Adeline had no intention of being the woman’s errand girl, but the idea of keeping up the act was amusing. “Let me check the back for you,” she simpered. “Can I see?” She reached past, pretending to take a closer look at the skirt in question. As she brushed past, she undid the clasp of the woman’s bracelet and palmed it neatly into her pocket. “Just a minute,” she said sweetly, and went off in the direction of the storeroom.
Along the way she grabbed an actual assistant. “Wait a few minutes and then tell Ma Fan Tai Tai her brown skirt’s out of stock.”
She finally made it to the upper floor, which was much quieter. She examined Fan Tai Tai’s bracelet properly: not a chunky bangle, which was popular with the younger girls these days, but an old-fashioned silver link chain with a single diamond strung into it. It had caught her eye because it wasn’t like the woman’s other gaudy pieces. An heirloom, perhaps?
Adeline stowed both bracelet and ring, anticipating her mother’s scrutiny, but when she approached her mother’s office door, there was a conversation already happening behind it.
“We’ll have something brought over if you really need it. What, you need me to handle something like this?”
Adeline leaned against the door and examined her nails, eavesdropping liberally. There was a long pause, and no response—her mother was on the telephone. “Won’t listen to you? Then make them listen to you. How do you expect to do this without me if you can’t even get them in line?”
It was always pleasing when someone else was on the receiving end of her mother’s condescension. Adeline picked at her cuticles. St. Mary’s had a rule about keeping nails short; she held her fingers up to her eyes and turned her palms back and forth, measuring them against her nail beds and deciding what color she wanted to paint them once the school term was over.
“Send someone down to the White Orchid tonight, make sure everything’s above board. You know how Ah Poh gets with some of his dealings.”
The White Orchid—a brand? A new business venture? A new branch? Adeline hadn’t heard the name before. It sounded like her mother was addressing a foreign team, albeit in the same language. The Johor branch, or maybe even a Taiwan or Fujian contact. Her mother’s ambitions grew every year, which made the store’s main funder, the Hwangs, more than happy. Malaysia had been the first foreign branch. Maybe next year there would be another.
“And come by the house tomorrow—during the day, my daughter will be at school. I… There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
Adeline frowned and leaned in closer, but the phone clicked in the cradle. Switching to halting English, her mother addressed someone else in the room itself. “Sorry. Please, continue.”
A man’s voice pitched through the door in a rash Australian accent.
“Oh, no worries. I was just saying—the girls are going to be tired of dressing like soldier boys, Kim, I’m telling you. The denim’s gotta be softened out, they’re wanting to look womanly again. Voile, satin, emphasis on the bust and waist—shirtdress, pleats, halters—romantic, you know.” A drag-length of a pause. “Singapore is justpulsatingwith potential. Everyone in Melbourne’s talking about it. Biggest new market in the Pacific. You’ve got a finger on it in this place. Good on ya. That’s why I want to work something out with you.”
Suddenly the door opened with a flick of cigar smoke. Adeline was revealed to a tawny Caucasian man, more to his surprise than hers. He was oily-faced and square-built, but otherwise well-groomed. His suit was tailored exquisitely, down to the handkerchief fold.
Adeline’s mother grimaced. “My daughter.”
“Ah, of course!” There was noof courseabout it; she and her mother looked nothing alike. “Pretty, aren’t you, if you’d smile a bit more.” He beamed at Adeline, then said in exaggerated slowness: “You like fashion, sweetheart? Dresses?”
Adeline expressly did not smile more. “Sure.”
The Australian took the hint, or else simply didn’t intend to bother with a teenage girl. “I’ll call back tomorrow,” he returned to her mother, undeterred. “Or I’m put up at the Marco Polo—you can reach me there.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Bucat.”
Mr. Bucat squeezed Adeline’s shoulder as he left past her.Adeline made a face, at which her mother scoffed, at which Adeline was reminded that her mother possessed an aura that took Adeline’s breath away; she was still and imagining, carved from something with warm luster under her skin that rippled as she beckoned Adeline over.
“Jiak pa bo?” She switched back to their native language with the relief of a held breath released.Have you eaten?
She had had to learn enough English to stumble through the increasingly necessary conversations with Western businessmen. Meanwhile, Adeline had burst into tears on her first day of kindergarten because the teachers and all the other children spoke English and she’d grown up learning her mother’s Hokkien. Now—from school, from the radio, from her frequent trips to the cinema and now the TV—Adeline was more than fluent in both. “Not yet,” Adeline responded in Hokkien.
Her mother got up from her chair. “Come, try this on for me.”
On the far side of the room there were two headless mannequins and a full-length mirror. One mannequin was naked; the other had a flowy orange dress on, which her mother slipped free. “What do you think?” her mother said, when Adeline had put it on. “Would you young girls buy it?”
“It’s hippie.” Adeline watched the mirror as she was turned left and right. “I think people would like it.”
“Hmm.” Calloused fingers undid Adeline’s braid, strands snagging on longer nails as they unwound and untangled. Adeline liked her mother’s feverish fingertips against her scalp, the only fleeting reminders these days that Adeline got of their shared power. Lingering heat stroked through her hair as her mother arranged it over her shoulders, frowned critically at the reflection, then twisted it into an experimental updo. “You have homework?”
“Not much.”
“Your exams are in a few months.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to do well in them.”
