Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

She had no idea what he was getting at, only a sense from his tone that disaster was imminent and that she must soldier on without him. And to keep him here in the room with her a moment longer, she rose from bed, all at once ashamed of her naked and well-used breasts, which never failed to remind her that Lynton, at twenty-four, was four years her junior. She wrapped a sarong under her arms to hide from his unflinching gaze.

“I’ve received a message,” he went on. “Nothing you should worry yourself about, but we’re being moved to a place where we’re more necessary.”

And there it was. The end. And how absurd — after all that she’d survived, much of it without a man to bear her up — that she should feel utterly incapable of enduring any of this without him. Allowing a young man such as Lynton into her life, a man who lived for freedom. It had only ever thrown into relief how burdened she was, how hopelessly weak and dependent.

“Don’t be angry,” he said, giving her one of his quiet, attentive smiles.

“Why should I be angry?”

That was enough to make him break out into one of his merciless laughs. He took her into his arms, and she — bathed again in his vibrancy, in the heat and light that emanated from his skin — allowed herself to pretend that she had been wrong, that everything would continue between them in a way she hadn’t yet guessed.

“You’ll take care, won’t you?” he said, the smile in his voice slackening. “You’ll take care of the children?”

“What a question!” She’d meant to scold him, but her words caught in her throat, and she felt as though she were scolding herself instead.

She had never felt at home in Bilin, occupying another family’s abandoned house. The air was stagnant, the Christian school was pickling the children’s brains, and the neighbors were a pack of pious gossips. But now, in the aftermath of her happiness with Lynton, she saw how savagely those neighbors and even her customers peered at Hta Hta’s expanding belly and hissed about Khin’s affair with Lynton, suggesting that — according to her seamstresses and cheroot rollers — he had been one of her many adulterous lovers, and that his absence now opened the way for her to more freely pursue their husbands.

And she was startled to find that she had become rather careless with her businesses during her recent carefree days, not always registering which wages she had distributed or which debts she had paid in her logbook, but scribbling notes she’d massed in piles around the house if she’d kept them at all. (Could it be she owed such an exorbitant sum to the shepherd, whose wool was so fine, and whom she’d thought she’d long since remunerated? She was sure she’d recently paid him, but in which pile in which part of the house lay his dashed-off receipt?) Part of her success as a business owner had arisen from her willingness to defer payment for her own goods for sale; and now she found that she had been just as careless, during her liaison with Lynton, with records of debts owed to her. Had the holier-than-thou neighbor always avoiding her eye ever paid for that case of cheroots? The thought of confronting the woman, with her reproving looks, was just as stomach-turning as the thought of facing the disorder of the piles — a disorder reflecting, more than anything else, how undone Khin had been by Lynton, by the miserable joy she’d taken in him.

One particularly oppressive night, after the children and Hta Hta were in bed, she scoured the house for piles of her papers and receipts, and then, her head pounding, spread everything out over the kitchen table. For hours, she struggled to cross-check her memories — some vague, some quite clear — with the numbers that had been recorded, and in the end all she was certain of was that she owed hundreds more rupees than she could reasonably claim to be owed, and that soon she would have no way to pay her employees’ wages or the cheroot factory’s rent, and no way to purchase basic staples to feed her children.

Near her face powder and the mirror reflecting her sobered, candle-haunted features, she kept a secret lockbox, and when she opened it now she found — instead of a roll of bills — only a single, rumpled ten-rupee note. Of course she had borrowed from her store of bills from time to time to pay this person or that, but she had reminded herself to replenish the box whenever she could, hadn’t she? What had been important was to keep going, from day to day.

In the kitchen, Lynton had left a half-drained bottle of whiskey, which she grasped by the neck before stumbling out of the house into the light of the full moon. The air outside was still and drenched in the heavy scent of something sickly. For a moment, she stood taking swigs of whiskey, feeling disconcerted by the cloying smell and the immense quiet of the sleeping street, which seemed to mute the roaring in her mind. The bitches, she thought, remembering the evil words the neighbors were said to have spoken against her. The haughty bitches who obediently sat in church all Sunday, listening to lessons about tolerance and the golden rule, only to be quick to cast stones. They couldn’t wait to prove their superiority, and only showed their own smallness of heart and mind instead.

“You think I’m having affairs?” she screamed into the silence. “Can’t you see I’m full of juices? I’m so fertile, if a man touches me, babies pop out! You could go to bed with an elephant and nothing would happen!”

For the next three days, storms blew in unremittingly from across the mountains, like a cosmic injunction that Khin should shut herself in with her thoughts. But she shrank from those thoughts, as though unworthy of them. Never again, they commanded her. Never ever again should she allow herself to lose her way in the inebriation of a man’s company. Never again should she so recklessly put herself in a position of inviting others’ censure.

The sky cleared on the fourth day, and, with the new sunshine filtering in through the trees, her mood began to lift. She asked Hta Hta and the children to follow her outside to a damp tangle of grass under the tree in the yard, where she set up a lunch made from breakfast leftovers. And as she glanced up at the shimmering road and the opening doors of her neighbors, it occurred to her that if she were to move the cheroot factory into this house and sell off the sewing equipment, the money saved and made would be enough to gradually pay off her debts. And couldn’t she, with very little labor, make something that these neighbors would enjoy far more than sweaters or tailored sarongs? Take a leaf, steam it, throw in some chopped betel nut and a dash of lime, a little anisette, maybe some tobacco if there was any leftover from the cheroots. Her mother had long ago taught her how to make betel so pungent and intoxicating, no one would be able to get enough of it. Which of her neighbors didn’t have a mouth reddened and teeth blackened from betel?

Now she watched Johnny run out to the gate to escape the mosquitoes hovering over their meal, and she had the sense of having nearly evaded disaster. With her first separation from the children, she had allowed herself to forget that they alone were the true center of her world. Yet here they were, by some gift of grace, within her line of sight: Gracie dashing out to meet her brother, Louisa calmly following after, while Molly grabbed at a handful of wet grass. Here they were, all four of them, resilient and curious, alive.

And soon they would be joined by another.

“You’re pregnant, Hta Hta,” Khin dared say to the nanny, who had started pulling blades of grass from Molly’s wet mouth. “Was it the Forest Governor? One of his sons? Did he injure you? You can tell me.”

For a moment, the poor girl only looked at her in a kind of dazed grief. Then she said, obviously ashamed, “I don’t know what you mean.”