Singapore
Day 66
Mr. Tai is returning from Macau tonight and the apartment is buzzing with the excitement and terror of his return. Angelica and Rupert are being more clingy than usual; they find it hard having him here. Most of the time he ignores their existence but sometimes, he decides that he needs to see their “progress” as if they’re companies.
“They’re only children!” I want to yell at him, but I can’t do that. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if I did that. I’m just the help and that is very clear. This is an apartment with a hierarchy. I’m above the maids but below the cook because he’s been here for twenty years and he knows how to make a noodle dish that Mrs. Tai likes and she says no one else makes it the way that he does. Rupert is superior to Angelica even though he’s only three and she’s five because he’s a boy and he’s going to take over the business one day.
There’s a hush as the call comes in from the driver that Mr. Tai is making his way up in the elevator. Angelica and Rupert are lined up nicely in front of Mrs. Tai, and I’m fifteen feet away because she doesn’t like to remind anyone that I spend more time with her children than she does. It’s ridiculous that we’re making such a celebration about a man coming home. He’s so rarely here we practically throw a parade when he walks in the door. The maids sometimes talk about where he is off to—Shanghai, Macau, Toronto, Sydney. The rumor is that he has a mistress in every city but Mrs. Tai doesn’t care as long as she has her credit cards. I don’t know if I believe that but it’s not like we’ve ever talked about the state of her marriage.
The elevator door opens and immediately I think, Mr. Tai doesn’t look so good. He’s sweaty and shaking. I have an urgent desire to push him back into the elevator, press the button and get him out of here. He forgets to bring his suitcase into the apartment so one of the maids runs to grab it before the elevator doors close behind him. Mrs. Tai is looking at him quizzically. He says something in Cantonese and she looks at me with her “Take the children” face. I gladly take Angelica and Rupert into the nursery—it’s already past their bedtime—and begin the routine of bath, pajamas (“No not those pajamas! I don’t like those ones anymore. I’m not a baby!”), book (“I want this book! I don’t care which one Rupert wants. I’m not a baby!”) and bed. When Mr. Tai comes into the nursery to say good night to Angelica and Rupert, Mrs. Tai is behind him, crying silently. I hope they will go away quickly. They’re scaring the children and he might have the Plague. He probably doesn’t, surely he doesn’t. But if he does, he might give it to Rupert and the risk of that makes me feel sick. That night, he and Mrs. Tai have a big fight. I don’t understand what they are saying as they always argue in Cantonese but the next day when I take the children to the kitchen for breakfast, I see that Mr. Tai is nailing wooden planks across the elevator. The sound of the hammer makes me flinch and Rupert keeps asking me what is going on. As I take the children back to the nursery to eat, Mr. Tai turns around and says in a crazy voice, “No one is to enter or leave this house.”
For the first time since I arrived in Singapore, my vulnerability here feels poisonous. I can’t rip the boards off. I can’t leave, I need this job. What am I going to do? Where would I go? What if the Plague ruins my life here? I hadn’t thought the Plague was going to be a problem in Singapore. I’ve heard about it. My mother has been e-mailing me about it, but Singapore is the safest country in the world and they shut the borders to foreign citizens. I thought I would be untouchable like the rich people are, but I’m just the help. I’m nothing to them.
Over the next two days we wait, and wait and wait in an odd pretense that everything is normal. Dressing as normal, eating breakfast as normal, playing with the children as if any of this is normal. We’re locked up in the apartment and I don’t know whether it’s scarier to be in here or out there. After two years as a nanny for the Tai family, I’m so used to being quiet and unquestioning that it didn’t even occur to me that I could just . . . leave. As I walked through the lounge first thing this morning, I saw that one of the cooks, Davey, was leaving. He had used knives and his hands to force off the wooden boards Mr. Tai had nailed across the elevator. He asked me if I had seen Mr. Tai today. I said I thought he was still in bed. “In that case,” he said and took the Ming vase that sat on the mahogany table by the elevator.
“Take care of yourself,” he said as the elevator doors closed.
I waved good-bye to the closed doors and thought Davey was stupid for leaving. As if a vase is going to save him from the Plague. He’s the one who should want to stay in here, not me, although the thought hovers around me that the Plague could already be inside the apartment. My throat tightens in fear for Rupert.
I walk around the huge living room, trying to breathe slowly, trailing my fingers along the glass panes that make up one wall of the apartment. When I first started working for the Tais I thought this room, this whole apartment, was the most unbelievable thing I had ever seen. All I knew before I arrived was that a family in Singapore had chosen me from the agency’s books. I didn’t know that Singaporeans are obsessed with having Filipino nannies because we are seen as the best. I just knew it was better money than I could make at home and the hours weren’t too bad. I was nineteen and didn’t know any better.
The moment I first met Mrs. Tai I knew she was challenging. The woman at the agency who hired me warned me it would be a shock. She said it was easy to feel resentful at first when they complained about how hard their lives were and talked about wanting more money, more jewelry, more everything. I nodded and thought Okay, lady, but I didn’t get it. Not until I got here and they had more money than I had ever seen in my life.
They don’t wave physical money around, obviously. It’s not cash, it’s everything. Servants, nannies, cooks. They live in three floors of this huge glass apartment block with the most amazing views. Mrs. Tai goes out shopping every day and comes back with more bags than the maids could carry. Or at least she used to. And then she complained about being tired. Oh, the irony.
Angelica is sitting on the sofa, playing on the iPad. It’s only 9:30 a.m. and I’m usually quite strict with iPad time but we’re locked up so the normal rules don’t apply. It was obvious immediately that I hadn’t been hired to be a nanny; I had been hired to be a mother. Mrs. Tai pays the children hardly any attention. She says good morning and good night to them and that’s it. I’m there for kissing bruised arms better and pinning their paintings onto the nursery wall and saying, “Yes we can watch Moana again but only if we watch Lilo & Stitch tomorrow and no we can’t have Frozen until next week, I don’t want to let it go again, that ice lady needs a time-out!” I hear their laughs and their cries and their mumbles in their sleep and I know what temperature Rupert likes the milk he still has at night that I really need to wean him off of, but it’s a good source of calcium and I’ll let him have it for a few more weeks.
I sit next to Angelica and stroke her hair. I want to ask her how she’s feeling but I don’t have any answers for the questions she would inevitably ask, so instead I just sit here, hoping my presence is enough. My phone pings for the fourth time in an hour. It’s another message from my mother. The Plague is back home in Mati. My mother calls it a sumpa, a curse. Her e-mails are hysterical. She doesn’t know anything, just that it is a terrible disease and the men are dying. It is scary enough being here but back home, if the power goes out or there are food shortages, there is no way to fix it. I try not to feel worried. At least we are a family of women. I think this every day and it makes everything seem better. My father left when I was small. Our greatest weakness has become a strength. Now, I think, what’s the worst that can happen? They will not die. I will not die. We will be okay.
I’m about to go and check on Rupert—he’s suspiciously quiet—when I hear a scream and Angelica and I jump up in unison. It’s Mrs. Tai, yelling for help in the bedroom. I know what this must mean but I can’t bear it. Don’t let the Plague be in the apartment, please. Not here.