the suitcase, pulled up her panties, pushed down her skirt, and tugged her red blouse together where the buttons had been torn off. Rivulets of perspiration coursed down her face. They stood there, dazed. The rest of the journey passed quickly.
The bus stopped at the main terminal on Avenue De La Paz. They waited until the other passengers had alighted. Several of the country folk who had travelled with them gave the couple curious looks. Was it possible their ardor had been less furtive than they had presumed? It hardly mattered now. No one had raised an alarm. They calmly stepped from the bus and wandered onto the wide avenue, which was quiet at this time of night, save for the occasional passing vehicle. A light rain fell, creating haloes of light around the well-spaced street lamps. They stood on the sidewalk holding hands.
CLEAN SEX
Ricky Low, Singapore
Hey, Jeff, what’s the matter? Why don’t you just get a maid in here, clean things up, lah. You can afford it now, man!”
Oh, please. Whenever my friends—or wannabe friends—have suggested this, I have just sighed deeply, raised my eyebrows in a cynical arch, and slipped into my above-it-all smirk—a look that says, “You so don’t understand what it’s all about.” It’s a look I picked up while studying at Stanford. They’ve really perfected that dismissive look over there. I can’t claim that I’ve mastered it quite as well as they do it, but I’m not at all bad.
While studying over there, I also learned the importance of self-reliance.
For example, no real guy lets someone else do stupid household chores for him. Even when you get married, you work out a system, you share those duties. That’s what being a full, responsible adult in today’s world means: sharing all those stupid things that just have to be done. Having a maid is clearly a symptom of some weak strands in your moral fibre, as I have always lectured my lazy friends back here.
I’ve never told them the full story of why I feel so uneasy about having a maid. Some of it is that I am still embarrassed that my first erotic episodes involved the maid my family had when I was a boy. But there’s more to it than that.
Like all fairly comfortable Singapore families, my parents engaged a maid soon after I was born. Actually, they engaged a few maids, but it was the third one who stands out in my memory: Hazniya. She joined us when I was about nine. She was the most energetic of the maids and, if I remember correctly, the only one you could even charitably call attractive. Like the other two, she came from Indonesia, had an enticing coffee-with-light-cream complexion and truly captivating eyes. She also had a prodigious set of boobs, the kind that assured she would never need to worry about drowning.
I guess I was always attracted to Hazniya, though at first it was just that kind of little-boy, prepubescent crush. As innocent as a plate of overcooked oatmeal with pools of skim milk. The sex part didn’t seep in until I was about twelve. As is also typical of many middle-class Singapore families, Hazniya was often assigned the task of bathing me. I mean, like standing over me while I did a cursory job of swabbing myself in the tub, then telling me to stand up while she finished the job, making sure that I got all the “hard-to-reach” places.
Hazniya had been doing this from time to time, starting from when she first joined us, but one evening, when I was twelve, it all changed, changed utterly. I had already started thinking how really stupid it was having a maid bathe me at my age and was being sort of deliberately peevish as I washed myself down in the tub. Then Haz asked me sweetly to stand up, she wanted to see how I was doing. I groaned and made a face, of course, but that was the deal.
As I stood up, Hazniya bent over. I’m sure there was no intent behind it, but on that day, she was wearing this very low-cut shirt and a bra which formed more of a suggestion than a support. As she started wiping my arms and my chest, I was fixated on those munificent breasts, now a glistening coffee-gold from the light sweat the bathroom heat had worked up. I wanted to lean over and take them in my hands, rub them, kiss them, lick them, see if they tasted like the toffee my uncle often brought me from Scotland—or maybe the coffee ice cream I loved. They were, after all, roughly the same colour as those two treats.
And then it happened, suddenly, without any prodding from me, I swear: I popped the first erection of my whole life. At least, the first one I can remember having. This was a shock to me, and I mean a terrifying shock. I didn’t even know what it meant, except that it clearly had something to do with Hazniya, and her bathing me, and that it had made this strange transformation in tribute to her. I stood frozen for a few seconds, and it seemed to get even stiffer as she continued twirling soapy concentric circles across my chest with the washrag. Then she happened to glance down and notice my boner.
I was appalled, hollowed out with shame. I wanted to say something, come up with some excuse, but I suddenly went dumb. While I was still choking on some words to spit out into this frightening situation, Hazniya got there first. “Oh, my, my, what have we here? Our little man has suddenly become a really big man, hasn’t he?” She then gave me that warm smile that had sparked my puppy love for her. But the whole situation had changed radically. I yearned to grab her, to squeeze those fantastic breasts against me, to rub my new-found power tool right up against them. I wanted her to take off all her clothes, right there, then join me in the tub. I wanted her.
Of course, I couldn’t deal with this at all, being just a spoiled twelve-year-old kid. I mean, this was my maid, dammit, who just two minutes ago was bathing me like I was a little boy. So my lust was instantly converted into anger. I scooped up two handfuls of water from the tub and splashed them fiercely across her face and breasts. I wanted her to look shocked, then enraged, to slap me maybe. She did none of that. “Get out! Get out of here! Right now!” I screamed at the top of my high-pitched voice.
And she, damn her, maintained her usual good spirits—she just smiled and said, “Oh yes, let me get out; I think Jeffrey is big enough now to take care of himself. Oh yes, I see this clearly.”
As she made her way out the door, I shouted a phrase I had learned the year before in school and was just waiting for the right opportunity to use in social discourse: “Fucking bitch!”
I underscored the bitterness of that curse by hurling the washrag at the door she had just closed behind her. I then sank back into the tub and started crying, crying like an eight-year-old. I looked down and saw that my cock had just about returned to its normal shape and size. I felt… saved. But just as soon as that happened, I started thinking of Hazniya and those gorgeous tits and the damn thing started stiffening on me again. “Hazniya, you bitch!” I shouted out into the ceiling, hurt and anger intertwined in my timbre. I then reached down under the soapy surface of the water and gingerly touched the thing. I gently rubbed it a few times, as if to console it, to say it wasn’t its fault that it had caused me so much embarrassment. “You bitch, you bitch, you bitch,” I whispered as I consoled myself a little more.
Luckily, my parents were out that evening, so they caught none of my little outburst. Hazniya and I said nothing about it the next morning, or ever again. We pretended like the whole thing had never really happened.
Of course, I never again let her near the bathroom while I was bathing—or even combing my hair, for that matter. She stayed with us for another six months and then was suddenly gone. She disappeared one week when I was off visiting an aunt and uncle in Hong Kong.
When I asked what happened, my mother shook her head sadly and told me that Hazniya had to leave abruptly because of some family crisis back in Indonesia. A couple of years later, my Dad confided that they had dismissed her because she had “taken some things that didn’t belong to her.” And some time after that, a close family friend told me he’d heard the real reason was that Hazniya got caught having sex on the living room couch with some guy while my folks were supposedly away. But I’ve often asked myself whether our little episode in the bathtub had anything to do with that sudden departure.
Whatever it was, we never engaged another maid after Hazniya left us.
Physically left us, I should say. Her memory stayed with me for the next few years. During the high-tide period of my masturbatory youth, I would invoke images of Hazniya whenever I wanked off: those warm smiles, the bubbly laugher, the wonderful eyes, those fantastic tits. The fact that I had never really viewed those tits in their
