“At least I don’t beg you for clothes. And what I wear is what you give me. It’s not ...”
“Shut up!” he roared. “You ...”
“Go to your room,” Mother said to Kim Li before he could finish. Her voice was placid as if such quarrels were an everyday occurrence. If Ah Kong’s bunched-up brows and protruding veins all balled up like a fist above his bony beak put her off, she didn’t show it. “Peng,” she continued, sweet-natured as ever, “maybe tomorrow we can go over the cost of some new clothes. The girls can shop for some cheap materials, and Ah Chee and I will sew a few simple skirts and blouses. We won’t have to pay a tailor. They’ll be very simple clothes, of course, because it’s been so long since I’ve stitched anything ...” So she chatted on, rolling a cosy domestic mat before him, and soon, they were spreading more butter and drinking fresh cups of tea.
Kim Li did not leave the table till Ah Kong’s attention was unravelled; then she stretched herself out of the chair, hummed, and sauntered to her room, casual as a cat and grinning from ear to ear. Her humming wasn’t grating, but it was loud enough to reach the dining room. What could Ah Kong do about it? He had again slipped into silence, drowsing along with the buzz of feminine discussion, acknowledging that, Sunday, he would once again open his purse and drive off in the warm evening to their grateful goodbyes.
But there was Saturday night and the evening meal late at nine and the soft hours till eleven when his girls would sit in the living room with long washed hair reading Her World and Seventeen, selecting patterns for their new frocks. And by midnight, everyone would be asleep.
There was Ah Chee snoring in her back room among empty cracker tins and washed Ovaltine jars. He had acquired her when his second wife had finally given in to his determined courting and, contrary to her Methodist upbringing, married him in a small Chinese ceremony. The three of them had moved in immediately after the ceremony to this large wooden house on Old Beach Road, and, gradually, as the rooms filled up with beds and daughters, so also Ah Chee’s room had filled up with the remains of meals. She never threw out a tin, bottle or jar. The banged-up tins and tall bottles she sold to the junkman; those biscuit tins stamped with gaudy roses or toffee tins painted with ladies in crinoline gowns or Royal Guardsmen in fat fur hats she hoarded and produced each New Year to fill with love-letters, bean cakes, and kuih bulu. Ah Kong approved of her as much as, perhaps even more than, he approved of his wife. Her parsimonious craggy face, those strong bulging forearms, the loose folds of her black trousers flapping as she padded barefoot and cracked sole from kitchen to garden, from one tidied room to another waiting to be swept, these were elements he looked forward to each Friday as much as he looked forward to his wife’s vague smile and soft shape in bed. Ah Chee had lived in the house for seventeen years, yet her influence was perceivable in only a few rooms.
Ah Kong seldom looked into Ah Chee’s room which, he knew, was a junk heap gathered around a narrow board bed with a chicken wire strung across the bare window. But, at midnight, when he rose to check the fastenings at the back door and the bolts on the front, he looked into every room where his daughters slept. Here was Bee’s, connected to her parents’ through a bathroom. A Bible lay on her bed. She slept, passionately hugging a bolster to her face, half-suffocated, the pyjama-top riding high and showing a midriff concave and yellow in the dimness. Across the central corridor Kim Yee stretched corpse-like and rigid, as if she had willed herself to sleep or were still awake under the sleeping mask, the stuffed bear and rabbit exhibited at the foot of her bed like nursery props, unnecessary now that the play was over. He sniffed in Kim Mee’s room; it smelt of talcum and hairspray. The memory of other rooms came to mind, rooms which disgusted him as he wrestled to victory with their occupants. But no pink satin pillows or red paper flowers were here; a centrefold of the British singers, the Beatles, was taped to one wall and blue checked curtains swayed in the night breeze. Kim Mee slept curled against her bolster. In a frilly babydoll, her haunches curved and enveloped the pillow like a woman with her lover. He hated the sight but didn’t cover her in case she should wake. There was a time when he would walk through the house looking into every room, and each silent form would fill him with pleasure, that they should belong to him, depend on his homecoming, and fall asleep in his presence, innocent and pure. Now the harsh scent of hairspray stagnated in the air. Its metallic fragrance was clammy and chilled, a cheap and thin cover over the daughter whose delicate limbs were crowned with an idol’s head aureoled and agonized by bristling rollers. Again the recollection of disgust tinged his thoughts, and he hesitated before Kim Li’s room. He didn’t know what to expect any more of his daughters, one spending her allowance on lipstick, nail polish, Blue Grass Cologne, and this other somehow not seeming quite right.
Kim Li was not yet asleep. With knees raised up, she sat in bed reading in the minute diagonal light of the bedlamp. He stopped at the door but could not retreat quickly enough. She turned a baleful look. “What do you want?”
“It’s twelve o’clock. Go to sleep,” he said curtly, feeling that that was not exactly what he should say; however, he seldom had to think about what to say in this house, and his self-consciousness was extreme. Suddenly he noticed her. She had cut her hair short, when he couldn’t tell. He remembered once noticing that her hair was long and that she had put it up in a ponytail which made her unpretty face as small as his palm. Tonight, her hair was cropped short carelessly in the front and sides so that what might have been curls shot away from her head like bits of string. She’s ugly! he thought and turned away, not staying to see if she would obey him.
He stayed awake most of the night. This was true every Saturday night for many years. Sleeping through the mornings, drowsing in the lounge-chair through the afternoons, and sitting somnolent through tea and dinner hours, his life, all expended in the noise, heat, and rackety shuttle of the mines during the week, would gradually flow back to being. The weakness that overcame him as soon as he arrived at the front door each Friday night would ebb away. Slowly, the movements of women through the rooms returned to him a masculine vitality. Their gaiety aroused him to strength, and his mind began turning again, although at first numb and weary.
He was supine and passive all through Saturday, but by nightfall he was filled with nervous energy. After his shower he would enter his bedroom with head and shoulders erect. His round soft wife in her faded nightgown was exactly what he wanted then; he was firm next to her slack hips, lean against her plump rolling breasts; he could sink into her submissive form like a bull sinking into a mudbank, groaning with pleasure. Later, after she was asleep, his mind kept churning. Plans for the week ahead were meticulously laid: the lawyer to visit on Monday; the old klong to be shut and the machinery moved to the new site; Jason, his eldest son, to be talked to about his absences from the office; the monthly remittance to be sent to Wanda, his second daughter, in Melbourne; old Chong to be retired. His mind worked thus, energetically and unhesitatingly, while he listened to his daughters settle for the night, the bathrooms eventually quiet, Ah Chee dragging across the corridor to bolt the doors, and soft clicks as one light and then another was switched off. Then, after the clock struck its twelve slow chimes, he walked through the house, looking into each room while his mind and body ran in electrical fusion, each female form in bed renewing his pleasure with his life, leaving each room with a fresh vibrancy to his body. So he would lie awake till the early hours of Sunday, calm yet vibrating strongly, breathing deeply, for he believed in the medicinal value of fresh night air, while his mind struggled with problems and resolved them for the next week.
Tonight, however, his sleeplessness was not pleasurable. Old, he thought, old and wasted his daughters had made him. He couldn’t lie relaxed and immobile; the bodies of women surrounded him in an irritating swarm. He heard Kim Li slapping a book shut, footsteps moving towards the dining room; a refrigerator door opening and its motor running. “Stupid girl!” he muttered, thinking of the cold flooding out of the machine, ice melting in trays, the tropical heat corrupting the rectangles of butter still hard and satiny in their paper wrappers. But he didn’t get up to reprimand her.
All day Ah Kong would not speak to Kim Li. This wouldn’t have appeared