Demand and Supply

Sharyn says that from the minute she was old enough to stand up and walk unaided, she had been brainwashed into getting married. Her very first doll, apparently, had been a bride, resplendent in her white polyester wedding gown and veil that, as with most things white in the hands of children who love to eat dirt, eventually turned brown.

            “And the first movie dey bring me to is Cinderella!” she said the other day. “Not like girl today. Dey see Wonder Woman. My time only got Cinderella!”

            “You make Cinderella sound like she’s a bad role model, Shazz,” said Saffy. “Every day, I wish I was married to someone handsome and rich, so I don’t have to work anymore and other people do things for me!”

            Sharyn waved her hands dismissively. “Aiyah, you can afford your own maid, lah! What for you mare-lee to get a maid?”

            Saffy stiffened, every HR bone in her body on full alert for a possible discrimination law suit against management. “Seriously, you have to stop saying ‘maid’! The correct term is ‘helper’!”

            Sharyn sniffed. “Anyway, hor, mare-lee, is one ting, but dey neh-ber say any-ting about the congee-ger right!”

            A silence settled over our lunch table at Island Café. As usual, Amanda turned towards Saffy, widely regarded throughout Singapore, Batam and the Greater Kuching Area as the undisputed Sharyn Whisperer. As Amanda once observed, if Sharyn were ever the first contact that suspicious, potentially hostile aliens made with Earth, the only thing standing between us and full-blown thermonuclear destruction of the ‘Predator’ kind would be Saffy. “Seriously, most of the time I have absolutely no idea what she’s saying!”

            But this time around, even Saffy was forced to concede defeat. “What?” she said, eventually.

            Sharyn looked surprised. “Hah? You doh-no, ah? I taught your England very powderful? Got English word you don’t understand, meh? Congee-ger right! Is when your husband say he can sleep with you!”

            Later, back in the flat, Amanda debriefed me on the ensuing confusion. “It took a while, but eventually, we worked out she meant conjugal rights!”

            “Oh,” I said. “Conjugal. What about it?”

            Turns out that in the world according to Sharyn, her parents’ deplorable lapse in educating their only daughter about matrimonial sexual demands had been the source of many tensions between her and her husband over the years. Amanda said it was like that scene from ‘Annie Hall’.

            “You know, where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton see their psychiatrists to complain about the sex in their relationship? Woody Allen’s psychiatrist asks him how many times they have sex, and he says, ‘Hardly ever! Maybe three times a week!’ and Diane Keaton’s psychiatrist asks her and she’s like, ‘Constantly! Maybe three times a week!’”

            I was impressed. “You don’t remember what you had for breakfast, but you remember the lines of an entire scene from a 1976 movie?”

            “1977,” Amanda said.

            A few days later, my mother FaceTimed me all the way from Vancouver where she and Father were visiting one of her cousins.

            “My God, I have to tell you this,” she began immediately. “You remember Cousin Lin? The one who married Conrad, that fat banker with liver problems? Well, anyway, we were all at her house playing mah-jong with Cousin Pin and Cousin Jin, and we had barely started the second round when Conrad came home. He stopped by the table and I nearly fainted from his awful BO and then he says to Lin, ‘Honey, let’s go upstairs for a bit!’ And at first, we all thought well this is irritating, can’t you see we’re in the middle of mah-jong? So, then Lin gets up and as she starts to follow Conrad upstairs, she leans in and whispers, ‘This might take about half an hour. He has such stamina, he’s wearing me out!”

            Later, when I told this story to Saffy, she literally screamed. “Wait, what? She went upstairs for a quickie with her husband?”

            “Well, I don’t consider half an hour a quickie, but yes. In the middle of the mah-jong game!”

            “How old is this Cousin Lin?”

            “Seventy! And he’s seventy-two. I asked my mother the same thing!” I told her.

            “Oh. My. God!

            “And so for half an hour, my mother and her cousins just sat at the table making awkward small talk while upstairs, conjugal rights were being exercised! Loudly, apparently. The walls are thin in Canadian houses.”

            “That’s kind of gross, no?” Saffy said.

            “You think?”

            Sharyn says if that ever happened to her at seventy, it would be the last straw. “Confirm die-vorce, one!” she said darkly.