Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  After Edison had slid every scrape of mush into Jay’s tiny mouth, he laid him down in his playpen. “Now it’s time to feed you up.” He wrapped his arms around her, a great fleshy scarf, too hot for the weather. “I’ll call the sushi place.” The local sushi place was staffed entirely by Koreans. “Two California rolls and one Philadelphia please,” Edison said into the phone. “Yes, the usual address.” None of the American-named sushi had raw fish, and so it couldn’t contaminate the baby. Her father used to call it inside-out sushi, the white rice put on the outside to please the white customers.

  Edison flexed his wrists. “So, I’m going to have to go into the office tomorrow. Is that okay?”

  Tomorrow was Saturday. “Of course.” His gaze was careful, as if she were a child learning to ride a bike. And he, the father, had let go but was ready to rush forward at any minute with Band-Aids.

  “Go take a bath, relax, I can answer the door for the sushi,” she said.

  After he left, she drifted down into the basement. The bike looked injured lying on its side, but she righted it. She’d never finished the bicycle painting. In the basement, it was frigid all year. She wheeled the bike around in a wide circle, listening to the squeal of rusted spokes. Water must be getting in through the walls.

  Yuki listened for Edison or Jay. She could hear nothing but her own bare feet, the sigh of rubber and the crying steel bike.

  Whatever Edison said, she knew she’d never go to art school. It was too late. All the students would be babies. They’d still be slapping away anxious parents.

  They used to go into the city on the weekends, visiting galleries, museums, and the rest, but no curator walked up holding an embossed envelope reading: Welcome to the Art World. Leaving the city always ached. She knew that all artists went home, had toasters full of crumbs and beds that needed making. But whenever she imagined them it was in the bright gap between inspiration and execution, not in a suburb-bound car. It was easier to stay home—artless.

  This windowless cellar and the circling bike were her fate. Around she went again. The architectural models of Edison’s early twenties were arranged in dusty piles. In the tomb of the dream city, she pushed the bike around and around.

  Her father was dead. Together, her mother and aunt were managing an American-style café in one of Tokyo’s suburbs. Her mother sent green-tinted photos of the scrubbed pine tables, checkered cloths and tubs of geraniums. A younger cousin did the grunt work. Her mother’s health had stabilized, but she’d never meet her grandson. Yuki wouldn’t travel to Tokyo any more than she would go to art school. She never wanted her mother to see her like this. Her mother had braided her hair every day, and when she was done ran a hand down each side of Yuki’s scalp in a final blessing. Now Yuki’s hair hung thick and lank, falling over her face, as if no one had ever even brushed it. Her mother did not need to see the way each year of love had been wasted and left in a trashcan somewhere in the East Village.

  “Yuki.” It was Edison. He sat on the bottom step. Spider webs sewed the wall to the floor.

  She circled around again.

  “You’ll ruin your pants,” she said.

  He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. In the basement, no light reflected from his dark eyes.

  “Just seeing if it’s rusted.” She tried for a cheerful, sing-song tone.

  “I’m short-sighted, not blind. You aren’t okay.” He touched the glasses resting in his tangled hair, and smiled like a presenter on kids’ TV. What made him think she was a nice child to be smiled at?

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Look,” he said, “you need help.”

  “With what?”

  “We could hire a nanny, someone to take the load off. Then you’d have time to talk to someone.”

  “Who would I talk to?” Not to him, surely. She had nothing to say to him, just as she had nothing to write to her mother. With Lou at least they were both failures. He was trapped reporting on sweaty jockstraps, never able to be a culture writer, and she was no sort of artist at all. At least, the communion of pain united them. A hand smashing against a cheek was at least a shared endeavor.

  “A professional. You could see someone. We can afford it. You’re not eating, I can feel your hipbones when we, when I . . .”

  “When we fuck?”

  “Yes.”

  If she could have a crisp bagel or summer eel, she’d be hungry again. But the bagels in Westport were bland and fluffy. There was certainly no eel. In New York she hadn’t felt thin so much as light. So light. As if her whole life might blow away. But look how free she’d been and never known it.

  “And someone could manage my mood, the way cleaning the bathtub and making dinner are managed. Why didn’t you just marry a committee?”

  It came to her like the unpicking of a difficult knot. The way one loop seems much the same as another, but pull the crucial one and the whole thing comes loose. It wouldn’t even be so bad to leave. Many parents abandon their children in parks, at Disneyland, by the side of the road. Foster families feed the children McDonald’s and touch them inappropriately. But Edison would never leave Jay. Her son would be safe with his father.

  “Yuki—”

  “And don’t we have a mortgage to pay?” The answer didn’t matter to her, but she had to keep her epiphany secret. She was afraid he would see the glint of it in her face.

  Yuki wouldn’t go to art school, but she would find somewhere quiet. She could return to Vienna or its cheaper cousin, Berlin. She would eat discounted potatoes. She would never paint a bicycle again, but she could draw those tussocky, German jowls. Vienna for her was sketched in Egon’s thin lines and desperate stabs of gouache. It would be a place that understood anger and loss in the way that the people of Westport, Connecticut understood tasteful napkin arrangements.

  But the whip of pain came again and she asked, “Where’s Jay?”

  “I put him to bed.” Yes, her son was safe with this safe man. If only she dared.

  1983, Turpentine

  Made from the resin of living trees. Turpentine thins oils, destroys watercolors and poisons people.

  There was something rancid in the house. Rot. There shouldn’t have been any food in Jay’s nursery. Yes, the room was clean. The sheets in the cot were white and freshly laundered by the girl who came once a week. The blue polka dots sponged onto the nursery walls, Yuki’s final painting, were unlikely to decay.

  “Bunny, can you smell that?”

  Jay did not look up from slurping Monkey’s tail. Worms of wool clung to his spit-sticky chin. Yuki had made the toy in a fit of hopeful motherhood. Jay, as if sensing the scarcity of this energy, had fixated on this new friend. Monkey came with them to the store to buy microwaveable meals, to the yard, to the bathroom. If Jay couldn’t see Monkey, he wept viciously, beating his tiny fists against her. Monkey was always coming unraveled, threatening to disappear. Once she took Monkey away for repairs, and Jay bit her, leaving a red tooth-mark crown on her palm.

  The stench was too putrid to be coming from any other room. Suspiciously, Yuki looked down at Monkey. His button eyes, possible choking hazards, glittered maliciously.

  “Jayjay. Can I dance with Mr. Monkey?”

  Jay squeezed his eyes shut. The lashes were so thick they could have been paintbrushes stuck to his face. “Mine.” He clutched Monkey tighter.

  “Please, Jayjay.” Jay glowered up from under curly, black hair. It hung past his ears. She should deal with that. People complimented her adorable girl. Yuki took Monkey’s stubby paw, and Jay released him begrudgingly. Yuki suspected Jay preferred the simian to either of his parents. She and Monkey twirled. Round and round went Monkey in a whirl of red. She sang: Ring-a-round the rosie, A pocket full of posies, Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down. On down, she pulled Mr. Monkey in for a lip-smacking kiss. She sniffed; yarn tickled her nose. It wasn’t him. Thank God, it wasn’t the ape. Monkey smelled of spit and peanut butter, but not rot.

  The
reek that hovered in the room had sweet overtones, with an undercurrent of mold, tubers, sour milk. It couldn’t be her son? She hefted him into her lap. He was healthy, despite that thin first year. He’d sit at the kitchen counter, denuding bananas. He smelled of fresh fruit. She kept him on her lap, running her hands through his long hair. His Tuesday playgroup had had an outbreak of lice. So far, Jay showed no signs of itching, but she ran her hands through his hair, lifting strand after strand to the light.

  On Tuesdays, while Jay played, she went to a woman who was both a licensed psychologist and a crystal practitioner. Yuki wondered if she should tell the crystal practitioner about the smell. But how would the woman know if it was insanity or bad plumbing unless she came to the house?

  The smell turned Yuki’s stomach.

  “Jayjay, I think Mr. Monkey wants to go to the diner? What do you think?”

  She’d started bringing Jay to the diner the last winter. Drafts flocked through Edison’s beautiful, old house. In the early dark, the diner was as gold as a Hopper, so she braved ice-treacherous roads. The waitress, an older woman who powdered her face, had asked, “You’re babysitting?” Yuki had laughed and corrected her. Jay’s nose had run all winter, and she’d dabbed at it with a napkin. “Mine, snot and all.”

  “You’re so young.” Something in the way the woman’s ballpoint wobbled had told Yuki this was real surprise.

  “Thirty,” she’d said. But she’d supposed she looked young. She couldn’t imagine powdering her face.

  Now it was summer, and the ceiling fans tossed them a breeze as they pushed open the door. They hadn’t come in for a month or so, and since spring the specials had changed. Apple pie to apple fritters. Lately, Yuki had had trouble finding the energy to lift Jay into the plastic seat. Her fingers hurt as she clicked the buckle in place, and her hands wobbled on the warm plastic of the wheel.

  “What can I get you today?” Yuki ordered coffee and a chocolate milk with whipped cream. It was the same waitress, with the same shade of too-pink lipstick. The powder gathered in her crow’s feet. “Right up.” The woman curtly turned her back.

  Had she forgotten Yuki? The diner wasn’t busy. Sitting in the high-backed booth, Yuki touched her cheek. Did she still look young? She looked down at her dress. It was pockmarked by pink flowers. She had put away her yukatas and dressed up in the costume of a housewife. Maybe that was why she hadn’t been recognized—camouflage.

  She tried to read the paper, but Jay wanted to know why Monkey didn’t get a drink.

  “Because Monkeys drink banana water.” Jay looked up at her suspiciously. He had a large, smooth forehead that showed emotion easily. “Chocolate is poisonous for Monkeys, it makes their tummies go ouchie, so make sure you finish up.” It almost wasn’t a lie. Didn’t chocolate poison dogs? Of course, then her son wanted to know everything that made monkeys ouchie.

  “Milk, tea, coffee, thumbtacks, glue, oatmeal, perfume, juice, rice . . .”

  The coffee, when it came, tasted thin. She pressed the side of the mug against her face. She appreciated the warmth against the throb of the air conditioner and the insistent fans.

  Edison had brought her yesterday’s New York Times. For a moment, she just looked at the masthead. She liked the T best, the fat swash of it. The strange medieval posturing of it: weren’t newspapers supposed to be about the new? The perfect paper for the old-new city.

  But she didn’t have much time. Jay would only remain entertained by chocolate milk for so long. She flipped straight to Arts & Culture. She almost didn’t notice the author. Lou’s work for The Paper didn’t make it to Connecticut, and Emily had only ever been stocked in three bookstores, all in the Village. She hadn’t seen Lou’s name in print for a long time. There it was in the New York Times, Arts no less. The column was an inch and a half wide and three inches long and close to the seam of the paper. This printing was weak; the edges of the letters wavered. She ran a finger down the article. The paper was soft as a dollar bill. The words seemed to crawl around, crossing paths on the page: Modern, Berlin, Gallery, Breath-taking, Conceptual, Decade, Artists. Only Lou’s name in all capitals under the title was burned into place. Was he living in Berlin or was it a visit? Did he take his daughter? So he’d made it into Culture at the Times too. And what had she done? She’d moved to Connecticut. Jay had whipped cream in his hair.

  The smell surged up again, gagging her. It had to be in her head. She’d read that olfactory hallucinations were a symptom of seizures. She held her wrist. It wasn’t shaking. A smell cannot follow you. It cannot slink down a road. It cannot watch and wait for your guard to slip.

  In the car home, Jay chewed Monkey’s tail. His lips were spit-shiny. Why did babies always have the glossiest mouths? She ran a tongue over her own dry mouth. The skin stood up in stiff curls.

  “Nap time.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  She lifted him. He was too heavy, but she did it anyway, taking shuffling penguin steps. She thought maybe we forget our childhoods so we won’t remember how awful babies are. The smell pushed its way between them, so strong and so sharp that she almost dropped him. Finally, they reached the bed.

  “No.” But his head rolled straight forward onto his T-shirt. Milk always made him sleepy.

  Next weekend was his birthday. Jay wanted a Monkey suit, well his exact words when asked what he wanted for his birthday were, “Wanna be monkey.” Edison had bought reams of red fleece from the Fabric District. He’d help her pin and cut. It would be nice, like their old days at art class. And when she looked at him, she’d see her friend, not this stranger in his suit and tie. Yuki opened the toy closet and pulled out the ream of red fleece. She pressed her face into the nubbed surface. It smelled good. Cotton and new dye. She wished she never had to lift her face.

  “Smell that?”

  Edison was still unlacing his shoes. They were stiff maple leather that demanded a long, lacquer shoehorn.

  “What?”

  “I think something’s in the pipes. Or maybe it’s the weather.”

  He straightened and sniffed. His nose seemed to have grown since they got married, the tip accreting flesh each year like a stalactite extending downward. His brows pulled together.

  “Darling, when did you last take a bath?”

  “Oh.”

  She lifted the crook of her arm to her face. There it was, the salty, stagnant smell. No wonder the waitress wouldn’t meet her eye. The only person she wasn’t disgusting to was Jay, too young to know better. Why hadn’t Edison told her she was rotting?

  Face still in her elbow, she cried. The tears were quiet, choking ones. She didn’t want Jay to wake. She felt herself rock. Edison took her stinking self into his arms. He led her to the couch, but she didn’t want to sit and infect more of the house.

  “Wait here. I’ll run a bath,” Edison said.

  The Jacuzzi-style bath was large with white pimples where bubbles were supposed to come out. After the first month, the nozzles spat black flakes into the water, and they’d stopped using the jets.

  Edison got in behind her. He scattered bath salts. Gusts of orange and jasmine rose from the warm water. He’d bought the salts as a Happy Monday present months before. She’d nodded and smiled and thought that they would complete her suburban lady disguise. Then, she’d neglected them. The salt jar sulked reproachfully at the bath’s edge. How had she forgotten to bathe? She remembered that long summer when she’d almost lived in Odile’s bathtub. If she closed her eyes, she could still trace the beige ring that stained that enamel tub.

  “You should’ve told me,” Yuki said.

  “I’m sorry.” He hugged her. “I just didn’t want to make you sad. Sadder.”

  “I can’t be the wife you hoped for.” She leaned back against his chest. Foam circled their knees. His arms were almost hairless, but strong.

  “Did I hope for a smart, beautiful, artistic wife? Did I want someone with vision? Because I got he
r.” He started with her hair, running his fingers through it, dragging them along the refuse of her scalp.

  “Down and rinse,” he said. Millais painted Ophelia drowning in the stink of flowers. Yuki held up her hands open-palmed and closed her eyes, the way Ophelia did on canvas.

  The rancid smell was gone. She imagined sinking deeper and deeper into the heat.

  “Up we go.”

  He massaged soapy circles into her back. Round and round.

  “Turn, face me.” The sponge kissed her nipples and her thighs. It was a “natural” sponge, the size of a fist and unevenly cratered. It’d been alive once. His lips kissed her wetly on the mouth and, in the heat of the room, it felt as if their faces were melting into one another.

  “All better, Kiki.”

  Where had Kiki come from? It was worse than when the journalists called her Yoko or even the times Lou shouted “You,” as in, “Hey, You! Grab some beer while you’re out.” But Kiki. Oh, Kiki was stupid. Kiki went to the nail salon once a week. She had an incontinent dog. Kiki was the stupid bitch Edison should have married.

  “I’m serious, what’s wrong with you? Is it just a lack of imagination or what? Any sane guy would’ve gotten a divorce. Would have fucking left. Or would never have married me. Was it a self-esteem thing? You didn’t think you could do any better than Lou’s castoff? That it?”

  He reached for her hands.

  “Don’t touch me.” She stood, unsteady, in the lukewarm water, looking down at him. He had such a weak face. His chin was still as pointed as a girl’s. His eyes belonged on a dying dog—filled with maudlin loyalty. He heaved himself up, water slipping off the new gut. His body and the glass curtain imprisoned her.