Free as a swallow

Yen closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the warmness of the towel but the trickling water from the plastic fountain outside wouldn’t leave her alone. If only she’d had the guts to ask for another room. In fact, if only she had more spas to choose from. As it stood, she had a choice between the rundown gym that looked like a teenage social club or the pseudo-zen spa that was really just a beauty centre. The masseuses were better at giving nail extensions and facial makeovers than a proper massage. Still, it was better than nothing and was only thirty minutes from home. Living far from the city took some getting used to. The real problem with this lack of choice was that it applied to everything else. There was one high street with all the usual shops, one hospital where the doctors and nurses knew each other’s addresses, one bakery where the baker and his wife called every customer by their first name – Yen had only bought three cakes in three years, but she was pretty sure they knew all the details of her life, including things she would rather forget but couldn’t because such things stuck.
‘A call for you, Mrs Dangerfield,’ Yen heard before feeling smooth knuckles graze her cheek like cold mints. ‘Come back, right now!’ Sam shouted over the phone. Yen wasn’t sure whether Sam was giving an order or simply excited; this wasn’t the first time she’d used that tone of voice and it was highly irritating, after all she was Melani’s nanny and not hers. Before Yen could ask if her daughter was all right, the phone went dead. She tried to call home again when she got into the car, but still nobody answered. Did it have something to do with Melani’s birthday cake? She’d decided to avoid the bakery at all cost and get a cake online, but maybe they couldn’t deliver it on time?
Sam had only started working for them two months ago, and even though Yen admired her vivacity and outspokenness, it did seem inappropriate that she was making new rules around the house and dishing out advice as if they were already best friends. Sam was ten years younger and had been working as a nanny since graduating from the school of sibling daycare. There was nothing she liked better than shooting holes in Yen’s mothering skills. For example, when Yen wanted to feed Melani, who couldn’t direct a spoonful of food to her mouth without flinging half of it across the room and spreading the other half over her face, Sam forbid her to interfere. ‘She needs to learn how to do it herself. You can clean up the mess later.’ When Melani chose mismatched socks, Sam stopped Yen from correcting her: ‘She has every right to choose what she wants to wear! Don’t you want your daughter to be an individual who can think for herself?’ A couple of weeks ago, when Melani had caught a cold and wanted Yen to sleep with her, Sam had told them both off and said that bedtime rules weren’t made to be broken. After snapping the nursery door firmly shut, Sam reminded Yen that the rules a nanny made had to be taken seriously otherwise she’d lose control of her charges. Yen appreciated Sam’s professionalism and efficiency, but resented the way she attempted to override her rightful authority and natural instincts as a mother.
After putting Melani to bed at exactly six thirty, Sam would stay for an hour or so to clean up and prepare for the next day, or simply to make sure that Yen didn’t allow Melani to get up again. Occasionally, when Yen felt that it was the nice thing to do, she would invite Sam to stay for a drink. Since Yen found out about his affair, Harry spent most days of the week at his mistress’s flat. The tension between them was at breaking point, but the joy Melani got from seeing her father gave Yen the strength to act her part when he dropped by.
It was difficult for Yen to put a finger on what went wrong in her relationship. She’d done everything womanly possible to please him: she’d given up her career, given him a baby, lost her own friends in an attempt to acquire his, she’d even learnt to make Beef Wellington – everybody said the surest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. Yet four years into their marriage, before Melani was even three, he’d left them for Nurse Brenda. He didn’t want a divorce, he said, but Brenda was his soul-mate; she didn’t want any of his money, she said, and couldn’t care less about keeping up appearances. If Yen hadn’t found out about the affair, and she didn’t for almost a year, Harry would’ve happily led a double life.
It was on Melani’s third birthday that Yen’s life took an unexpected turn. ‘Don’t let this one fool you,’ the baker’s wife had smiled when she introduced the apprentice standing in for her ill husband, ‘he’s young but he’s very talented! He can make you anything your heart desires.’ Yen had serious doubts as she watched Damian take her order with an uncontrollably shaky hand. A thick vessel pulsed on his pale neck and his eyes flickered wildly whenever she tried to make eye contact. Finally, when she asked him again if he’d noted everything down, he managed to smile and hold up a nail-bitten finger in affirmation. A few days later he delivered a beautiful cake and a little note. He looked so young she wanted to ask him for ID first, but she didn’t listen to her head and as a result lost her heart. Not long after realising she was hopelessly in love with him, Harry found out. It turned out that nurses made fantastic spies and gossips.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t find out?’ he shouted in disbelief. ‘What do you think they’re saying about me at the hospital right now?’
Yen bit her lip to stop herself from shouting back the obvious.
‘If you want a divorce, say so. But you will only get Melani over my dead body!’
He spoke as if he’d never tried to undermine her freedom, and yes, she had willingly given up many things over the years, but now that she wanted her independence he was going to show her precisely how useless she’d be without him. He was going to take away what was naturally and rightfully hers, the only thing she couldn’t live without. How could she choose her reason to live over her heart’s longing?
Damian was inconsolable when she told him. It wasn’t only the fear of losing Melani that convinced Yen to end the relationship, she was actually thirteen years Damian’s senior and it seemed so wrong to be wasting his time. What could a lonely woman in her thirties bring to a young man barely out of his teens? Maybe it was patronising for her to worry about such things – life brought happiness and meaning to each person differently – but if they parted now, the wounds would heal quicker for them both. There were simply too many ways for their relationship to go wrong: what if his salary wasn’t enough to support them both if she failed to find a job; maybe she could practice medicine again but would that make him uncomfortable working as a baker’s apprentice; might time or their circumstances alter her appearance so much that he would no longer found her as attractive as she was now; what if he met someone more suitable his own age? These were all pertinent issues she needed to consider carefully.
‘Yen, you think too much!’ Sam told her one evening. ‘Is it a Taiwanese thing not to enjoy life? Can’t you take things as they come without worrying about how to prevent or prepare for the worst? Nobody can control and predict life, you know. If you spend so much time worrying about it, how are you going to enjoy it before it’s over?’
Yen had to admit there was a lot of truth in this. Despite all her efforts hadn’t all her plans been made in vain? Her career – how hard she’d worked to pay for her education and where had it led to? Her marriage – hadn’t she worked on it with faithful earnestness and where was it now? She had to confess that she didn’t know where life was taking her and, worse still, which way to turn if she was given the chance.
‘Have a one-night stand,’ Sam suggested. ‘If something comes out of it, fine, if not, well, what’s there to lose? It’s the experience that counts, right? I bet you’ll be grateful for it when you’re old and not getting any.’
Yen felt ashamed to admit that she believed in very old-fashioned feminine virtues. There was a book that her friends used to pass around in college called The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. Some of them treated it like a bible; others laughed at the rules like good jokes. There were impossible rules like ‘Don’t talk to a man first,’ or obscure ones like ‘Don’t accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday,’ or sexist ones like ‘Don’t expect a man to change or try to change him,’ they all sounded a little funny to the twenty-first ear. But, some of them had really worked when she tried them on Harry, and even Damian. ‘Always end the date first’ and ‘Don’t see him more than once or twice a week’ had worked like a charm. Men were such masochists when it came to emotions, it was as if they wanted a woman to make them feel the pain of absence, to force their hearts and minds to travel to places they’d never usually go, in order to bring a new dimension to their lust.
When Yen confessed her affair, Sam raised an eyebrow; when she admitted that she’d been celibate since Harry found out, her jaws dropped.
‘You haven’t had sex for a whole year! Are you human? If I were you,’ Sam liked giving advice on sex almost as much as she did on mothering, ‘I’d get back with the lover.’
‘What about my husband?’ Yen tried to make it sound like a mocking afterthought rather than a serious consideration.
‘What about him? He’s never at home, what difference would it make? You’re thirty-four, you can’t stop having sex forever! My boyfriend,’ Sam grinned a bit more smugly, ‘my fiancé, he’s going to say yes when I ask, is amazing. When I think of him,’ her eyes glazed over like a fortune-teller’s, ‘I can almost see swallows flying.’ Sam explained that her boyfriend had a swallow tattoo on his chest. Yen’s heart leapt with the symbolism of this story because her name happened to mean swallow in Mandarin. Maybe fate was indirectly telling her to break free and follow her dreams.
Floating on the tailwind of Sam’s liberal-mindedness, she decided to see Damian again. Why worry so much about other people’s opinions when she, like any individual in a modern world, was entitled to live her life as she pleased? Indeed, wouldn’t she, and not society, be the one to suffer the consequences of her own mistakes? Yen inadvertently shivered at the memory of her grandmother’s socially restricted life. Every single decision she took she weighed on a social scale first. This behaviour was forced on her daughter-in-law who had to know the precise angle of a chicken’s neck and the exact amount of fat on a slice of pork when making an offering at the temple. If it was not up to standard, the community would laugh at them and the family would lose face. Having grown up in an environment where you worried instinctively about how others saw you and what they might say behind your back, Yen realised that it hadn’t made her life any easier or more respectable. If she loved Damian, surely the only thing that mattered was if he loved her back?
‘Come back,’ Yen said over the phone and immediately regretted it. ‘Don’t call him and rarely return his calls,’ was one of the rules. ‘To call men is to pursue them, which is totally against The Rules. They will immediately know that you like them and possibly lose interest.’ Damian’s silence emphasized the fact that she had broken two rules simultaneously. Almost a year had passed since he waited for her by the gates desperate to convince her to leave Harry, and now the tables had turned.
‘I always wanted more than sex from you,’ he finally said. Yen refrained from asking him how he could be so sure when they’d only seen each other for three short weeks. ‘I was ready to settle down with you and have a family. I still love you, but give me some time. I’ll let you know…’ Yen couldn’t bear to hear the rest and quickly hung up.
It was still raining when she finally drove up to the house and, purely out of habit, glanced up at Melani’s room. Even though bedtime was still an hour away, the dark window made her heart lurch with inexplicable fear. She entered from the back door, listening carefully for Melani’s footsteps. There were no sounds in the kitchen and only the bright lights welcomed her. A large cake box sat on the kitchen table with glossy pink ribbons and colourful balloons tied to it. She heard Sam shout, ‘Higher, higher,’ and Melani squealed with delight.
‘Oh, you’re back,’ Sam said offhandedly when Yen entered the lounge. ‘My boyfriend’s personally dropping off Melanie’s cake.’ Yen looked at Damian, who clung to Melani like a long-lost friend. Sam tried to take Melani asking, ‘Isn’t he a good daddy?’ Before Melani could reply, Damian looked at Yen and said, ‘Give me a chance.’