Frank gets all his merit badges at once when he shows us into our new apartment. We have ample storage, large rooms and huge balconies, and every window in the entire joint has an unobstructed sea view. And, we have carpeting. This may not seem worth mentioning but it is rare here. No more crawling around with the kids on a cold, hard, marble floor. If that’s the icing on the cake, then the cherry on top is Sadie’s pink bedroom and the pink velvet headboard over her queen-sized bed.

Frank is all aglow as the three of us cheer and hug him. ‘Hooray for Daddy!’ We dance. He can’t hide his pride and relief. He shows us around every nook and cranny and gives us a tour of all the wonderful features in our new home. He has taken it upon himself to purchase things we need, like a microwave, toaster oven and blender. He has had phone jacks installed on the balcony so I can work at night, watching the ships’ lights, and, when it’s clear, see Indonesia twinkling in the distance. We have remote-controlled lights, airconditioners, ceiling fans, boom boxes and VCRs. The place is filled with cables and thin little palm-held devices that are the only way to turn everything from the overhead light to the coffee maker on and off. Forget where you put one of these remote control suckers and you’re screwed. What the heck is wrong with a toggle switch? I guess the marketing people are sure that the only way to edge past the competition is to appeal to the paraplegic and terribly lazy.

After the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ I’m faced with brochure overload. I flick through dossier after dossier about the stuff that is to make our lives easier. Ninety-eight pages of text come with the microwave; 160 pages come with the sound system. I decide to tackle it room by room, and start with the kitchen. I flip through the microwave book. The convivial little introduction starts with ‘Welcome To Your Breezy New Lifestyle’. I get bored after the diagram of the appliance broken down into pieces labelled AA–ZZ. I just pull the microwave and all the accessories out, tossing styrofoam peanuts around and ripping through bubble wrap (saving enough so the kids will have a new toy tomorrow). Frank is watching me with that enormous – but now starting to get on my nerves – grin on his face. It must hurt to have it like that for so long. His eyes are moist when he points and says, ‘This one came with a mirror. Special promotion.’

I give him a sceptical look. This isn’t Frank; it’s Ernest. I move on to the blender and in that box there is a Filofax. Frank is still over the moon.

‘Special promotion?’ I ask. Frank’s head goes up and down in the enthusiastic affirmative.

I’m not unhappy about these little extras but I am confounded by their relevance. I mean, I can understand the whole ‘But wait … there’s more! If you order now …’ thing. But there was always a correlation between the freebie and the product, something that would, say, enhance your cooking experience. But a full-length mirror with my microwave? A Filofax with a blender? Hey, I just checked my schedule, no time to chew, better get out the blender – ha ha.

They have a totally different idea of marketing over here. They think it’s sheer brilliance to have slogans like: ‘Make it a Hock Toey night!’ or ‘Buy Chow Wang and you’ll never go back!’ The guys who thought up these bon mots are probably promoted to Grand Poo Bahs of their agencies. ‘Yu Xin, you are like tiger,’ says Goh. ‘These ads are the lizard’s gizzards. They do “the bump”.’

I don’t want to get sardonic so soon after landing, after seeing how happy my new husband Ernest is, after committing to three more years. I tell myself to shut up and enjoy. I assemble my mirror in the kitchen, position the microwave on the counter and watch myself nuke. I look pretty good. I get so far into it that I even think, ‘Gee, if I get two, I’ll look twice as good and nuke up twice as much.’

After a while, Frank finally leaves to check in at the office. We only landed yesterday and life feels out of focus for me, like I’m acting it out but missing my cues. I get tired of pulling boxes apart and trying to catch those wily little grains of styrofoam. I grow weary of figuring out where to put things and identifying their usefulness. Even dreaming of sweeping through my home in a white silk gown with rabbitfur cuffs, flipping stuff on and off, fails to thrill after a while.

But I’m determined to make the place homey and get rid of the boxes. For something different, I turn my back on the new gizmos, begin hacking away at the containers sent from home, and start taking things out, beholding them as if for the first time. ‘Oh, I remember this potato peeler … Yes! I am so glad I didn’t leave the masking tape behind …’ And then, as I line it all up, growing soft and nostalgic, I see the little bonus: every bowl, fork, knife, spoon, masher, peeler, grater, candlestick, cheeseboard, piece of linen, towel, toy, book and CD is covered not only in old grease and old crud but also carpets of brand new mildew. I open a box marked ‘Sadie’s Toy Chest’ and scream. A dozen dolls stare up at me. These are not the faces of innocent childhood playthings. Each lovingly named, cherished, treasured doll, from the American Girls to the Barbies, has turned sickeningly mottled – as if painted for jungle warfare, or worse – with mildew. I can only see the whites of their eyes. Evil is in that box. I kick it over. Their chanting dies down, but the magic eight ball rolls out, telling me: ‘Whatever you think, is right.’

It will take forever to get all this stuff cleaned. I see my bunny fur balding and my silk greet-your-husband dress stained and smelly. I see my rhinestone heels getting caught up in a herd of rusty Brillo pads. I see my breezy new lifestyle turn skeezy. I must attack this mess … I must attack this mess … I walk steadily, slowly. My eyes are unblinking as I advance, chisel in hand, poised at ear level, ready to chip away at a five-month-old blob of guacamole or fossilised noodle – or maybe I’ll just maim Baby All Gone.

‘Why you brought so much?’ comes a voice from the living room.

‘Pearl!’ I cry. ‘How did you …’

‘Ah, we begin again,’ she says.

She opens several bags filled with household cleansers and pulls a chisel out of her hip pocket. We both watch it gleam in the light for a moment.

Taking hold of myself, I ask, ‘What about that family from Texas?’

‘So cheap, lah. They got maid now, Filipino. Here my new card.’

Her rates now include unpacking expats – $400 a day. I look around the room, thinking about it for a minute. If I say ‘Forget it’, she’ll disappear again, but if I take it, she’ll keep appearing again. I look around the room and shell out $500.

‘Keep the change, just stay with me for the day.’

I take a bath with the kids and share their dismay and disappointment that bubble bath doesn’t work here. How can that be, you wonder? Because there is no water pressure. It took seven hours to get two inches of lukewarm water. Still, we feel better. After the bath, the kids sit in their car seats in the hall and we pretend they’re still on the plane. ‘Have a nice flight!’ I call out.

‘Mommy, don’t go!’

‘Have to, sweetie, but the stewardess will come around.’

‘Mommy!’

‘We’re just playing. You aren’t on a plane. I have tons to do around the house. Now have a nice flight.’

Finally, I set about making the home a home, for Sadie, Huxley, Frank and me. A place where we will play and grow and laugh and tickle and … and that’s when ‘The Night Chicago Died’ comes to Fortune Gardens. I’m shocked out of total recall. I can’t remember all the details – just like I can’t remember the seconds before I hit a car full of Hassidim in Baltimore. I only remember their yarmulkes dangling at unnatural angles. It was horrible, there were bobby pins everywhere. There wasn’t a dent on their car, but their headgear had gone astray. I was shamed. And I call myself a Jew! I stepped out of my car with some difficulty since I was nine months pregnant. The officer told me I had an expired licence. The men said, ‘God forbid, she should keep driving that … that … weapon, going around killing innocent people.’ I rubbed my stomach. The officer took my keys away. The men took my insurance premium.

Back to this crash … Okay, I remember I plugged in the wedding-gift cappuccino machine. I was eager to get Huxley’s room ready for him for his nap so I plugged in his fish tank. I plugged in the 200-year-old-from-Rittman-to-Rittman china lamps after placing them on overturned boxes I had lovingly draped with colourful matching batiks. I started to charge up Frank’s electric shaver and tested the printer and tried sending a fax to my mom and playing some old albums on the stereo, but I didn’t get far. The hissing and burning and popping, the sizzling and frying and sparking. Glass flying, plastic melting, coffee everywhere … it all happened so fast.

So it would seem Singapore is on a different power system. Most profoundly retarded people know this.

Frank walks in the door. The studio audience gives him rousing applause. They elbow one another knowingly. ‘Now the jokes are coming,’ they say.

After a beat, Frank gives the camera a look. I remove his shoes. I hand him his drink. I’m over-solicitous, anticipating his every need, the perfect wife with a big old boo boo that has to be ’splained. I promise him his favourite thing in the whole world if he promises not to yell. There’s grousing, nervous pacing, aye carumbas. The best I can hope for is an endearing tone when he shouts out ‘Whah was chew thinnin’ about?’ because I just destroyed about $3,000 worth of appliances and whatnot we brought from America. And I seem to have caused some electrical damage in the apartment because nothing works now.

‘All I wanted to do was have you come home to a nice place. Wah, wah, wah.’

Ah, what’s going to happen next? Pearl! She looks up and smiles and flicks the switch on our $800 vacuum cleaner. Flash, boom, bang, the thing explodes. She stands there cloaked in a soft, downy fluff of Westchester debris, sooty but for the whites of her eyes.

Frank turns to me and says, ‘Everything?’

‘No, no … no, God, no … the kids are fine. They were in their car seats. Wanna beer?’

‘Definitely,’ he says.

‘Okay, I’ll just go down to the little store. I’ll be right back.’

I have nothing in the apartment to feed anyone, busy as I was destroying it all. Hey, there’s a special promotion on eggs. Buy ten, get two free. I think, ‘Well, that’d make a dozen, so, yeah, okay, thanks, but isn’t that rather like “Buy the shirt and we’ll throw in the buttons”?’ Marketing genius, huh?

Back at home I hand Frank his VBs and step out onto the balcony. I don’t want Frank asking me to explain again how I can be so stupid. I don’t want to watch Frank pass through the stages of his grief. With the first beer, there will be a stoic acceptance but it will be understood that I am not to leave the room because I must bear witness to the strength he musters. With the second beer, he’ll tour around the apartment silently, bereaving all that is lost, running a finger over this or that. With the third, he’ll come back to me as if I’ve had enough time to accurately answer the question: How can you be so stupid? If there are more beers, he’ll just hold on to the kids for dear life and shudder at the thought of what could’ve happened in this house of horrors.

When I go back in, Frank’s placing a sheet over his big old Klipsch speakers. I put on my Sauconys. I’m going for my first run in Singapore. Pearl’s all right and is cleaning again; the kids are fine. I’m pretty much no good to anyone; it’s best I leave. ‘Bye, everyone.’

The elevator ride is too short. I’m outside. I’m not going to do this; it’s crazy. Even though it’s after five in the evening and the wind is picking up and the sun is covered by cloud, it’s so hot. I’ll keel over. I don’t deserve to die. I should stay home, enjoy the food and have boozy playdates for the next three years. It’ll be the age of my complacency, my sleazy new lifestyle. An older woman approaches the lift, smiles and says, ‘Oh, you so fit. Running, is it?’ I nod.

‘Good! Good!’ she barks.

How could I disappoint this little old auntie?

Right. Okay. Let’s do it. I trot through the parking lot and skip down the steps of the underpass. I take the ones leading up to the park path by twos. I’m already dripping but I recognise myself and don’t feel half bad. Reunited with my animal soul, the atavistic particles of my psyche, carving my way across the land with speed and power. I really don’t feel a thing but my engine burning. Perhaps that’s because I’ve only been at it for three minutes.

I stick to the joggers’ path and loudly cuss at the bikers who are disobeying the roools. The lanes are clearly marked, both on the ground and on signs conveying in words and symbols, impossible to miss, that joggers are here and cyclists are here.

But neither group listens, natch.

‘Jogging path!’ I scream as I pass a cycler. ‘You belong over there,’ I bellow and point. Every time I get angry I run better. So, I keep myself angry. I curse at everyone and everything. I shout at the hawkers that their food really reeks. I loudly proclaim to the toddlers wandering about that I am barrelling through and they better watch their step. I feel great.

Then I hear, ‘Hi Fran!’

It’s Samantha, the lady I met after my first power swim at the pool. I had since discovered that she wasn’t really part of the baby pool bunch but was their friend all the same. I’d taken to her. She was an inviting sort of person. I enjoyed hopping out of the pool and saying, ‘Earned my beer today’ because she always countered with something upbeat and convincing like, ‘Ya did excellent. That’s what it’s all about.’

I join her and tell her that this is my first run in Singapore and apologise for my slow pace. She smiles and says, ‘You kiddin’ me? It’s a great pace. You just take it easy now. It’s a killer when you first start out.’ Then she looks at me and gets a worried frown. ‘Don’t you have any water?’

‘I never carry it,’ I answer. ‘Yeah, I can be that stupid.’

Then, with the same ‘shame on you’ expression, she asks rhetorically, ‘And you don’t have any powders either?’

‘I used a roll-on.’

She tells me that I’m asking for trouble without water and energy-infusing, secret-ingredient-Z-containing, $600-a-scoopful powder. ‘And it tastes just like tonic water.’

‘I’m fine. Really. Water is something I use to rinse my mouth out after brushing and tonic is what I sprinkle on gin.’

She laughs and hands me a shmattah.

‘What’s this?’ I ask.

‘Oh, it’s pieces of my son’s underpants that my helper sewed together. I brought two.’

‘Why, thank you. How kind.’

She dabs at her face with it and I can see that anyone would need two. I’m already watching large drops of water fall from my eyelids.

Samantha’s stride is low and quick. She’s deceptively fast and because we’re running side by side, I match her beat instead of using my own slow-motion leprechaun style. I’m succumbing to the pace and the heat. I start talking mindlessly to rise above it.

‘Your helper?’

‘My maid, Bet.’

‘Oh, do you work?’

‘No, I have three kids. She frees me up so we can enjoy the good part of the day.’

‘There isn’t supposed to be a good part of the day until it’s night,’ I say.

I can’t imagine having a Bet, someone doing everything I’m supposed to do, depriving me of the pleasures of being a martyr. Washing our things, doing our shopping, making our meals, babysitting, sewing shmattahs, cleaning the toilets, scrubbing the oven, ironing the shirts, sewing on buttons, mailing our letters, waxing the car, killing bugs. She’d answer the door when Frank came home for an afternoon rendezvous, overhear our discussions about money, witness my terrible temper and, no doubt, join the small but vociferous encounter group called ‘I Worked For Fran’, or ‘IWFF’, which has now become a verb meaning ‘to have lived to talk about working for Fran’, as in, ‘Yeah, I was pretty IWFFed, but God, cigarettes, coffee and all you kind people have helped me lead a normal life.’ I’ve had supervisors call me in. ‘You will have to be let go if you tell anyone again they are “dumber than a bucket of hair”.’ If only I had a chance to tell my side of the story. Which is, she was!

‘I do home schooling for my kids – or rather, unschooling – and Bet helps with that sometimes,’ Samantha continues. (What is unschooling? Does she tell them one plus one doesn’t really equal two, and don’t let those power-hungry mind-control freaks in the education system tell you otherwise? I’m very curious but I don’t ask because really I want to know more about maids.)

‘Don’t you feel, I don’t know, inhibited with a maid around?’ I ask.

‘Oh my gosh, no. Bet’s part of the family.’

‘Does she eat with you?’

‘No.’

‘Do you take her on outings?’

‘No.’

‘Do you celebrate her birthday?’

‘Oh, that would be a grand idea.’

‘So … she’s sort of like a useful pet.’

We laugh.

She tells me more about maids. Most come from the Philippines but some come from Sri Lanka or Indonesia. You don’t have to give more than one Sunday a month and public holidays off. They learn how to be excellent cooks and would throw themselves in front of a bullet to save your child. Most of them speak passable English and learn languages quickly. They’re generally well educated, because even a nurse or teacher stands to make more as a domestic servant in Singapore than at the top of their career in their home country. Samantha tells me that they flock here hoping for work and I’d be doing them a favour by hiring one. Not just because I’d be offering a job to a needy person, but also because I’m an expat. Apparently, a number of locals have their maids sleeping on the floor of their kids’ rooms or calling a hard chair in the kitchen a bed. Every week there are stories about employers beating up their maids. Just the other day, there was one about a nurse who bit her maid.

So, in Singapore, I’d be a good boss.

I’m wondering if Samantha will run with me again, maybe tomorrow after Caroline’s playgroup. I had found out about it when I ran into Caroline at the store. She hurried up to me while I was at the register and whispered, ‘Don’t get those here’, pointing to my two potatoes. ‘They have them at Cold Storage for half the price this week.’ I didn’t want to seem unimpressed with the tip, so I nodded conspiratorially and put them back, saving myself about a nickel. She called out, ‘Playgroup at mine tomorrow, three o’clock till five, block three, seventh floor.’

‘What apartment?’ I asked.

‘Seventh floor,’ she repeated as she put helmets on her children for the stroller ride home.

‘Hey, are you going to Caroline’s playgroup?’ I ask Samantha.

‘Oh, no, that’s much too structured for me,’ she responds.

‘Really? I thought we’d just sit around, have coffee and cake and make sure the kids share,’ I say.

‘Exactly. It makes me so mad,’ she says, getting visibly angry. ‘Why should my child share just because it’s playgroup?’

Ah, unplaygrouping.

‘I see your point. Well, I, for one, won’t have my child participate in such conformist activities like Simon Says or singing “If you’re happy and you know it do whatever I tell you to”.’

She laughs. She isn’t offended. She can run, she has a joie de vivre that could wake the dead and she’s sweet. Her kids are just the right ages to play with mine. I love her right then. We chat about this and that and the time flies. Turns out she’s one of seven daughters of an Irish migrant couple who moved to Canada, is a vegetarian and breastfeeds her kids until they’re five. She’s got her ideas and some of ’em are plenty out there, but I hope we’ll do this again.

‘Do you want to run again tomorrow?’ I ask when we get back to Fortune Gardens.

‘Sure, this was great. See you at the Boonlap entrance at five. Bye for now.’

I’m a different person when I walk into the apartment. I have a friend and I have an answer about why I’m so stupid: ‘Because I’m a jock, Frank.’

After I shower, we open a bottle of red and have a drink on the balcony. The disaster, though always to remain part of the fabric of our lives, is behind us. Frank talks about work. He tells me that the new staff is typically Singaporean and didn’t say a word to him all day except, ‘I’m going for my lunch now.’ I tell him about playgroup tomorrow and my great run with my new pal. We pour another glass and then hear, ‘All done already. I’ll go now.’

‘Oh, Pearl, I forgot you were still here, sorry,’ I say.

She giggles and shifts from one well-planted foot to the other.

‘What do we owe you?’

‘$400 for expat moving, $100 for babysitting, $100 for cleaning and $10 for under 24-hour notice.’

‘Hey, wait a minute, I already paid you $500, and I didn’t call you, you just came,’ I protest.

‘Okay, okay, $207.’

I pay her. She’s carting off $707 today. A maid costs $350 a month. And they do your shopping, make your meals, babysit, lick your stamps and smash your bugs. But Pearl’s what I’ve got. ‘Pearl, can you come tomorrow so I can do some heavy-duty grocery shopping?’

‘No, tomorrow no good.’ Her beeper goes, she whips off her apron, slips on her shoes and as she’s doing the combination lock on her purse, she asks, ‘Alabama, that US, right?’

I nod.

‘When can you come again?’ I ask somewhat shrilly, but the elevator door is closing between us and I can’t hear her answer.

We put the kids to bed and settle out on the balcony again. Gosh, this is nice. It is our home. The chairs we’re sitting on are cushy and we put our feet up on the two unused ones. We look at the stars and then at each other, and smile. This is going to be a good life. I bring out some snacks and another bottle of red. I light my first and best cigarette of the evening. I lean against the balcony and look out over the grounds, the water fountain, the shimmering pool, and, in the circle of light outside the grocery store, there is Pearl. She’s standing in front of a stunned, red-necked foursome, her card between her fingers. I ask Frank, ‘Do you think we should look into a maid?’

‘Absolutely,’ Frank answers without hesitation.

The next day, the kids and I play and shop, which is hellish because I need so much and they behave so badly. Huxley breaks five bottles of ketchup and Sadie tries to pick them up for me. The trolley wheels won’t move and I have no idea where to find what I need. In the end, I get flustered and leave the cart in the middle of the aisle and buy a frozen apple pie to take to Caroline’s. I have no idea how to convert Fahrenheit into Celsius so I just wing it and the result is a dry, fruity brick that would break your toes if you dropped it and your teeth if you didn’t. Before stopping at Caroline’s, I head to the little store for some ice-cream to apply like make-up to my ugly pie and go to block three, floor seven at 3 pm with the kids. I needn’t have worried about finding her apartment. She is indeed on the entire seventh floor. After ringing the bell a dozen times, I just let myself in. The shoes scattered all around the enormous foyer remind me that I’m supposed to take all of ours off. I call out, ‘Anybody home?’

A fortyish Filipino woman in a servant’s uniform bustles out to greet me.

‘Ma’am, Caroline is in here. Can I get you anything?’

‘No, we’re fine,’ I say. ‘Can I just put this in the fridge?’

We walk for 20 or so minutes from the foyer through the dining room, the rec room, the bar, another hallway, another den and finally to the kitchen. After adjusting the lifetime supply of Diet Cokes, I find a place for my pie.

‘This way,’ the maid instructs.

We go through another hallway and find ourselves in yet another den where Caroline has her feet up on a coffee table, toes sandwiched with cotton balls, and the kids are sitting comfortably on the sofa watching a Thomas the Tank Engine video. There’s a rack hanging on the wall with several dozen remote control devices, labelled ‘drape opener’, ‘aircon’, ‘DVD’, ‘VCD’, ‘VCR’, ‘TV’, ‘fan’, ‘light’, etc.

‘Hi Fran,’ Caroline says. ‘Bethy, you left off here.’ She points to a toe and the maid resumes buffing and polishing Caroline’s right foot. The doorbell rings and Bethy continues her pedicure.

‘Bethy, I can’t get it, can I?’ Caroline says.

‘No, Ma’am, the polish is still wet. I’ll get it.’

‘Maids,’ Caroline says, saying it all, as Bethy walks down the hall.