by Kyoko Mori
“I’ll be busy, too,” I announce. My voice sounds just as stiff as his. “I’m going to visit my grandmother and then Uncle Shiro. I won’t be back till Wednesday night.”
“Remember when Jumpei was going to see their grandmother?” Michiko asks Hiroshi and chuckles. “I was right there when he made the phone call.” She turns sideways to address me. “This was about a year and a half ago. He was staying here a few weeks before going to South America. He called her and said he’d drive over to see her. Guess what she said.”
I shrug.
“She said she wasn’t feeling very well. It was in the middle of winter. She asked him not to come because she couldn’t do much to entertain him anyway. You should have seen his face. His jaw dropped. He said, ‘Fine then. Maybe I won’t see you for a long time now. I’ll be leaving the country soon.’ He hung up in a big sulk.” Michiko has to stop because she is laughing too hard. “Imagine being rejected by your own grandmother,” she says between gasps of laughter. “I had to remind him that people get funny when they get old. They get so they don’t want any intrusion.”
“Maybe she was really sick,” I suggest.
Neither Michiko nor Hiroshi answers.
“Jumpei said he didn’t start seeing our mother’s family till Grandfather’s funeral,” I say. “He was a junior in college then. I thought you were going to let him visit when he was eighteen.”
I lean back in my chair and look at my father, who is still sitting bare-chested, sipping his tea. The afternoon he forbade Jumpei and me from seeing our mother’s family, Hiroshi was wearing the suit he had worn to work and sitting bolt upright in his father’s drawing room. I am amazed, suddenly, that all these years have passed and I am grown up. He is just a frail old man without a shirt; even his hands look bony and stained with age.
“Jumpei never asked to see those people,” Michiko says. “He was pretty busy back then, going to school and working part-time.”
Hiroshi drains his teacup in a gulp. He scrapes the chair legs against the floor as he stands up. “I’m going to lie down for a while,” he says to Michiko. “Wake me up when you have to drive her back to Kobe. I’ll go with you so you won’t have to drive alone on the way back.” He glances at me and then turns back to Michiko. “She doesn’t seem sure about the directions. She has such a poor sense of direction, but I can figure out the way from the address.”
“I don’t know the way because I don’t drive here.” I pause, take a deep breath to keep my voice from sounding shrill and defensive. I need to sound calm and polite: I am a grown-up guest, not an upset child forced to live in their house. “You don’t have to drive me back. I can take the train.”
“How can I not give you a ride?” Michiko protests. “This is the only time you visited our house. I have to give you a ride. Otherwise, you’ll say we did nothing for you.”
Hiroshi is already walking toward the bedroom.
“Do you not feel well?” I ask him.
He stops, turns around. “Nothing is wrong,” he declares. “I’m just tired from working late last night. I need some rest.”
“Do you want me to leave now so you don’t have to get up later?”
“No. You can stay.” He goes into the bedroom and closes the door.
“You should have called a day ahead of time,” Michiko says as she pours herself some tea. “He’s not up to a visit.”
“I didn’t realize he would be sick.”
“He is not sick. This has nothing to do with the surgery. Your father’s not a very sociable person. It’s not a good idea to visit him all of a sudden.” She notices my empty cup. “Do you want some more coffee? I can make another pot.”
“No. Thanks.”
“You don’t drink green tea, do you?”
“Not usually.”
Michiko shakes her head. She pushes her chair back a little and turns sideways toward me. “I guess that’s very American,” she says.
“I never liked green tea. It has nothing to do with where I live.”
Michiko changes the subject. “I’m surprised your grandmother only wants you to visit overnight. Why doesn’t she ask you to stay longer after you’ve come all this way? But then you haven’t seen her for so long. At her age, I suppose she’s not ready to see anyone new.”
“She’s my grandmother. I’m scarcely someone new.”
Michiko sips her tea. “You can’t help losing touch with your relatives. You live so far away. But you and Jumpei are lucky to have ended up in foreign countries. You wouldn’t fit in here. You didn’t have a very good upbringing, even though I did everything I could. It was too late by then.”
While she rambles on, I concentrate on staying silent and calm. Every time my mind forms devastating words I could say to interrupt her stupid talk, I push those words away and try not to think of any more. Regardless of what Michiko says about my upbringing, my mother didn’t raise me to be a rude person. She taught me that dignity is important.
“Remember how you knew nothing about housework when I came? You would never have been good enough to marry here. You started too late. I would have been embarrassed in front of my in-laws. But in America, you don’t have to worry about that. I heard about how American women don’t do housework the way we do in Japan. Everyone probably does their laundry only once a week. I never forgot your telling me that in New York. I hope you don’t get sick from the germs. But it’s none of my business.”
I won’t even address her comments. Politely changing the subject, I ask her instead if she heard from my brother lately.
“He called last week from Quito,” she replies. “Your father answered the phone. Jumpei didn’t identify himself at first. When your father said I wasn’t home, he said he’d call back another time. They didn’t even talk. It’s a pity. He’s never been very close to your father. But at least he’s close to me.”
“Jumpei said he didn’t talk to Father for two years while he was in college. Is that true?”
“They had a big fight during one of the vacations. Jumpei said he would never come back to our house for a visit. Your father told him he would stop sending money then—the allowance Jumpei needed to pay his tuition and the rent at his lodging house. The money he made working part-time was mostly for buying clothes and taking trips with his friends. He couldn’t live on that. So I sent him the same amount he was getting from his father, every month.”
“Did you try to talk Father into forgiving him?”
“No. We never discussed it. He didn’t know what I was doing. Your father always expects me to manage our finances. He never asks how I spend our money. So I did the right thing by Jumpei. That’s all I cared about. How the two of them felt about each other was none of my business.”
“So how did they ever make up?”
Michiko grimaces. “Your Aunt Akiko invited the two of them to dinner and insisted that they forgive each other. She tricked them. Each of them thought he was having dinner with Akiko alone. If she had told them ahead of time, neither would have shown up.”
“Did you know ahead of time?”
“Of course not. Your Aunt Akiko never tells me anything. She’s pretty close and sly.”
Outside, the neon signs have been lit in the distance.
“I think it’s too bad you and Jumpei aren’t close to your father,” Michiko continues. “But that’s perfectly understandable. He was never home when your mother was alive. You never got to know him. It’s your mother’s fault, too, for keeping him away. Still, he isn’t naturally good with children. He’s a great husband, but he’s not suited to being a father. He should never have had you two, especially the way he felt about your mother. He might have been talked into spending more time at home if he’d had children with me, but even then, he probably wouldn’t have been a very good father.” She points at the lights outside. “See those white lights just down the hill? That’s where the hospital is. I drove my mother there every afternoon for her treatments until they could admit her. We
had to wait a month for a bed to become available.”
She finishes her tea and pours another cup.
“I used to hate my mother,” she says, “when I was young. She wasn’t happy in her marriage. My parents fought every day, so when my father died, I thought it was all her fault. I was only twenty. But I’m glad I took good care of her when she had cancer. She was very grateful to me at the end. I think she finally understood how wrong she had been to favor my brother over me. She saw the truth. As they say, people learn a lot from painful experiences. Of course, I had no help from my brother or his wife. My mother still left her money to them. I don’t mind. My brother’s a good-for-nothing. He needs everything he can get. And it is my mother’s fault in a way, for having spoiled him when he was young. So everything turned out the way it should. It always does, you know.”
She stops and looks toward the doorway. My father has come out of the bedroom and is standing there in a polo shirt and gray pants. “Are you about ready to take her home?” he asks Michiko.
“Yes,” I say, getting up and grabbing my backpack. “I’m ready to leave.”
Downstairs in the parking garage, Hiroshi opens the door on the passenger’s side and gets into the front seat, leaving me to sit in the back. Michiko starts the car, and we proceed down the hill.
“Don’t take the highway,” Hiroshi says as we approach the commuter train station. “That takes you out of your way. Here, turn west on this street.”
The street he points out is the one that cuts through our old neighborhood. In a few minutes, we are driving only a few blocks from the house where Michiko came to live with us the spring after my mother’s death.
“This is near where we used to live,” I say. “I ran here the other day. The house is gone. Did you know that? They poured concrete over that next lot where my mother had the vegetable garden and built another house there.”
Ahead, the headlights of a car appear around a bend in the road. Where our two cars come together, the road is too narrow. Michiko waits for the other car to back up. When it doesn’t, she sighs and puts hers in reverse, steps hard on the gas. We zoom backward to the corner where the road widens.
“I used to walk here in the rain,” she says, tapping her fingers on the wheel, “with groceries in my basket to make you food.”
“So did my mother,” I say. “She hated it.” The other car approaches slowly. We are at the same corner where Hiroshi long ago told me that he would remarry because I could not be expected to keep house for him. I look out the window at the dim yellow light of the lamppost and remember my mother with her basket of oranges, loaves of bread, bouquets of carnations and roses she bought in the winter when our garden was bare. I wish that at least her shadow could cross the headlight fanning out from Michiko’s car and be seen, even for a moment. It is unfair that she has no voice, not even mine, to make a protest: how can Michiko, who got what should have been my mother’s—the house, my father’s and my brother’s affection—claim the past as well? You only took care of us because it was my father’s excuse for marrying you, I want to say. You didn’t do it because you loved me. I owe you nothing. But of course, I refrain and, in silence, watch the other car come closer and then maneuver around us. Michiko jerks her gear into drive and steps on the gas. We don’t talk the rest of the way.
In front of Sylvia’s house, Hiroshi turns in the front seat and sticks his hand toward me. He is holding three thousand-yen bills.
“I don’t need any money.”
“Take it. You can always use money.”
His hand is not moving. His bones and veins stick out from beneath the skin.
I reach out to take the bills, careful not to touch his fingers. “Thank you,” I say. To myself, I think, The money doesn’t make any difference now. I can take it because I don’t need it. “If I don’t see you before I leave, good luck on your surgery.”
He nods and says ja mata, “Well, another time.”
“Thank you for the coffee,” I say to my stepmother, “and for bringing me back in your car.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Good-bye,” I say and get out.
Immediately, they drive away. My friends both in Japan and in the States would wait in the car till they had seen me enter the house. It would be a small gesture of courtesy: making sure I got home all right. I cannot remember my father or stepmother ever making such gestures of courtesy or consideration. When they did anything for me, whether it was giving me money, taking me to dinner, or driving me somewhere, they made a big production out of it. Each time, they wanted me to observe how meticulously they fulfilled their obligation toward me. Nothing they did had to do with courtesy or affection. This time has been no different.
I take my shoes off in the foyer and go in. Sylvia and Cadine are sitting on the couch in the living room. Cadine has brought the jar of caterpillars and put it on the coffee table. There are new leaves inside. One of the cats, Ophelia, is sleeping on the floor.
“So how was your visit?” Sylvia asks me as I sit on the floor next to the cat.
“About what I expected,” I reply. “They argued a long time about which one of them should take me out to dinner because they were both busy. My father got up from the table and went to lie down because he had worked late last night and he was tired.”
“He went to sleep?” Cadine asks, her eyes rounded in surprise.
The look on her face makes me realize, truly, how unbelievably rude my father has been. Still, I try to keep my tone light. I shrug. “I don’t know if he really fell asleep or not. But he was gone for half an hour. He came back out and asked my stepmother if she was ready to drive me home. He wanted to come with her because I was so bad with directions.”
The cat sniffs my hand and goes back to sleep. Her whiskers twitch. Nobody says anything.
“I guess that’s a weird thing to do,” I add. “I mean my father’s taking a nap. Most people wouldn’t do that in the middle of a visit, especially after you haven’t seen them much in the last thirteen years.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Sylvia says.
“If my father were a normal person, he wouldn’t do that regardless of what I did or said to him.”
“You could say that.”
“I don’t know why I need to ask you that. My father always has this effect on me. I want people to confirm that he’s weird, that I’m not just imagining his behavior.”
“I understand,” Sylvia smiles a little.
“He’s supposed to have surgery in a week and a half to remove some intestinal polyps. My stepmother’s leaving town on vacation tomorrow and coming back in time for the surgery. So I won’t be seeing much of them again. I guess that’s the best part.”
“Are you worried about him?” Sylvia asks.
I think about it and have to say, “No. Maybe I’d feel different if his condition were life-threatening. But they both made like it was nothing.” As I say this, I know I wouldn’t be worried even if my father had been more seriously ill. Unsettled, maybe, but not worried or concerned the way I am about Aunt Akiko.
We don’t talk for a while. Inside the jar, the caterpillars are eating the leaves they are perched on. By morning, all will be gone except a few stems too short to crawl on. Every night, the caterpillars are bringing down their own house, eating their way toward flight.
“I’m still glad I went to their house tonight,” I tell Sylvia and Cadine. “I talked to my cousin Kazumi on the phone from there. Her mother, my aunt Akiko, is in the hospital recovering from surgery. I made plans to see them both.”
“You have cousins?” Cadine asks.
“I have lots of cousins. Only one on my father’s side, but lots on my mother’s.”
“That’s neat,” she says. “I don’t really know my cousins.”
Cadine’s cousins would be in Ohio, where Sylvia is from, and in France, where her father, Jacques, grew up. Cadine sees them once every summer, if that.
Lying in bed a little later in
my room, I think of how isolated Cadine and Sylvia must feel, stuck in the small community of gaijin in and around Kobe. In that small group, people tend to get eccentric. One of my old teachers from Kobe Jogakuin, Paul Bennett, and Cadine’s father, Jacques, have a three-year-old feud going on because Paul once had people over to watch a Joan Crawford movie and Jacques made fun of her acting. The two men haven’t said a word to each other since that evening. I wasn’t surprised when Sylvia told me that. Nor was I surprised, exactly, at Mrs. Peterson’s abrupt and rude message on Sylvia’s machine. People can lose touch with something when they are constantly outsiders—some sense of moderation or balance. They get extra bossy, extra sensitive, extra blunt. Isolation takes its toll on people. I know Sylvia worries about herself and Cadine because of it. She’s told me that she never feels at home, either in the States or in Japan. Though I have known Sylvia only for a few weeks now, I know we share something important: we are both outsiders no matter where we go; isolation is a fact of our lives.
But we didn’t become outsiders by moving to a foreign country: we have never felt at home anywhere in the first place. It was the same way with my mother and Aunt Keiko. They didn’t have to be foreigners to feel that they never fit in, that they were isolated and lonely. If my mother had survived the period in her life when that loneliness seemed unbearable, she might have come to accept it and make the best of her quiet life surrounded by her garden flowers and all the beautiful things she made; or she might have tried to overcome her isolation by reconnecting with the friends she had at our apartment house. Either way, she would have been someone I could have talked to about my own feelings of not fitting in, not being home anywhere. This is how it is for me, seeing my father and stepmother: always, after seeing them, I miss my mother terribly.
If I had come to visit my mother, she wouldn’t have left me in the middle of the conversation to take a nap. She wouldn’t have gone on about how she was too busy to take me out to dinner. She would never be so rude to anyone under any circumstance.