Hiroshima in the Morning

  He tries to straddle. He can’t straddle. He wants to take his pants off so he can get one leg on each side of the floor basin and he is still crying.

  Actually removing his pants will be the end of me. “It’s okay, Dylan. It’s okay. Do you have to pee?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have to pee?”

  “No. I mean yes. I mean, no I don’t have to pee.”

  “Okay, so, we’ll face this way.” I steer him so that he’s squatting with his back toward the potty, butt hanging over the basin, American style, with his pants around his ankles. “Don’t worry about your pants. It’s no problem.”

  “But Mom . . . ”

  He knows this is the wrong way to face on a Japanese potty, and my three-year-old wants so much to do everything correctly.

  “Don’t worry Dylan. Just don’t pee.”

  “But . . . ”

  Hobbled, he has nothing to hold onto to keep him up, so I move in front of him and slightly to one side so he can brace himself on my arm. When he is set, holding the length of my forearm like a water skier, it turns out that he has to pee, which he does in an arch over his bunched-up pants and within inches of mine. It’s impossible to make him stop, or point him in the right direction. It is spraying all over the floor, all over the wall of the stall. If he keeps the stream high, we, at least, might escape without getting soaked, but I cannot direct him to do this; he is using both hands to keep himself from falling and I can do nothing to save us from my folly at the last minute, because it is clear—oh, how clear—that this is my fault, my selfishness that he’s suffering, and there’s no longer anything I can do.

  He is still sniffling; I’m assuring him that it’s okay, not his fault, we will both dry; and my forehead is still on fire. I am replaying all my failures as a mother, and I remember, suddenly, the first time I ever hit one of my children—it was Ian, he was two, and for those first two years he was my angel and I had protected him fiercely. And then Dylan was born, a plump, squalling baby who cried all night and ate all day. And one day, when Dylan was breastfeeding, my angel walked over and bit Dylan’s face in mid-suck—and I shoved Ian to the floor. Hard, without even thinking about it, I hurt one child I loved to protect the other. It was appalling, but the worst part was, I didn’t process it, consider it, decide—I just struck. I am appalled now, even more appalled because this time there’s no backhanded excuse of maternal instinct. There’s no forgiveness in the fact that Dylan managed to miss us both with his urine. My child is dissolving because of me, because I could not see him or make room for his needs, and all I can do now is to wipe his bottom, and then, in penance, use the rest of the tissues to clean the floor and the wall he aimed at.

  Shhh . . . It’s okay. It’s okay, Dylan.

  Then, when he is zipped and straightened and I have blown his nose, I scoop my baby into my arms and hug him. He hugs me back—a tight pulse of love and relief that lasts past the point when we have righted ourselves and flows into the warmth of safety. I can feel him, who he is: his concerns, his worries, his needs, curiosities, and preoccupations. I know him; I have always known him. He is my child. There is a union—not a link between abstractions, but a world of color and light and love between my sorry, uncertain self and this small person in my arms. It’s the same feeling I had when I first fell in love with Ian: that he was a real, distinct individual. Mysterious, ever-changing, I can feel his essence: everything he will be already existing; a mind, a heart, a soul in this pudgy body waiting to be seen.

  I lost my children. Or perhaps I never had them. He is clutching me as if he can sink into me, pull his body through my skin. Is this the first time I’ve felt this in him, this fierce and utter love? I am standing for both of us, holding us up, but he is saving me.

  I love my children. Oh, how I want them.

  Dylan settles against me, still hugging, but no longer clinging. I keep him circled in one arm and put the other hand on his heart. I can feel the beating in my palm, the heart that is open, will open to me despite everything I’ve done. I want to give him what my mother gave me, that security of being known, the comfort of presence. I cannot hold him still for my convenience—I have to let him grow, take on new forms, change direction. Which is exactly what I have to do for my mother: accept her the way she is.

  When he has finally had enough, Dylan releases me and pulls just slightly away, pushing the hair off my forehead to get a closer look at the purple egg that has appeared there.

  “Oooh . . . That’s a good one!”

  I know. I can feel it—still in my ears and also under my fingertips—it must be standing an inch off my head. Was it a shelf? A peg? I can’t remember what the stall looked like, but I’m going to carry this one for a long time.

  When we step outside, Brian is waiting. The car is running in the parking lot near the door, puffing steam out the exhaust. The snow is falling in fat, horizontal flakes, wrapping the muffler of silence around them again: warm, secure, restored. When I put Dylan in his car seat, he proudly lifts my hair to show his father the bruise on my forehead.

  “Look, Dad.”

  “Christ. What in the hell happened to you?”

  I look at Brian, and my sons, and the falling snow, and I have no idea how to answer.

  MOSHI MOSHI

  WHEN I CALL TO WISH THEM a merry Christmas, my father answers, like he always does.

  “It’s your daughter,” he calls out, settling my mother on the receiver and then dashing to get the other extension. I can hear her breathing, waiting for the phone to speak.

  “Moshi moshi,” I greet her.

  “Moshi moshi,” she replies, “moshi mosh.” This is what my mother has said to me on the telephone all my life, what my grandmother used to say. I take comfort in the fact that she still remembers this, still seems to recognize my voice, so much like hers that other people cannot tell us apart, though I cannot overlook how deft my father has become at announcing who is on the phone. And then, “Where are you?”

  I tell her I am still in Japan. She says, “Oh, no wonder you’re not home.” She asks what I am up to.

  We are traveling, I tell her. I describe Tsuwano, with its carp-filled moats; the black and white castle town of Hagi, where we searched for their signature pottery. I try to make her laugh with a story about the boys and their Japanese words. They love it here, love the food, the fish-shaped manju filled with chocolate custard. I remember, when I left New York, each of my sons put together a book of photographs of himself for me to look at. When I showed them to friends, their comment on my baby was “Itsumo tabeta.” And they were right; in every picture, he was eating. I recall this story for her, tell her about Brian’s dried fish breakfasts, and how the boys like to challenge him to eat the most dubious-looking things. When I have finished my update, have made her laugh, I ask my parents, “So, what’s new with you?”

  They have just celebrated Christmas, but my father doesn’t say anything for a moment. This is how he measures my mother: he is waiting for her to speak. Finally, he prompts her. “What’s new here?” he says.

  “Oh . . . ” she says, gaily. “We’re boring. What’s new with you?”

  And so I tell her again, from the beginning. My father listens without comment as I add some new details—how the carp didn’t even flinch when the food we dropped on them hit the tops of their impassive heads. I add “I might have told you” casually to what I’ve already said in case my answer suddenly seems familiar: it’s important that she doesn’t suspect, that she doesn’t get depressed. I start again with Tsuwano and its carp-filled moats, then move on to the black and white castle town of Hagi. It is not until she begins to laugh in the same places, that I can relax into it, knowing I will tell her a third time if she repeats her question.

  I am talking to my mother; she is listening. And, in this moment, I will cherish every word.

  COURT MUSIC

  I WAKE TO THE ALARM: a nameless, repeating dirge played by the b
astard child of an electric keyboard and a kazoo, the world-time clock which I set only once before the family arrived, in the pre-dawn of August sixth. Brian’s back is curved away from me as I lie down again and try to pull my way out of sleep. Today marks fourteen years of marriage and a preceding seven of life together: it’s our wedding anniversary.

  The bugaku is performed in only three places in Japan, and one of them is Miyajima. It’s the New Year and . . . This is what I’d hoped to give him: the wail of the shō; the simple repetition of the traditional court dance; the dragging brocade costumes. It was an omen that the program I’d longed to see for most of my stay in Japan was to be performed on the day we were married, a day that once was perfect, and in one of the three most beautiful places in Japan. Today was going to be our new start: 2002, a morning when we planned to wake before the sunrise, when we planned to erase. When we thought we could turn to each other as strangers, unhurt, not rejected; when we could rekindle the excitement of meeting for the first time.

  But there are things we cannot let go of.

  Last night, in those hours before this chapter could be forever closed, when we might have been able to file this away with all the wrong labels—yes, I am a mother; yes, I am going home—we finally hit the wall. With the anger banished, and a bottle of sake to accompany us, we sat in our bedroom on the tatami and looked out onto the river. The street lights were enough to see by, as much as we wanted to see. Surrounded by the life I had chosen—just a floor, sliding paper doors, futons spread out to sleep on—he found the heart of his sorrows.

  “You never wanted to come home,” he said into the darkness. “You should have missed our life together, but you didn’t. I waited for you, but you didn’t want to come home.”

  In his voice, a child lost. I felt for my own responses. Excuses came first, a way out, words I could attack to rewrite this verdict he had issued. You didn’t ask. You could have come here. You were so angry all the time . . . But I knew these weren’t fair and would not save us.

  There will come a time when I will describe it this way: that in that moment I realized I had become intimate with war. Once, I had asked about the effect of war on the individual lives of people: And what about war? Not, who fights, or who dies, or how does the amputated family rise from the ashes, but how does it change the people we are? In Brian’s voice, I could hear how war can be measured: the collective consequence of where we stood, what shielding we had from the blast. Whether we fled.

  I fled. I was afraid of losing myself, of losing my family, of the turmoil and helplessness of war, so I held off the pain beneath Brian’s anger; I held him to his promises and judged him for being unable to fulfill them. I experienced him as a bully: he was the one who defined and categorized, and I offered no alternative interpretations. And if I felt rejected, he too felt abandoned.

  Both of us, tipping and trapped. Both of us reacting to the velocity of the trigger.

  IT IS SNOWING when we leave the apartment, but by the time we reach Miyajima, the temperature has dropped, clearing all but a sifting of white from the sky. It is my coldest day in Japan. We disembark from the ferry: first stop is the bathroom, then to pet the deer. Don’t be scared, just don’t touch its antlers, see the stumps where they cut them off? You can feed the little ones. It’s okay. Take your time. Time is the key to our day; we pretend we have a lot of it.

  We walk, with great deliberation, down the middle of the gamut of “any things” for sale. The streets between the pier and the famous Itsukushima Shrine are lined with post-cards, painted fans, key chains, and plastic trucks. Wooden shakushi of every size painted with various kanji; wooden bowls; wooden plates. Oyster bars with windows displaying lengths of shell-encrusted ropes from the Seto Inland Sea; open barbeques with fresh oysters on the grill. And, of course, the ubiquitous momiji manju, the maple leaf-shaped sponge cakes filled with red bean paste that are the specialty of the island. We watch the assembly-line machines pour the batter, scoop the filling, and bake them before our eyes. And we stop—today being what it is; my boys being creatures who need fuel, who look on anything sweet, not as a taste, but as something to be consumed in multiples. These will hold us while we walk through the arcade, still strolling for the shrine.

  I am trying not to get caught in the aimless currents of shopping. Even if there’s no hurry, even if I’m moving as if my space boots are all that keep me from floating away, I have pinned my future on this performance. It’s a symbol of what I’ve given my old life up for, and a gauge of what I’m moving toward. This is my boys’ first chance to step onto the wooden walkway of the shrine that floods when it storms; their first wild shake of the white paper wands over their heads to cleanse themselves at the shrine entrance. We are here at last, but the stages are empty. The boys drag Brian toward the narrow pier that fronts the shrine and point to the floating torii—they have found open ground, and they each have a hand—and their momentum allows me to wave them off and see if I can find out what’s going on.

  The boys are beginning to flip over the low railing that encloses the stage. Three shimai performances are scheduled before the bugaku we have come for; each is a half an hour long. These dances are simple—there are no masks or elaborate costumes—and the stage is placed right in the middle of a milling crowd in a tent, and so, even though many people stop to see what’s going on, they aren’t exactly rapt. Attention is good for five minutes, and then, since the small gaijin boys cannot drift toward the sake with the others, they twist and whine and wiggle and talk.

  I could shush them, make them watch. I could measure the distance between how bored they are and how much I would love this with any one of the Japanese friends I have made here, and use it as proof that I can’t be a mother, but today, I will not. Three performances is long enough to do something else before the bugaku, and on this island, not too far from here, is the temple where I went firewalking. I stoop to pull them to me, hold them still and close to me on either side as I tell them about the long steps, the room of jizos at the top, and the ceremony of fire. You walked on fire, on the flames? And you weren’t burned, really? They are captivated, ready to race ahead and then they do, checking back at every branch in the path, leaving Brian and me to walk together. He is sad and settled; I don’t know what he’s thinking. I’ve lived here long enough to know that an answer is not correct just because it is timely, so I don’t press him. Bad news comes when it comes.

  “You should do what you want from now on,” he told me last night. “Finish your interviews. Your time here is your own.”

  All this time, I was waiting for love to save us. I was waiting for the truth to present itself, for the happy ending. You never wanted to come home, he’d said, and it seemed important to let that stand. It was true. I have to own that. I have to feel it, because it is how he feels. He had something that disappeared, and who am I to say that he shouldn’t want it? It was his, was what he loved, and he was who he was because of it. We all have the right to imagine ourselves as we want to be, and to try to make that real.

  There will come another night when we will write our own metaphor. It will be summertime, in New York, after months of him asking for parameters and definitions, and me not being able to say. We built a treehouse, he will say to me, and it was perfect. And I will imagine a boat, one that could take us anywhere; I will describe it, and how we could build it, and I will ask him to join me in it.

  But I like the treehouse. I can still hear his voice. I want the treehouse.

  For some reason, I will place this exchange on our futon, in our room as it was last night, as we looked out over the river. That’s how memory is: imperfect. That’s how the future embeds in the past. But it may also be that I place it here because last night, I made a decision. Though he did not leave Japan early as he threatened to, I will stay here after he leaves. There’s an end I haven’t reached yet. I will postpone my trip home for another two weeks.

  He is leaving me. In my head, I try out this configur
ation of words. They sound strange but just as right as the switch of the pronouns: I am leaving him.

  Is this how divorce happens? I wonder. You wake up to a day when pronouns do not matter? When it’s no longer surprising that the one you loved doesn’t want you anymore?

  Right now, today, I am still surprised. There will be plenty of time ahead to become used to the idea. I will try until I cannot anymore because that is who I am, and he will never be the one who would step out the door, which has always been him. The death of a marriage is a long course toward exhaustion. The last breath may not even be remembered.

  The boys are ahead of us, stopped on a long promenade of steps lined on either side with engraved stone pickets that record the donations to the temple. They have been worried about their parents, linking us in a chain for most of the day as if they knew we were about to fly apart, but this place has liberated them. First they crouch down beside the tiny statues, then spin gold through their fingers as they zigzag up the stairs. Now they are reading kanji. Just a few. They are checking each donation marker—there are hundreds on each side—for my name, the “Mommy character,” an older and uncommon kanji; they are looking for ko, which means child; for kawa, the three lines that look like a river; ta the box with the cross through it that signals a rice field. They are looking for themselves in Japan: Ian methodical in his search; Dylan running up and down the walk, racing backward, leaping, always about to fall. This is a day, that’s all it is; it doesn’t have to be an omen. It doesn’t have to be the end of something, or the first sign of what’s to come.

  WE ARE SITTING on a bench in the cold, eating fried and frittered food. Our visit to the temple has restored us somewhat, and the plentitude of French fries seems to be finishing the job. Dylan is entirely focused on his chicken fingers and I’m enjoying my octopus balls; we’ve each chosen what we wanted, and our delight in finding it overshadows the fragile fact that our choices are entirely different. This small allowance in the seams of our life allows us to breathe, so when the snow begins to fall again and Brian spots a crowd gathering around the stage at the shrine behind us, we leave our food behind and take off together. The music has begun, but the stage holds only snow, and there’s a place for four in the front in the center as the bugaku begins.