by Kyoko Mori
* * *
The next afternoon, a little after four, Kazumi and I wait for my father in the kitchen of her home. She gets up to make a pot of Earl Grey tea. Outside on the patio, her dog is pacing back and forth. The nails of his paws click, and the chain makes not quite a squeak, more like a whistling sound, against the concrete. Kazumi puts a thin lemon slice in each cup before pouring the tea. Then she sits down at the table across from me. This is where we used to do homework the spring after my mother’s death. I sprinkle a teaspoon of sugar on the lemon slice, which has floated to the top.
“My grandmother told me something I can’t figure out,” I say.
“What’s that?” Kazumi asks, stirring her tea.
“She said my father came to visit her two years ago. He showed up out of the blue and wanted to bring flowers to the family grave. Isn’t that strange?”
Kazumi puts down her cup and narrows her eyes. “He never told you about the visit?”
“No. Why? Did he tell you?”
She shrugs. “He didn’t tell me, but I knew about it. The visit was Grandfather’s idea.”
My hands around the warm teacup, I wait for her to go on.
“Two winters ago, Grandfather got very sick. He stayed in bed for weeks, coughing and burning up with fever. My mother and I had to change his pajamas every few hours because he said he was suffocating in the smell of his own sweat. Every week, he sent us to Shinto shrines to buy amulets. He really thought he was going to die.”
Kazumi pauses to sip her tea. I don’t comment because I can’t feel sorry for him.
“Anyway, when he recovered, he called your father to the house and gave him a big lecture. He ordered your father to visit your mother’s family grave, offer flowers, and apologize.”
“Apologize for what?”
“Grandfather thought his sickness had come because your father had angered the ancestral spirits of your mother’s family. Your father had to make amends so no more bad things would happen. Grandfather said your father had been particularly wrong to forbid you and Jumpei from seeing your mother’s family.”
I drink my tea in silence, thinking of the letters I found at my grandmother’s house.
“I don’t understand,” I tell Kazumi. “Grandfather and my father were in agreement about not letting us see our mother’s family.”
“Grandfather is old. He conveniently forgets what he wants to forget.” She gets up and takes a pear out of the fridge. Peeling the skin in one piece, she cores and slices the pear and puts the slices on a plate.
“I remember what Grandfather said to your father,” she says, sitting back down. “He said, ‘Go apologize to the spirits of your wife and your father-in-law. Bring them flowers. Make sure you are humble to them. Humility is an essential part of human character.’”
“You heard all that?”
She grins. “I’m the one who brings them tea.”
She pushes the plate toward me. The slice I take tastes cold and hard. Pears in Japan have the texture and tartness of apples.
“My father lied to my grandmother, then,” I tell Kazumi. “He said he had been sitting on a train when, all of a sudden, he was overwhelmed by an urge to visit the grave. Afterward, he rushed off without having lunch with her. And just think—the visit wasn’t even his idea to begin with.”
Kazumi shakes her head.
“I’m embarrassed to be his daughter. Grandfather, too. I wish I wasn’t related to them.”
We each take another pear slice and eat in silence. I think of my grandmother’s wrinkled face and thin hair. In her garden, she wanted me to dig all her potatoes because they were the only things she could offer me to eat. I remember the way they hit the bottom of the pan, hard and small. How could my father refuse to have lunch with her? How could he look her in the face and tell her a lie—such an elaborate and sentimental lie—about why he was there? I imagine my grandfather sweating and groaning in his sleep when he was sick. Even in that state, he was a tyrant, ordering Kazumi and Akiko on errands, contributing nothing but a pile of dirty laundry. He wanted to appease the spirits of my mother’s family only to protect his own health.
Kazumi pours more tea in my cup and pushes the sugar bowl toward me. “I called my father in April,” she says, “when I thought my mother might die. He had nothing to say to me. He didn’t even ask me if I was okay. I hung up crying. He never called me back. I would have felt like an orphan if my mother had died. I know how you feel.”
I put another spoonful of sugar in my cup, trying to think of what to say to break the sad mood we have fallen into. But suddenly, the dog stops his pacing and barks loudly. Someone is knocking on the door.
“Hey, Ran-chan,” this person says to the dog from the other side of the wall. “How are you today? You recognize my voice, don’t you? What a smart dog.”
Kazumi gets up from the table. The dog changes from barking to whimpering.
“That’s not my father, is it?” I ask her.
“Of course it is. I’d better get the door.”
“It doesn’t sound like him,” I insist. “Besides, he hates animals. He never even once petted my dog.”
“Your father is old now,” Kazumi says, slipping on her shoes. “He likes our dog.”
I stay at the kitchen table while she goes outside. As soon as she opens the door, the dog dashes toward my father, barking. The chain rattles; the paws click as he jumps up and down. “What a good dog,” my father is saying. “Are you happy to see me? Oh, I’m so happy to see you, too. Roll over for me, can you?” The chain rattles some more. My father must be bent over petting the dog. I can hear the thump-thump of the dog’s tail against the concrete. When my dog Riki was lost, about a year after my brother and I had moved back to his house, Hiroshi said nothing to console us. Who would have expected that years later he would be gushing over this dog? I wait, sipping my tea. I will not get up to meet him outside.
Finally, Hiroshi comes into the kitchen, dressed in the navy blue suit he must have worn to work. He takes off the jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair. He is wearing a white short-sleeved shirt underneath. After he sits down, he unknots and slips off his tie, rolls it up, and tucks it into the pocket of his jacket.
“I have to go upstairs for a minute,” Kazumi says, “to get Grandfather’s room ready in case he comes home while we’re out.”
From his breast pocket, Hiroshi takes out his lighter and a pack of cigarettes. He taps his cigarette against the table a few times before lighting it. He smokes in his usual way, taking many nervous puffs, scarcely letting the cigarette rest on the edge of the ashtray to burn by itself.
The tea left in my cup is cold. The uneaten pear slices on the plate are beginning to look bruised.
I don’t know what to say to him. He looks so thin, scrawny, even. His arm keeps jerking back and forth like a wound-up device between the ashtray and his mouth. I reach out to lift the teapot, but it’s empty.
My father continues to smoke, not even looking at me.
“Kazumi and I were having tea,” I say. “There isn’t any left, but I could make more if you’d like.”
“No,” he shakes his head. “We’re leaving as soon as Kazumi comes downstairs. Let’s try the Chinese restaurant near the bridge—not the one by the station.” He takes a deep drag of the cigarette and looks into my face for a brief second, then looks away. “Michiko called yesterday from Hokkaido,” he exhales. “She sounded like she would rather stay at the hospital with me than go out to dinner with you. Of course, I told her she didn’t have to stay with me, so she’ll still take you to that other restaurant by the station.”
“She doesn’t have to take me to dinner,” I say. I can hear the icy politeness in my own voice.
Hiroshi doesn’t even notice. “Michiko worries too much about me.” He sighs in an exaggerated manner. “There’s no need for her to be with me tomorrow night. They won’t be doing anything yet. But she wants to be there just in case. I decided to take you
out tonight so she would feel less of an obligation toward you if she couldn’t make it.”
I shrug.
“She will call Kazumi tomorrow morning either way.”
“She really doesn’t have to do anything for me. I don’t expect it. Besides, I’m hoping to see some of my school friends tomorrow. Maybe I can spend more time with them if we don’t go to dinner.”
“You have to see things from her point of view.” Hiroshi frowns as he leans forward, sticking out his scrawny neck. “You never understood about obligations. You think they are the same as expectations. You should have learned the difference a long time ago.”
I pick up my cup and drink down the cold tea. Did you go to my mother’s grave out of your sense of obligation? I want to ask. Then why did you cry? Were you faking that, too, or were you giving way to some temporary feeling of guilt?
“Doing the right thing is very important to Michiko,” Hiroshi continues. “She was going to cancel her trip to Hokkaido because of my surgery, even though she’d been planning this vacation with her friends for a long time. I convinced her to go. I said, ‘Go now, because once I have the surgery, you’ll be busy taking care of me. I want you to have a vacation first. Besides, you have obligations toward your friends, too. You can’t inconvenience them.’ So she went, but she was very reluctant. You have to admire her for taking her obligations seriously. You have no right to dismiss her concern out of hand just because you don’t understand.” Hiroshi squashes out his cigarette and immediately lights another.
I can hear Kazumi’s footsteps upstairs. She must be straightening out Tatsuo’s room and the sitting room, laying out a change of clothes. She said Tatsuo changed three, four times a day so he “wouldn’t smell like an old man.” He didn’t care how much laundry she had to do every day.
My father, in the last years of his marriage to my mother, used to come home once or twice a week to put a fresh supply of clothes into his suitcase and leave again. Though I seldom saw him, I knew when he had been home the night before because his shirts were hanging in the backyard. The way my mother stretched the sleeves out and pinned the shirts side by side, they looked like a gathering of invisible people holding hands.
My cup clatters when I put it down. Hiroshi looks sharply at me, as if offended by my clumsiness.
“I heard you went to see Grandmother a couple of years ago,” I say, trying to sound casual. “You wanted to visit the grave. Is that true?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes a long drag from his cigarette, squints at me, and blows out the smoke.
“Did you really go there?” I ask again.
“I went there,” he says, flicking his ashes.
“Well,” I say when he doesn’t go on. “How was your visit?”
He sighs, blowing out more smoke. “I took a cab from Himeji because I’d forgotten how far the place was. What a mistake.” He pauses. “The cab ride took forever and cost me a fortune. When I got near the house, I couldn’t remember exactly where it was, so I stopped at a gas station to ask. I had a lucky break there. The attendant happened to be her grandson.”
“My cousin Akira?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask his name.”
“Did you tell him who you are?”
“No. But he obviously knew where she lived, so he gave me directions.” He puts out the cigarette, grinding it hard.
“Was Grandmother surprised to see you?” I prompt him. “You hadn’t called ahead of time, had you?”
“No. I guess she was surprised. But she recognized me right away.” Hiroshi squints as he lights another cigarette.
“You went to the grave together, right?” I ask.
“We went most of the way in the cab. I told the driver to wait at the bottom of the hill. The car wouldn’t make it up that dirt path.” He turns away and looks out the window, not offering another word.
I don’t know how I can get him to go on to the next part. Will he admit to crying at the grave? I want to memorize everything he says so later, when I’m alone, I can compare his version with Fuku’s. It’s like saving the letters he wrote to my grandparents. What I am after is evidence. I want to see if he will lie to me. Trying not to sound too eager, I ask another question. “You had time to talk to my grandmother?”
“We talked some.” He frowns and closes his mouth on the cigarette. “Kazumi is taking a long time,” he says, pointing at his wrist-watch.
Almost the next moment, I hear her steps down the stairway. “Sorry I took so long,” she says as she enters the kitchen. She must have heard him.
“No problem. We have plenty of time,” Hiroshi says, jumping up from the chair. He grabs his jacket and heads toward the door before she can say anything more.
No one talks during the five-minute walk to the restaurant in the afternoon heat. Watching my father shuffle on, a few steps ahead of Kazumi and me, I think, just for a moment, that I imagined our conversation in the kitchen. I can’t believe that he really went on about the expensive cab ride and mentioned meeting my cousin as a lucky coincidence. Did he dwell on these things to avoid talking about the actual visit because he suspected me of trying to draw him out, to catch him in a lie? Or is the expensive cab ride really what he remembers most about the occasion? I wish Kazumi had been there to hear his words with me.
We arrive at the restaurant, which is a white building with red and jade-green pillars. Inside, no one else is at the fifteen or so tables covered with white cloths. It’s not even five-thirty. A waiter in a black uniform seats us by one of the red pillars: Kazumi and I on one side and Hiroshi on the other. The air-conditioning is working full blast. Hiroshi puts on the jacket he has been carrying.
While the waiter is getting silverware, water, and menus, Hiroshi says, “Let’s make sure we leave by six-thirty. I worked late the last couple of nights. I want to go to bed early.” He waves his hand toward the waiter even though he is already coming back our way. Hiroshi reaches out and grabs all three menus and then says without opening them, “We’ll start with some egg rolls and shark-fin soup.” The waiter has to stop in the middle of laying out our silverware to write down the order. He walks back to the kitchen at a brisk pace.
A few minutes later, lighting a cigarette, Hiroshi opens his menu but doesn’t hand us ours.
“What do you think, Kazumi?” he asks my cousin, turning his menu and pointing so she can see. “I’m thinking we should order family style. We’ll get the sesame beef, pockmarked tofu, and spicy chicken. Then we can always order more things as we go along.”
Kazumi looks from him to me, as if trying to connect the two of us through her glance. Hiroshi does not so much as move his head in my direction.
“Whatever you think is best,” she says.
My father is smoking his second cigarette when the waiter brings the soup and the egg rolls. I don’t touch the soup. Even before I became a vegetarian I never ate fish because it made me sick. Cutting the egg roll in half, I scoop out the stuffing, dunk just the skin into my mustard sauce, and eat it. Hiroshi eats his soup with relish, sucking the liquid from the tip of his big spoon. He has not put out his cigarette. It continues to burn in the ashtray next to him.
The last time I had Chinese food with him was in New York, a year ago. The time before that was in Kyoto when I was ten. My family had a reunion dinner with three other families, all of whose fathers had gone to the same university with Hiroshi. The food was served banquet style, with large platters placed on a revolving-top table. One of these platters had a boiled carp with its head and fins, a yellow eyeball swimming in the eye socket. Coated with a brown sauce the color of pond scum, the carp looked worse every time it made the round—the skin broken into tatters, the flesh flaking off where people had poked with chopsticks. After about ten minutes, I threw my napkin over the carp, got up, and waited outside for everyone else to finish eating. When we got home, my father told my mother that she should make me eat fish at home once a week. “Her allergy is all in her head,”
he said. “I don’t care if she breaks out. She’ll have to get used to it.” My parents argued for a long time, but my mother let the subject drop in the end. She must have realized that it was pointless to keep on. My father wasn’t home often enough to see whether or not she fed me fish. That reunion dinner in Kyoto was one of the three or four times he ever went out to eat with us.
“What’s wrong with your egg roll?” Hiroshi asks me now. The cigarette is still burning, as if he planned to take a puff from it between mouthfuls of soup.
“Nothing. I don’t eat meat. The filling has pork in it.”
He grimaces as he lifts his spoon to his mouth.
“I told you in New York that I didn’t eat meat. That was a year ago. You made a big deal about it, so how could you forget?” Hearing a sharp edge in my voice, I stop, look away.
Hiroshi puts down his spoon with a clatter and waves at the waiter. Once the waiter is at our table, his pad and pen ready, Hiroshi opens the menu and picks up his cigarette. He smokes while he looks over the menu, taking his time. The waiter stands at attention. Finally, Hiroshi says, “Bring us this broccoli and carrot dish. And the fried noodles with vegetables.” Taking the cigarette out of his mouth, he cocks his head toward me. “The one with the long hair is my daughter,” he says. “She’s been living in America. She doesn’t eat meat.”
Hiroshi closes the menu and glares at me. The waiter is smiling politely and uncertainly. Nobody says anything for a while. I turn my head toward the window, which is covered with pale green venetian blinds. I want to raise them and put my face against the cool glass. I imagine what would happen if I just stood up and left. But I turn back in time to see Kazumi smiling at the waiter.
“That’s all for now,” she says, nodding. “Thank you very much.”
I pick at the rest of the egg roll without eating any more.