The Path Of Dreams

by Eugene Woodbury

  Connor retrieved the manuscript box. “You sure trained them well.”

  “Desh , desh ?” She grinned. “Too bad they don’t do the same thing in the 300 classes. Those RMs could use a bit of humility.”

  “If you’re going for the high school experience, how about uniforms?”

  She gave him a stern expression. “Don’t tell me you have a thing for girls in sailor uniforms.”

  “I do not have a thing for girls in sailor uniforms. I’m just saying that if you wanted to make it an authentic experience—”

  “The only time I ever wore a sailor uniform was the study abroad I did with Atsuko when I was fifteen. She thought about it for a minute. “You know, I probably do have a picture somewhere—”

  Connor said, “I’m taking the Fifth.”

  Chapter 44

  Dragon Lady

  E lly got her voice back sufficiently to teach Japanese 101 on Thursday, though she bumped up a calligraphy lesson in order to minimize the time she’d have to spend talking. By Friday, a lingering touch of hoarseness was not enough to keep her from lab.

  The regular 201 students were relieved, the lab rats disappointed. She greeted both reactions with a small measure of satisfaction. “I’m afraid,” she told the class, “that if your exposure to Atsuko continued any longer, your progress in the language would retreat as quickly as it advanced.”

  Two girls approached her after class. The one who spoke introduced herself as Jessica. She glanced at her friend and then said, in a coy voice compromised by self-consciousness, “Um, McKenzie Sensei, your brother is really cute.”

  “My brother?” Elly frowned. How in the world did she know Sam? “Half brother, I mean. You know, he taught the lab on Wednesday. Anyway we were wondering if—” Elly’s mind jumped ahead to the predicate of the sentence: —if he’s available? She bristled, a reaction she felt rippling through her muscles. “Husband,” she said, her voice almost a growl, lowered another half an octave by her cold.

  “Husband?” the girl echoed, her face turning red. “Your sister said—” Elly forced a disarming smile to her lips. “My cousin Atsuko was no doubt being too clever for her own good.”

  “Oh—” the girl said, now thoroughly embarrassed.

  “We should review family relationship terms in an upcoming class.” She smiled again. The contradiction of emotions made her cheeks hurt.

  The girl nodded and hurried off, whispering angrily to her friend, who hung her head in obvious chagrin.

  Elly watched them leave and caught herself scowling. In fact, it was a comic scene, especially the poor girl’s expression when she said husband. All that courage blasted.

  No, what surprised her was the visceral nature of her response. Had she been a cat, she would have laid back her ears, ready to lash out with tooth and claw. She took a deep breath and placed the back of her hand against her forehead. She had no fever to blame for this bout of insanity.

  Outside it was cloudy and blustery, the air gritty with dust blown in from the West Desert. At the Writing Center, Connor was working with a student. He glanced up and gave her a wink. The smile she returned this time was genuine.

  She continued down the hallway. Husband, she repeated to herself. She loved the way the word sounded, the way it articulated against her tongue and lips. She sat at her desk and contemplated her dysfunctional psyche. Her dream-givers did not care about her existential travails. Perhaps the dragon, having gotten what it wanted, had chased them off.

  She thought about Miss Watson, her high school social studies teacher her senior year. One day she showed them a slide of Raphael’s St. George and the Dragon and then the Uccello rendition. Miss Watson pointed out that in the Uccello, as the knight gorily slays the dragon to rescue the fair maiden, the chain between them does not bind her to the beast. Rather, it is a leash around the dragon’s neck that she holds in her hand.

  “Hey,” said Connor, leaning over the cubicle divider, “how was lab?”

  “Aside from clearing up a few misconceptions—”

  He nodded. “I wondered if bringing Atsuko along raised more issues than it settled.”

  “It did enliven the conversation, and that’s not a bad thing. And Kevin seems to have mastered the stopped-consonant.” She reached up and grasped his hand. “You off at six? Walk me home, then?”

  He smiled. “Sure, girlfriend. I’ll walk you home.”

  The wind had died down some, though high over the Quad, the flag rippled and snapped in occasional gusts that floated Elly’s mane out behind her like the tail of a comet. She caught her hair back beneath her jacket and said, “At lab the other day, what did Atsuko say about how we were related?”

  “Someone did ask if she was married. She took it as being married to me.”

  “And she said—?”

  “Something like I was a brother to her. Then she went off on this riff about how you were a sister to her, and so that wouldn’t be proper. I think she concluded that I should be her half brother.”

  “Ah,” said Elly.

  “I doubt anybody in the class followed what she was saying. I thought I made it clear that the two of you were cousins. Why?”

  “It seems a few concluded you were my half brother. It’s not an totally irrational assumption that if you look Asian and have a European name, you must be adopted.”

  “It’s those dominant Japanese genes.”

  Her eyes glinted. “Yes, they are, aren’t they?”

  But getting ready for bed that night, she still hadn’t put the subject out of her mind. Could not some aspect of possessiveness or jealousy reflect the essential qualities of love? Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.

  “Connor,” she said, coming out of the bathroom, “you did know that Sametaroh Oh had no sons?”

  He looked up from his book. She imagined him a few decades from now, graying, reading glasses perched on his nose, waiting for her to join him in bed. Her imagination made her smile.

  “That must mean your great-grandfather took your great-grandmother’s surname when they married.”

  She knelt on the bed next to him, ankles tucked beneath her, Japanese style. “I know I’ve asked you before, but, really, does it bother you, being listed in our family registry? I mean, it is a muko-iri record.”

  He shook his head. “It’s only symbolic. Though I have to admit that if I were in your great-grandfather’s shoes, it would take some getting used to. Not that there aren’t plenty of McKenzies in the world, but I am my father’s only son.”

  “Well, you don’t have to,” Elly said. She placed her hand on his chest. “You see, husband, I take your name and gladly. But not only your name. I take you. My beloved is mine, and I am his.” She thought he might be annoyed by this declaration, but no.

  “So I’ve gathered,” he said, and his eyes sparkled.

  She scooted off the bed. “Just so’s you know,” she said. She went to brush her teeth.

  Saturday night they went to see the San Jose Taiko Drummers at the Harris Fine Arts Center. She wore her little black dress. It was Connor, though, who complained about the air conditioning. By bedtime he was shivering noticeably. Elly rubbed his arms and pressed her body against his. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, attempting a lightness of tone and not entirely succeeding.”

  “It’s just a cold.”

  “You don’t get literally cold when you get a cold.”

  “I do. I’ll develop more predictable symptoms tomorrow. Promise.” “You sure? You’ve never caught a cold from me before.” “I never had you to keep me warm before. Fair swap.”

  He was right about the symptoms. “You’re like sleeping next to a heat

  lamp,” she told him in the morning. He was sitting at the side of the bed, resting his head in his hands. She put her hand on the back of his neck. “You’re burning up. You should stay in bed.”

  “I’ll feel a lot better once I
take a shower. Really.” But she checked his forward motion and tucked the comforter around his shoulders. “There’s no need for you to be traipsing around.”

  “I’ve got tithing count to do.”

  “I’m sure you aren’t the only one in the bishopric who can add and subtract.” She got him two Tylenol and a glass of water. “Get better,” she ordered him.

  Elly hadn’t gone to church alone in years. During her mission, she always had a companion. And Melanie after her mission. How was Melanie doing these days? They had lunch now and then, and sometimes studied together, and sometimes Melanie came to lab with Susan. They should have a girls’ night out. She could get their opinions on the announcements. Her mother had sent over some samples from a printer in Kobe.

  The bishop greeted her in the lobby. “Connor’s not with you?”

  “He’s not feeling well.”

  He nodded. Elly wandered through the lobby to the lecture hall where sacrament meeting was held. She sat with Sandra. She counted Sandra as her best friend in the ward. But Sandra was still single, and that made her a different species of person. Elly wondered if perhaps she and Connor shouldn’t attend Aunt Wanda’s ward next semester. A normal ward. She hadn’t been in a normal ward since forever.

  But as much as she missed her husband, she wasn’t happy to see him. A few minutes past twelve she came down the hall from the Relief Society room and there was Connor, crossing the hall to the bishop’s office.

  “A-na-ta!” she said, enunciating each syllable of the pronoun, and in a tone a voice that made everybody within a half-dozen paces of her stop and back away slowly.

  Connor turned, a quizzical expression on his face. All at once, Elly saw herself—in a rare moment of true self-reflection—the way the impersonal universe saw her. She’d done something that’d make any man furious. Yet he only seemed glad to see her. In that moment of clarity, she fully realized why her mother married her father. The dragon had found a knight with flame-retardant armor. And so the scaly, green creature drew up, surprised, if not a bit befuddled, the smoky flames licking about its nostrils and making it sneeze.

  “Hi,” Connor said, his voice a quiet rasp.

  Still, she had it all stored up so it had to come out. “What are you doing out of bed?” she demanded, though speaking now in Japanese.

  “I’m feeling better.”

  “Then why are you whispering?”

  “Because my throat is killing me.”

  She wanted to be mad at him. She really did. But as she stood there, she couldn’t think of any good way to justify her outrage.

  Connor said, “I’ve got to get a few checks signed, and then we have to make the deposit.”

  “And then you’re going home and straight to bed.”

  He agreed to these terms.

  He didn’t go to bed. He fell asleep on the couch watching football. He woke up to get a throat lozenge, slouched about like a rudely awakened bear, then returned to the couch to watch the last half of the 49ers-Rams game.

  “When McKenzie men get sick,” Wanda confirmed, “they get grumpy and as chatty as a chunk of granite.”

  Elly decided to test this assertion. Connor gamely tried to carry on a conversation with her, but after a while she felt like a child poking a sleeping cat with a stick to see if it will do something “interesting.”

  “Well,” she concluded, “you definitely are the suffer-in-silence type.”

  “Laryngitis.”

  “My contribution. Share and share alike, no? Sickness and health and all that.”

  “Colds don’t count.”

  “An inherited characteristic, I’m sure. Stiff upper lip and all that.”

  “I’m Scottish. Brits have stiff upper lips.

  “That’s right! That British explorer who froze himself to death in Antarctica so as not to burden the rest of the expedition, who all froze to death anyway. I always thought that was the dumbest thing. And Japanese are supposed to be the suicidal race. It certainly never was a popular option in our family. Have I made myself unbearably annoying yet? I have, haven’t I? See, I can be like Atsuko if I try. There—made you smile.”

  “When I get sick, Broca’s area goes first.”

  “Well, I know that now. You don’t have to talk, you just have to pretend to pay attention to me. A little tatemae goes a long way. I think that’s why the Japanese are so good at it—pack a hundred and twenty million people into a place that small, and it becomes as necessary as air.”

  Chapter 45

  Akisame

  J apanese society ran on tatemae. Except that Elly wasn’t very good at it. She’d grasped the basic ins and outs in elementary school, like knowing to duck a wild pitch in a softball game. But that wasn’t the same thing. The full powers of social conformity were formed in the pressure cooker of the Japanese public high school system and the “examination hell” that preceded college, both of which she’d happily avoided.

  She could say and do what she was supposed to. She just couldn’t put her heart into it. The same way she couldn’t toss off an “I love you” like an infatuated teenager. But she felt that love in every fiber of her body. It was the word that got in the way. The word didn’t connect to the right parts of her brain, didn’t connect to the meaning she demanded of it.

  The weather matched her mood. Far out in the Pacific, the jet stream swept north towards the Gulf of Alaska, carrying a pocket of low pressure across the Sierras and up against the Colorado Plateau, bringing gray days and rainy nights. The trees higher up the mountains turned red and gold. The bands of color slowly descended the rocky slopes as the days passed.

  Elly checked her watch and collected her books together. Susan said, “Doesn’t Connor usually come by about now?”

  “He traded schedules when I got sick last week, so he’s working late. Oh, has Melanie told you about our get-together Saturday night?”

  Susan nodded. “Where is Mel?” she asked, glancing around the Asian Collection room.

  “I suspect she and Greg found themselves a more private venue.”

  Susan sighed dramatically. “They’ll be married before you know it.”

  “So it would seem. Though I think Mel is going to be rightly cautious about her engagement, if only to show her junior companion the proper way of doing things.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder. “See you in lab Friday?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

  Susan was probably right about Melanie and Greg. Elly was beginning to understand some of Mel’s grumpiness about Elly’s unexpected nuptials. Life was simpler when people weren’t going off and changing the ground rules on her. Maybe Mel and Greg could find a basement apartment in the Tree Streets so they could attend the same ward together.

  It was still daylight savings time and not that late in the evening. But the low-lying clouds created a false sense of night. The air was sweet with mist, the sidewalks spotted with puddles. Elly lifted her face toward the sky and tasted the falling rain on her lips.

  The Center was mostly vacant. Connor got up from the desk and met her at the counter. “Started raining again?” he asked.

  “More of a drizzle. It doesn’t look too busy here tonight.”

  “It usually isn’t this early in the semester and with the bad weather.”

  “Well, I’d stay, but I’ve got a Relief Society meeting at Sandra’s.”

  “I’m off at eight. I’ll stop at Sandra’s place on my way home.”

  When she left the JKHB, the rain was falling harder. She hunched her shoulders and ducked her head and proceeded across the Quad at a brisk walk. She’d made it to the corner of the Harris Fine Arts Building when she heard her husband’s voice.

  “Elly!” Connor ran up to her, his sneakers slapping on the wet concrete. He held out an umbrella. “I remembered it after you left.”

  She stared at him, at the unopened umbrella, at the rain pattering on his head and shoulders. When she spoke—a sudden torrent of Japanese— the words came o
ut of her like a tape recorder had turned on in her head and she couldn’t find the switch to turn it off. “Good grief, of all the silly things to do. What’s the sense of carrying around an umbrella if you’re not going to use it? You’ll catch your death—”

  And then, thankfully, the words stopped. Connor grinned sheepishly. He undid the strap around the umbrella and popped it open.

  Elly put her hand to her mouth and started to laugh. She remembered running home through the drenched streets of Hiratsuka, the autumn rain soaking her to the skin—running home to a warm kitchen and a steaming bath and the kerosene scent of the old stove aglow in the tiny living room. She ran home to her mother’s stern and unconditional affection, to her father’s strong embrace, to a love that never failed her. She’d grown up and believed she’d left those feelings in the past. But she was wrong.

  She flung herself at him, her backpack smacking against her shoulders as they collided. The umbrella parachuted unattended to the ground. “I love you.” She kissed him. Her heart beat madly. “I love you.” The words tasted like warm chocolate in her mouth. “I love you.”

  He enfolded her in his arms. “I know,” he said.

  Elly pressed herself against his chest, her head aswirl. “Oh, my meeting with Sandra, I’m going to be late.”

  “The umbrella—” he said.

  “You need it more than I do!” Elly flung out her arms. “It’s the akisame!” She darted back for a quick, wet kiss, and then set off down the sidewalk. She turned and waved back at him. “I love you!”

  Connor wasn’t planning on going to Melanie’s condo after work. BYU housing units were divvied into multiple wards in order to bring in some demographic diversity. So Sandra’s unit, facing the park, was in Connor and Elly’s ward, but Melanie’s wasn’t.

  But crossing Ninth East, force of habit took over. Susan answered the door. “Elly’s not here. She had a Relief Society meeting.”

  “Oh, right.” He turned to leave and stopped. “There is something you could help me with. You wouldn’t happen to know Elly’s ring size?”

  “Ring size?” Susan gave him a scolding look. “That’s right, you never gave her a ring.”