by Misa Sugiura
Considering the fact that I was making a sincere effort to be nice to Dela and help her with her box, you’d think she would be a little more understanding about the completely accidental accident that happened. But no. She’s acting like I came out to the van, tore the box from her grasp, and hurled it into the street, shrieking to the skies in evil triumph as the wind picked up the contents and sent them swirling all over the city.
Even after I apologized a hundred times as I followed her to the recycling dumpster, even after I begged her to let me make amends, all she would say was, “The installation is ruined and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.” Clang. The lid of the dumpster slammed down.
“What if—what if I helped you fold some more of those things? How many were there? Maybe we could—”
“There were literally a thousand of them in there. It takes three minutes to make each one, and that’s if you know what you’re doing. Not to mention the time it takes to write on every single one of them. And the time it will take to hang them all up. It’s days of work.” Her voice is shaking, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think she was on the verge of tears.
But I don’t back down. “Okay. The installation opens on the night of the gala, which is three weeks away. . . .” I make some estimations and do some calculations. “If we work together two hours a day just on weekdays, we’ll be done folding with a few days left for setup. That’s not so bad!”
The look she gives me indicates that she thinks it’s very bad, indeed.
“Hey,” I say, irritated. “I’m not thrilled about it, either, but I’m trying to be positive. Maybe you could, too.”
There’s no other way. I’m the one who ruined her project, so it’s not fair to make her do all the work—and she won’t trust me to work on my own.
So now, instead of spending my afternoons and evenings with the future love of my life, trying to turn our fake romance into something real, I’m going to spend them cooped up in the staff room folding a thousand pieces of paper with the most disagreeable girl I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. And despite what I said earlier, I do not feel positive about it at all.
13
AS IF MY DREADED ORIGAMI PROJECT WITH DELA wasn’t going to be tedious and time-consuming enough, Stephen has decided to put me and Max to work this weekend purging tons of junk from Baba’s garage in preparation for her inevitable move elsewhere. We’ve brought stuff in bit by bit for Baba to identify, and her living room is so full now, you can barely walk. Towering stacks of dusty books and photo albums. Giant plastic bins full of papers, tests, worksheets, and report cards from Stephen and Dad’s school days. Big cardboard boxes bursting with old clothes, baby toys, and books.
Naturally, Stephen is still too afraid to mention our real purpose, so he’s dressing this project up as a fun family experience wherein Baba goes through all her stuff and tells us stories about her favorite things, and helps us decide what to keep and what to—ahem—not keep.
It doesn’t seem fair to Baba to treat her this way, but how else are we supposed to get her to cooperate? As it is, she’s steadfastly refused to go through any of the boxes we’ve brought in, and is currently shut up in her room. I bet she’s guessed the real reason we’re doing this; she may be losing her memory, but she’s not stupid. And even if she doesn’t see through the ruse, I’m sure it’s tough to have people sweep into your house and dig through everything you’ve accumulated over fifty years.
Willow has pretty much taken over the corner of my brain labeled Nozomi’s Obsessions lately, so I’ve been able to cram my issues with Baba into a closet—so to speak, ha-ha. But now that we’re in her house and going through her stuff, the homophobia keeps surfacing. Literally. Photos of teenage Stephen dressed for Halloween as eighties LGBTQIA icon Boy George in full makeup, braids, and a big, flowy shirt. (“How could anyone miss a sign like that?” I ask, and Stephen shakes his head. “You would not believe how deep in denial people were back then.”) A tightly folded rainbow flag and a bag of weed in a shoebox, on which Max promptly calls dibs. An old church pamphlet entitled, “Homosexuals: Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner,” which fills me with something gray and heavy.
I don’t even want to touch it to throw it out.
“How do you do it? How do you keep being nice to her?” I ask Stephen.
“I don’t know sometimes,” he says. “I’ve thought pretty seriously about cutting her out of my life again. But she’s trying. In a perfect world, she’d embrace every part of me. But this isn’t a perfect world, and Baba’s not a perfect person. And she’s poured her entire life into raising me and your dad, and for the most part, I think she’s done a pretty good job. I’ve always felt loved. I’ve always felt cherished. I know she’s proud of me. And if I don’t look after her, who will? I owe it to her. I don’t know if what I’m doing is right or wrong. But it’s what I’m doing.”
“What about me, though?”
Stephen looks at me and lets out a shaky breath. “Come here,” he whispers, and wraps his arms around me. We stand there quietly for a while. Eventually, though, he says, “Life is long, Zozo. We’re all evolving. Try to be patient.”
“With life? Or with Baba?”
He chuckles. “With Baba for now. With life in the long run.”
Stephen nods in the direction of the stairs and asks me, “Do you think you could go up there and talk her into going for a walk?”
“Do I have to?”
“I bet she’d love it if you asked her to take you to Cinderella Bakery,” Stephen says. “Do you remember where it is?”
“Pretty much.” Cinderella Bakery is a Russian bakery a few blocks away. Baba used to take me there quite a lot when I was little, and that memory is what persuades me.
“She goes there practically every other day, so it shouldn’t be a problem. But make sure you bring your phone. Just in case.”
I wince. Stephen had to pick Baba up from the library the other day. “I got tired,” she’d explained to him. But she had her little roller basket full of groceries with her, and her house is between the grocery store and the library. Maybe she went straight to the library after grocery shopping—but maybe she accidentally overshot her house and forgot how to get home.
One of my favorite things about Baba has always been how strong she is. Strong body, strong will, strong everything. According to her, she was a tomboy, faster and stronger than all the boys in her class when she was little. Jiji was always working and traveling, so she brought up Stephen and Dad practically all by herself in a country where she barely spoke the language. She fought Stephen’s school principal when he got teased by his gym teacher for being “girly” in third grade. She was still climbing up and down the Lyon Street steps in her seventies—something she is very proud of, and I don’t blame her.
So it’s tough to think about her lost and confused, the way she must have felt when she called Stephen from the library to ask for a ride home. Even if she wouldn’t admit it.
I find Baba sitting in a worn leather armchair by the window in her room, looking disconsolately out at the backyard, a knitting project on her lap.
“Hi, Baba,” I say, knocking on the doorframe. “I was wondering if you could take me to Cinderella Bakery.” Her face lights up.
Ten minutes later, Baba is walking next to me in her sensible shoes, pointing out the mint plant growing in one of those squares of dirt in the sidewalk with a tree in it. “Don’t pick, though,” she warns me. “Dogs do pee here sometimes.”
We turn the corner onto Balboa, and Baba says, “I think we’re close to Cinderella Bakery. Do you remember I used to take you when you were a little girl? Do you want to go?”
“Um, sure,” I say, and smile to hide my dismay. It’s kind of funny, actually—but also not funny at all.
“You always wanted a napoleon cake. You thought it was a Russian specialty because we always ate it there. You and Max had a big fight about it one time.”
I remember that fight. Tec
hnically, Max won, since napoleon cake is originally an Italian pastry—but he also lost because it’s not French like he thought. And I also won because it turns out that it’s so popular in Russia that a lot of Russians consider it a Russian dessert. The best part, though, was that I cried so hard when Max refused to cede victory that Baba bought me two pieces to make up for it.
“I remember we used to tell Dad that we were going to get pelmeni for lunch and we’d just eat pastries instead,” I tell her. Baba and I used to be a great team. I miss those days, when she made me plum jam, when she didn’t get lost, when I didn’t know how problematic she was.
Baba’s face crinkles up with laughter, and she says, “I used to do such a thing all the time. I remember we went to Kyōto for a school trip when I was a teenager, and instead of visiting the temple and shrine and listening to the tour guide, I snuck away with Jiji and my friend, Nana-chan, and we spent the afternoon at a café.”
This is an old story, one I remember her telling me when I was little. “Did you get caught?” I ask, even though I know the answer.
She shakes her head. “Students had the specific route to go, and the teachers trusted us to follow. But I already knew all about the temples we had to visit, so I made Jiji and Nana-chan . . . what is it that you say? We played hooking.”
“You played hooky.”
“Yes,” she says, nodding. “They were so worried.” She laughs: how silly of them! “But I told them the answers to our worksheet at the café and we took a taxi to the last temple and no one knew we were gone!” She laughs again at her own audacity, so pleased with her teenage self that I have to smile with her.
“No one? Not a single kid? Not the teachers?”
Baba scoffs. “Teachers didn’t pay a close attention—they stayed up late the night before, drinking. I knew, because I snuck out of my room to spy them. And other students didn’t care.”
We buy a box of napoleons, plus a box of pelmeni for dinner. As we put the napoleons onto plates at home, I ask Baba if she has photos of that class trip to Kyōto.
“They’re in a photo album,” she says. “Come, I’ll show you.”
When we walk into the living room, Baba doesn’t even greet Stephen, but says rather shortly, “I want a photo album. I hope you haven’t blocked the bookshelf with all of these boxes.”
“Why don’t you sit on the couch, Mom. I’ll grab the albums for you,” Stephen says, his voice even. “That’ll save you from having to kneel down. I know your knees have been bothering you.”
“You don’t know which one I want,” she complains, but she takes his suggestion and sits down.
He sends me to the kitchen to boil water for tea to drink with the napoleons. It takes me a minute to find the tea; it’s not on the shelf labeled TEA, but in a drawer full of dish towels. Concern rattles through me like a marble.
A few minutes later, I’m sitting next to Baba with the album open on her lap, and a napoleon and cup of tea for each of us on the coffee table. She’s flipped to a page toward the back of the album, to a photograph of a teenage girl with bobbed hair and a dark sailor suit—the quintessential Japanese public school uniform. Her head is tilted slightly away from the camera, and she’s smiling coquettishly and holding the skirt of the dress out, totally hamming it up.
Baba points to the guy standing next to her and smiling at her in the photo, wearing dark trousers and a matching military-looking jacket with a mandarin collar and a row of five metal buttons down the front. “Can you guess who this is?”
Even if he didn’t have Dad’s nose and eyes, I could have guessed by looking at the goofy, lovestruck expression on his face. “Jiji,” I say.
She flips through the album and tells me story after story while I wonder how that rule-breaking, boundary-pushing tomboy whose spirit was too big for her home country grew into the cranky old lady who barely tolerates her gay son’s marriage, and who flat-out declares that she’s not willing to broaden her horizons. How does that happen? And when? Or maybe she was always this way and I just didn’t see it. If I never come out to her, I bet I could get along with Baba the way I used to. But isn’t that betraying who I am now? Is being myself—my whole self—around Baba worth the risk of damaging what we used to have? I get why Stephen says it’s a process, and we have to be patient with her. But I’m less and less sure that we have time for that kind of patience.
14
WILLOW’S REACTION TO THE NEWS OF MY unavailability for after-work socializing wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for.
“This is perfect!” she exclaimed. She urged me to use my time to learn everything I could about Arden and Dela’s relationship, so we could plan our next step in Operation Make Arden Wish She Never Left. “We need to know what we’re up against,” she said.
She wasn’t wrong. And I guess I could also learn useful information for Operation Make Willow Fall in Love with Me. So it’s all good. Though a little more sympathy and a little less strategy might have been nice.
After work, I meet Dela and Cliff in the staff room for my first session of origami penance. I have no clue how I’m going to get Dela to even speak to me, much less tell me anything personal. For inspiration, I’m pretending this is a top secret surveillance operation and I am an undercover spy, expert at tricking unsuspecting enemy agents into revealing their secrets. Childish? Perhaps. But I do what it takes to survive.
Cliff presents us with a list of hundreds of wishes downloaded from a website specifically set up for this project. We have to write each and every one on a sheet of origami (I can already feel my poor hand cramping up), and fold them into cranes and butterflies, which will eventually be suspended with silk thread all around the courtyard from bamboo branches and from the rafters of the structure that he and Dela are building.
Wait a second. “This sounds a lot like Tanabata,” I say.
Tanabata is one of my favorite Japanese holidays because it’s a celebration of true love and magic and wishes coming true, but not in a sappy Hallmark Valentine’s Day way. It’s based on the legend of Orihime, the daughter of the Tentei, King of the Sky. Orihime was a weaver, and she would sit in the sky next to the River of Heaven, which we know as the Milky Way, and weave the most beautiful silk cloth. But she worked so hard at it that she could never meet anyone to fall in love with. Her father felt sorry for her, so he arranged for her to meet Hikoboshi, a cowherd who lived on the other side of the river.
Naturally, the two fell passionately in love and got married. But once they were married, they were so into each other that they stopped paying attention to their duties. Orihime stopped weaving, and Hikoboshi stopped watching his cows, which crossed the river, wandered all over the sky, and wreaked heavenly havoc. Orihime’s father was furious. He sent Hikoboshi and his cows back across the Milky Way and forbade Hikoboshi and Orihime from seeing each other ever again.
Heartbroken, Orihime begged her father to let her be with Hikoboshi. Finally, he relented, and said that for one night each year, he would allow her to cross the Milky Way to meet her husband on the other side. When that night came, Orihime went to the river and found that it was too deep and fast to cross, and she wept with despair. But a flock of magpies took pity on her and formed themselves into a bridge, and she was able to cross over and be reunited with her beloved.
Tanabata is a celebration of that night—the one night every year when heaven listens to our most heartfelt wishes. People write their wishes on paper and hang them on bamboo branches, which is symbolic because bamboo grows fast and straight, so it can carry the wishes to heaven. What more do you need to fall in love with a holiday?
“I guess your mom told you about it?” I ask.
Dela says nothing; she’s clenching her jaw shut so hard, I can see the muscles working. I glance nervously at Cliff for an answer, but he’s looking at Dela with an unreadable expression on his face. Finally, he says, “Well, yes, but the thing is . . .” He looks at Dela and trails off, then switches to telling me more about the
installation.
Whoa. I guess I hit a nerve. I feel like there’s a lot to learn here. Maybe not what I came here to learn, but still. I watch Dela carefully.
On the day of the gala, Cliff says, when the Tanabata Pavilion opens, guests will enter the courtyard and write their own wish on a piece of origami “wishing paper.” Assistants from the San Francisco Academy of Art University will fold the wishes into a crane or a butterfly, and wishers will choose a wish that’s already hanging from a tree, and replace it with their own.
“What happens to the old wishes that come down?” I ask.
“They go in a fire,” says Dela, and I can’t tell whether or not she’s kidding, so I look at Cliff, who nods.
“The fire is symbolic,” Cliff explains. “Fire is purifying, so only the purest essence of any wish goes up to heaven. You let go of your wish when you hang it on the branch, and you participate in someone else’s wish when you put one in the fire. Because a wish doesn’t come true on the power of your desire alone, or even on the actions you take or the plans you make. There are a lot of factors beyond your control. That’s the beauty of this piece,” he concludes with a tender look at Dela, who looks away. “It’s a twist that we developed after Dela won the grant.”
“Wow. That’s deep,” is all I can say.
“That’s my girl.” Cliff smiles fondly at Dela again, and again she looks away. What is wrong with her? I would be so proud if I’d come up with something like this.
I look at the stack of origami and wonder what I would wish for. Something smart and political, like Please let the government take real action on climate change? Or I could wish for something sensible and good, like Please let Baba agree to move to a retirement home. Or maybe something ambitious, like Please let me get into the College of My Choice. Except those wishes feel like something Dad or Stephen would recommend. Responsible. Practical. They’d be wasted on something as magical as this Tanabata installation. I need something heartfelt. Something with wings, the kind of wish that you can imagine swirling up to the sky, into the stars, for Orihime to pick up and give to her father to grant.