“Six blocks away. Oh. My family,” she replied. “Japan.” When she moved back, would she say she was from America?
“Like Yoko Ono?”
Over the summer, Cynthia Lennon had sued John for divorce. At the time, Yuki’s father had frowned, and asked, “Why is Ono-san doing this? She is from a good family. One of the best.” The kids at school had briefly given Yuki more attention, as if she might be hiding something seductive under the pearlescent buttons of her blouse.
Again, Yuki raised her fingers to the tiny cross. She’d grown up giving food to her dead and believing in the souls of rocks. What bemused her was this God’s all-powerfulness. Life seemed to her like so many signatures scribbled on a bathroom wall, not one vast mural.
“This will save you?” she asked.
“That’s what my ma says.”
He reached for the counter and took another long slug of beer. Yuki was pretty sure that it was from the bottle that was supposed to be hers.
He wrapped his hand around her braid. She could feel his fist against the back of her head. His lips were soft, and her mouth sank into them. The sinking was disconcerting, like having misjudged the depth of a puddle. The whole kiss she wondered: is this how it should be, or this, or this? And after it ended, she still didn’t have the answer.
“Now I’ve got two blessings,” he said, winked, and tapped her nose and the silver at her neck.
His friends whooped and raised their bottles. Cigarettes swung and ash danced.
“Ignore them,” he said. Yuki wished she remembered his name.
“Careful with my girl,” Odile said. “She’s delicate.”
Yuki put her hands to her face like a kid playing peekaboo. Her young man said, “They’re idiots. How about you and me, we head over to the park, share a cigarette, look at the moon?”
Odile took her hand. The palm was soft and Yuki clutched it.
“And leave me here?” asked Odile. “With these lunks?”
Her lunks pretended to be insulted.
“Fine then,” Sgt. Pepper said. “We’ll all go moon-gazing.”
They clinked their beers and swallowed them down. Whichever one had been Yuki’s had slipped into someone else’s hands.
While they’d been in the bar the sun had set, though gold still rimmed the sky. The moon was a silver freckle. He took her hand, and she let him. His grip was hot and sticky.
It was eight o’clock. Yuki’s father would just have got home. Her mother would be cooking dinner and listening to Chiemi Eri records. Chiemi supposedly looked like Yuki’s mother the spring they got married. Yuki couldn’t imagine her father as a suitor, or as the man who in post-war gloom had gone to the market every Sunday to buy peaches for his pregnant wife. The man who rotated them each morning, so each inch would get an equal share of light.
The kisser tugged Yuki back. In front of them, the shimmering puff of Odile’s head swung from escort to escort.
“Why would you want to enlist?” Yuki asked. Her family had built a life on forgetting the war. Her father said the only good thing America did for Japan was forbid them to have an army. Who needed tanks when you could own a midsize sedan with a radio?
“Pay’s good,” he said. “My da worked on the docks, but that isn’t there any more, is it? I’m going to see the world. All of it.” He put an arm around her. “Maybe I’ll say hello to Japan for you. Get me a kimono.”
He said it, key-MOW-no. She laughed, imagining his hairy arms sticking out from silken sleeves. Giggling, her body rocked forward, and she felt the cool crucifix shift.
“You better take this back,” she said. “It’s your mom’s blessing, right?”
Again his arms were around her neck, the fingers quick and confident. The others moved ahead. He struggled with the catch. His pupils were as wide as dimes. Then he was putting it back around his own throat.
“We’d better catch up,” she said. Odile and the Brooklyn Boys were already walking into the park.
“If we have to.”
They sat on a bench a way off from the rest. He continued to cloak her hand in his.
“When I was a kid, I’d go down to Red Hook and make hitchhiking thumbs at the freighters.” He crooked a thumb at her, as if she were a ship, able to take him away. “What does everyone want to come to New York for? It’s not so great. Just diners and dirt.”
Yuki tried to look exotic, but she wasn’t sure what that entailed. The three boys stood around Odile and in the night air, they seemed to be men, their shoulders broadening. Odile sat on the edge of the fountain, and in the moonlight her face was pale and rabbity. There was a story Yuki’s mother told of the rabbit who fed himself to Buddha. As a reward Buddha sent him to live on the moon. Yuki always thought the moon looked lonely.
“What’re you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
The boy’s arm pulled her so close that the buttons on his jacket bit into her side. His hand skimmed her right knee. The last time she remembered her leg being touched was her first day of American school. She had worn long, ribbed, white socks. Her mother had stopped before turning the corner and set each cotton ridge ruler-straight, but by the time Yuki came home, she was all diagonals.
The pallid park lights lengthened his face and puddles of shadow collected under his browbones—it was a face like an alleyway. What was charming in the bright light of six thirty now seemed ominous. Yuki edged her fingers toward her left knee, trying to feel what he was feeling. The knee felt as it always did, cold, smooth and bony.
Odile held three cigarettes, one in each finger gap. She hand-fed her suitors, gently inserting the rolls into male mouths. They were laughing. In other corners of the park, other strangers were laughing. The noise sounded jangled and foreign.
His hand moved up her leg. The thin muslin provided little defense. Her stiff school skirt would have protested.
“Where would you go,” he asked, “if you could go anywhere in the whole world?”
Home, she thought, to the tablecloth her mother had cut from green gingham. Home where her mother would be trying to make cheeseless pizza. At home, she would stretch her lips to replay the kiss in slow motion. In private, she might begin to understand it.
“Maybe Europe,” she said. She thought of the postcard pinned above her desk. The houses with their shattered windows and joyful laundry. The artist was Austrian, her teacher had said.
“Asia and Africa are the New Worlds. America is the New Old World,” he said. “Why would you want to go to the Old Old World? It’s dead.”
“I guess.”
One hand was wedged right between the tops of her thighs, and the other was doing something to the side of her dress—lifting it? Despite the talk of travel, she felt as if a gigantic gob of chewing gum had stuck her to her seat.
The boy seemed to decide something. The hand lifted from her legs. He put a palm on each of her shoulders, pulling her close. He bent and touched his forehead to hers. She inhaled. Gushing New York summer stink obliterated any individual smell he might have had. His two eyes melted into a single blur; she felt his fingers on her shoulder blades. She concentrated on each pad, one after the other, locating where they pressed into her. His mouth and her mouth hovered at an inch distance. His breath was warm, or was it hers, rebounding against his teeth?
She couldn’t see Odile any more. Yuki strained to know which laughter was her friend’s.
“Slow down,” she said. She was talking as much to Fate as to the man. Her life had been a solitary amble. Tonight, it was sprinting, tripping over its own feet.
“Hey. Relax. Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” He touched her cheek.
He leaned forward. Yuki tilted back. He pressed further. She leaned back until her shoulders jammed against the slats of the bench. The moon disappeared behind the shadow of his face.
In her father’s Tanizaki, Naomi—fifteen, a whole year younger than Yuki—was initiated into slick pleasures by her older lover. Naomi was limber and hun
gry. Yuki had been attracted to something in the rouge-red characters on the cover. The complicated strokes of: , love. The way the radical , claw, stabbed at , heart. Did real Japanese people notice this linguistic quirk, or was it just because she was half foreign and a slow reader? She’d kept reading because she was amazed her father owned such a scandalous book.
Of course, the novel was a political allegory and not a guide for girls, but Naomi had cradled mature male lust in her juvenile white fingers and Yuki couldn’t slow a single boy. Pathetic. How had she retreated into horizontality? He had a good jawline. He had freckles. These were good things. He kissed her again, and the incisors scraped along her lip. The smirking face on the Happy Hour sign came back to her. Yuki thought, I am not here. Her lashes struggled like window wipers scratching ice. She was staring at the bar’s grubby window. She was in Odile’s room hooking the silver strap of a sandal over her heel. She was with her mother listening to Chiemi. She was on the fire escape watching the whole world change color. She was not pressed against a bench, a great male weight on top of her. She was not lying on her back, her dress now pushed all the way up. Jesus’s silver toes were not grinding into her collarbone. Hands were not moving up along her thighs, to the white flap of her underwear.
“Odile,” she said. The word came out like a timid “oh-dear.”
A finger hooked up under her underwear’s elastic. It felt blunt and male. Trigger finger, she thought. Yuki’s mind flashed to her father’s newspaper, to the photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong boy: a slight wind had lifted the soft brush of his black hair and his shirt was loose and open at the neck. Inches from his temple, the gun had done its work. Black blood and gray print pages. More fingers probed.
The boot flashed just above Yuki’s eyes. The head was pushed away, and above her was the blackening sky. The weight lifted. Something wet, spit or blood, splattered her cheek. Yuki slid from the bench to the pathway, smacking her knee.
“Up,” Odile said. “Now.”
Yuki grasped Odile’s hand. The boy was standing holding his nose. Her arm was pulled taut. Odile was tugging Yuki to her feet. Odile was running. The silver sandals clapped against Yuki’s heels. She slipped out of them entirely. Her bare feet smacked the sidewalk. Slap, slap, the sound of applause or the sound of a beating. They turned pink under the streetlight. Two red dancing shoes. The liquid fear pooled in her lungs began to drain. As Odile’s hair rippled in a bright pelt, Yuki’s braid untangled and spread out into a black cape. In another life, they could have been superheroes soaring through the night. But it was this life. Sweat stuck behind her ears. The sunglasses slipped to the ground. Glass slashed her foot.
Back in Odile’s room, Yuki tweezed out a large triangle of glass. Her blood had striped the lens with a wet sunset red. On the bed, Odile counted out the cash—it was maybe thirty dollars in total. One of the notes was carefully Scotch-taped, the transparent plastic smoothed down on both sides of the bill. Yuki wondered which boy had done this, or if the wound had been passed on transaction after transaction. Odile split the bills into two neat piles.
“Your share,” she said.
Yuki took the notes and wondered what in all of New York was worth buying. Odile stuffed hers into the pocket of a sun-faded dress that hung pinched in the window.
“Hidden in plain sight,” she said and winked a heavy wink like someone from the old movies.
“Do they often . . .” Yuki asked.
“I don’t normally leave the bar with them.”
“But you have?”
“There was a friend, at my old school, we used to go out together. We were always okay.”
Somehow it was Yuki’s fault. Amidst the swathes of color, Yuki located the husks of her old clothes. She felt like a bug crawling back into its sheddings.
“You can keep the dress if you want.”
“My parents would want to know where I got it.”
She changed fast. This is what came of being noticed: this putrid bile in her gut.
“He hadn’t actually done anything?” Odile asked, “Right? As soon as I saw him on top of you, I came. It was just a minute.”
The leather carapaces of Yuki’s buckled shoes lay in the corner of the room. She pulled them on.
“I guess not.” Things that took a minute: brushing her teeth, toasted barley tea dissipating into a pot, catching a fly in a glass tumbler, losing hope. Two days ago, she’d been offended that a flasher didn’t want to wave his squiggle of a dick at her. Now, look at her running. The boy’s fingers had only reached toward the dry, purple part of herself. The nails had only scratched the ends of her thighs. They could just have easily been the twigs from the shrubs she’d clambered through in Central Park as a child.
“Good. Don’t forget your money.” Odile put it in her hands, looping Yuki’s thumb over Alexander Hamilton’s injured face.
Walking home, Yuki tried not to pressure the injured foot. Each step stung, and her feet made a husky shuffle. The Village was sequinned with happy couples and laugher wove into the air. She removed the money from her pocket and held it up to the breeze. A car rushed past as her fingers loosened. The bills scattered like the first leaves of that fall. They curled and tumbled away from her. There was nothing she wanted to buy.
Yuki shoved her shoes onto their shelf. The warmth pricked. She looked at the clock: 9:30 p.m. It felt later, darker.
“Yuki-chan, it’s late. Where were you?” Yuki’s mother was in the kitchen washing dishes, her back to the door. Soap bubbles popped in the quiet air of the apartment.
“A friend’s house.”
She dried her hands with a dish towel, turned, dropped the towel into the full sink, and rushed toward her daughter. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Your hair,” said her mother.
Yuki reached up and felt the strands. Sweat from running, sweat from heat, and sweat from fear soaked them.
“What happened? Are you all right?” her father asked. Black flowers of ink blossomed on his lower lip where he had sucked his pen.
“I fell.” Yuki cried, and she couldn’t have said if the tears were for the bloody shards of orange glass, the boy’s hands, her braid undone, or the neat blue-striped bowl of rice that her mother had left out. Each grain seemed plump with well-being. She added, “And nobody helped me up.”
Her father pulled her into a hug that smelled of pink erasers and wool. His belly and arms were warm, and she felt the numbness in her temples melt. They were the same height. His face warmed her neck. For work, her father Brylcreemed his hair straight and flat. But tonight it was post-shower soft.
“We’ll be home soon,” he said. “Finally home.”
“Oh Daddy,” she said. Yuki pictured herself and Sgt. Pepper in their separate planes aloft the Pacific. It didn’t feel like an escape.
She jammed her hands into the stiff pockets of her skirt. There was something sharp and hard. Glass. When had she put it there? In her room, she removed the orange triangle. The blood had flaked off in her pocket. Yuki walked to her window, pulling it wide open. She was about to drop the worthless glass into the dark, but each edge glowed in the streetlight. Below, young men and women yawped their drunken pleasure. Yuki decided to keep her broken bit of joy. Lifting the glass to her eye, she painted the moon gold.
Jay
1.
New York, June 2016
My wife slept. Her face was swollen, the edges of her lips purplish. She hadn’t wanted a natural birth. Until her body gave up its haul, they’d refused to give her “all the fucking drugs.” Her bleached-brown hair stood up in clammy spikes.
I looked at the clipboard. Its blistered plastic was as hideous as everything else in the ward. How many new fathers had held it in their sweaty fingers? Did the clipboard do the hospital rounds, clipping death, then life, then the everyday malice of fees? The form was designed to be read by machine: one square per letter, block capitals, like the SAT. Under
Parent 1, I wrote her name: MIRANDA LIANG. My hand hurt. On the palm were eyelash-fine cuts, where my wife’s nails had dug in during the birth. I texted Dad to tell him his granddaughter was healthy. She wasn’t pretty: patchy hair scrawled across a ruddy forehead. But she had all the expected limbs.
I returned to the paperwork. Parent 2. Yes, I was Parent 2. Miranda Liang was Parent 1. Mimi had been the sort of pregnant lady who wore striped shirts that enhanced the topography of her bump. Her friends had said she glowed. The pen slipped from my hand and skittered under my wife’s cot. I gave chase on hands and knees. The stench of orange Glade seared my nose.
Prone, under the bed in our overpriced private room, I paused. I pulled my feet up under me. For a moment, I lay, breathing. The shadows were a relief from the antiseptic hospital lights. Through the gap between bed frame and floor, I could see my bag hanging on the door. It was packed with toothbrush, change of shirt, and all the rest. It was prepared for flight.
If I left now, I wouldn’t have to write my name on the form. I don’t know why my hand was afraid. I’d seen my own birth certificate enough times. My mother’s name, Yukiko Eaves, in typewriter script, and her signature. She made a square, stacking one name atop the other. The inscription didn’t stop her giving up motherhood. Mimi’s weight bowed the mattress. I reached up and touched the curve of my wife.
Then came the tap of the nurse’s feet and the swing of the door. I wormed out from under the bed, stood, and brushed myself off.
“I, uh, dropped the pen.” I held it out as evidence and made a show of washing my hands in the small basin.
The nurse was holding my daughter. She’d just had her first bath and Eliot was wet as a slug. The nurse offered her up to me. “You look like Daddy,” the nurse said. The baby didn’t look like me, or my wife, or anyone I knew. It looked like a bag of veins. In my arms, I held this beating, bloated heart. “She has your eyes.” I had my mother’s. Was it also genetic, the twitching I felt in my hands, and the great desire to just let go?
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