Gaijin

by Sarah Z Sleeper

  I went to bed the way I did most nights, listening to “Hallelujah,” the rumbling poem-anthem of a song by Leonard Cohen. I was asleep before the song’s refrain, awash in anticipation of my final semesters in college, feeling more adult at twenty-one than I’d felt the day before. In what I first perceived to be a half-dream, I woke to my mom’s panicked shouting. It seemed like it had only been five minutes since I went to bed, and I couldn’t make sense of her yelling, the sounds of paramedics scuffling and bumping about, and the baritone “Hallelujah” still playing on repeat.

  By dawn I was standing in an over-bright hospital lobby with my mom and Doctor—White? Brown? Black?—his name was a color, only I didn’t recall which one. His mouth was moving, but his voice came from a tunnel somewhere else, saying that my dad had a stroke in the late-night hours and there was nothing to be done. My mom chimed in, robotic, and said that his skin had been blue-grey and cold by the time she noticed him, unmoving beside her. I was a block of ice, my nerves frozen in a state of alarm.

  “He was intoxicated last night?” the doctor said, not waiting for a response. “We could do an autopsy…?” My mom declined the autopsy, unwilling to hear the results, saying what did it matter, he was gone now anyway.

  A flurry of activity followed. Friends filled up the house, casseroles and cookies occupied every surface. Then came the small funeral and burial at the local Unitarian church. We weren’t members, but they were kind enough to host us anyway. The thing I remembered most clearly from that day was the casket dropping down, slowly, mechanically, into a brown dirt rectangle. I couldn’t reconcile my father with this wooden box and the white roses splayed on top. Since the night of his stroke, everything moved so fast until that moment at the hillside cemetery when it all slowed down. It took an eternity for the coffin to inch down into the grave. My mom threw another rose, red, down into the dark hole and I imagined it dripped its color onto the white ones, staining them.

  I called my college advisor and told her I wasn’t coming back to school. She offered me a delayed start to the semester, but I declined. Paralyzed by a chainmail of grief, I was unable to think or feel or venture outside our tiny tidy house. My mom, stuck in her own sorrow, didn’t comfort me or ask comfort of me. She seemed still and far away, perched on the edge of her bed, like a baby bird about to tumble to the ground from a swaying tree branch. She clung to each day quietly, a beating heart her only moving part. I stayed in my room and watched Hunger Games movies and Kpop videos. Rose tweeted at me and texted me, but I told her not to visit. I didn’t have the energy to talk, and if she had tried to hug me, I’d just start crying again.

  * * *

  Growing up, my mom had been a boulder, steady and strong, the solid ground under my feet, anchoring me and righting my missteps. My dad had been sky, open and limitless, urging me to any possibility. “Be an astronaut, be a singer, anything you do is good, Lu,” he’d say. Now with Dad dead and Mom wholly changed, I was ungrounded yet bolted in place, staring into a dim unfamiliar horizon. Things carried on this way for a year, I didn’t think of the present or the future, only wallowed in the past when my father was alive.

  The weekend before he died, we spent Saturday morning on the public tennis courts. I finally managed to return one of his fireball serves and even won a few points. That afternoon we warded off pretenders and hogged the reflex tester at the Museum of Science and Industry. We liked to track our speed stats and maintain our status in the top ten. That night, we’d gone to the Oakville Pub, a raucous sports bar where most parents didn’t take their kids. I ate chili with extra onions and cheese, and he guzzled beer. I relished time with him, and he loved doting on his only daughter. When his eyes began to look glazed and faraway, I called Mom to pick us up.

  Dad was a minor-league alcoholic, the type who mostly drank at home, became bleary and happy, and went to bed early. One terrible time though, he got drunk at my senior prom. He was a chaperone, which was embarrassing enough, and I was on a first date with a shy, smart boy I’d liked for a while. My dad either snuck alcohol in, something a student would’ve been expelled for, or he snuck out to his car to drink. I was slow dancing with my date and saw Dad slump down on the bleachers like a sack of laundry. Teachers and parents rushed to help him as a circle of students looked on. Two adults carried him out and took him home. I told anyone who would listen that he had the flu and a high fever, but my date and the other students knew the truth. For months afterward, I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. My dad never set foot at my high school after that, not even for my graduation ceremony, and I never spoke to my prom date after that night.

  Over the years I fought off my own urges to drink—oh how I wanted to—and only once, on the evening of Dad’s funeral, did I succumb, guzzling white wine until I wept in the corner of the church parlor. For a long time after that I was as sober and cold and hollow as a tomb.

  My pragmatic mom, I later learned, almost left my father because of his drinking. He passed out at their tenth anniversary dinner table and she said she was done. But in the end, she decided her life with him was enough for her. He was mostly a cheerful drunk and they shared passions for academics, civics and me, and so she stayed. I found this out years later, and when I did, I understood why she was so steady and quiet. She was holding on, staying on her chosen path, but without hope for more. “I love him. And that’s that,” she’d said.

  My love for my father was complicated by being ashamed of him and afraid that it was genetic, and I’d become a drunk too. Still, his death left me bereft. Even though I was angry with him for messing up his life and probably contributing to his death, at the core of my heart I burned with love for him. At my young age, and despite my sheltered upbringing, I understood that to love someone meant to accept them, that if you knew someone fully, faults and all, and accepted them anyway, that was love. That’s what my mom taught me, both by her words and be her steadfast commitment to my less-than-perfect father.

  * * *

  A hot day eleven months after he died, I sat listless, half-staring out my bedroom window at a plump robin who stared back at me from his perch on an oak limb. A gust curved the branch sideways and the bird clenched his claws, holding tightly to his leafy seat. When the wind stopped, he cocked his head to one side, eyeing me with suspicion. Though of course he didn’t, I clearly heard him say, “Are you going to sit there forever?” It was the first coherent thought I had—maybe it didn’t come from the bird, but from inside my own head, I wasn’t sure, but it startled me into the present moment.

  The robin gave me one more skeptical look and flew away as another breeze whooshed through the leaves. I squinted into the sunlight that danced through the branches of our old backyard tree; it was a different sun, brighter than on recent past days, more piercing. I’d deferred my senior year of college but in that sharp sunlit moment the chains fell off my limbs and it was time to go.

  * * *

  And so, I continued my scholarship at Northwestern in Evanston, several towns away from Oakville, my hometown, and from my mother who still sat in stony grief in her bedroom. Mom and I talked on the phone but it was like talking with a zephyr. She’d always been stolid; now she was barely a breath of air. “Lucy, be safe,” she’d breathe, at the end of each conversation and I promised I would.

  Good for you, Lu, I heard my father whisper on the windy morning I headed back to school. I hadn’t been raised in any church, didn’t adhere to any doctrine, didn’t believe in angels or ghosts who whisper from beyond, but that day I heard him, and it pushed me along.

  For the first time, I’d relinquish the faded familiarity of my childhood bedroom and live on campus, be fully integrated into college life. My dad and I had set it up before he died and I would follow through, despite the nudge of discomfort I felt when touring the dorm, surrounded by bodies and smells and sounds I wasn’t used to, sour perspiration odors, unexpected clangs and clunks from down long halls. One girl snorted and babbled as she slept on the common r
oom couch, and some annoying soccer players yelled as they ran up the stairs. It was way outside my Oakville safety zone, but I’d suck it up, the way my dad and I had planned. Just one more year until graduation and my life could begin. Next year, I’d get a job, take an apartment in the city—the whole adult works.

  Chapter Five

  Illinois autumn rolled in hot and thick the week I went back to school. On the first day, I meandered to my classes. I’d left myself extra time to wander around the campus and refamiliarized myself with its layout and architecture, its odd mixture of imposing nineteenth-century stone facades and modern, gleaming, window-walled buildings. Though my skin was sticky from the humidity, I didn’t mind; it was a relief to feel anything after my year of bolted-down numbness. Evanston was just one-hundred miles from my hometown, but the muggy air was different from the oppressive air in Oakville; it was palpable and promising, like a kiss from a new boyfriend in a warm rain shower.

  When I began, four years earlier, Northwestern was an intoxicating upgrade from my homogenous hometown. It was really something to be on a big college campus after eighteen years in a suffocating suburb.

  From sheet-linen ivory to piano-key black and all shades between, a multicultural mishmash of animated, eager students strolled, skated and biked around, and bantered, debated and laughed. A year ago, I’d been one of them, lively and full of light. Now, I was a year behind schedule for graduation, but at least I was there.

  I headed toward my English class, patting at my flyaway curls, pushing my hair behind my ears, off my sweaty neck. I arrived at the back of a dim, squat building I’d never been in before; it had Lysol-scented hallways and not enough windows. When I got to the classroom, Rose sat green-washed by the fluorescent bulbs, and I hugged her, inhaled a double noseful of her latest fragrance. She’d tried a new one every month for the past four years and told me she’d eventually settle on a favorite.

  “Juliette Has a Gun,” she said, as I took the seat next to her. “That’s the name of the perfume.”

  Rose and I had been best friends for fifteen years, enmeshed by our shared passions for good books and bad T.V. We read highbrow contemporary fiction—Lorrie Moore, Louise Erdrich and George Saunders—watched lowbrow T.V.—Real Housewives of Anywhere and Catfish—and were superfans of K-pop music. She could be surly but accepted my insecurity and my compulsion to be nicer than necessary.

  Her father was an alcoholic, like mine, and died of liver failure when we were in grade school. By unspoken agreement, we never talked about our fathers, and took comfort in knowing the other one understood. I felt guilty saying so, but I told Rose I hoped my mother would be happier now that my father was gone, perhaps relieved a little. Rose understood what I meant and commiserated.

  Rose had taken a year off college too, not because of a family tragedy, but to work as a steakhouse waitress and earn more money to pay tuition. Her high school grades had been decent, but not the four-point-two-five marks I earned in advanced placement classes, good enough grades to garner me a full scholarship. Rose spent the summer after high school taking the remedial prerequisite to English 101 so that we could take it together; we’d studied English together ever since, always in the same classes. Her explanation for her poor achievement in high school English despite being an avid reader of difficult modern literature was, “I’d do better if the school let me read anything decent.” She couldn’t afford to room in the dorms, so we scheduled our senior year classes together and ate lunch together most days.

  That first day, her eyes were dark with tired, puffy circles underneath. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said. “And you look even more pink than usual.”

  It was a reference to my cheeks, which blushed an embarrassing fuchsia when I was nervous. A teacher once asked if I had a fever because my face was so flushed after I gave an oral report.

  “No. I’m good,” I said. “Trying to be.”

  She nodded. Ever since we were little, we’d dreamed of attending Northwestern. During my year of concrete and darkness, I’d forgotten how this place could light me up, prompt me to visualize my future. Before my year off, I’d majored in journalism, and wrote for the student news website, North by Northwestern. I loved poetry and literature and would’ve majored in English, but my mother convinced me journalism was more practical.

  “You can support yourself as a reporter,” she’d said, “not so much as a poet or novelist.”

  My father had been my cheerleader. He said, “Follow your passion and it will lead to a living.” He was prone to tipsy over-optimism, so I didn’t completely believe him, but I hoped he was right. To be safe, I studied both literature and journalism, semi-expecting to become a reporter after college. I was anxious and eager to succeed, and generally chose safety over risk.

  Rose started to ask how I felt but stopped when the door swung open. A slouchy crepe-faced professor took his position in the front of the classroom, made a slow turn, checked out each student one-by-one. He was about to speak when the door flew open again. A slender guy dressed all in black, even black-soled sneakers with black laces, strode in. He was tall, maybe six-feet-three-inches, with spiky black hair and light olive skin. The front of his black t-shirt was emblazoned with red calligraphic characters. Rose and I caught each other’s eyes and she raised one eyebrow.

  “Cute,” she mouthed.

  I turned back and examined his striking shirt. He noticed, lifted his lips in a slight smile, and came over.

  “Beware of perverts,” he said, and his small smile expanded to a grin. I couldn’t articulate a response. “That’s what my shirt says,” he continued. “It’s a popular slogan in Tokyo. Perverts grope women on trains there.”

  I may have said, “Wow,” but I can’t remember. My face was hot. His knife-edge cheekbones were so much manlier than most baby-faced college boys, and his deep-set eyes shone with intelligence. I struggled to take in the whole of him, his sallow skin against the solid blackness of his attire, perfect small teeth, still smiling. He stood close to me and it was hard to form perspective, to put him into context. His energy, foreign and electrically attractive, raised goosebumps on my arms.

  I was so surprised by his black-clothed coolness and his odd comment about perverts, I hadn’t noticed he was Asian. Was he Chinese or Japanese or Korean or…? Wait, he’d said Tokyo, so maybe Japanese? My face was on fire, as if he were privy to my internal dialogue about his nationality, as if he sensed the wash of pheromones surging over me.

  “My name’s Owen,” he said.

  Rose barged in and said, “Hello.” And I opened my mouth, but before I could speak the professor cleared his throat and started class.

  Owen took the only empty chair, across the room. I half-listened to class that day. Owen’s directness and striking appearance had jolted me. I was sure the searing chemistry that coursed through me was visible and palpable to the whole room. Rose smirked as she noted my effort to keep my eyes focused anywhere but Owen.

  Is this how things happened? Just like that, people fall in love, or lust? A stranger walks into a room and, well, that’s that? This had to be more than lust, certainly, deeper, a cellular-level connection, I told myself, though what in our one-minute interaction justified more than lust? I’d had boyfriends over the years—tepid, proper relationships that included first dates and first kisses, but no sex. My introversion and insecurity motivated me to abstain. When I was thirteen, I decided sex would have to wait until my heart, mind and body were all aligned, ready for such closeness on all the necessary levels. I knew I couldn’t handle doing anything with my body that my spirit didn’t agree with. It wasn’t a popular stance, and Rose teased me about it, calling me “non-loosy Lucy.” Rose and other friends followed contemporary norms and treated sex like the equivalent of sharing a soft drink, but I held out. I wasn’t scared of sex exactly, but I wasn’t ready. At least not yet. But none of my early boyfriends had spurred this type of searing poker stab in my gut.

  The professor
rambled off the syllabus; I continued to not look at Owen. I pondered what he’d said, people grope women on trains in Tokyo, the idea of public transit feel-ups, women fending off the probing, grimy hands of strangers. I was certain on-train groping happened in the U.S., too, though I’d never heard of it. Certainly, I’d have read about it if I needed to worry.

  Rose texted me. “Perverts on trains? LOL!” Amused by the drama of my reaction to Owen, she strained not to let out a guffaw.

  During class introductions Owen boasted he’d been educated at the best international school in Tokyo, that his mother was a bigwig at a wireless company, and his father and brother were still in Japan. “Northwestern is the best college in Illinois,” he’d said with authority and no discernible accent, “and my mom had to move here for work, so I came too, to experience the United States. In Tokyo, some people try to dress and act like Americans. My parents named me Owen because it’s an American name. They deny this, but it’s true,” he said with a wry laugh, and like teenagers mesmerized by reality TV, the other students laughed in unison. Humble-bragging was intriguing when Owen did it.

  Standing tall, speaking to our small English class, Owen had the radiance of a sparkly minor league star. He was cool and sophisticated, not like other nerdy boys, with their baggy jeans and floppy hair. Owen was an exotic to my small-town sensibilities.

  I left my first senior English class with my emotional landscape crazily tilted by this stranger from Japan, a country I’d rarely thought of before. Now I knew things I could never unknow, that Japan had a groping problem, some Japanese people wished they were American, and the country was inhabited by supremely hip and well-spoken men. When class was over, Owen gave Rose and me a little wave and disappeared out the door.