Chorus of Mushrooms

by Hiromi Goto

  “Naoe,” he whispered, “come to me.”

  I left the comfort of my futon and crawled beneath his blankets, face rigid and spine stiff. He was not unkind. His hands were warm and gentle. Perhaps if he had placed his lips upon mine, covered my mouth with his and breathed some blood back into the roots, but it was not the fashion to kiss and I was not willing to part my lips. He parted my nemaki with careful hands and touched my breasts, my thighs. It was not unpleasurable, this touching, and I was always ready when his body covered mine, but I never moved to touch him and I never said the words. Just the beat of blood in my temples chanting, “I did not choose to marry. I did not choose to marry.”

  Choices made remain unchanged and useless to wish it otherwise. Choose now! I shout, Choose now! The wind howls, forces dust through seams in the walls, and swirls a dry web around me. Choose! I scream and dust turns to mud in the pit of my throat. But that cannot stop me. I ball the mud with the back of my tongue and spew it out with the force of my words.

  “Hssssst. Naoe. Not married yet? My, oh my. Old Miss, Naoe. You’re nothing but an Old Miss. Juices all dried up and nothing fresh left. You’re leftovers. The shop’s closed and nothing left except shrivelled plums and dried out apples. Better hurry, Naoe. Better hurry, or your Otōsan will have another thing to cry about. You poor thing. It’s almost too late.”

  I didn’t care. I really didn’t.

  Old fool. Of course I cared, or I didn’t not care enough. I did get married after all. Could have refused, could have stayed home, could have swung from the rafters by a long silk cloth. Could have—I thought about all of these things and more, but there they remained. As thoughts. I acted on nothing and my lips only opened to scream when Keiko was wrenched from my body with great gleaming hooks.

  “Otōsan, where does pain come from?”

  Keiko and I, our differences remain. But there are times when one can touch the other without language to disrupt us. Daughter from my body, but not from my mouth. The words we speak leave small bruises on the skin, but what she utters from her face doesn’t always come from her heart. Sometimes, we are able to touch the other with gentle thoughts and gentler hands. We still have our hair days, and she still asks me to clean her ears. Such a fragile trusting thing, to have one’s ears cleaned by someone. It’s not something you can ask of everyone. It is more a woman contact, something that boys grow out of. But old women will turn to their daughters to have their hair looked after. Grown women will still turn to their aged mothers and ask to have their ears cleaned. As long Keiko asks me to, I know she trusts me.

  I am an old woman, and I am also stubborn, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid and bitter. It’s only that I spent so much time saying nothing in my youth, I have to make up for things unsaid in this house of dust and moth.

  There are so many moths this year, it’s all the rain we had this spring, some say. I wait for them, each night, to flutter from the wrinkles in my clothes. People are so silly about moths. Keiko bats her hands around her head, crushes them with wadded Kleenex, or sucks them up with the vacuum cleaner. “Dirty, filthy insects,” she says. Murasaki plops empty cups over them and slides a piece of paper underneath so she doesn’t have to bear their frenzy of wings against her skin. She tosses the moths outside and they flutter back toward the light. I cup them in my palms and stare. They are as furry as mice given dusty wings. I would like to stroke the fur on their bodies, but my trembling hands are clumsy. So I only hold and look. Whisper. They stay and listen for a while and flutter away with the whir of beating wings.

  You carry the groceries in from the garage, the bite of minus thirty-seven degrees Celsius cutting through the warmth of the kitchen faster than you can close the door. I set the last pot on the draining board and dry my hands.

  “Did you shut the garage door?” I ask, and you shake your head. I stick my feet into your large snow boots and plod awkwardly outside. It is so cold that the automatic garage door is incapable of being an automatic anything. I have to press the button, then reach up to grab the rim of the door to drag it shut. Only I am stupid. So stupid. I didn’t bother to put any gloves on and the pads of my fingers are still damp from washing dishes. I am stuck to the garage door with my hands above my head and the wind is tearing like knives into my back.

  “Help!” I yell, stuck between crying with cold and pain and laughing at my own stupidity. “H-h-h-h-help!” I laugh/cry and you stick your head around the corner.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m stuck to the garage door, my fingers, they froze on the door,” I gulp, warm tears rolling down my icy face, laughter bursting from my lips like gasps. You are amazed, never having seen a human actually freeze and stick to something. You rush to my side, breathless with concern. And I watch, mute with horror and fascination, as you open your mouth, extend your tongue, to lick my fingers free. Steam rises moist from the warmth of your mouth, but the warmth is nothing compared to the icy strength of an Alberta winter day. Your tongue freezes to the garage, just above my fingers.

  We are so pathetic I am laughing and laughing until I can’t stop. You start laughing too, but it rips at your tongue making your eyes water. Hot salty tears drip down your face, land on your tongue, my fingers. You laugh only to cause yourself pain. So that it makes you cry long enough to melt the ice that holds us. You soothe a balm on my fingertips and there is nothing to be done for your tongue except to stroke it with some of the sticky flesh of the aloe vera plant.

  “It’s a bit bitter,” you muddle, around the pain and stickiness in your mouth.

  “Do you want me to kiss and make it better?” I ask.

  “No! Thank you. Just go on with your story so I don’t have to think about how much my tongue really hurts.”

  I blow on my fingers and settle my head in the warm cup of your thighs.

  MURASAKI

  Obāchan’s bed of tales was a good place to dream in. Her words sometimes notes of music instead of symbols to decipher. Lay my head in her bony lap and swallow sound. There are worse places to be when you are thirteen. Of course there were times when my Mom and I had conversations. But the things we spoke of never lingered in my heart or deep inside my head. She couldn’t offer me words I craved, and I didn’t know how to ask.

  It’s easy to travel distances if you fly on a bed of stories. My Mom didn’t tell tales at all. And the only make-believe she knew was thinking that she was as white as her neighbour. I wanted to hear bedtime stories, hear lies and truth dissembled. I wanted to fill the hollow with sound and pain. Roar like the prairie wind. Roar, like Obāchan.

  (Naoe: Child, here is a story for you. Somewhere to begin.)

  Mukāshi, mukāshi, ōmukashi . . .

  When there was nothing but the primeval waters, Izanami and Izanagi left their celestial home, crossing a bridge of many colours.

  “Where are we going?” Izanagi called to his sister, who strode ahead of him.

  “We are going down,” Izanami answered. The bottom of her robe staining blue and green and violet from the seeping bridge.

  “But there is nothing down there except oily water,” Izanagi cried, lagging further behind.

  “Hurry! Or the bridge will fade out from under your feet.”

  Izanagi looked back, and sure enough, the bridge was slowly fading, its colours evaporating like mist.

  “How will we go home?” the boy panted, running a little to catch up with his sister. He caught her hand and held tightly, looking back once more, to the growing space that separated them from the glowing lights of their heaven.

  “It’s time to make a new home,” a smile began to form on Izanami’s lips.

  “How can you make a new home? There’s nothing down here except black water,” Izanagi argued, twisting his fingers inside Izanami’s cool grasp. He was angry with his sister who had taken him from his comfortable home. He had been eating gingko nuts, and now he was sorry he had not brought any with him, for there would be nothing to eat in this oily wat
er except a few unsightly jellyfish, most unpalatable unless dipped in hot pepper and sesame seed oil.

  “We are gods,” Izanami said, dropping her brother’s hand. “We can create.”

  “Oh,” Izanagi was a little taken aback. “What are the rules?”

  “There are no rules,” Izanami chanted, and saying it aloud made it so.

  They reached the foot of the bridge where the colours seeped into the black water, little rings spreading blue, green and violet.

  “This water is displeasing. I wish the water to reflect the colour of the sky.” At her words, the water rippled and spread away from where she stood, a growing circle swelling outward until all the water hummed a singing blue.

  “That’s nice,” Izanagi sighed.

  “Now it’s your turn,” his sister said.

  “Let there be light!”

  “No! No!” Izanami shouted. “That’s not the way to do it. Take it back!”

  “You said there were no rules!” her brother complained in his normal voice.

  “I said there were no rules, but there is such a thing as good taste and understated beauty. Make this mittomonai light go away,” Izanami said. “Besides, the sky and water aren’t blue anymore. You made them turn into a sickly olive colour with that awful light.”

  “Okay, I take it back,” Izanagi muttered. The sky and water turned blue again and the sickly bright light disappeared.

  “Now it’s my turn,” Izanami said.

  “No fair! You cancelled my light so I should get another turn.”

  “No, if you botch your turn, you’ve used it up. Besides, we have to hurry. The bridge is almost faded and we still don’t have anything to stand on.” Izanami stood, tapping her foot on the last wisps of rainbow beneath their feet.

  “All right,” Izanagi muttered. “But hurry up. I’m getting hungry.”

  Izanami dipped her fingers in the cool blue water and flung the droplets back into the water. “I wish for green islands, like jewels, to rise from the sea,” she chanted.

  “Don’t forget the gingko trees,” Izanagi said, poking his sister in the ribs with his forefinger.

  “And gingko trees like giants to reach and embrace the sky.”

  The droplets of water congealed, swelled, growing green and healthy. Bursting with mountains and valleys and the rush of waterfalls, the squeak of gingko bark growing. Izanami and Izanagi stepped off the almost faded bridge onto the firm, green-smelling soil of the new island.

  “Nice,” Izanagi sighed.

  Beneath the arms of a great gingko tree, they collected the fallen fruit. Izanami and Izanagi told each other tales as they peeled the outer smelly flesh and roasted the inner nuts in the embers of a fire. They pushed the nuts out of the low blue and orange flames with a stick. Picked them up, still too hot to handle, burning their fingertips and tongues in their eagerness to eat them.

  (Murasaki: Obāchan, this story. Is this a story you heard when you were little?

  Naoe: Child, this is not the story I learned, but it’s the story I tell. It is the nature of words to change with the telling. They are changing in your mind even as I speak.)

  Mom never told me of her childhood stories. There is a hollow in my hearing I must fill on my own. Not like Obāchan, who breathed words in and out all day. Mom’s voice only rattled like a tiny mushroom in an otherwise empty bucket. Her stories must be ugly things filled with bitterness and pain. The pain of never having told. And Dad, the man who unlearns with the ease of breath. His is a physical response, like a knee-knock-swing or sneezing after looking at the sun. He is as blameless as a chameleon changing colour. Yeah, sure. Obāchan, yet. Obāchan, still. You hover about my ears my eyes, you touch the things I care to dwell in.

  Yet.

  Mom and Dad made me work at the mushroom farm. An odious job, literally, when you are a child. They wanted me to learn about responsibility and patience and forbearance and how money must be earned and not taken for granted and other basically fundamental Baptist attitudes. I hated it. The sour stink of compost and the armpit smell of mushroom soil. No kids but me, and they made me do jobs that were most boring and most meaningless.

  “Girl,” Joe said, “go make boxes.”

  I hated him. Calling me girl and making me make boxes.

  Hated the way cardboard scraped against cardboard in that raspy squeak and the hair on my arms stood up and prickled up my neck and not in a pee-your-pants-feel-good-way either.

  “Girl,” he said, “go do blocks.”

  I hated him. Calling me girl and making me set blocks between every post of every bed of mushrooms. Doing the stupidest job on what everyone called the Green Machine. A huge assembly line that took a stack of beds on one end then jerked them down the line, one by one, for either spawning or loading or casing. Why it was called casing I’ll never know. All we did was cover the spawned shit with peat moss. Where did the cases come in? And me with the stupid job of blocking every post with a four by four cube of wood so that the spaces between the beds would be bigger. Wider. Running around the bed to get the four corners, then punching the button so that the bed was crammed upward piling them on top of each other sometimes six high when the forklift was too slow in coming back and it all teetering and the fear of it toppling and crushing me stupid and no way a hard hat would save me even if I was wearing one. Calling me girl.

  “Girl,” he said, “break.”

  “Muriel, some Boat People are coming to work on the farm,” Mom said.

  “What do you mean, Boat People?” I asked.

  “They are people who left Vietnam because it’s a difficult place to live because Communists have taken it over and the standard of living’s been so reduced that they just can’t bear to stay. Or for some people, it’s too dangerous to stay. And they had to sneak away on boats, because it is against the law to leave. Be very nice to these people, Muriel. They’ve suffered so much.”

  “Oh,” I said, not thinking beyond the words I heard. No, I was doing something. Doing this thing of adventures at sea like the Medusa and wondering about the gory details of people drowning and what happened when there was nothing left to eat. I wasn’t immune.

  “Help me think up of some nicknames for these people,” Mom said, “their real names are too hard to pronounce and no one will be able to remember them.”

  “Okay,” I was eager, the thought of thinking up new names for grown-ups gave me a thrill of pleasure. I ran my finger down the row of names, rolling foreign words on my tongue. Changing them. “How about Jim?” I asked. “How about Joe?”

  “Joe,” Mom mouthed. “Yes, that’s nice and simple. Joe it is.”

  “Girl,” Joe said, “phone.”

  “Girl,” Joe said, “pick room twelve.”

  “Isn’t that being steamed?” I asked.

  “Steaming it tomorrow,” Joe said.

  “I don’t think I should have to pick it. It’s not worth the effort. All I’ll get is a couple of crates of diseased #2s. Only worth a buck a pound. It’s not worth it,” I stood my ground. For my picking rights.

  “Ohhhh?” Joe said, in his annoying way. “You the boss now, Girl?”

  Grabbed buckets off the shelf, cling clang rattle and muttering muttering beneath my breath. “I’ll Girl you, you asshole. Make me pick in the fuckin’ junk room all by myself. Fuckin’ stinks in here. Ah, god! There’s nothing in here but stinkin’ #2s and green mold! Why do I have to bother with pickin’ them for fuck’s sake. They should just steam this sorry mess and be done with it. But, no. Make the boss’s daughter pick the stinkin’ room by herself.” So busy filling my ears with bitter, I didn’t hear what Can was saying. He might have been saying something else, but all I ever heard was Joe calling me girl.

  I didn’t enjoy working at the mushroom farm. I simply didn’t enjoy working. All the pickers talking Vietnamese and laughing, I was sure, at my slow picking. Everyone’d be done three of their rows and I would still be on my first. Whoever finished their own rows would ha
ve to loop back and pick toward me, so I wouldn’t be left behind when everyone went to the next room. Sometimes, if the next room had to be picked before the gills opened and turned them into #2s, I’d be left on my own. No sound except the plipping of water into puddles on the floor, then the sudden intermittent explosion of the furnace starting up, so loud in the mushroom hush of darkness, I’d squeak out loud for fear. I would push the mushrooms down, through the soil, and cover them with peat moss so they were completely buried. Buried hundreds and thousands of mushrooms so that I could leave my silent tomb. If there were simply too many to bury, I would go and sit in the outhouse for hours on end, watching spiders drug flies and then suck out their innards.

  It was difficult growing up in Nanton, daughter of a father who grew mushrooms, daughter of a mother who became an other, granddaughter of a grandmother who never shut up until she left the house forever. It’s difficult growing up, moving closer then farther away from people who tell you they love you. I’m not bitter. I’m just saying, it’s difficult growing up. People say this and that.

  “You’re lucky to be a kid growing up in a time like this. When I was younger, only very rich people could eat bananas.”

  Sure there are plenty of bananas to be had now, but I don’t even like them. And when you start thinking about who picks them and who pockets the money, you’re lucky if a lump will even get past your lips. You have your basic Yankee Doodle Tom Sawyer role model, but let’s face it: most childhoods begin and end in Cinderella’s ash heap. People say, “Oh, I would just love to be a child again.” But I would never go back to that fairy tale.