Miss Seetoh in the World by Catherine Lim Read Free Book Online

superiority was wifely treason. ‘Just what are you trying to
prove?’ She hated the question, loaded with suppressed hostility, unrelieved by
the slightest sense of teasing fun, as much as she hated his response when she
tried to tell him what each of the books was about: ‘So what do you hope to
accomplish with these earth-shaking, world-shattering ideas?’
Either by nature or a sedulously cultivated seriousness, he was incapable of
humour, except the biting, cynical kind.
    He found a letter from a publisher politely
declining her request to take a look at her collection of short stories.
Refraining from open ridicule, he again asked, in a measured tone: ‘Just what
are you trying to prove?’ Any attempt at a life outside his wishes was an
intolerable defiance of those wishes.
    Explanation or, worse, argument and
protestation, would shatter the already fragile atmosphere, requiring an
incredibly long time and an unbearably huge expenditure of energy to start
picking up the pieces, one by one. There were no small children for whom, for
the sake of a peaceful atmosphere, women readily opted for calm and stoical
submission. She had a girlfriend, an extremely intelligent and perceptive
woman, who stayed silent through her husband’s wild, noisy rantings when drunk
and cold, harsh criticisms when sober, for the sake of their four children, aged
ten to two.
    The modern woman’s quandary was more acute
than her mother’s, or her grandmother’s, because being in the ambiguous
transition stage between the oppressions of the past and the uncertain hopes of
the future, she bore the brunt of both.
    More than for herself, the peace had to be
maintained for Por Por, her mother and the maid Rosiah, three nervous women in
the house, tiptoeing around his dark moods, looking to her for clues as to what
to do next. They had to be protected from the fear, which, like a creeping,
strangling miasma spread to every corner of the house.
     Sometimes the strategy of silence paid off,
actually eliciting a sheepish kind of guilt from him. Incapable of saying
sorry, he would fidget around her a little, trying to make small talk which she
ignored. The worst possible exercise of reparation was a spree of expensive
dining and purposeless shopping, ending, as soon as they returned home, with a
wild bout of love-making. A man of small mind and large, extravagant gestures
alternating between the coldness of the first and the intensity of the second,
completely bereft of humour’s saving grace, he had, from the very start of
their marriage, shriveled up all her creative energies.
    Thankfully, these could be brought back to
life in her classroom. She once read an article in an educational magazine
about overzealous teachers forgetting the real needs of their students; it had
the very captivating title ‘The Geranium on the Window-Sill Died, but Teacher,
You Went Right on Talking!’ The geranium on the window sill of her awful
marriage would do its own watering and never allow itself to shrivel.
    There had been a single fearful moment when
that almost happened. When her husband one day said, very casually, about two
years into their marriage, ‘Dear, there’s something maybe we ought to talk
about,’ her own suspicions were sharpened into the quivering alertness of a
small animal poised for fight or flight.
    For some time she had known it was coming. I
want you to quit your teaching job. He left the second part of his wish
unuttered. So that you can stay at home and concentrate on being a good wife to
me. There had been a long preamble about how he was expecting a promotion on
the recommendation of
Dr Phang, and they would be able to live on his salary, also about how Dr
Phang’s cousin’s wife who was a bank executive readily gave up her job to have
more time for her husband. Then he delivered the coup de grâce. With your being
so busy at your job, how can you have a baby? Her first reaction was an inward
screaming protest, for to all the