Fruit Loop

Let it be said, and not for the first or last time either, that women are very strange. And by strange, I mean “get locked up in a padded cell and howl at a full moon” kind of strange.

            Saffy once shouted at an uncle in the MRT for ogling at her formidable bosom, completely ignoring the fact she was wearing a tee-shirt one size too small for her that said in lurid red letters, “I’m in asset development and these are two of my most lucrative investments.”

            The poor old man fled the train when it stopped at Dhoby Ghaut. “He is such a pervert!” she huffed to the auntie sitting next to her on the train. Wisely, the auntie averted her eyes and pretended to play with her phone, but you could tell she was just randomly tapping the screen.

            And then there was the time Amanda decided that she just had to have the new gold Apple MacBook but since it was completely sold out in Singapore, she hopped on a morning plane to Hong Kong to get it and came home that evening in triumph. If the woman had just won Wimbledon while delivering triplets, she could not have been happier or prouder.

            A few days ago, Saffy decided that the ridiculous Five-Two Diet she and Amanda are on is just not working for her.

            “I can’t not eat for two days,” she explained to me unnecessarily. “It’s just not natural!”

            “You don’t have to tell me!” I said.

            Saffy paused, eyeing me munch contentedly on my lunch of nasi padang from our favourite store down the road.

            “But I really do need to keep the weight off,” she went on, shifting her chair slightly away from me as an extra two inches was going to stop the fragrance of the beef rendang from wafting towards her. “So, we’ve decided that we are going to do a fruit diet!”

            Which, as it turns out, is exactly what it sounds like. All you eat is fruits. Like you were a monkey or something.

            “That’s so rude!” Amanda said when she joined us. “I’ll have you know Steve Jobs was on an all fruit diet!”

            I paused chewing and waved a fork on which was speared a peanut-sauced fried tofu at her. “And I’ll have you know the man is dead!”

            “He didn’t die from eating fruit!” Saffy said, her bosom inflating with newfound medical knowledge. She pulled out her phone and started tapping it.

            “You don’t know that,” I pointed out. “Who knows what he really died from?”

            “If I had to guess, I’d say he died from the stress of running Apple!” Amanda said.

            Saffy looked up from her phone. “Google says he died of pancreatic cancer! So there! No fruits were involved in his death, so you can just stop spreading malicious misinformation!”

            Leave it to Barney Chen to announce that as a diet devotee, the fruit diet is the stupidest thing he’d ever heard of.

            “What are you, monkeys?” he growled, his perfectly groomed eyebrows knitting together.

            I glowed. “Thank you, that’s what I said!”

            “You need some kind of protein!” Barney said. He flexed his absurdly sculpted biceps. “You think these babies happened from eating pineapple slices? Why torment your body with cow chow?”

            Amanda sniffed. “Don’t try to pull that one on me! I’ve seen what’s in your kitchen cupboard. It’s all nuts and grains and brown stuff. You eat nothing but squirrel food!”

            “Which is exactly the same as cow chow!” Saffy added, anxious not to be left out of a complex scientific nutritional conversation.

            Sharyn says she wishes she had brought up her children on a diet of fruits. “Wah, so much cheaper!” she told me yesterday, shaking her shaggy head of hair. “Imagine, hor, I just buy nothing but mango and papaya. Wah, save so much mah-ney! All day I can shop at Louise Wui-ton!”

            I said I’d read there was speculation that Steve Jobs had died because of all the strange diets he took.

            Sharyn’s eyes bulged. “Yah, lor, life already so short, why make it shorter with diet? Must enjoy life, mah! You look at me, I eat what I want to eat, got no ploh-blem, one. My doctor say I can live to ninety! What for sah-dun-ly die at fifty and your last meal was a star-flute? Chiam, ah!”

            “Tell that to Saffy,” I said.

            “If I was Steve Job wife, confirm today he still alive, one!” Sharyn went on. “And fat, some more!”

            Barney says Sharyn should write a diet book. “I’d be the first in line to buy a copy!”