Joss and Gold

Two

Two SchOOlreunions were a We"em practice. Li An had read about them in the International Herald Tribune and in thinly disguised autobiographical accounts in American women's magazines: the fretting over clothes and jewelry, eagerness to preen before ancient rivals now rotund and drab, the happy shocks as sight adjusted to missing hair, overflowing flesh, and crows-feet. She had not considered attending one, although her British colonial school was only six hundred miles away in Penang, and, with the new air routes, closer by many hours than before. A resident of Singapore for the past nine years, she had become accustomed to being merely a spectator in the city. Singaporeans talked to her about family events, weddings, Chinese New Year dinners, the Sunday sermons, and their thirtieth school reunions with relish and blandness. It was their culture, their world, their lives, and she listened with skillful attention, grateful to be included in the conversation, although slightly inattentive about the details, the lists of dull characters, and the stories never as funny as the speaker had found them. So she was surprised when, in the middle of a meeting to decide on a strategy for packaging the stock portfolio in new graphics, she received a call from Gwen, saying, "I've booked a table and told everyone you are coming to the school reunion. We are celebrating the Penang Free School Centennial in the Kuala Lumpur Presidential Club. Now, with LANDING the new flights, everyone who has left Penang has no excuse not to attend." Still, her first response was unsurprising. "I can't go. I will have to rush back for a consultation on Monday, and my body just can't take all the travel." "What travel?" Gwen's voice over the phone was brusque and impatient. "Excuse me, it's only forty-five minutes by plane to Kuala Lumpur! Come on! Don't you want to see all your old boyfriends? Besides, Mrs. Leong says she'll be coming to the dinner just to see you again." "Who else will be at the table?" "I'm not sure. You must come, you know." She didn't know. After all, for nine years she had successfully avoided Kuala Lumpur, its smoky afternoon haze, the foul snorting lorries and women wrapped in black purdah like walking corpses. She remembered the heat and her confusion from the months when she had carried Suyin, blotting her fear and grief with the vision of the baby, hanging from its umbilical branch, unsexed, complexion shrouded in a sac shot through with crimson pulsing webs. It was the web she wove to save her life. Suyin had not wanted to come out; the branch would not break, and the doctor had had to cut it down. Henry had recognized immediately that the baby was not his. "She's beautiful," he said when Li An woke up from the anesthesia after the cesarean. His eyes were wet. Then he left. The lawyer came next morning. She never saw Henry again, although he did not disown the baby. She refused the alimony as soon as she could pay their way, but Suyin kept his name. Yeh Suyin. Second Mrs. Yeh had picked the name months before she was born. "Carry low, I know she must be a girl!" She had not abandoned them even after the divorce was final. "Keep the father's name," she counseled, as the papers were mailed back and forth. "Girls with father's name are more safe. Later, she can also marry. Later, she can change to her husband 's name." Even then she was worrying about Suyin's place, fatherless, perhaps husbandless. 169 JOSS and GOLD "She's Henry's baby," Second Mrs. Yeh crooned to the infant, her visits unchecked by Henry's absence. Humming her song, she rubbed olive oil onto the carapace where the skull bones had not closed, the light brown hair twisting over the tender spot where only skin protected the brain. "Ah Pah's granddaughter," she breathed over the membrane, fingers stroking the green oil into the scalp. Li An closed her eyes, exhausted from guilt, and saw the oil seep through the hair, staining the fine chestnut wisps a darker brown, seeping in atomic molecules through the skull. Invisible, unerasable. Second Mrs. Yeh's granddaughter. But even after moving to Singapore, where a woman could be husbandless, a child must have...