“You know what the problem is? It’s too late for us.” The baker snapped the two halves of his metal tongs together as he waited for the old lady to decide. “Too late for change. Too late for moving from one building to another. They think that people our age—sixty, seventy years old—can still adapt to a new building, a new neighborhood.”
Wang Di had told the baker about her morning—half of it spent trapped in her new bathroom with its fancy, folding door. She had struggled with it for ten minutes before sitting on top of the toilet, debating whether or not to pull the red pull-for-help cord. She was about to do it when she kicked at the door out of desperation. The thump echoed through the flat and the folding door folded, creaked open. She stepped out of the bathroom. Sat down on the closest chair she could collapse onto.
“Isn’t this easier?” the housing officer had said a year ago as he brought Wang Di and the Old One to the new flat—the flat that was “in the same neighborhood, still Ang Sua, Red Hill,” or so he kept saying. Wang Di had asked if the distance was walkable, she wanted to be able to visit the shops while they still stood but he had said, “Better not, especially with Uncle’s bad leg,” and suggested they take the bus instead. She had asked how much the bus fare would be but he didn’t know. After that, they had lapsed into a strained quiet during the fifteen-minute drive, most of it spent in thick traffic. The new building, 6A—cough-syrup orange—had lifts that stopped on every floor in the building. Except the housing officer called it a studio. She had tried saying it but had got stuck on the first syllable: suh-tu-dio. The suh-tu-dio was a one-roomer as well, and the elderly couple trailed behind the man as he showed them the apartment, making the most of the only two doors in the narrow space (one that led to the storeroom, the other to the bathroom) by opening and closing them and touching everything—the light switches, the taps, all the windows.
It would take her time to unlearn decades of memory. This was not what she thought the end of her life would be like: on her own, in a flat that was stark white and much too quiet, stripped of the things she’d been used to for most of her life. I will get used to this, she thought. I’ve got used to worse. It was this last thought that made her get up and leave her strange apartment. Once she was out, she kept on walking. Her knees still felt weak and she had the feeling that if she stopped, she would fall and never get up again. So she walked past the coffee shop next to the building filled with food stalls she had never eaten at, manned by people she didn’t know, and started on the long stretch of road that was Jalan Bukit Merah. Wang Di kept to the shade of the wide-branched trees, her feet crunching on their fallen leaves as she passed pairs of Filipino maids pulling market trolleys behind them, passed uniformed children camelbacked with schoolbags, passed yawning house-dressed women and elderly Indian men in lungis walking their dogs, and armies of white-shirted men and women heading for bus stops or the train station. Walked for half an hour, at least. When she was nearly there she stopped for just a second to look up at her old pink-and-yellow building, then crossed the street to get to the bakery on the ground floor. Her feet were aching and it felt as though the sun had scorched a hole on the top of her head but she knew why she was there. What she had to do.
“I’ve only lived in the new flat for three days. Time,” she told the baker, “just needs time.”
“But that is precisely the problem. Time. We have none! Ah, except you, Mrs. Chia. You are what...only?”
“Seventy-five.”
“Ah, see? You’re a gin na compared to me. Just a child.”
She said nothing but waited to catch his eye before she continued. “Since I’m here, I just wanted to ask... You’ve known us, the Old One and me, for a long time. Did he ever tell you about his life before we moved here? You know...during the war.”
“The war?” The baker’s face expanded in surprise, then he snapped the metal tongs again as he frowned. “No, I don’t think so. He didn’t really—oh, but he did tell me where he used to live before—Bukit Timah.”
“Yes, but was there anything else? Did he ever mention anything to do with February?”
“February? You mean like a birthday or something? No, nothing like that. But I know he worked for years in town. Told me he moved because it got too crowded and dirty.”
Wang Di straightened up. “Do you know where? Which street, I mean?”
“Sorry.” He shook his head. “Only so much this head can hold.” He looked away, kindly rearranging the pastries on the counter before him as she flushed and dabbed at her forehead with a cotton handkerchief. When she was done, he asked, “Are you okay? How are you coping with the move?”
How am I coping? Wang Di thought. Then a flash of memory. The trees in front of her window, almost as tall as the buildings around them. Her trees. The dark green scent of their leaves mixed with the sting of exhaust. She turned around to look at them now. Soon they would be gone. Torn out of the ground like weeds. But to the baker, she said, “I’m okay. Same, same. Going back to my rounds tomorrow.”
“Maybe you should stop. Not good to keep on walking around like that in the heat. You know, the island is getting hotter, with all the buildings. All concrete and steel and glass. How not to get hot?”
Here she brought out the little speech she always gave everyone when they asked. A face-saving speech. Little lies that made up a big lie. “Oh, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Nothing to do. I’ll get bored sitting at home.”
He nodded and made sympathetic noises. “Oh, I know, I know.”
But when Wang Di tried to pay, Teo held out the bag and waved his hands at her. “No need, no need.”
It was in the last few years living in their gray and broken-down flat in block 204 that Wang Di became Cardboard Auntie. She had just been dismissed from her cleaning job at the hawker center for being too slow and had put off going to the bank for some time. She waited two weeks, until what remained in her purse were a few silver coins and a safety pin that pricked her finger each time she reached in to scrabble around, hoping for a lost cent, or a dollar note, folded and wedged into a corner. When she got her bank passbook back from the cold, smiling teller, she pinched it tight in her hands until she arrived home. Then she went into the kitchen and opened it to the last printed page.
$92.77.
This was how much they had left, the two of them together. She at seventy-two years of age and the Old One at ninety. Wang Di stared at the page until the numbers started to shift and bloom into different shapes. She pushed a fingernail into the paper, scoring a slight curve into the blank space beneath the digits.
On her first day, as the red-eyed koel sang its woeful koo-wooo koo-wooo from a treetop, Wang Di reached her arm into the bins around her neighborhood, called through quiet storefronts or knocked on back doors to ask if they had any used cans and unwanted boxes. It took getting used to, took learning, like everything else. On good days, she received up to ten dollars from the collector. If it was raining, she considered herself lucky if she got two.
It wasn’t long before she started to bring her gleanings home. The Old One looked away every time she returned with one more item: a small glass bottle, a collection of bottle caps. Stuffed them into the kitchen cupboards and drawers, underneath the bed, on top of their slanting wardrobe. As if to fill up the empty corners of their lives, the quiet between them, to leave no room for thought.
It was to this quiet that Wang Di returned that afternoon. This same quiet and lack of questioning that she now regretted.
She could recall the first time her husband had told her he wasn’t going to work that morning—was leaving home that day to take care of something. They were still strangers, muddling through their first week of marriage, of knowing each other. She had felt watched as he waited for her to ask where he was going. “Okay, of course,” she’d replied instead.
He did the same thing the following year on the same day, 12 February, and every year after that. After he left his boss’s shop to set up his own tailoring stall, he would ask Wang Di for permission to leave, just for a few hours, as if she were in charge. She had the idea that he was doing something shameful—the way she was doing something shameful, going to the sinseh for herbs that turned out not to work—so she didn’t ask.
The yearly ritual only stopped when his leg became so bad that even a walking stick was of little help. The first time 12 February came and passed without his half day away, Wang Di almost wanted to ask if he had forgotten but let it rest. It was much too late to talk about this, she decided, it would only bring up the question of why she hadn’t wanted to know all these years.
“I should have asked,” Wang Di said, as she looked at his photo on the altar. Then she did the only thing she could to feel at home again: she went to bed. Even though it was thirty degrees outside and her flat was lit with the afternoon sun. Even though Baker Teo’s words were still buzzing between her ears. The look on his face when she started asking him about the Old One, a look that said, “Why talk about what happened during the war?” and “Why now?” She lifted the thin blanket over her head and closed her eyes. As she lay on her mattress, she tried to weigh her two fears against each other. Her fear of his past and her own, swaths of it still untold, and her fear of the future—one that was absent of her husband. The only other time she had lain in bed like this was the day after she began telling the Old One about what had happened to her when she was young, just on the cusp of adulthood. How it had felt, all that history like a large, wriggling fish she was trying to wrestle to shore, how she had to fight not to get pulled under. She remembered how she had told him all she could until a familiar dread stoppered her throat. That night, the nightmares returned (her first one in years) and he had to hold her hand while she slept, as if trying to prevent her from being swept away by a swift current.
She thought about the way people stayed on afterward in the very places they had died, wondered if the Old One would be able to find her new place or if he would linger in the building, even as construction workers took it apart and grew something new in its place. If he were still here, she told herself, she would ask him instead. None of this creeping-around-and-asking-the-baker business, as if she were doing something she was not supposed to do. She would ask him and hope that he would forget about all the times she made him hold his tongue, hope that it wasn’t too late.
“Is it true? Have I run out of time, Old One?” The answer, when she sat up and looked around her, was clear. It echoed in the things she had accumulated over the years, brought over from the old flat (much to the chagrin of the movers) to fill this chalk-white, new apartment. The cardboard boxes bricking a half wall that led from the entryway into the living room. The plastic bags hanging from doorknobs or left gaping on the floor, all of them filled with inconsequential objects—rubber bands, jam-jar lids, disposable plates and bowls. The kitchen table covered with piles of junk mail and letters that she couldn’t read, that she’d left unopened since the Old One died. His things, lifted out of the box and put back in their respective places: his clothes, in his side of the thin plywood wardrobe, clean and folded. His sewing kit on top of the TV, expectant, like a plant waiting to blossom. It echoed in her ears—too late, too late.