Tales From A Broad Read online

  It is the first day that Frank has to leave us and go into work. The kids are still not settled into the time zone and, therefore, no one is. Huxley’s doing a lot of screaming – a lot of screaming. Therefore, we all are, though some of us put it to words. I guess we’re just a family sharing a wavelength.

  I have to get the kids back into a nap routine. If I can’t, I don’t know how I’m going to get any work done. Emails from clients have already averaged about 30 a day. And, to make matters worse, there’s construction going on above us. The jackhammering begins the minute we get in the door, stops long enough for us to think it’s safe to sleep, and starts the minute a head – any head – touches a pillow. It stops at 9 pm and then you’re left with the ghost sounds buzzing in your brain.

  On Sunday, yes, Sunday-gawd-gonna-smite-you-if-you-work-day, they were still at it. I went upstairs, found the apartment that was being renovated and stormed in. They were on a break. Huh? I just heard them … Oh, I get it, they stopped because I left the house. It’s like when you’re a kid and the minute you leave your room all your stuffed animals start dancing.

  The workers were sitting on the floor eating saucy rice with pincer fingers when I burst through the doors screaming, ‘Can you possibly stop?’ They stared. I felt stupid. I mean, I guess the answer was ‘Yes, madam, we can stop. In fact, we have. Why don’t you go back down to wherever it is that you came from and let us enjoy our tasty lunch. Say, have yourself some, too.’

  Now it is Monday. And I am Frank-less. And I am in Singapore. By 10 am I have the kids bathed and fed and in their respective containers. Huxley is velcroed in his bouncy seat with a bottle and Sadie is in a high chair. She’s a little old to be in one, but she likes it … I tell myself. A large component of my particular type of parenting has been finding a harness for all occasions. There’s the car seat, the high chair, the double stroller, the bike cart, the bike seat, the backpack, the umbrella stroller, the snuggly playpen, crib and walker, and a host of floaty things that do require some adult supervision – or so the label would have you believe.

  We managed to bring just about all of it. God forbid I’d be in a place where I can’t have Huxley and Sadie hooked to a table, strapped to my back, hemmed in with some soft toys, clamped down for a walk to the store, roped in so I can ride my bike and get the extra cardio from lugging 15 kilos of baby behind me, or just plain kept safe from disasters while I take a shower.

  What we didn’t bring was a crib, because the realtor said she had a spare. She did. It looked like a bundle of firewood. When we cut the twine, we were left with a jumble of giant toothpicks and tongue depressors that we were supposed to hitch up log-cabin style without the necessity of a single nail, nut or screw. Our befuddled, jet-lagged minds couldn’t figure out how to assemble it. After a few days, we came to the conclusion that there once were nails, nuts and screws and it wasn’t us being daft. I mean, Frank can put together – after a night out drinking – an Ikea Igor Super Deluxe entertainment unit without ever referring to the instructions, ie, two line drawings: (a) how it looks now and (b) how it’ll look later. As if to say, ‘We won’t insult your intelligence by walking you through the other 8,000 steps.’ Perhaps it’s just the Swedes being Swedish and not wanting to clutter the clean, white page.

  Anyway, we washed our hands of the whole thing and Huxley has been sleeping on the floor surrounded by sofa cushions. Today I’ll find something more suitable for him, which will make us all happier at night.

  The phone rings. It’s Frank.

  ‘Hey, how’s it going over there?’ he asks, in such a sexy, deep Frank voice I suddenly feel needy and adrift, homesick. I want him with me.

  ‘Great!’ I decide to say, instead of, ‘The minute you marched out the door on your way to a busy, eventful day, I looked around the room and saw a lot of dried-up egg yolk and cried inside the vacuum you left behind.’

  I even go so far as to add a casually placed mundanity: ‘That jelly you got, it’s weird. It won’t spread. Can you ask Serene if I’m supposed to nuke it or something?’ I’m not getting into the role that well yet but it seems like a normal thing to say, a sign of domesticity, an indication that I am embracing the slower pace, appreciating this time spent away from the pecking of clients, instead focusing on small miracles, like jelly.

  ‘Okay, hang on.’ I figure that his interest in this is just as bogus as mine and he’s rehearsing his role, too. The manly man bestowing upon me the leisure to ponder something we otherwise would ignore because it is dull – that is, unless we could find a way to get into a big fight about it. In the old days, it would have gone like this:

  ME: Why did you buy this disgusting jelly?

  FRANK: Sadie thought it was pretty.

  ME: It’s crap. Did you read the nutrition label?

  FRANK: What’s nutrish … nutrush … What was that word again?

  I take the cordless over to the window and look down at the pool.

  ‘Fran,’ Frank gets back on. ‘Serene says it’s candy, sort of an Asian gummy bear. It’s like you were breaking open a Reese’s to make a peanut butter sandwich.’ We both fake-laugh.

  ‘That explains the individual wrapping,’ I say. ‘So, how’s it going there?’

  ‘Fine. I’m just hanging out with Sebastian.’

  I snort. Sebastian Gok was fired from the Singapore office. Finding his successor is the reason we’re here. This couldn’t be fun for Frank.

  ‘Actually, it’s fine. He’s great. He and Sylvia want to go out to dinner with us tonight. Can you try to find a babysitter?’

  ‘I’ll try. I definitely want to go out without the kids. I’ll turn over every stone. Um, that didn’t come out right. I’ll call you at four and let you know.’ I want to go out, get dressed up. This event, though, could be something strange: dinner with the guy Frank needs to find a replacement for. His wife, I’m told, is quiet. Moreover, I’ve never liked the Gok.

  I hang up the phone and continue gazing down at the pool. The water is clear, crisp, inviting, the palm trees flutter in the sultry breeze, beckoning. The sea beyond is calm as it meets the clear, cloudless sky. So why is ‘Monday’ stamped all over the scene? We’d had such a great four days wandering around. We went to the Tiger Beer Brewery, Raffles Hotel, the zoo. When Frank said goodbye in his starched dress shirt and buffed shoes this morning, I just wanted to grab his ankles and make him stay and play, give our day some shape. Now, as I look down at the pool, enticing as it is, I still have that punch-in-the-gut Monday mood: blues mixed with anxiety. What can I do in three months that will change my life, anyway? Why are we doing this? The answers are not coming. All I want is a little clarity and what do I get? Monday. Monday is Monday, even if it’s still Sunday in New York. Couldn’t I have just gone without me this one time? Couldn’t I have woken up like a puppy, without a doubt that the world is a great place?

  I see some people arrive and set up at the pool. They’re an abundance of beautiful, shapely blonde women and about 12 gorgeous towheaded kids. The moms take off their coverups and step into the pool. Preternaturally languid, their supple, tanned bodies marinate in the shallowest end of the kiddy pool, shoulders touching shoulders, long legs slowly scissoring in the water, conversation obviously flowing from thought to word without need or use of a filter. Easy friendship in the hot sun of a foreign place where their good and loving husbands have brought them to be happy. I imagine the kids playing an ongoing game of chase every single day and the moms, of course, discussing who will bring the juice and who will bring the snacks for tomorrow.

  I have never had this. I had to be careful around all my friends – they were either neurotic or clients. I was a working, nervous wreck of a mother. Plus, I had frizzy dark hair and would have had a moustache if not for living in this century. Yes, I want in! I do! Especially if it makes me look that good.

  I gather up our mountain of pool toys, shave my legs, get into my most expensive bathing suit and even put on lipstick. I have a sudden ins
piration to put my very expensive sunglasses on my head (I can’t see out of them – too dark – but they look real good up on my head). And … oh, wait! Some pool shoes, the heels I got in Italy for $400. Shit, what to wear as a cover-up? I pull out the dress my mother-in-law bought me in Florida. Yessss, I’m in, baby! I got the part! I’m the new girl, the New Yorker. I’ll come in a little brash, full of Yankee spirit. I’ll lay on the accent and drop in a few words these Barbies never heard before. I can’t wait to get to the part where I tell them my husband is a lawyer in the music industry and I’m a literary agent. ‘Oh, of course you don’t know what an agent is … I forget … it’s really a New York–London thing.’ They’ll love me.

  After putting on more make-up and some self-tanning fluid (I wish I’d read the instructions first. Wouldn’t you know it? It doesn’t start to kick in for an hour. So, I’ll be changing hue before their very eyes. How to explain that? Metabolic rate?), I go into the living room to gather the kids and change them into their swimsuits.

  There are streaks of brown sludge all over the white marble floor. It stinks in there. Huxley’s feet are encased in the same shit. And, shit it is. Sadie, who I had taken out of the high chair, had been running around bottomless because we’re in toilet training. Apparently we’re not there yet. She’s taken a dump on the floor. Huxley is joyfully riding his walker back and forth, zigging and zagging it all over the place. We have miles of poo trails leading us through the living room.

  I fill the bathtub with water and plop the kids in. While they play, I scrub the floor and soil my cover-up from Florida. There’s a nasty spray of crap on my left heel and my fingernails can’t help but harbour a little line way down deep that will diligently send up a subtle, foul reminder of where my hands have been. I get a chopstick and try to clean it out but the chopstick’s too fat. I get a knife and start bleeding. I try soaking and scrubbing, but still the doody won’t come out. Fuck it. The kids are prunes now.

  I get them into their swimsuits, spread on a heavy layer of sunscreen and put them into the double stroller. Toys slung over my back in a knapsack, another bag full of really useful mom stuff like snacks and wipes dangling from the handles of the stroller, we all clatter into the elevator.

  I push the heavy stroller up the hill toward the pool. When I pass the plaza of life-support stores, a woman suddenly appears before me. She’s about four-foot-nothing, bowlegged, broad-shouldered, sturdy and stocky as a fire hydrant. Even though she’s no spring chicken, I can tell she could beat the hell out of anyone. If you hit her with your car, pity the car, is what I’m saying. She looks Chinese with a mix of Malay, and her hair has a big, wide stripe of grey in the middle.

  She smiles a toothy grin. All her teeth are exactly the same size and shape, as if designed by a rushed cartoonist. She hands me her card. It’s more like a cut-out piece of paper but it has the card-like factoids: ‘I am Pearl. I specialise in expat services. I can clean. I can babysit. Here are some of the ways to reach me.’ There are three phone numbers, two fax numbers, a pager number, website and email addresses, home address, where she can be reached in case of emergency, and, if all else fails, just wish real hard, she’ll pop round.

  ‘Pearl!’ I exclaim. ‘This is great. Is there any chance you’re free tonight?’

  ‘Tonight, lah, can can.’ She nods rapidly. ‘What time you need me for?’

  ‘How about sevenish?’

  ‘Can can. Until what time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I charge double after midnight. You pay taxi fare. Okay wich you, lah?’

  ‘Fine, fine, fine.’

  ‘How many kid you have?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘I charge $12 an hour.’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  ‘I like to clean when kids go to bed.’

  ‘That’s terrific. Th–’

  ‘Okay, then I charge $13 an hour. There’s a one-time charge of $6 for booking me under 24 hours’ time notice.’

  That last one stops me in my tracks – we pay her extra because otherwise she wouldn’t have been working that night? Oh well, I am happy, grateful. This doesn’t feel like Monday any more!

  ‘Just come at seven, please. Thanks.’

  I have a heck of a time getting the double stroller down the stairs to the pool. The guard sits there watching me bump it down step by step, all the while disturbing the fine alignment of my babies’ skeletal systems. I turn the corner toward the kiddy pool and it dawns on me that I should have brought drinks to share.

  Never mind. Because when I look up, I see there is no one to share with. Turns out that I missed the party. Everyone is gone. The pool is bereft of companionship.

  Note to self: they go in for lunch at one.

  I stay and play with the kids, endlessly sampling their ‘soup’, telling them to add more horseflies or take out the dragon pus. At last, when they seem to really need it, I finally bestow upon them the mark of good taste, rub my stomach and loudly beg for more. Then they come back with more buckets of soup. They must think that the reason I am focusing on them so much all of a sudden is because I really like this game. How would they know it’s because I don’t have a phone call to take or make or wish for or worry about, or a fax to write or send or read? The weather stays perfect, the water is warm and we are getting nut-brown.

  Around three, a group of Singaporean mothers and their kids arrive. They sit quietly, somewhat sullenly, around the edge of the baby pool while the moms organise themselves. A few of the kids seem too old for a baby pool but don’t look like swimmers either. They are a bespectacled, goofy lot for the most part. Their conservative bathing suits – hiked up too high on the boys and tugged down too low on the girls – don’t spruce them up any. They watch us play, confused and perhaps embarrassed at how loud and expressive we are.

  All of a sudden, they come to life. They lift their legs out of the pool and run. I figure they heard chip bags opening. But they’re laughing and pointing. Jumping up and down, covering their mouths, pinching their noses. What? What?

  Then I see it. Several hardy turds floating at various depths in the pool.

  I don’t need to dust for fingerprints. It was one of my kids.

  Mondays. Shitty, aren’t they?

  The first time I met Sebastian Gok was in Manhattan at the Rainbow Room, just Frank, Sebastian and I. We ordered champagne and tiers of nibblies. We watched Sebastian eat with gusto and noisily slake his thirst. We were toasting the opening of the Singapore office, which Sebastian, a Singaporean, had been hired to head. His and Frank’s futures were intertwined. The evening had the trappings of a spit-in-your-palms-pact-making-all-for-one-united-we-stand sort of mood, except it never got to those great heights.

  For one thing, Sebastian was an unbecoming man – barrel-chested and overweight, cursed with a porous, waxy complexion and a self-inflicted frosty perm. Oh, why stop there … He also had small, dim eyes, three hairs to call a moustache, and his lips seemed to be trying to dissociate themselves from the rest of his face as they hung down low, gelatinously.

  Want more? Well, Frank and I were distracted by the regular, slurpy, phlegmatic sounds he issued. I’m no doctor, but I diagnosed Tourette’s syndrome.

  The night was not a total disaster because we wouldn’t let it be. We wanted to believe. Struggling with English, Sebastian tried to explain the company’s good fortune. I briefly wondered why he was struggling with his native language. Soon enough, I realised he’d have just as tough a time with Chinese or French or pig Latin because his tongue was too thick, his mouth was too stuffed and his lips continued to try to make their getaway.

  He wiped his mouth, popped the last teriyaki stick in, and told us the Singapore office was a brilliant move. Raids and audits were so ripe, the pirating thieves were just going to fall at the company’s feet. They would have to pay! In settlement. In court. Justice would be served. Commissions would mount. He and Frank would be legends. As he made these pronouncements, his chubby,
busy hands worked like a sewing-machine bobbin, stuffing mushrooms, beer-battered shrimp, spring rolls, crab puffs, peanuts, olives, ice cubes, limes and all six teriyaki sticks into his gob. These were the hands holding our fate. Maybe he was okay. Maybe I was just cranky.

  ‘Waiter, we’ll have another bottle of this and we’ll try the smoked salmon pâté now,’ he said, suddenly quite intelligibly. We’ll try the smoked salmon pâté? Think I might get something to eat over here this time? He continued his chatter. Frank and I smiled with some effort and tried to believe.

  The Singapore branch had been Frank’s brainchild, but Frank’s boss, Ken D—, had claimed paternity, leaving Frank in the role of kindly uncle. Nevertheless, the success of the office would be reflected in his bonus. It was his job to find candidates for the role of office head, get it going, create mandates, and oversee the day-to-day operations. Sebastian was on the B-list. His history had a few gaps. But he was cheaper than the lot Frank recommended, and apparently that counted for more than talent and experience. Was everyone too polite to comment on his grossness, or did they have a bout of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ syndrome? (‘What a persistent cold he has, poor fellow.’ – ‘Oh, he’s just a little, um, ravenous after the flight, the dear.’)

  For the first year he was head of the Singapore office, Sebastian Gok – doesn’t it sound like a genus name for some type of swamp creature? – was laying the foundations for a huge anti-piracy campaign. He said that he was placing his pieces carefully, playing the game with a shrewdness born from an intimate knowledge of the players and their cultural codes.

  ‘When’s it gonna come down, Sebastian?’ Frank would ask eagerly.

  ‘Give it time,’ he’d say. ‘We’re working on something big.’