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Sport 41: 2013
Rosabel Tan — Paper Butterflies
Rosabel Tan
Paper Butterflies
Grace was rubbing moisturiser into her nails when her mother rang—twenty minutes early, but that was no surprise. She wiped her fingers on her legs and reached over the kitchen table, tracing an oily path on the touchpad of her laptop.
‘Hi love,’ a voice called. An ivory ceiling fan appeared onscreen, slicing aggressively through the air. Hanging from its base was a set of silver wind chimes, tinkling delicately with each sweeping rotation. ‘Chiak pa buay?’
‘Not yet,’ she replied. Her mother always asked if she’d eaten, regardless of the time. ‘That’s why you’re calling, remember?’
‘I remember. Are you keeping warm?’
‘Yes.’ She pushed the sleeves of her cardigan up to her elbows, anticipating the next question, ‘And I’m drinking lots of water. You know I can’t see you, right?’
‘How can?’ she heard her say. ‘I can see you.’
‘Move the screen down. You should be able to see yourself in the top-right corner.’
‘Aiyah. Is because your brother not home yet.’ The camera panned shakily over the plain white walls, until her mother came into view, her lips scrunched in a pout. She was sitting at the dinner table, the television behind her paused in the middle of one of those lurid-coloured soap operas her mother and her aunties swapped like secrets, the ones that always ended in murder or marriage, the subtitles underneath too small to make out.
‘Much better.’ She reached back and untied her hair, letting it fall to her shoulders in stiff tangled waves before gathering it into a loose bun.
‘Today it has been raining.’ Her mother ran her fingers through her own short hair, unconsciously mimicking her daughter’s action. ‘But is the warm rain. How is it over there?’
page 151Grace shifted in her chair and looked out the kitchen window, wondering if her mother’s insistence on working through this exact script each time they spoke reflected a need for order, and what kind of disorders that would make her vulnerable to. At the back of the garden she could make out very faintly the ashen shadow of the washing line, a solitary blue silk dress hanging by its shoulders. ‘The same as always,’ she said, turning back to the screen.
‘Did you get the ingredients?’ Her mother’s journal came into view, a faded spiral-bound notebook containing all her recipes and prayers, each carefully transcribed in meticulous handwriting.
‘Everything except the pandan leaves.’
Her mother clicked her tongue. ‘Aiyo,’ she drawled.
‘None of the shops had them.’
‘Here we have everywhere.’ Her mother said this in the hushed tone of somebody embarrassed about their better quality of living.
Grace tugged at the grocery bag on the table. ‘I have everything else,’ she said, mentally ticking off the chicken, the ginger, the garlic, the chilli. ‘It’s not important, is it?’
‘We will make do. First, you stuff the chicken with garlic and ginger. And then you boil.’
Grace repeated the instructions under her breath as she retrieved their largest pot from the bottom cupboard. They had lost the lid for it, but it was the only one that would fit the chicken. ‘So how is everything,’ she asked as she ran the tap, trying to remember when they had spoken last.
‘Quite good,’ her mother said. ‘Your father is busy with work as usual and then your brother is having exams soon. Actually I think he is quite worried ah, last week he wasn’t sleeping very much, but this week is not so bad.’ She looked down at her journal and flicked to the next page. ‘He is always on the internet, that one.’
This was something Grace had noticed only after she’d left home, the way her mother never talked about herself, a genuine dismissiveness that was quite unlike the feigned modesty she encountered with her clients. ‘And how about you,’ she asked again.
‘Me?’ She hesitated. ‘Good. I been watching the show Aunty Rosalyn lend me. This one is about a taxi driver who is having an affair with the woman who cook hokkien mee at the hawker centre.’ page 152 And even then, surface detail. A level of disclosure that frustrated her, not because of the distance it created, for her mother’s love was uncontested, but because it made their conversations an exercise in reciprocal exchange.
‘How about you?’ her mother said. ‘How is the psychology?’
She dropped the chicken onto the wooden board with a wet slap. ‘The placement’s going really well.’ She was working in a small clinic that ran group therapy sessions for people suffering from depression and anxiety. The clients were mostly women her mother’s age.
‘Eh, you remember phui kia or not, Aunty Jacqui daughter.’
‘I can’t believe you still call her that.’
Her mother shrugged. ‘Everybody call her that.’
‘It’s so mean.’ She started peeling the garlic, recalling some of her mother’s own nicknames for her as a child. Pony face. Duck face. ‘She’s not even that fat.’
Her mother tapped her temple impatiently. ‘Anyway, she got depression, but she is only taking medication. Jacqui don’t want her go to therapy.’
‘What?’ Grace paused, her hand inside the chicken. ‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t want to ask,’ her mother said, ‘but your father say she think is chemical problem, so medication is enough.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘She is the kind of woman who will join a queue when she don’t know what the queue is for.’
Grace considered this, wondering if her mother meant this in the way that she thought. She had never heard her say anything negative about her sister before. ‘There’s usually a reason people are depressed, you know.’ She carried the chicken over to the stove and dropped it in the pot, remembering the time that Aunty Jacqui had refused to let Brenda eat for two days, telling the maid that her daughter was fasting and could only have water or plain rice. ‘Do you think she’s worried about what might come out in therapy?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Boil the chicken for twenty-five minutes.’
Grace pressed her lips together. She wanted to explain to her mother the activity of neurons in a depressed brain, depriving it of serotonin like a clogged bottle of sauce. Medication helped, but only to a point where the sauce could flow freely, leaving the person in a good enough headspace to figure out the source of the blockage. page 153 She liked that metaphor, but she knew her mother would start asking what kind of sauce she meant. ‘And then what,’ she said.
‘Fry the rice with oil and garlic and once the grain start to look clear, put in the cooker with the chicken broth.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You get the rice cooker I sent or not?’
‘Yes.’ She pulled a chair to the bookshelf where they stored their plates and bowls, and on the top shelf, the rice cooker. ‘We used it last time, remember?’
‘I remember,’ she replied, but she sounded unsure.
While she was carrying the cooker down, her flatmate sauntered into the room, carrying on his breath the kiwifruit tang of someone who had been drinking beer. ‘Aww yeah,’ he drawled, inspecting the pot, his voice unnaturally deep. ‘Shit be gettin’ real.’ When he saw the laptop, he cleared his throat. ‘Hi Mrs Lee.’
‘Hello Todd.’ She regarded him sceptically. ‘You look like you been working hard. You should rest in the weekend.’
‘I don’t think that’s the problem.’ He retrieved a beer from the fridge and snapped it open, the wet fizz puncturing the room. ‘Has Grace told you her good news?’
On hearing this, her eyes widened, and she turned around and shook her head frantically, waving her hands in a desperate flurry. Todd choked and took a step back. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, out of shot.
‘No, no news. Grace?’ From where she was standing she could see her mother craning her neck, trying to look for her beyond the confines of the screen. ‘Where are you?’
‘She’s—getting something,’ he offered, sliding back in front of the laptop. ‘I better get going. Wonderful to see you.’ He glanced at the pot. ‘I can’t wait to taste your chicken.’
‘Nice to see you also,’ she said. ‘I think you will like this meal.’
‘I’m sure I will.’ He waved at the computer, walked over, and smacked his head mournfully against her shoulder. ‘I’m an idiot,’ he groaned. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, knowing she couldn’t blame him. ‘I was going to tell her anyway, after I finished cooking.’
‘Good.’ He began inching towards the door in exaggerated slow motion. ‘I’m going to go stream the game,’ he whispered, pretending to swing a cricket bat.
page 154‘Grace?’ Somehow her mother managed to stretch the word into about eight different syllables. ‘What is this news?’
‘The news is that my boss offered me a permanent position after I graduate. It’s only part-time, but it’s a really good job and the pay’s pretty decent.’ She said this in a rush, hoping that the words would fall over themselves in an indecipherable mess. ‘It’s a really good job,’ she repeated anxiously, bracing herself.
Her mother raised her hand to the base of her throat, but her movements were jerky, like a series of photographs, or one of those flip books you made at primary school, of people falling out of the sky or horses running across fields. ‘Congratulations,’ she said, but even her voice was warbled. ‘How long is it for?’
‘We didn’t talk about it in any depth,’ she said carefully. ‘But I’d like to stay for a while, to build up my experience.’ Her mother opened her mouth to say something, but Grace rushed on. ‘I know I said I was going to come home, but–’ she faltered, unnerved at the way her mother was staring at her, unblinking. ‘It’s a really good job.’
She waited for her to say something, anything, but she just kept staring. ‘I’ll see you at Christmas,’ she said hopefully, and when her mother still didn’t say anything, she realised the video had frozen.
She looked cautiously at the image. It was an unflattering shot. It always was. Her mother’s eyes had been captured halfway through a blink, and there was a tiny speck of pink lipstick staining the bottom of her front tooth, a crumb of something camel-coloured hanging off her chin. At the corners of her lips she noticed a series of deep lines. It surprised her, to notice these. Her mother had always been insufferably beautiful, while Grace had inherited her father’s face. As a child she had watched with envy and admiration as her mother applied various creams from the glass pottles on her dressing table, rubbing them into her skin in small, circular movements. She caught whiffs of it at times, that combination of custard-apple and cinnamon, at the clinic, the supermarket, the video store, though she knew it wasn’t the moisturiser she smelled but only something that resembled it.
‘– hear me now?’
She jumped back. ‘Yes,’ she said, flustered. ‘You must have cut out for a minute.’
‘Can you hear me,’ her mother shouted. She had moved the laptop page 155 onto the armrest of the couch, and now the TV and the top half of her mother’s forehead were missing from view.
‘I can hear you,’ she said, enunciating each word.
Her mother nodded, satisfied. ‘So will you have a baby soon?’
‘Mum,’ she blurted, taken aback by her forwardness.
‘Todd is a nice boy.’
‘Yeah,’ she agreed, and then realising what she meant, ‘No! I mean, he is, but—no.’
‘Never mind,’ she clapped her hands. ‘I am happy for your job. Have you checked the rice?’
The rice. She had forgotten. It had begun to burn. She turned the element down and scraped the saucepan with a wooden spatula, pushing hard against the patches where the rice had stuck to the bottom.
‘Plunge the chicken into ice water,’ her mother said. ‘Did you prepare it?’
‘You didn’t tell me I needed iced water.’ She scanned the printout of the email her mother had sent. There was nothing about iced water.
‘I did,’ she said, her voice rising insistently. ‘I put in the email.’
She pressed her lips together. ‘Maybe you did,’ she said. ‘Maybe I didn’t read it properly.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she replied. ‘You can use cold water from the tap. Probably it is like ice anyway.’
‘Alright,’ said Grace, instructing herself not to bite. As she was carrying the pot to the sink, she saw, out of the corner of her eyes, her mother bring a glass of sparkling green liquid to her lips. ‘Are you drinking Midori,’ she exclaimed, instantly regretting the accusation in her voice.
Her mother looked at her glass, as though the question confused her. ‘I’m thirsty.’
It was silent as she ran the tap, and she looked over her shoulder to check if the video had frozen again. It hadn’t. She turned back to the chicken and pressed her palm against it, feeling it grow cold in the water.
‘Christopher,’ she heard her mother say. ‘I’m talking to your jie. Come and say hello.’
The camera moved jerkily towards the front door where her page 156 brother was hunched over, untying his laces, his backpack slung over his shoulder. ‘Hey Chris,’ she said.
‘Hi Ducky.’ His face was more tanned than usual. A scattering of acne sat high on his cheeks. ‘What are you making?’
‘Chicken rice.’
‘Yum. We had that last night.’ He raised his chin, his eyes darting in the direction of his bedroom. ‘Here’s-Mum-again-good-to-see-you-bye!’
Her mother clicked her tongue loudly, but playfully, and when her face reappeared she seemed more herself. ‘How is the garden, love?’ When she had last visited, they’d spent an entire morning at the garden centre, picking out flowers and fruit and vegetable seedlings.
‘It’s flourishing,’’ she said, turning on the rice cooker. ‘The swan plant is crawling with caterpillars.’
‘Oooh,’ her mother shuddered with pleasure. ‘You must send me some photos.’
‘I will.’ She tilted her head. ‘Hey—do you remember the time we made the butterflies?’ The words tumbled out of her mouth before she recognised them, and she blinked, surprised. She had forgotten about the butterflies.
‘Of course,’ her mother replied, sounding slightly offended. ‘It was very beautiful.’
She had been sick with a fever that day, and her mother had come back from the shop with a plastic packet of purple and green origami paper. They had spent the afternoon folding them in ways that didn’t make sense to her, but which she learnt to trust, each series of folds producing a shiny, stiff-winged butterfly. They had dropped them off the balcony, one by one, watching them float through the air, landing on the trees below. Some of the butterflies had still been there a week later when she was better, adorning the leaves like a tropical Christmas tree. ‘We should have taken a photo,’ she said and on an impulse, she slid her hand over the keyboard and pressed the ‘Print Screen’ key.
‘Lucky we didn’t get a fine for littering.’ Her mother took another sip and said, ‘How is the chicken? When is cold you can start cutting it up.’
She went over to the sink and felt it. It wasn’t cold yet, but she didn’t think it mattered. She smacked it down onto the board and started slicing, page 157 throwing the skin away.
‘Where are you?’ her mother said. ‘Don’t throw the skin away.’
‘I’m not,’ she said, clumsily arranging the skin back on each piece. While she was waiting for the rice to finish cooking, she sliced some cucumber and arranged it on her plate.
‘What shall we cook next time,’ her mother asked. ‘You want to learn something sweet?’
‘Kuih lapis?’
Her mother flipped through the pages of her recipe book. ‘It will be better if we do the rainbow one, the butter one will take too long.’
‘I like the rainbow one better anyway.’ She lifted the glass lid of the rice cooker and stirred the mixture with an oversized plastic spoon, the salty steam fogging her glasses. ‘I’m ready,’ she said, scooping some rice onto her plate.
‘Show me.’ She brought the plate over to the table and tilted it towards the camera. ‘It looks good,’ she said, pride in her voice. ‘Chiak.’
‘Chiak,’ Grace brought a forkful to her lips and blew, thankful that her father wasn’t in the room to make the joke he always made about saying grace.
‘How does it taste?’
Her mouth filled with saliva as she chewed the warm, garlicky rice. ‘Just like you used to make,’ she said.
Her mother smirked. ‘Now you can make for me when I go siao,’ but when Grace looked back up she saw that she was staring intently at a point to the left of the camera.
‘What is it?’
She seemed disoriented, unsure of where her voice was coming from, but then her gaze trailed back and she looked into the camera. ‘I forgot to water the plants,’ she said, and Grace wondered if she was lying, but she couldn’t think of any reason why this would be the case.
‘Do you want to water them now,’ she said uncertainly, ‘before you forget?’
‘I think so,’ her mother said. ‘One moment.’
She lifted the laptop and rested it on the seat of the couch so that the screen was facing the television, but she could hear her mother’s slippers slapping against the tiles and, she realised with a jolt, the sound page 158 of the balcony door sliding open. For as long as she could remember they had kept the doors open during monsoon season, using the air conditioning only at night when they slept, because otherwise it dried out their skin. ‘Have you got the air conditioning on?’ she asked.
But there was no reply. She imagined her mother outside on the tiled balcony, squatting by the red bucket of water they kept by their plants. She’d be using the white cup to scoop water into each pot, humming a hymn to herself.
‘Mum,’ she called half-heartedly, knowing she wouldn’t be heard. When she’d been living at home she’d spent countless nights on that balcony this time of the year, sometimes with her brother, sometimes alone, watching through the metal bars as streaks of lightning forked across the nearly cloudless sky. They lived on the sixteenth floor, the top level, and when the doors were shut she could have been anywhere, and when it rained, this was exactly where she was. She spent hours watching the rain bullet down, and discovered that when you looked at just the right angle, you could imagine that you were sitting on a platform in the sky, surrounded by a curtain of rain, but then the illusion would be broken, by the smooth whirring of the MRT passing behind their apartment block, or the sound of somebody’s rubber-soled slippers against the concrete, or somebody crying, or somebody shouting at somebody else.
‘Okay,’ her mother said, sitting back down. She had poured herself another glass of Midori. She drank it thirstily, until there was only an ice cube left, and then she sucked that up as well, crunching it between her teeth.
Grace had never watched her chew ice like this. It made her look crude, which she liked. ‘Good?’
Her mother raised an eyebrow and bared her teeth, though it was not quite a smile. The lipstick on her tooth was gone, Grace noticed, and she wondered if it had ever been there, or if it had been some trick of the light, a speck of dust on the camera or a double exposure. ‘Of course good,’ she said, and she laughed, loudly, and with a true sense of delight, as though she had delivered the punchline to the greatest joke she knew.