of guacamole or fossilised noodle – or maybe I'll just maim Baby All Gone.

‘Why you brought so much?' comes a voice from the living room.

‘Pearl!' I cry. ‘How did you …'

‘Ah, we begin again,' she says.

She opens several bags filled with household cleansers and pulls a chisel out of her hip pocket. We both watch it gleam in the light for a moment.

Taking hold of myself, I ask, ‘What about that family from Texas?'

‘So cheap,
lah
. They got maid now, Filipino. Here my new card.'

Her rates now include unpacking expats – $400 a day. I look around the room, thinking about it for a minute. If I say ‘Forget it', she'll disappear again, but if I take it, she'll keep appearing again. I look around the room and shell out $500.

‘Keep the change, just stay with me for the day.'

I take a bath with the kids and share their dismay and disappointment that bubble bath doesn't work here. How can that be, you wonder? Because there is no water pressure. It took seven hours to get two inches of lukewarm water. Still, we feel better. After the bath, the kids sit in their car seats in the hall and we pretend they're still on the plane. ‘Have a nice flight!' I call out.

‘Mommy, don't go!'

‘Have to, sweetie, but the stewardess will come around.'

‘
Mommy!
'

‘We're just playing. You aren't on a plane. I have tons to do around the house. Now have a nice flight.'

Finally, I set about making the home a home, for Sadie, Huxley, Frank and me. A place where we will play and grow and laugh and tickle and … and that's when ‘The Night Chicago Died' comes to Fortune Gardens. I'm shocked out of total recall. I can't remember all the details – just like I can't remember the seconds before I hit a car full of Hassidim in Baltimore. I only remember their yarmulkes dangling at unnatural angles. It was horrible, there were bobby pins everywhere. There wasn't a dent on their car, but their headgear had gone astray. I was shamed. And I call myself a Jew! I stepped out of my car with some difficulty since I was nine months pregnant. The officer told me I had an expired licence. The men said, ‘God forbid, she should keep driving that … that … weapon, going around killing innocent people.' I rubbed my stomach. The officer took my keys away. The men took my insurance premium.

Back to this crash … Okay, I remember I plugged in the wedding-gift cappuccino machine. I was eager to get Huxley's room ready for him for his nap so I plugged in his fish tank. I plugged in the 200-year-old-from-Rittman-to-Rittman china lamps after placing them on overturned boxes I had lovingly draped with colourful matching batiks. I started to charge up Frank's electric shaver and tested the printer and tried sending a fax to my mom and playing some old albums on the stereo, but I didn't get far. The hissing and burning and popping, the sizzling and frying and sparking. Glass flying, plastic melting, coffee everywhere … it all happened so fast.

So it would seem Singapore is on a different power system. Most profoundly retarded people know this.

Frank walks in the door. The studio audience gives him rousing applause. They elbow one another knowingly. ‘Now the jokes are coming,' they say.

After a beat, Frank gives the camera a look. I remove his shoes. I hand him his drink. I'm over-solicitous, anticipating his every need, the perfect wife with a big old boo boo that has to be 'splained. I promise him his favourite thing in the whole world if he promises not to yell. There's grousing, nervous pacing, aye carumbas. The best I can hope for is an endearing tone when he shouts out ‘Whah was chew thinnin' about?' because I just destroyed about $3,000 worth of appliances and whatnot we brought from America. And I seem to have caused some electrical damage in the apartment because
nothing
works now.

‘All I wanted to do was have you come home to a nice place.
Wah, wah, wah
.'

Ah, what's going to happen next? Pearl! She looks up and smiles and flicks the switch on our $800 vacuum cleaner. Flash, boom, bang, the thing explodes. She stands there cloaked in a soft, downy fluff of Westchester debris, sooty but for the whites of her eyes.

Frank turns to me and says, ‘
Everything?
'

‘No, no … no, God, no … the kids are fine. They were in their car seats. Wanna beer?'

‘Definitely,' he says.

‘Okay, I'll just go down to the little store. I'll be right back.'

I have nothing in the apartment to feed anyone, busy as I was destroying it all. Hey, there's a special promotion on eggs. Buy ten, get two free. I think, ‘Well, that'd make a dozen, so, yeah, okay, thanks, but isn't that rather like “Buy the shirt and we'll throw in the buttons”?' Marketing genius, huh?

Back at home I hand Frank his VBs and step out onto the balcony. I don't want Frank asking me to explain again how I can be so stupid. I don't want to watch Frank pass through the stages of his grief. With the first beer, there will be a stoic acceptance but it will be understood that I am not to leave the room because I must bear witness to the strength he musters. With the second beer, he'll tour around the apartment silently, bereaving all that is lost, running a finger over this or that. With the third, he'll come back to me as if I've had enough time to accurately answer the question: How can you be so stupid? If there are more beers, he'll just hold on to the kids for dear life and shudder at the thought of what could've happened in this house of horrors.

When I go back in, Frank's placing a sheet over his big old Klipsch speakers. I put on my Sauconys. I'm going for my first run in Singapore. Pearl's all right and is cleaning again; the kids are fine. I'm pretty much no good to anyone; it's best I leave. ‘Bye, everyone.'

The elevator ride is too short. I'm outside. I'm not going to do this; it's crazy. Even though it's after five in the evening and the wind is picking up and the sun is covered by cloud, it's so hot. I'll keel over. I don't deserve to die. I should stay home, enjoy the food and have boozy playdates for the next three years. It'll be the age of my complacency, my sleazy new lifestyle. An older woman approaches the lift, smiles and says, ‘Oh, you so fit. Running, is it?' I nod.

‘Good! Good!' she barks.

How could I disappoint this little old auntie?

Right. Okay. Let's do it. I trot through the parking lot and skip down the steps of the underpass. I take the ones leading up to the park path by twos. I'm already dripping but I recognise myself and don't feel half bad. Reunited with my animal soul, the atavistic particles of my psyche, carving my way across the land with speed and power. I really don't feel a thing but my engine burning. Perhaps that's because I've only been at it for three minutes.

I stick to the joggers' path and loudly cuss at the bikers who are disobeying the
roools
. The lanes are clearly marked, both on the ground and on signs conveying in words and symbols, impossible to miss, that joggers are
here
and cyclists are
here
.

But neither group listens, natch.

‘
Jogging path!
' I scream as I pass a cycler. ‘
You belong over there
,' I bellow and point. Every time I get angry I run better. So, I keep myself angry. I curse at everyone and everything. I shout at the hawkers that their food really reeks. I loudly proclaim to the toddlers wandering about that I am barrelling through and they better watch their step. I feel great.

Then I hear, ‘Hi Fran!'

It's Samantha, the lady I met after my first power swim at the pool. I had since discovered that she wasn't really part of the baby pool bunch but was their friend all the same. I'd taken to her. She was an inviting sort of person. I enjoyed hopping out of the pool and saying, ‘Earned my beer today' because she always countered with something upbeat and convincing like, ‘Ya did excellent. That's what it's all about.'

I join her and tell her that this is my first run in Singapore and apologise for my slow pace. She smiles and says, ‘You kiddin' me? It's a great pace. You just take it easy now. It's a killer when you first start out.' Then she looks at me and gets a worried frown. ‘Don't you have any water?'

‘I never carry it,' I answer. ‘Yeah, I can be
that
stupid.'

Then, with the same ‘shame on you' expression, she asks rhetorically, ‘And you don't have any powders either?'

‘I used a roll-on.'

She tells me that I'm asking for trouble without water and energy-infusing, secret-ingredient-Z-containing, $600-a-scoopful powder. ‘And it tastes just like tonic water.'

‘I'm fine. Really. Water is something I use to rinse my mouth out after brushing and tonic is what I sprinkle on gin.'

She laughs and hands me a
shmattah
.

‘What's this?' I ask.

‘Oh, it's pieces of my son's underpants that my helper sewed together. I brought two.'

‘Why, thank you. How kind.'

She dabs at her face with it and I can see that anyone would need two. I'm already watching large drops of water fall from my eyelids.

Samantha's stride is low and quick. She's deceptively fast and because we're running side by side, I match her beat instead of using my own slow-motion leprechaun style. I'm succumbing to the pace and the heat. I start talking mindlessly to rise above it.

‘Your helper?'

‘My maid, Bet.'

‘Oh, do you work?'

‘No, I have three kids. She frees me up so we can enjoy the good part of the day.'

‘There isn't supposed to be a good part of the day until it's night,' I say.

I can't imagine having a Bet, someone doing everything I'm supposed to do, depriving me of the pleasures of being a martyr. Washing our things, doing our shopping, making our meals, babysitting, sewing
shmattahs
, cleaning the toilets, scrubbing the oven, ironing the shirts, sewing on buttons, mailing our letters, waxing the car, killing bugs. She'd answer the door when Frank came home for an afternoon rendezvous, overhear our discussions about money, witness my terrible temper and, no doubt, join the small but vociferous encounter group called ‘I Worked For Fran', or ‘IWFF', which has now become a verb meaning ‘to have lived to talk about working for Fran', as in, ‘Yeah, I was pretty IWFFed, but God, cigarettes, coffee and all you kind people have helped me lead a normal life.' I've had supervisors call me in. ‘You will have to be let go if you tell anyone again they are “dumber than a bucket of hair”.' If only I had a chance to tell my side of the story. Which is, she was!

‘I do home schooling for my kids – or rather, unschooling – and Bet helps with that sometimes,' Samantha continues. (What is unschooling? Does she tell them one plus one doesn't really equal two, and don't let those power-hungry mind-control freaks in the education system tell you otherwise? I'm very curious but I don't ask because
really
I want to know more about maids.)

‘Don't you feel, I don't know, inhibited with a maid around?' I ask.