It was pointless to ask for what she wouldn’t receive, but Yuki asked anyway: “I want to stay. Here, I mean, in America. I have nobody in Japan.” Through the cutaway in the wall, Yuki saw her mother go still. Dishwater stopped plashing and there was only the sound of bubbles expiring. “No, I mean. I know, I’d have family, but I’m not from there. I wouldn’t belong.” It had taken her so many years to begin to belong in New York. “You know what that feels like, right? Yes? To be in a place you really don’t belong.” Neither her father’s rages at Americans nor her mother’s obsessive polishing of the altar had ever been described explicitly as homesickness.
Her father folded the paper across his lap. “I see. And where would you live?”
“Odile’s mom said I could live with them.”
He frowned. Her father hadn’t liked Odile when he came to the Christmas concert. The two girls had stood at the back and mouthed words to hymns neither had bothered memorizing. He didn’t trust her pale eyes, the shade of lettuces fresh out of the bag. “When American girls look soft it means they are hard. She is not the sort of friend I hoped you would make.” She hadn’t asked him what he knew of hard American girls.
But now, he tucked Yuki’s hair behind her ear, as he’d done when she was a kid. “My colleagues advised me that your chances of university placement would be poor in Japan. It is not like when I was young. You write like a child. But you are not old enough to live alone.”
She switched into Japanese, and her voice pitched up a notch. “I won’t be alone. I’ll be staying with Odile’s mom.” Yuki heard herself wheedling.
She hadn’t prepared for negotiation, but he seemed open. If she stayed here, she might go to a good school and come back to Tokyo with a prestigious American degree. Her father listened, even nodding along.
“You are sure this is what you want?” He ate the silver band of salmon skin, a luxury he always left for last. “I will need to speak to this Ms. Graychild.”
Her parents invited Odile and Lillian out to dinner. Yuki’s parents never invited anyone into their apartment. It was their space, not for the eyes of Americans. Her father made a booking at the local French restaurant. He hated French food, but Yuki knew the bill would qualify the restaurant as high-class, which was what mattered. No one would look down on the Oyamas.
The Graychilds were late. They rushed in, and Yuki’s father stood to shake their hands. Odile had trapped her cream-puff hair in a bun, and her tweed skirt was almost staid. She greeted Yuki’s father with a professional, “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Mr. Oyama!” Lillian kissed him on the cheek. The cheek muscle twitched. Yuki wrung her napkin in frustration. This dinner was pointless.
“Pleased to meet you,” her father said.
It was early in the night, the restaurant was half empty and their orders were fulfilled quickly. Odile chopped her salad leaves up into neat squares. Lillian’s foie-gras-stuffed quail crackled as she dug the point of her knife into its back. Around Lillian’s white neck was a string of whiter pearls that Yuki suspected were fake.
“You live alone?” Yuki’s father asked.
“Oh, yes, quite alone.”
Odile had told Yuki there was a boyfriend—a journalist, rolling her eyes as she said it to indicate what a pathetic job that was.
Her father’s steak knife was blunt, and he stopped between each question to saw at the red-hearted meat. Lillian scraped foie gras off the edge of her knife. Despite his perfect manners, Yuki’s father was the one who looked out of place at the table with the white roses and three layers of silverware. Five to a table left one empty seat and Yuki’s mother was opposite Lillian’s scarlet leather briefcase.
“Your husband has passed on?” Yuki’s mother asked, presumably addressing Lillian but facing Lillian’s case.
“Something like that, yes. Passed on. Greener pastures.”
Her father nodded. “It was kind of you to offer.”
“Oh, Yuki is a pleasure.”
Lillian speared a thin leg, sucking down the flesh on the gray bone. She’d ordered the most expensive dish on the menu. Yuki had never seen Lillian eat this much. She waited for her to go into one of her speeches, but Lillian just said, “Of course, I’m a writer, so we may not be able to keep her in the manner to which she has become accustomed.”
Yuki’s father flushed. In Japan, such a matter between social equals was handled without mention of payment, only gifts. These gifts were like payments, but came in prettier envelopes. Yuki thought, it’s over now, but her father didn’t rage at American etiquette. He dabbed his forehead with the thick napkin. Had the indomitable beef broken his spirit? Or maybe, just maybe, he understood that his daughter wasn’t ready to be different all over again in a new country.
“We would support her, of course.” And then in an even quieter voice, “And the burden she’d put on your household.” Yuki tried to meet his eyes, but he just looked down at the steak.
On the way home, he spoke with admiration of Lillian. “She is a writer. She can help you with your college essays. Your mathematics are not good, but perhaps you will be okay.”
But as they set their shoes in the neat familial row, Yuki’s mother—normally so accepting of Americans—said, “Did you see, when the girl dropped her napkin, she waited for the waiter to pick it up.”
“It’s the American way, lazy. I thought you knew that by now,” Yuki’s father replied. “But Yuki is a big girl. She won’t forget how to be Japanese.”
“I won’t, I promise.”
“You are sure?” her mom asked, voice thick with worry. The hand touching Yuki’s chin seemed to be asking something else. “You won’t forget?”
“Of course not.”
“Stay here.” Her father walked to his study. Her mom lowered her voice and said, “You can come home if you are lonely. It is okay. I did not go to university anywhere.”
Yuki did not know how to say that she was lonely right then standing next to her mother, that she could feel the loneliness biting into her hands. She knew no one else who had to choose between their family and their home. She didn’t want to be her mother following a sad man around the world. But then the sad man was back, checkbook in one hand, fountain pen in the other. He made out two checks; one she was to give to her principal and the other to Odile’s mother. He put each in its own envelope, writing the recipients’ names in the thick ink of his fountain pen. His handwriting was perfectly smooth, the middle “l”s of Lillian swaying together like two trees in the same breeze. She hugged him, tightly. The pen still in his hand dropped two points of ink onto the table, but he didn’t complain. With his free hand, he petted her hair.
She packed quickly. She’d move in with the Graychilds immediately as a trial run, before her parents boarded the plane for Japan. If either party backed out, other arrangements would be made. Lillian accepted the check without commenting on the amount, although Yuki, knowing her father, suspected it was generous.
There was no guest room.
“You’ll share with me,” Odile said.
“Where should I?” Yuki gestured to her suitcase and the cluttered room.
“Under the bed.” Odile flung shoes across the floor, making room for Yuki’s small life.
Yuki took from her purse the photograph, and slipped it between glass and mirror frame. “I won’t need to take it with me, because this is where I am.” It was Yuki’s copy of the photograph they’d taken together as snow slipped down their skulls, a totem of her invitation. In it, Odile’s eyes were shut, while Yuki’s eyes stared outwards. Their black and blond hair laced in the wind.
“Weirdo.” Odile laughed.
From the first rush of their friendship, she’d gone to Odile’s apartment almost every day after school. Yuki knew the toilet needed to be flushed twice, and that it was acceptable to wear one’s shoes inside. Still, there were things to get used to.
Lillian and Odile skipped lunch and breakfast in favor of coffee and
grapefruit so sour the taste seared through the brew. The radiators sighed, and the windows rattled. In places, the paint was rubbed down to its beige undercoat. In others, it held the discarded bristles of a long-ago painter’s brush.
It wasn’t until she’d been living there a week that Yuki met Lou, Lillian’s “lover”. Odile called him “that fucker.” She enunciated the two syllables with such vigour that it sounded like fuck-her.
He just showed up for Friday dinner. Yuki looked up, startled, from her homework; it was a week late and it was an exercise in the mathematics of guilt as much as Pythagoras.
“Lou,” he said. It took her a moment to understand that he was introducing himself. At dinner, he talked about The Paper, where he worked. Yuki was initially excited that he was a journalist, but then he said he was a sports reporter. She always skipped the pages detailing the endless cycle of men and their muscles. Apparently the game, whatever game it was, had gone long. Yuki didn’t know if that was good or bad. She watched his big hands; she could see each muscle connect to the next, as he stabbed at the dry chicken meat. Lillian was almost silent as he talked, her eyes big and soft as Yuki had never seen them. After dinner, he pulled Lillian onto his lap. He was short and she was tall, so her chin rested on the top of his red hair.
“We’re going to my room,” said Odile, as Yuki fumbled to gather up the plates.
Behind the thin and draught-leaky bedroom door, Odile didn’t lower her voice. “Urg. He’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting?” He wasn’t handsome—short, red-headed, arms latticed with green veins—but disgusting was an oozing sort of word.
“He’s just so weaselly.” Yuki had never seen a weasel. He’d made her think of a cat. As they ate, he had swiveled his eyes over the table without twitching his chin, in a way that was strange and feline, like he was watching a mouse make its oblivious way across the floor. Strange to think of a grown man as catlike. Wasn’t that supposed to be girls, who were feline? But then she’d seen the raw-boned toms leap from trashcans, and heard the hard clatter of their claws on pavement.
“And like, why is he dating my mother? She’s ten years older than him.” Which Yuki guessed put him in his mid-thirties. But they made sense to Yuki, the writer quite literally scraped at the heels and the journalist with the clawed smile.
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know.”
Odile frowned. Yuki was being boring.
“Well look, it’s better than my parents. It was so boring . . . This is, this is . . .” The right word was stuck between her teeth. “Artistic.”
“Yeah right.” But Odile seemed pacified.
“It suits you.”
Lou stayed the night and on Saturday morning he lay on his stomach, feet in the air, like a boy at his coloring books. In front of him were the typewritten pages of Lillian’s tsars and princesses. She specialized in Russians. He was attacking them with three different shades of pencil. Lillian watched, sitting on the kitchen table, her heels dangling above the floor. She poured a capful of whiskey into her coffee.
“Irish wake-up, girls?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” said Yuki.
Lou hummed along to the record player. Orange hairs wrapped his arms, fingers and upper lip, like a fungus slowly eating a dying tree. Pencil shavings sprinkled the dark boards.
Lou said, “ ‘Alexi lifted Ola onto his horse.’ Bit bland?”
“Hoisted?” asked Lillian.
Lou grimaced. Lillian put down her Irish coffee and closed her eyes. She stretched out her arms and made two circles with her thumbs and forefingers, the most unlikely Buddha. Odile, sitting on the arm of the couch, rolled her eyes.
“ ‘Alexi hoisted her, and her breath fluttered, light as a sparrow’s wings.’ ”
Yuki imagined the princess choking on feathers.
“Dove’s rather than sparrow’s,” Lou suggested.
As the couple chucked phrases back and forth, Yuki curled on the couch. The dark wooden frame and stiff velvet cushioning made it look like a battered refugee from one of Lillian’s novels. She thumbed a brochure for the Rhode Island School of Design that Miss Shahn had ordered specially. The teacher had held her back at the end of class and said, “I’ve never been as happy as I was there.” Yuki stared at the tuition page and knew it was impossible. Her father wouldn’t pay for art school. He hoped against all evidence that she’d go to Radcliffe, as his younger cousin had done. There she’d meet and marry a Harvard doctor, or even become a doctor herself. Many girls from good families became doctors these days.
No amount of hunger could pay these fees.
Slam—a noise like a fly being smashed. Before Yuki could look up, another thwack. Lillian yelped, and there was the heavy noise of a body falling. Leather hissed against wood. By the time Yuki’s eyes had focused, Lillian was sitting on the floor, touching her jaw. Yuki jumped up, full of the senseless adrenalin of someone running toward a fire. The door snapped shut, and Lou was gone. Odile sighed and left the room.
Lillian walked to the long mirror and began rearranging her hair. Her high heels had skidded to opposite sides of the room. Yuki picked them up. They were light; she’d expected a greater heft.
“Are you . . .” Yuki offered up the shoes, but Lillian’s imperious posture didn’t welcome her concern.
“Hold this, dear.” Lillian waved the hairbrush. Yuki laid the shoes at Lillian’s feet and clenched her fist around the handle. Anything could be a weapon in this new, domestic war zone, but Yuki seemed to be the only one to have noticed. On the table, the flowers were still in their vase. The tumblers were unbroken; bubbles clung motionless to the sides of the glass. Lillian slipped into her shoes, took the brush from Yuki, and went back to brushing her hair. Her hands had blushed a deep pink.
The apartment was a nation with its unique barbarisms. Yuki told herself that Odile would be just as lost if the situation were reversed, but it was a lie. In Rome do as the Romans, but everywhere else the Romans had made damn sure the locals did as the Romans. Odile contorted the world to her will.
Yuki retreated to Odile’s room.
“Why does he do it?” Lou was short and weak-wristed. He didn’t look like someone with a talent for violence.
“Hit her?” Odile replied. “Don’t you want to?” Odile was organizing her record albums by color.
“Not really.”
“You better hurry, if you don’t want to be late for your dearest daddy.” Odile examined a psychedelic square, seeming unsure whether to slot it in with the greens or pinks. Yuki felt dismissed.
At lunch with her parents, she didn’t mention the fight. She laid the food out for the ancestors, without stealing a nibble. All Sunday had the melancholy of performance, as if they were imitating their past selves.
In early March, Lillian finished her book—she completed one every six months. Lillian removed her shoes and danced. Lou joined her in her waltz. Behind them icicles hanging on the windows glowed like stalactites of solid light. Lou ran out to the pizza place and came back with a wheel of margherita. Odile ate the fastest of them all. The dough buckled as she pushed it into her mouth, and the palms of her hands turned orange with grease. They all knew that she’d vomit in the bathroom. Yuki tried this once, but although her body rocked and rolled, the food stayed down. She coughed up saliva, and scraped her throat raw until red swirled through the spit.
Yet, in that moment, they were all happy, even Yuki. Oil dappled their chins. Yuki stretched the long strands of cheese between her fingers and realized that with the Graychilds, she could fail. She could sleep all morning and not attend class. No one would care any more than they scolded the radiators for coughing, or the fridge light for going out. She could paint, and no one would tell her to practice math or kanji. They wouldn’t judge her work because they wouldn’t look at it. If she fell and fell and never hit the ground, was there really anything to distinguish it from flight?
March shuttled past and her parents’ departure date came. She wai
ted with them for the airport car on the steps of their apartment—she’d been gone for a month and a half, and already it had stopped feeling like her apartment. Soon, it really wouldn’t be. She sat on the tile step and wondered when she’d sit there again. When had she last sat there? Her father wrote a list of numbers to call in an emergency and gave her twelve envelopes of cash, each with the month written in his neat script.
“Pocket money,” he said. “In case you need anything.”
Her mother asked her to write and handed her a bag.
“What’s this?” Yuki asked.
“Open it and see,” her mother replied.
It was food, boxes and boxes of food in her mother’s precious Tupperware. It would have taken all night to cook so much.
Two white hairs wound through her mother’s black bob. When had they grown? Yuki’s father had dressed up for the flight. He kissed her on the forehead. Cologne masked his usual scent.
Then, they were gone.
She was left holding a few pieces of paper and a bag of food. The white plastic handles strained from the quantity of boxes, and she had to lace her arms under it like a baby to support it. The weight fell against her chest and throat, though she knew that was not why they hurt so much. Her mother had packed a year of lunches into this one bag. When had she done it, alone in the kitchen? Her mother would always cook alone now. If her mother had had a choice, would she have stayed? Too late to ask now.
Yuki began to walk toward Odile’s apartment; although she knew she could not bring the food, she still clutched the bag. At the last block, she upended the bag, into a sidewalk trashcan. She told herself that it wouldn’t make a difference if it decomposed in her gut or in the trash.
Yuki fitted her key to Odile’s lock, but then pulled it out, darting back to the can to take a last look at the Tupperware rubble. Through the transparent plastic, she saw a brown sliver of eel. It was a taste she barely remembered, from a long-ago trip. Her father never ordered eel in the one Japanese restaurant he deemed authentic. He said it couldn’t compare to Kanda eel. The box lay beside banana skins and worse. A fly landed on the plastic. Yuki reached down and pried off the lid. The meat was sweet, rubbery, but still so good. She held the last bite in her mouth. She’d traded this taste for a new life and a new friend. Yuki promised herself she’d make something beautiful here and her mother would see that it had been worth it.
Harmless Like You Page 5