DAUGHTER—
‘Your mother and I can’t understand what your problem is,’ her father told her late one evening when she was at the family home. ‘We are introducing you to people, new people you would not have a chance to meet because you’re too busy with work.’
‘I can meet my own people.’
‘Obviously not,’ he replied, ‘because why else would you have felt the need to go to that dating agency? We’re your parents. We know you better than any dating agency.’
‘Yes,’ she sighed. Oh no, they were still going on about the dating agency. ‘But the dating-agency manager did not sit next to me and the other party on our first date. That’s the difference!’
‘When I was courting your mother,’ her father replied, ‘I went and visited her all the time at her house when her parents were around.’
‘That’s not the same thing. You scooted her off on the back of your bike ten minutes into each visit. How would you like it if you saw her for the first time across a yum cha table, wedged in between her parents, and you between grandma and grandpa, not being able to speak to each other properly?’
But she knew his first engagement was probably arranged in just this way. He had been set up to marry a nice Chinese-Cambodian woman back before the Black Bandits took over the country and they lost each other.
‘You don’t have to speak that much to each other on the first meeting,’ her father explained. ‘The first meeting is just for looking.’
‘So I’m just meant to sit there, to be looked at?’ Her father was impossible! She couldn’t understand why he thought it acceptable to arrange and intrude on the first dates of his grown-up offspring. It had happened more than once. Invariably, someone would turn up at Retravision with photographs of their son or nephew, or mention their child who was a lawyer or doctor. Numbers would be exchanged, a lunch arranged on a Sunday afternoon with the boy and his family – and his grandmother too if she wanted to tag along.
‘Why can’t you just give the guy my phone number and ask him to call me?’
‘What if he’s too shy to call?’
‘But getting your parents to do all the work for you?’ Come on, couldn’t he see how pathetic this was? Why was he so stubborn, so paternalistic?
Her father was wearing his Smiling Monkey pyjamas. A fifty-something man in boy’s flannelette pyjamas. It was the same when her mother wore her Western Bulldogs beanie and her puffy red polyester vest. It was difficult to be angry at your parents when they were dressed like sleep-befuddled children from a 1981 Target ad.
Yet she had lost the affability that came naturally to her younger siblings. It was a battle, and she often felt that she had to be the one who fought tooth and nail to prevent meetings like these. Young adult automatons, glaring at each other across a table while their parents raved on about how good and obedient they were, which is why they could not find life partners. Because they studied so hard. Because they worked so much. Because they saved up for a mortgage. Because they were good and never went out to nightclubs.
Her father was tired. He had stayed up for an hour to have this conversation with her.
‘So what you are saying is that you don’t want your mother and me to introduce you to anymore people?’ he asked, irritated.
‘Don’t set me up on anymore dates!’ How could they not see that every time they tried, the results were disastrous? The most recent candidate had been Rick, who came from China and was working at Retravision; the only sentence she could extract from him was that he liked Van Damme films. Her mother had brought Rick home on one of her father’s birthdays, and there was no way to get out of it. Because she had been polite to Rick, her father worried that she might be interested in him – and then became irritated because he didn’t want her to be. Anything other than open hostility was to be construed as interest.
‘Why haven’t you met anyone?’ her father wondered. ‘You must meet heaps of people in your work. Maybe your mum is right and the reason you are still single is because you live out of home.’
‘What?’
‘Perhaps because you are living by yourself, all the players come, the ones who are not so serious. If you were living at home, then you’d just get the suitors who were serious about you.’
Where on earth had he picked up a term like ‘players’, she wondered.
‘I’d get no one!’ she said to him.
A while back, she had naively gone to a dating agency because she wanted all of this to stop. She worked at the law office during the day and came home in the evenings to teach at the college, a pattern of unchanging contentment that was only ruffled when she returned to her parents’ house and their incessant worrying.
So she had ventured into the least tacky agency she could find, close to the Chanel store in the city. Two slippery grey pillars stood to attention at the front, topped by Art Deco reliefs of Atlas holding up the world. The foyer looked like Marie-Antoinette’s marbled ballroom. The floor immediately below housed one of the top international law firms. She saw its name on the office listings in the glass cabinet. When the elevator stopped at her level, she thought she might be in the wrong place. Perhaps she had ended up in the entrance of the law firm after all. There were three young receptionists with pencil skirts and pencilled eyebrows. One of them asked if she could help.
‘I’m looking for the Elite Encounters Agency.’
‘Oh yes, please take a seat. Caroline will be with you shortly.’
She sat on a red couch and waited. She was glad that she had worn her work suit. This looked like serious business.
Caroline came out, brown hair pulled back and arranged in a loose bun like a Cadbury milk twirl. She was led into an office with nothing on the walls and nothing on the desk except a laptop. Caroline sat down opposite and explained how the agency worked.
‘There are seven main areas that couples are most likely to fight and separate over,’ she was told. That was why the agency had a special personality-compatibility test for her to take. The results would be matched up with those of other candidates, and pairings would be made. First, though, Caroline asked her some questions.
‘What are your hobbies?’
‘What would you consider your greatest achievement?’
‘What are the personal habits you can’t stand?’
‘What is your star sign?’
She had no idea how a couple of rocks millions of light years away could determine potential conjugal bliss, but she answered anyway, out of curiosity. She wanted to see where this was heading.
‘Do you belong to any professional networks?’
It was beginning to sound very much like a job interview, though she could see that Caroline wasn’t as interested in taking down the answers as she was in getting to the next part, showing her the lifestyle packages. The Silver Service, the Gold Package, the Platinum Ultimate Lifestyle Enhancer. The first came with a selection of potential dates which would be emailed to her once a month, the second with a life coach, and the third with a personal stylist to offer make-up advice and a voucher for a haircut.
‘Some people just don’t know how to appear confident, or even how to groom themselves,’ Caroline advised her. ‘You’d be surprised by the number of professionals who are successful in their careers but have such trouble finding partners.’
‘Really?’
‘That’s why one of the questions on our test is how often a candidate showers.’
‘What are the options?’
‘Twice a day, once every day, once every two days, once a week.’ Caroline knew she was digressing, and pulled the conversation back to the packages. ‘So,’ Caroline continued, ‘once a month you’ll get emailed profiles like these.’ Turning her computer screen around, she showed her a picture of a middle-aged man named Tom who, according to his profile, was a self-employed entrepreneur.
‘How often does Tom shower?’ she joked, but Caroline wasn’t biting.
‘That’s personal information I can’t divulge.’
She didn’t know whether a computer and a five-minute interview was enough to find her someone she could tolerate for the rest of her life. Could you choose a life partner the way you might a car, she wondered. Where was the human element in that? Was this any better or worse than what her parents were trying to do?
‘I will have a think about it,’ she told Caroline, but when the elevator deposited her in the marbled foyer she almost tripped over in her hurry to get out of there. What on earth had she been thinking?
She was still in her mid-twenties, for crying out loud.