by Kyoko Mori
“Your mother must have known about Michiko for a long time,” Keiko goes on. “A woman always knows.”
Every time my mother referred to the future in her journal the winter before her death, she wrote that my father would no doubt remarry. She must have suspected that he had someone specific in mind, but it wasn’t because “a woman always knows.” A generic statement like that reduces my mother’s particular situation to a trite principle. But I know that my aunt does not mean to trivialize my mother’s suffering, so I say nothing.
“Your mother could have handled the situation differently,” Keiko adds. “If I had been in her position, I would have cried and complained or thrown and broken all the dishes in the house and begged my husband not to leave me. I would have won him back by showing him that I couldn’t live without him. But your mother was too proud. She pretended that she didn’t care what he did. She was a perfectionist. She couldn’t admit that he had failed her in this way. She didn’t understand that maybe he had been attracted to Michiko in the first place because Michiko wasn’t as smart as she was. You see, your father could relax in front of Michiko. She treated him as the smartest, greatest person in the world. He could never relax in front of your mother, who outdid him in everything. She didn’t laugh at his stories; she told more amusing stories than he did. Rather than praising his hard work at the office, she tried to match it with her hard work at home. Maybe that’s how she thought she was showing her appreciation, but that’s not what he wanted. He wanted someone to admire him, not compete with him and make him feel inferior. Your mother didn’t do any of this on purpose. But you must remember he was unhappy, too.”
Keiko stops just as the waiter comes toward our table. Though we sit in silence, he must see that we are in the middle of a serious conversation. Instead of stopping to ask if we need anything, he walks by very slowly so that it will be up to us to flag him down. We don’t. He passes the table, looks back, and bows slightly. His restraint is so typically Japanese I’m suddenly annoyed, almost angry: everyone here is supposed to know his or her part without being told or asked. But what if you somehow missed an important cue so that everything you did after that was completely out of sync, inappropriate? Is that what Keiko is saying about my parents—they missed each other’s cues? What marriage doesn’t have a few missed cues?
Keiko is waiting for me to say something.
“I don’t blame my father for being unhappy with my mother or making her unhappy,” I offer. “I don’t even blame him for having an affair. You’re right. He’s not the first man to be unhappy or to have an affair. But I can’t forgive him for having refused to talk to my mother those last times she asked him to come home early so they could talk. He called from some place drunk and didn’t come home for days. I don’t forgive him for what he did to me after her death. He kept me away from you and Ken Nichan and everyone who loved me. He tried to make me forget my mother.”
Keiko leans forward. “If you don’t forgive him, you’ll be stuck in the same bad karma your mother had. Things turned out all right in the end for you. There’s no reason to keep holding a grudge.”
I take a deep breath. “But he’s still the same. Last year, when I saw him in New York, he let Michiko say terrible things about my mother. He showed no interest in what I was doing. He said he was disappointed in me because I had gotten my Ph.D. in English literature but I knew nothing about Japanese literature. As soon as we sat down the first time, after twelve years of not seeing me, he asked me how much money I made. That’s all he wanted to know. How could I forgive someone like that?”
Keiko sighs and looks into her empty glass.
“I should be calling him soon, but I keep postponing it. I’m leaving in less than two weeks. I wouldn’t even bother calling him at all if Akiko and Kazumi didn’t live with my grandfather.” I look away from Keiko toward the clock. It’s almost five-thirty.
“Your mother loved your father,” Keiko says. “She was very happy with him once. When he had tuberculosis and she was nursing him, people were worried that she might catch the disease herself. She told them she didn’t care; she said if Hiroshi died, she wanted to die, too, and be put in the same coffin. Because she loved him like that, you need to forgive him.”
“That makes no sense. It’s more the reason not to forgive him. How could he treat her the way he did after that?”
“You won’t help her soul by holding a grudge against him. Any grudge you hold comes back to you. You won’t be able to get out of her bad karma unless you forgive him. Don’t repeat her fate in your life.” Keiko reaches out across the table as if to take my hand, but I pull away.
“Her fate is part of my life whether I forgive him or not,” I insist. “I want it to affect my life. She was my mother. Why shouldn’t her fate affect mine?” I stop, feeling dizzy and cold. “Besides,” I add, “it isn’t just what he did to her. I don’t forgive him for what he and Michiko did to me and keep doing to me.”
In New York, he said that Keiko was a religious fanatic, that her obsession with religion was another manifestation of the mental defect in my mother’s family. The only member of my mother’s family he could stand, he told me, was Shiro, who had become a distinguished professor of microbiology at the Hiroshima National University. Sitting across the table from Keiko now, I can’t help being angry at him for saying these things, no matter how much Keiko wants me to forgive him.
That afternoon in New York, after eight hours of walking with Hiroshi and Michiko in midtown, I left to have dinner with Henri, the friend I was staying with. As soon as we sat down, I proceeded to tell him about my afternoon. I thought I was being more ironic than angry, making fun of my parents’ pettiness and insensitivity. Hiroshi and Michiko were no worse than I had expected them to be; I wasn’t surprised. I told Henri that Michiko had criticized the way I held chopsticks at the Chinese restaurant where we had lunch. To her, it was another occasion to say that my mother had not raised me right.
Henri interrupted my story and said, “Listen. I want you to remember something. You left their house twelve years ago and went to Illinois, where you didn’t know anyone. That was a very courageous thing to do. I want you to remember that everything you’ve done with your life since then has been remarkable.”
I looked at him, a little stunned by what seemed like a non sequitur, and then suddenly I was on the verge of tears. Henri was trying to comfort me, I realized, because I was hurt and angry. He was reassuring me because I needed to be reassured. Hiroshi and Michiko had gotten to me even though I had told myself that they could no longer hurt me. I blinked hard to stop the tears and smiled at Henri. I wasn’t sure if I was crying more because I was touched by his kindness or because I was hurt by my parents’ insensitivity. That moment was only the beginning of my realization. I still went back to Green Bay thinking our visit was not as bad as it might have been. It took me two, three months to fully understand how terrible our afternoon together had been, how angry I was.
“There’s so much I can teach you,” Keiko says. “Just once, come to the hirameki shrine with me. I’ve been doing a lot of teaching there and in the streets. I want to tell you about my faith. It’s all about forgiveness and letting go. It won’t hurt you to hear it, will it?”
I look away from her earnest gaze. “It won’t do me any good,” I say. “I’m not interested in forgiving or letting go.”
We sit in silence for a while.
“I’m sorry, but I need to leave,” I tell her. “I’m meeting my friend in twenty minutes.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to eat something before you go? You were always too thin.”
“You know I never eat before I go swimming.”
Tilting her head sideways, Keiko smiles. She must be remembering all the arguments we used to have at my grandparents’ house in the summer. Keiko, my grandmother, and my mother wanted me to eat lunch before swimming in the river at one or two, and I refused because I thought the food would make me heavier an
d cause me to drown. In the end, I always got my way about not eating, as well as about most other things.
One afternoon when I was ten, I even sneaked out of the house to go swimming alone in the rain while everyone else was taking a nap. As I walked down the path among the rice paddies to the river, the sky to the west began to look silver rather than black. It was a sign that everyone else had been wrong to say that I couldn’t swim: the rain was clearing up, and there would be no lightning.
When I got to the river, I waded in and started swimming toward the deep water. I already knew the breaststroke and the sidestroke. My mother had been teaching me freestyle all that summer. While I was practicing that alone—trying to kick my legs and turn my head to the side—I swallowed water, splashed in panic to the shallows, and stood up, pressing my left foot onto a piece of glass. For a second, I thought I had been bitten by a water snake. I would faint any minute from the poison and drown. But once I lifted my foot and saw the piece of glass, I got out and started hopping my way home. The path through the rice paddies was muddy. I hopped all the way to keep my bleeding foot clean so I would not get tetanus. When I was halfway home, my foot began to throb. I was dizzy by the time I was across the street from the house and saw Keiko standing next to the hydrangea bushes by the gate. “Where have you been?” she called to me. “Your mother’s gone to the school grounds looking for you.” Feeling faint, I didn’t answer. I wanted to save my breath. Keiko frowned as I hopped across the street. She must have thought I was doing it as a joke.
“I’m wet because I went swimming,” I said, “not because it was raining. You were all wrong. It didn’t thunder, but I cut my foot.”
As soon as she saw my cut, Keiko lifted me in her arms, carried me inside, washed and bandaged my foot. She didn’t talk the whole time. I didn’t cry or flinch though she disinfected my foot with peroxide. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. I wouldn’t give anyone reason to say, “Didn’t we tell you not to swim alone? Didn’t we say it was dangerous?”
Now Keiko is signaling the waiter. When he comes, she pays the bill. We get up and walk out the door without speaking and head toward the station. Keiko stands behind me while I put my coins in the machine to get a token.
“It was good to see you,” she smiles.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I tell her, “about going to the shrine and about karma. I don’t believe those things. I can’t. But I shouldn’t have spoken the way I did.”
She puts her hand on my elbow. “It’s all right. You weren’t rude.” She squeezes my shoulder lightly when we say good-bye. “See you on Saturday,” she says as I put the token into the slot and the electronic arms swing open.
Walking down the stairs to the platform, I can’t get over the feeling that I have somehow let her down. I want to run back up the stairs to find her, to apologize once again, but it’s too late.
* * *
When I get off the train two stops to the west, in a residential area on the western edge of Nishinomiya, Vince is already waiting. We walk out into the street, which is crowded with people coming home from work.
At the health club, a few blocks away, Vince registers me as his guest and pays the fee.
“Thanks.”
He just smiles.
He knows that I don’t have much money left. I don’t protest or thank him too dramatically. His generosity is one of the basic facts of my life. I take it for granted because he wants me to.
“See you in the pool.” I head toward the women’s locker room, which is much more posh than the one at the Y in Green Bay. The floor here is covered with a pink carpet. Small bottles of shampoo, conditioner, soap, and skin lotion are lined up on the shelves by the mirror. In the shower area, the tiles are green and blue. I change quickly and walk to the pool.
It must be suppertime for most people. The pool isn’t crowded at all. I jump into one of the middle lanes. Vince is already swimming two lanes away, alternating laps of breaststroke and freestyle. I envy how easily he can glide along. Swimming has never been a natural sport for me, though I’ve learned to be an adequate swimmer. I don’t float very easily. I get cold in the water. This water is already colder than I would like. Still, I begin my mile in freestyle, flutter-kicking and moving my arms, trying to keep my knees straight. At first, I breathe every two beats and then, after I warm up, every four beats.
Somewhere between the quarter mile and the half mile, I think of the way Keiko frowned and drew her lips into a straight line while she bandaged my foot on the afternoon I swam alone. She frowned the same way this afternoon when I mentioned my unwillingness to forgive. She must have been frustrated by my stubbornness, but her reaction had nothing to do with anger or self-righteousness. I had been too proud to cry in front of her, both times, afraid to show any weakness. But I had no reason to feel that way: if I had cried, she would simply have comforted me. Unlike my father, she would never have told me where I had gone wrong, how she had been right all along. When we argued, she wasn’t trying to prove herself right in the way he always did. She wanted me to see her point of view only because she thought she could make me happy.
Vince and I get to the wall at the same time, nod, and then dive back under the surface. After a few strokes, I pass him because this is his breaststroke lap. As I continue to kick and breathe, I think of what Keiko said about karma: the same bad things happening over and over in our lives. But the reverse has been true in my life. The bad things are balanced by the good.
One of the worst things in my life has been the way my father used money to threaten me. At least once every month during my high school years, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking it’s a waste of my money to send you to Kobe Jogakuin. Why am I paying such a high tuition for you to go to a private school when you can go to a public school for free? I don’t think you’re getting a very good education there. Your teachers must be stressing too many American ideas and not enough respect. Maybe you’ll benefit from the discipline you’ll get at a public school. It’ll be good for your character. Besides, sending you to Jogakuin was never my idea.” This was one of the things he said to reduce me to cold sweat and tears. I had to beg him to continue sending me to Jogakuin because I could not possibly go to a public school where I would have to take exams every day and wear a navy blue military-looking uniform. If I had to do that, I would have to become a totally different person. My father never let me forget that my life could be destroyed by some simple action on his part because he had complete financial and legal control over me.
But this particular bad thing has not continued in my life. I have not been financially connected to my father since I received a scholarship to transfer to Rockford College at twenty. More than that, other people have been generous to me. Even this summer, Vince keeps giving me money and wanting me to downplay my gratitude; Sylvia never wants me to pay her back for anything we both use. It never occurs to my friends that they are doing me a favor.
No bad thing has happened in my life without there being a balancing good thing. Keiko, who believes in karma, is herself part of the good. Like my mother and the rest of her family, Keiko wants to influence my views only to do me good, not to prove herself right. Unlike my father, she isn’t motivated by concerns about how my behavior would embarrass or vindicate her. She wants her religion—whose name means a holy flash of light—to light up my life and make everything clear to me so I can feel peace and happiness. Even though I cannot agree with her about religion or forgiveness, her concern—her earnestness about my happiness—is still a gift. I should have thanked her rather than tried to argue.
A few laps past the half mile, I am cold, my toes are cramping up, but I keep thinking about Keiko. You can’t expect any man to be faithful, she said, as though that were an accepted fact. Had she been in my mother’s position, she would have cried, complained, broken all the dishes in her house to make her husband see how much she needed him. Did anything like that ever happen in her own life, and if so, did she
win back her husband in the way she described? Or does Keiko know so much about my mother’s loneliness and pride because she feels the same way?
Keiko’s smile is the same big frank smile my mother had. Most Japanese women their age don’t smile so openly, any more than they wear the bright yellow flower print Keiko was wearing today or the brown coat my mother lined with red-and-green tartan when she was forty. Unlike Keiko, they don’t talk about love, aijo. The other women are, or at least pretend to be, content to have years of hard work pay off. They make jokes about their husbands’ indifference, insensitivity, or even infidelity, so long as the men are financially responsible. For them, love is for novels and movies, not for life. But my mother chose to die because she no longer felt her marriage had love. She wasn’t able to say to herself, “Well, at least my life is financially secure and I have good children.”
My mother had never been content just to live and be comfortable. She always wanted something more—some form of beauty. She and I started going to art exhibits together when I was in the second grade. The old masters were my immediate favorites. In their portraits, a little light from a candle flickered across the sitter’s eyes in an otherwise dark room. In their still lifes, the skin of each fruit shimmered against white cloth. I liked their dark canvases with just enough light to see by. My mother, on the other hand, loved the impressionists, who blinded you with their light. I was sure they had been nearsighted to see the world in huge blurs of bright colors. One day when I was in third grade, we saw a Rembrandt show in the morning and a Pierre Bonnard show after lunch. I didn’t understand why she was moved by the trees that melted like fireworks seen through wet glass. I didn’t understand what longing for love or beauty had motivated her to take a nine-year-old daughter to two art exhibits in one day.