Soy Sauce for Beginners Read online

  She laughed weakly.

  “Good,” I said. “We’ll start right away.” I thought of my father in the hospital cafeteria, sipping from a can of artificially flavored apple juice, and wished I hadn’t been so harsh.

  Ma took my hand. “There’s something else I want to discuss.”

  Beneath my fingers, her skin felt parchment-paper thin. I fought the urge to let go.

  “Did Paul reach you at work?” she asked.

  I couldn’t help but pull away. “Why were you talking to him? What did he say to you?” Then I caught myself. “Why are we even getting into this right now?”

  “What exactly happened between you two? Why won’t anyone give me a straight answer?”

  “I think we have enough to discuss right now,” I said. “Like why you’re sucking down gin and tonics in the middle of the afternoon.”

  Her eyebrows came together in the center of her forehead and just as quickly separated. I’d finally said the words, and now I had no idea what was supposed to come next.

  A loud beep shattered the silence: the IV infusion machine. A nurse bustled in without knocking and silenced the beeping. “Everybody doing fine?” she asked. She inspected the needle in Ma’s elbow crease and rotated her forearm in the air. She didn’t appear to notice that neither Ma nor I had answered her question. “I’ll be back in an hour to take your vitals,” she said and left.

  I wished I had some reason to call the nurse back. I was afraid to look at Ma’s face.

  She spoke first. “You are thirty years old,” she said. “It’s time to start acting your age. Your problems won’t disappear simply because you want them to.”

  I stood with such force that my chair tipped over and landed on its back with a metallic clang. “Right. You would know. You’re a wonderful example of how to face problems head on.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what?” I yelled.

  “Sooner or later you’ll have to tell me what’s going on. Why not start now before you lose him for good?”

  “Fine,” I said. “You want me to talk? I’ll talk. And when that’s out of the way, maybe we can focus on why you’re in the hospital. Because your drinking problem seems to be the real issue here. You’re turning into a drunk.” The word rang in my ears. I didn’t know if I was finally saying all the things that needed to be said, or if I was trying to avoid talking about Paul. But even in my heated state, I sensed that telling Ma about the affair would unleash a slew of other issues I wasn’t ready to examine. Once I started talking, there would be no taking any of it back.

  She said, “He can only forgive you so many times.”

  It took me a second to realize she thought I was to blame. I stood there with my lips parted, trying to figure out where to begin.

  Ma let out a sigh. “Come,” she said. “Sit.”

  Before she could say anything else, I hurried out the door and down the hallway, past my tired, confused father. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  I shook my head and told him I’d be home later and pounded the button to close the elevator door.

  In the parking lot, I dug in my purse for my phone and scrolled through the list of missed calls, watching the cursor jump back to the beginning to highlight Paul’s name. I twisted the knob on the radio and scanned the channels until I caught the opening notes of Dvořák’s New World Symphony. The blazing sounds of brass instruments filled the car.

  I was five when I first heard the slow, stately melody of the second movement on my mother’s record player. Afterward, I’d gone over to the piano and plucked out the horn solo, right on key. When my mother—eyes feverish with excitement—described the moment to my piano teacher, my teacher agreed that I must have perfect pitch. Ma loved to recount that old story; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made her so proud.

  I switched back to the soft-rock station and drove out of the parking lot. As I waited for the light to change, I considered going back to Chaplin’s. The bartender was a balding Englishman who only charged me for every second drink, but picturing his watery eyes and down-turned mouth made me even more depressed than I already was. Instead of veering west to Chaplin’s, I got on the Pan Island Expressway to avoid rush-hour traffic, and before I knew it, I was heading back in the direction of the factory.

  Two stoplights ahead of Lin’s, I swerved into the parking lot of Jalan Besult Hawker Center. I told myself that my colleagues probably wouldn’t even be there anymore, but if they were, I’d just stop for a quick drink. Surely no one would mind. Surely they’d be friendlier outside the office.

  The hawker center was a large, open-air hall that housed four dozen independently owned food stalls, each specializing in a single signature dish, from barbecued stingray coated in fiery, pungent shrimp paste to Hokkien mee, a mixture of yellow and rice noodles, fried with eggs and then braised in rich, savory prawn stock. At this hour, the hawker center teemed with couples on their way home from work and families who lived in the nearby government-subsidized housing estate. The air smelled of wok-fried garlic and the cleaning chemicals doused on tiled floors that never completely dried in the humidity.

  As I weaved my way through the tables, I sensed scrutiny of my soft leather bag, of my intricately embroidered black-and-white blouse and slim pencil skirt.

  The beer stall was on the opposite end of the hawker center, where Fiona, Shuting, and Jason were squeezed around a table alongside four teenage boys in white short-sleeved shirts and khaki shorts—the uniform of a well-regarded secondary school. Shuting noticed me first. Her eyes grew large. She lowered her head and muttered to the other two. Surprise, then panic spread across their faces, and I knew I’d made a colossal mistake.

  “Hi,” I called out, waving enthusiastically. What else could I do?

  They mumbled hello back.

  The teenagers looked up briefly and then returned to their steaming bowls of noodles.

  “Want to sit down?” Fiona asked weakly. She tried to slide over on the bench, creating a sliver of space.

  Shuting’s eyes narrowed. “How’s your mum? Everything eh sai boh?”

  “She’s fine,” I lied in that same loud, bright voice. I told them I couldn’t stay, I was just picking up dinner to bring home—although all of us knew there was no way I would have driven back here.

  “See you Monday,” I cried, before hurrying around a corner, past a hawker carrying a stack of bright green plates, who scowled and shouted at me to watch where I was going.

  Giggles erupted behind me—giggles that I knew belonged, in part, to Fiona, Shuting, and Jason. I could already imagine the pitying looks and barely concealed snickers I’d receive at work.

  Back inside the car, I cursed my own stupidity. I wished I hadn’t stormed out of the hospital. I even considered returning to apologize. But I was so tired of Ma’s constant disapproval. She didn’t understand why I couldn’t pick a career and stick with it, why after getting a master’s degree in English, I now needed one in music education, why I’d given up on my marriage, why I’d let my father talk me into working at Lin’s.

  My mother believed her best years were the ones she’d spent as a doctoral student at Cornell. From the very beginning, she was determined to prepare me for a life away from Singapore: She named me after her favorite Schubert lied even though she knew everyone here would stumble over the name. She convinced my father to send me, their only child, halfway around the globe to boarding school in California. Later, when I was in college and my parents first met Paul, she counseled Ba not to immediately dismiss my ang mo boyfriend.

  After all she’d done to set me free, here I was, right back where I’d begun.

  The car was hot and stuffy and the backs of my thighs stuck to the leather seat. I rolled down the window and sat there with my hands on the steering wheel until the lights came on in the parking lot. Then I reached for my cell phone and called Paul.

  It rang once, twice, three times before I realized it was the
middle of the night in San Francisco. I was about to end the call when he answered.

  “Why, hello there,” he said, his voice gruffer than usual.

  I stumbled over my apology, wondering if that girl was right there beside him in bed.

  “Calm down,” he said, giving that low throaty chuckle that got me every time. “I’m at work. You didn’t wake me.”

  So he was still pulling all-nighters like a college kid. A computer science postdoc at Berkeley, he’d always said there was something magical about working until the sun came up.

  I tried to relax. “Why did you call so many times?”

  Paul said, “Well, listen, I was going to send you a convoluted email, but decided it’d be quicker if I called. Then I couldn’t remember which number was for your cell and which was for your parents’ house, and then your mom said to call you at work.” He rambled when he was tired.

  “Okay,” I said, drawing out the last syllable.

  He said the couple subletting our apartment was selling weed out of the living room. Neighbors—probably Mrs. O’Donley—had complained, and the landlord was giving them until the end of the month to move out. “If it’s okay with you. I think we should split the remaining rent and be done with it.”

  My throat tightened. I didn’t know if I was about to laugh or choke. This was what he’d needed to discuss? This was what had prompted him to call all over Singapore looking for me? I started to cough and reached for the half-empty bottle of water in the passenger seat of my car.

  Meanwhile, Paul was explaining how much time and hassle we’d save by not bothering with new subletters—another noisy, happy couple traipsing across our apartment’s creaky, sun-warmed wood floors, ooing at the bay windows that looked out on the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Suddenly it struck me that this was his problem. He’d created this mess in the first place, and he could figure out how to deal with it.

  When he told me that my half of the rent came to twenty-seven hundred dollars, I said, “Actually you owe my dad money. Take my share out of that.” Five years earlier, my mother had insisted that my father pay off the rest of Paul’s college loans as part of our wedding gift.

  “Oh,” he said.

  I knew he was coloring in the letters on a phone bill or credit card application or some other sheet of scrap paper, the shading growing darker and more frantic as he thought of a response. This was a guy who refused to take cabs in the pouring rain, who preferred sleeping in turtleneck sweaters to running up the heating bill. He’d hated taking the money in the first place.

  “I’m going to pay him back,” he said. “I just need some time. You know what I’m making as a postdoc.”

  I said, “Maybe you should have thought this through before moving out.” What a relief it was to finally say those words.

  In a steady voice he said, “This may be hard for you to understand. Most of us don’t have over five thousand dollars sitting in the bank.”

  His words sliced through me. “Maybe your girlfriend can help you out. Oh, wait, she’s an undergrad.”

  “Leave her out of this,” he said in a menacing tone I hadn’t thought him capable of.

  What had I expected him to say? That as a matter of fact they were no longer happy together? That she was gone? I pounded a fist against the steering wheel and accidentally sounded the horn. Its beep was a short, sharp slap. At the end of this conversation, Paul would get in his car and drive home and crawl into a bed already warmed by that sleeping girl. At the end of this conversation, where would I be?

  He exhaled long and slow. “Let’s not be this way.”

  Jamming my forehead into my palm, I tried to tap into the white-hot anger I’d felt moments before, but found only dead ash.

  “Where do I send the check?” I asked.

  He gave me his new address, 62 Lowell Street, and I tried not to picture his new apartment in the Berkeley Hills. Didn’t wonder where he’d placed our coffee table, fashioned from an abandoned door we’d found leaning against a dumpster, or the battered loveseat I told him wasn’t worth taking, its black velour faded to a dingy green. Didn’t wonder about what kind of bed he’d bought after we’d agreed—the only thing we’d agreed on—to junk our old one. Didn’t wonder whether they slept beneath one large comforter, or whether he’d insisted, right away, that they each have their own.

  “Is that it?” I asked when I’d written everything down.

  “Gretch,” he said in a voice that made my breath catch in my throat.

  I waited for him to go on, but then he thanked me and hung up.

  3

  FROM TIME TO TIME during our last year together, Paul’s computer science research assistant came up in conversation. Her name was Sue, but he called her “the kid.” As in, “The kid was coding for me today and wouldn’t shut up about that ridiculous new reality show,” or, “The kid and her friends are all crazy about that girl band. Kitty Cat? Hello Kitty? It’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” From hit songs to viral YouTube clips to Internet memes, he became an expert on all things college students were into, but I figured he was just trying to stay connected to his youth. After all, I, too, was feeling anxious about turning thirty.

  Five months before the dreaded birthday, I was taking a break from writing my final music theory pedagogy paper of the semester. I don’t know what inspired me to type Paul’s name into a search engine, but there he was on a site that allowed students to rate their instructors. His page listed his name, the introductory class he taught at Berkeley, and a single posting: “Pretty cool dude, but flirts with female students. Especially a certain cute one.” In the kitchen the microwave dinged; I scraped my bowl of oatmeal down the garbage disposal, too sick to my stomach to eat.

  Later that night, I pushed my pasta around my plate while Paul recounted the debate he and his officemate had gotten into over the best dive bar in San Francisco.

  “The 500 Club,” he said, rolling his eyes and making a guttural sound of disgust.

  I tried to keep my tone light. “Was Sue there, too?”

  “Hmmm?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me.

  My fork clattered to my plate.

  I wouldn’t bring up her name again until a month later, when we were visiting his family in Southern California for New Year’s Eve. At six minutes to midnight, I walked into the guest bathroom and found him whispering into his cell phone. While everyone else gathered in the den to count down the last seconds of the year with the crowd in Times Square, Paul and I screamed at each other upstairs.

  At first he claimed he was checking his voicemail. But when I held the phone right up to his face and told him to read me the name of the person he’d just hung up on, he snatched back the phone. He told me he could call whomever he wanted; he didn’t need my permission; he couldn’t talk to me when I was this hysterical. But when I yelled that she was a goddamned child, all the color left his face. He backed away until he stumbled against the sink. The phone tumbled out of his hand and landed in the toilet with a sturdy plop.

  “Goddamn it,” he yelled so loudly I expected my in-laws to pound on the door.

  That night he slept on the futon. We didn’t say a single word to each other through the entire seven-hour drive north. Back in San Francisco, however, he begged me to forgive him and swore he’d never slept with Sue. He said he loved me. He vowed to do whatever it took to earn back my trust.

  Unsure of what to do, I turned to Frankie, my old college roommate. That rainy afternoon, she and I sat on a damp bench overlooking the bay, clutching paper cups of coffee.

  “He says he’s sorry, and I want to believe him.”

  Frankie frowned and squeezed me arm. She hesitated before opening her mouth. “I don’t know, Gretch. I’m not sure I’d ever be able to trust him again.”

  It was the kind of advice she’d given me countless times before, and yet this time—because I wanted so badly to believe that Paul and I were still a team, because I’d already made up my mind—I seiz
ed on the fact that Frankie had never had a boyfriend. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Oh yeah? When was the last time you went on a date?”

  Frankie stiffened and looked away, but not before I caught the dismay on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” I began, but didn’t know how to go on.

  “Forget it,” she said. She tossed her empty cup at the mouth of the trash can, and it slid right in. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble figuring things out on your own.”

  I vowed to tell no one else about the affair.

  For the rest of January, at least, Paul did his best to earn my forgiveness. He hired a new research assistant. He called in the middle of the day to say hi. He surprised me with a weekend trip to Carmel. And I believed he was sincere. The girl was an undergrad. How far could this have gone? Female enrollment in computer science was notoriously low; I’d seen some of them on campus—thin girls in thick sweaters with pale, stringy hair and round glasses worn without the slightest trace of irony.

  In February, our schedules filled up with work and school, and we settled back in our normal, separate routines. Paul’s paper deadline loomed, and he spent more time at his office, at the library, in coffee shops. He did his best work late at night, so he’d be fast asleep when I woke to go to the gym and then to school. By April, we were so rarely together we were barely speaking. When we both happened to be awake and in the same room, we bickered, or worse, had full-fledged fights about silly inconsequential things: the way he left his dirty clothes in a ball at the foot of the bed, how I forgot to clear my hair from the shower drain.

  In May, when he finally told me he couldn’t do this anymore, I wasn’t entirely stunned, but it didn’t hurt any less.

  “It’s Sue, isn’t it?” I said.

  His bags were already piled by the door. He looked down at his feet and whispered he was sorry.

  I fell onto the sofa, waiting for him to sit down beside me, maybe take my hand.