Em's Awful Good Fortune

by Marcie Maxfield

  I did not acquire this piece of art—I fought for it, tooth and nail, blood, sweat, and tears, baby. I did not merely, discreetly, or easily buy her. I reclaimed her and took what was meant to be mine. I am not a geisha either, dammit.

  MAKING SMOOTHIES IN TOKYO

  But what if instead of writing broken, torn, pissed-off essays that sound a lot like rants, I was to write lyrical, expat-slice-of-life travel pieces about living overseas. Like this:

  Stopped for lunch in a park in Hiro-o, plugged into my iPod, listening to Black Eyed Peas. Took a path up some wooden steps past a man sprawled on a park bench, reading a book, kids wading in a pond, a girl painting in watercolors on an easel. Where is the love? The path wound and twisted, opening onto a clearing with a small garden near an arbor where I sat on a bench to eat lunch—onigiri: seaweed-and-salmon triangle—my soul drifting. In front of me sat a Japanese woman with gray hair, playing with a goose the size of a small dog, red bandanna tied around its neck like a collar. Balancing the goose on her knees, she held it in her palms, flat on its back, spindly legs and webbed feet stretched out in ecstasy as she kissed its beak, bouncing it up and down like a baby, rubbing its feathered tummy, nuzzling its head. Then she held that goose midair, hovering above the grass, and blew on its belly until it peed. Carefully, she set the goose on the ground; it rose up on its haunches and spread its wings in play. She retrieved some toilet paper from her bag, picked up the goose, gently wiping its belly and privates, and meticulously cleaned the ground. I don’t know how long I sat there, in that cocoon of a park, in the middle of Tokyo, letting the afternoon wash over me. Unplugged my earbuds, letting the air fill with the music of cicadas. The woman opened a book; her pet goose waddled about contentedly. Felt like my veins opened up and America drained out.

  Or this, haiku:

  Woke up, made the kids

  a power smoothie, took a

  walk in Shibuya.

  Or maybe this, a day in the life, fragments:

  I’m hugging the edge of the bed, leg dangling, my hand resting on the floor. He’s been dogging me all night. I can feel his heat, his heartbeat through my T-shirt, know he wants something, can’t keep pushing him away. The alarm goes off. It will have to be quick, I think, turning toward him. The comfort of him takes me by surprise, the rhythm of us like home, Motown, loose and sexy. It triggers something deep and primal, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Me and my guy. Afterward, we kiss, a gentle fusion.

  “Breakfast!” I yell upstairs to my high school children, who are not little anymore and don’t like to be yelled at in the morning, don’t even like to talk in the morning, at least not to me—especially not to me.

  “What’s in the smoothie?” Rio asks, wrinkling his nose. “You put that weird stuff in it, didn’t you?” he says accusingly.

  I shake my head no, lying.

  He sips and frowns.

  “Just OJ, banana, and yogurt,” I tell him.

  “You forgot to mention the weird stuff,” he says.

  “Tomorrow you can make breakfast.”

  “I’m just saying”—he circles back—“seeds are not food, that’s all. I’m not saying I don’t love you.”

  Rio makes me laugh; he is so cheeky and perfectly comfortable in his skin, slouching around in baggy jeans and high-top sneakers, smelling of rubber and dirty socks, ink and grease. I wonder if the girls at school love this boy, with his ponytail; his wispy, never-been-shaved mustache; his smart mouth and marshmallow center.

  Ruby ignores the smoothie entirely. “About this weekend,” she says. “The ryokan. Will there be beds?”

  “Couldn’t get beds,” I tell her.

  “Don’t say you couldn’t get beds if there are no beds.”

  “Guys, it’s a ryokan. There are no beds. By definition. There will be mats on the floor.”

  Ruby crinkles her nose.

  “Please come,” I beg. “It’ll be fun, a family trip, an experience, something to recount someday about the time you went to the Japanese onsen nestled in the snowcapped mountains, bathed in natural hot springs, and slept on the floor.”

  “Outty on that,” she replies. “Nori says I can spend the weekend with her.”

  “I just like to tease you. You know that, right?” Rio says, kissing me goodbye as he follows Ruby out the door to catch the school bus.

  I drink the power smoothies with flax, hemp, and chia seeds; I make them for myself anyway. Hours later, Gee calls to firm up details for Kita Onsen. It’s centuries old, in the middle of nowhere; getting there will require trains and buses and a taxi ride. Our Japanese teacher, Saya-san, is coming, with her American boyfriend, the one who works with Gee. I tell him we are one for two on the kids.

  “Cool,” he says.

  Hanging up, I realize that was my first actual conversation since breakfast. A red-and-blue-striped Mardi Gras mask pops up on my laptop. “You have a call,” Skype informs me; it’s my mother, calling from Detroit. I put on my headset and press “connect.”

  “How are you?” I ask the party mask on my computer screen.

  My mother is getting older. She’s got arthritis, gout, diverticulitis, and God knows what else. She takes more pills than a rock star, and these days she’s more likely to trip and fall than go to a costume ball, but her Skype screen icon is a Mardi Gras carnival mask. I tell her I’m coming home this summer and ask if I can bring our dog when I visit her.

  She hesitates. “That drooling, farting, snoring creature?” But she eventually relents.

  We haven’t seen each other in more than a year. Gee will visit his family; I will visit mine. Home leave is never long enough to do everything we need to do—that’s the official explanation for his-and-hers family visits. It works better this way. After Paris, I stayed with Gee, but I gave him back all rights to his mother.

  The street is strewn with cherry blossom leaves, pale pink, the sky a blanket of white. If this were LA, I’d say it was overcast, that it would burn off by midafternoon and the sun would come out. But I really don’t know Tokyo at all. It occurs to me that I probably couldn’t point to Japan on a map. I live here but don’t know where here is. Where is home, anyway? Where you sleep, where you’re from, where your dog is, where you find yourself, where you left the biggest piece of yourself behind?

  I have a new student, named Shota. “I lived in California,” he tells me.

  “I have a house in Los Angeles,” I tell him.

  “Is it a McMansion?”

  What am I going to teach this kid who looks Japanese but opens his mouth and pitch-perfect American slang spills out? Nothing, maybe. Maybe he’s just taking my class to feel comfortable; after-school English is a safe zone for kids who look Japanese but aren’t, not experientially. My students are kids who have lived overseas, Japanese boys and girls, from six to sixth grade, from barely verbal to fully bilingual, with one thing in common: They were expats, and now they are misfits in their home country. They’re like my children in reverse. The term “third-culture kids” makes me think of Third Rock from the Sun, like they’re Martians or something, kids who are comfortable anywhere in the world except where they’re from, who stumble over the simple stuff like “Where do you live?”

  I stop in a boutique on the walk to Shibuya Station. A tiny pink vinyl skirt and jacket hang on a store mannequin. I touch them, feel their slickness, admire the rhinestones and decals: a decorative high-heeled slipper and a cherry red lipstick tube. This is exactly the type of outfit I used to buy Ruby when she was little and looked cute in everything, candy sweet, all kisses for Mommy. I touch the skirt and let it go.

  Ruby is on a no-carb diet, in addition to being a vegetarian. The vegetarian thing is definitely about not wanting to eat things with a face that you cuddle, but the no-carb thing is all about the prom, I suspect.

  Ruby, Rio, and I sit down to dinner: rice and tuna sashimi from the market in the basement of the metro station.

  “Where’s Dad?” Ruby asks.

  “Working lat
e,” I say.

  “Aren’t you glad we all came here so we could have family dinners together?” she says, sarcasm dripping.

  Ruby recounts her challenging day with mean girls at the American school. “I was a mean girl in Paris,” she admits. “Then we moved back to LA and I got dumped by all my friends back home.”

  Rio recounts middle school social architecture: There were the blondes and the nonblondes, and the subgroup of nonblondes: Asians and geeks. “I was a geek,” he says.

  Ruby laughs. “You are a geek.”

  When Gee’s here, we talk about school projects, but when it’s just us three, we talk social groups. It’s like we’re best friends. Almost. It’s almost like being home. Her room is almost clean, his math is almost done, my husband is almost home, I’m almost happy.

  After dinner, Ruby coils up on the couch like a kitten, twirling her hair around her finger, sucking her thumb.

  “Stop that,” I scold her.

  “I found a prom dress online. They could ship it,” she says hopefully, getting her laptop to show me.

  It’s a V-neck, halter-top party dress with full skirt that looks like it would be pretty on her. But she’s worried.

  “Nori says prints make you look fat. What do you think?”

  I think she is soft and beautiful and that she should wear what she wants, but high school isn’t that simple. Neither is living in Tokyo. It’s hard to find clothes that fit American bodies. It’s dangerous to buy a prom dress online, I say, offering to take her shopping instead. Relief spreads across her face; she is still my baby for another nanosecond.

  The international man comes home late, eats leftovers, and climbs into bed next to me. I pretend to be sleeping; he falls asleep instantly, snoring lightly, reminding me of my dog, Chandler, who is home in Los Angeles with Andra. Princely Chandler. Who is getting old while we are away. My dog’s getting old, I think. Limping, farting, slowpoking old. I turn on the light and jot that line in my journal. Then I scribble “old dogs” and underline it. I’ll write more tomorrow. I curl up next to Gee, rub a strand of his hair back and forth between my thumb and index finger, and close my eyes. I don’t know where I am from one year to the next, but for now this man is my home. Sometimes it’s enough. Almost.

  It’s that time again, of boxes and lists, organizing my life into piles. The things I need to take with me on the plane: laptop, favorite jeans, a bathing suit, T-shirts and sweats, driver’s license. The things that can be shipped: art, books, puffy down jacket, and gloves. Travelogues on Japan can be given away. Or can they? There’s a rumor floating about our possibly coming back in a year or two. Do I pack my navy suit or ship it by sea? What I mean is, how long can I wait before looking for work? And does it fit anyway? Sushi is fattening. No one told me that. Maybe it wasn’t the sushi; maybe it was the ramen. Here’s a list of stuff I want to do or get before I go: buy chopsticks, and T-shirts in Kanji; visit a stone spa, lie on hot rocks, and sweat. Detox. Say goodbye to teachers and students and my one tagalong friend, Veda from Atlanta, whom I’ll probably never see again. Host the American-style barbecue I’ve been promising for Aiko, Mebae, and Terada, the Japanese ladies who taught me how to cook that cucumber thing with warts.

  I want to tell people in LA we’re heading back, but I get stuck on the verbiage: Am I coming (or going) home? Coming or going? Is LA my home or a stopgap between one relocation and the next? I have a home in Los Angeles, but I’m not at home there anymore. How many going-away parties can you throw—sushi, sake, sayonara, baby!—and still be missed? How many birthdays, bar mitzvahs, and graduations can you not attend before you aren’t even invited at all? I’m that old friend my parents had when we were growing up, the guy who did business in the Orient (that’s what they called it back then) and married a Japanese woman. For a few years, they came to dinner whenever they were in town, he and the wife, delicate and shy, but then we lost track of his comings and goings. He wasn’t at my sister’s wedding or my father’s funeral. He fell off the radar. I’m that guy. I don’t even remember his name anymore.

  CRACK ME OPEN

  Crack me open, and there’s a D tattooed on my heart and a map in the shape of a mitten, Great Lakes coursing through my veins. Motown albums next to Eminem CDs. A ticket stub from Patti Smith at the Second Chance Bar in Ann Arbor, where I hung so close to the stage that her spit hit my cheek. A frayed Michigan T-shirt belonging to that guy who lived on the third floor of my dorm freshman year, whose name I’ve forgotten. A string of music-industry jobs taped together with bumper stickers, designed by Andra and me, radio “it” girls—her in stilettos, me in leather. She was the sexy one, but I had swagger, a sassy hip sway you could recognize from behind. Not to be mistaken for a limp, ever.

  This walk of mine is the result of a childhood accident. I was climbing a cement planter, when it fell on me. The handyman who was cleaning the windows warned me not to climb on the flower box, but I didn’t listen to him and there was no one else watching us—me and the girl next door, whose name I do remember, but I’m not gonna mention it because her mother threatened to sue mine after the accident. And all she had were a few bruises! I was the one who wound up in the hospital. In a surge of adrenaline, the kind you see in the movies and think never happens in real life, the handyman lifted the concrete and someone pulled us out from under it. Later, when my mom hired the handyman to come back and remove the flower box, he couldn’t budge it. It had to be busted up into pieces. Fortunately, I was only busted up, not in pieces.

  My recovery was documented in black-and-white stills and home movies. There’s a picture of me, my leg in traction, surrounded by a stuffed-animal zoo. Lions and tigers and monkeys hanging off the bar I used to hoist myself up and greet guests. The room was filled with a steady stream of well-wishers and an embarrassing amount of gifts for a five-year-old with only one friend, the girl next door. She didn’t come to see me. But my grandmother had been a longtime volunteer at the hospital, so I was a legacy patient, showered with visits and presents from all the old bubbes. My mom made me give away most of the toys and stuffed animals to other kids in the hospital when, two months later, I went home in an ambulance. That was the only way to move me—I was in a full-body cast that extended from my armpits to my toes on one side and down my thigh to my knee on the other. My mom had a hospital bed installed in our breakfast room, where my siblings would hang out, pretending my cast was a table while eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on my plaster torso. Okay, that’s not true, but it makes for a good image.

  Here’s what is true. There’s a home movie of me on the deck of my dad’s motorboat, surrounded by Rat Pack–y men and women in wide-brimmed straw hats, Italian-movie-star pretty, holding cocktails and smoking cigarettes. My sister pretends to be camera shy while my brother makes silly faces, hooking his index fingers into the corners of his mouth to stretch his lips, tilting his head to the side, and crossing his eyes. Then the camera pans to me, a papier-mâché kid wearing nothing but a pair of plastic sunglasses, spatchcocked on the deck like a Thanksgiving turkey, no life jacket.

  What if there was a wave?

  That’s what I was thinking when my mom pulled out the home movies to show Gee and the kids. We were on home leave from Paris. “Home leave”—that’s Tagalong for taking your vacation in your home country. We couldn’t go “home” to Los Angeles because our house had been rented to a bunch of twentysomethings with Indian bedspreads tacked to the walls and mattresses on the floor. So we went to Detroit instead. My mom broke out the movies, and everyone waxed nostalgic about the good old days. Everyone except me.

  I was struck by how many things were wrong with that film footage. First, how did they even get me on the boat? They must have thrown me in the back of a station wagon and prayed they didn’t have to brake fast. And then what if I’d had to go pee? Hold my cocktail for a minute, Nan. I need to get a bedpan for the kid. What kind of parents drag a plaster-cast child on a boat outing? That’s what adult me wants to know
. One big wave, and I would have slid overboard and sunk to the bottom of the lake like an anchor.

  “Why did you take me on the boat?” I asked my mother after we watched the movies. I was having a glass of wine while Gee put the kids to sleep. My mom was sitting on the living room couch, drinking a vodka, straight-up, no ice. She was wearing a kaftan, chunky jewelry, her blondish hair cropped close to her head.

  “Oh, Emma,” she said with a sigh, as if it was so obvious it needed no explanation: “You wanted to tag along.”

  My head nodded yes, of course, little broken sparrow didn’t want to be left behind. It made perfect sense. No kid wants to lie in bed alone all summer long while everyone else is outdoors, playing hopscotch. But the tagalong spouse in me shook her head no, not buying it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be left behind; I wasn’t the decision maker. I was only five years old. It was that my dad didn’t want to sacrifice a glorious day on the water because of his clumsy kid with a broken leg. And, to his point, the summers are short in Detroit. You spend all year fantasizing about that one perfect boating day. Like girls and weddings. Only I’m not the kind of girl who dreamed about wedding dresses and bridal bouquets. I dreamt about leather jackets and bands on tour. A corner office and rocker-chick cool. Music was more important than boys. It was the language through which I experienced life.

  I grew up in the Motor City; it made me wanna holler. Made me wanna get up and dance. Made me wanna prance and pose and preen from the moment I held a cheap plastic guitar in my hand and played along with my big sister’s rock ’n’ roll singles. It seemed as though the very air we breathed was filled with Motown grooves and pop hooks. We listened to vinyl records and waited, in screaming anticipation, for bands to come through town.