by Kyoko Mori
Aya had come out of the kitchen and was standing next to Yuki. “Don’t you have anything darker to wear?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Yuki said. She looked at her pale blue dress and remembered how she and her mother had chosen the handwoven material at a craft fair in Kyoto, the same day they had bought a tea set the color of ripe persimmons. “You wanted me to wear blue or gray if I didn’t have anything in black,” she said.
“I meant dark blue,” Aya said.
“You didn’t say.”
“Let’s go back to your room and find something more appropriate.”
Yuki followed her aunt up the stairs. The priest was just arriving. From the stairway landing, she saw him coming into the house with her father. The priest’s black robe ballooned around him and made him look like a buoy riding on the sea. Yuki thought of the musty smells of old cloth, temple burying grounds in the rain. Her father did not look up; he did not notice her standing on the landing. They had scarcely talked since yesterday afternoon when he had told her not to call an ambulance. The doctor he’d brought took one look at her mother and shook his head. It was too late, the doctor said, her mother wasn’t breathing. Yuki tried again to think back to the moment when she had come into the kitchen and found her mother on the floor. No matter how hard she tried, the only thing she was sure of was that her mother’s forehead had been not exactly cold, but not warm anymore after she had opened the windows. Exactly when did she stop breathing? Yuki wondered. Why didn’t I check her breath right away?
Her aunt was waiting. Yuki turned the corner and stepped into her bedroom, across the landing from her mother’s room, where she and her aunt had put away the clothes in the afternoon.
Aya closed the door behind them and motioned for Yuki to turn around. Yuki stood still and felt Aya’s fingers down her back, her forefinger drawing a strong straight line, peeling open the zipper. Yuki stepped out of the dress and sat on the edge of her bed in her white slip while Aya hung up the dress in the closet and quickly examined the other clothes. The hangers squeaked on the metal pole and rattled against one another. Yuki listened to the dry, hollow sounds.
Her throat tightened. There was something utterly humiliating about sitting on the bed nearly naked while her aunt went through her clothes, moving the hangers and opening and shutting the drawers, just as she had gone through her mother’s clothes. Maybe I’ll die too, Yuki thought, and Aunt Aya will pack my clothes just like she did Mama’s. She imagined her clothes folded and crammed inside a wooden box, her scarves and handkerchiefs stacked up in a limp pile to be discarded or given away. Her chest felt as though something sharp was stuck inside.
Aya laid out a white blouse and a gray jumpskirt on the bed. “There. You’d better hurry now. The wake will be starting in a few minutes.”
Yuki sat fingering the hem of the gray jumpskirt. That was the only thing she had in a dark color—part of her school choir outfit. She and her mother had laughed at its ugliness, its drab shapelessness. Yuki watched her aunt close the door on a closetful of brilliant colors, the clothes her mother had made for her. But she’s dead now, and they want me to wear my ugly choir outfit, she thought; maybe they’ll want me to sing, too.
“Shall I stay and help you?” Aya asked.
Yuki shook her head.
“I’ll see you downstairs then. Hurry.”
Aya left the room. Yuki sat and listened to her steps down the staircase. When she couldn’t hear them anymore, she took a deep breath. As she exhaled, the tears she had been holding back began to come out of her eyes. She blinked hard and wiped her face on the pillow. She put her arms through the blouse. From downstairs, the brass bell sounded and the priest’s chanting began. It was interrupted occasionally by the mourners responding in chorus. Their words were inaudible, just a wailing monotone. Yuki finished buttoning the blouse, stood, and stepped into the jumpskirt; but when she pulled it up, she couldn’t bear to zip it—her fingers went cold when she reached in the back, and she wanted to cry again. The wailing continued from below.
Yuki dropped the skirt on the floor and walked to the closet. She pulled open the door and turned on the light switch. The bright colors of her clothes flooded the small, square space. She closed the door behind her and sat on the floor of her closet, her cheeks touching the soft hems of her summer dresses. She pulled her knees up against her chest and covered her ears with cupped hands. Then she looked up and breathed in the colors. She would drown out the wailing chant with their brilliance.
3
TIPTOES
(April 1970)
Her father’s new bride had been in the dressing room for nearly three hours. Yuki stopped outside the door and tried to steady herself. She couldn’t get over the feeling that the floor underneath her was still rocking. She had arrived on the morning train from Tokyo, where she had been living with her aunt Aya since her mother’s death a year earlier. Aya had come with her and was waiting in the coffee shop downstairs.
Yuki hesitated a moment with her hand on the doorknob. She could still taste the sourness of the tangerines she had eaten on the train. She pushed open the door and walked straight toward the window without looking at anything else. The dressing room was on the fifth floor of the hotel where the wedding would take place; from the window, she could see the port of Kobe only six or seven blocks to the south. The early afternoon sunlight cast a sheen on the calm water.
Slowly, Yuki turned toward the bride, who sat in front of the mirror along one of the walls. She had already put on several layers of the wedding kimono—everything but the silver-white outermost layer, which hung on the wooden rack on the opposite wall. The clothes she had worn to the hotel—a brown knit dress, coffee-colored nylons, and black high heels—lay in a heap on a folding chair in the corner. Her hair was pulled back, her head covered with a white towel, and two women from a beauty salon were massaging her face and neck with glossy white face cream.
“Aunt Aya said that I should come and see you,” Yuki said to the bride. “She said you’d probably want to talk to me before the ceremony.”
The beauty salon women stopped massaging the bride’s face and began to wash their hands in the sink by the mirror.
“You’ve never seen anyone getting dressed for a wedding, have you?” the bride said. “Why don’t you stay and watch me for a while? It’s all us girls in here, you see. No man, not even your father, is allowed to see me until I come into the ceremony.”
“Father won’t miss it,” Yuki said. “He doesn’t care that much about clothes and makeup. He used to tell Mama that she made me too many clothes. He said people shouldn’t care too much about their appearances. He’d be bored watching people get dressed for three hours.” Yuki put her hand on the window ledge. She felt dizzy. The metal on the ledge was surprisingly cold.
“You were very fond of your mother, weren’t you?” the bride said. Yuki remained silent. In spite of this, her mother had written in the note she had left on the kitchen table, please believe that I love you.
“There shouldn’t be any hard feelings between us,” the bride was saying. She lifted her long, thin hand to her temple and pushed a stray wisp of her hair back under the towel. Her fingers looked bony and her nails were painted silver. “You’ll probably hear people say all kinds of bad things about me because I was married to your father so soon after your mother’s tragic death. They may even say that I’ve always had my eye on him—that I drove your mother to her death. You know how people talk.”
People will tell you that I’ve done this because I did not love you, her mother had written. Don’t listen to them.
“You shouldn’t believe what they say,” the bride said. “I’ve known your father for a long time because we worked in the same office. But there was nothing between us, and there’s no reason for you to be angry at us. I want all of us to be happy together. Do you understand?”
From the window, Yuki counted the ships in anchor. There were six on the south pier. She rememb
ered the first time her mother had taken her to the port to see the ships. All the way down the pier, Yuki had kept asking, “What are those tall buildings? What are they doing in the water?” At the end of the pier, with nothing between her and the large black and gray shapes but ten yards of shiny water surface, Yuki had realized that these were the very ships she had come to see. They looked nothing like the ships in her picture books, which were colorful triangles and rectangles stacked up together with a single column of smoke coming out at the top. You will no doubt get over this and be a brilliant woman, her mother had written. Don’t let me stop or delay you. I’ll never get over it, Mama, Yuki thought.
“Are you listening to me, Yuki?” the bride said. The beauty salon women began to dab her face with cotton squares drenched in flesh-colored paint. When they were done, the bride’s face and chin were a shade lighter than her neck. Although she was several years younger than Yuki’s mother had been, her skin was tired looking where there was no makeup. Yuki remembered the first time her father had come up to Tokyo with her; that was eight months ago. He had telephoned the night before and said that he was bringing a very pretty woman with large pretty eyes who wanted so much to be Yuki’s friend.
“Of course I’m listening,” Yuki said. She looked away from the window and at the silver-white kimono on the rack, its large sleeves spread out like the wings of a huge bird.
“Will you call me Mother?”
“Yes,” Yuki said. “Mother. But not Mama, like I called my own mama. May I go now?”
“We’ll be happy together, won’t we? And you’ll try to like me?”
“I can’t promise you that,” Yuki said. “I mean about being happy. I don’t think I’ll be happy.” She felt a lump in her throat. The air was heavy with the perfumes of hair oils and makeup. “I have to go. I can’t stand the smell of makeup. I’ll be sick if I stay.” She turned away from the window and ran out of the room.
She ran down the hallway and through the door that led to the stairs. The red wool dress she was wearing made her neck and legs itch. Her father and the bride had bought the dress for her when they had been in Tokyo the second and last time to visit her. “Make sure you wear it to the wedding,” her father had said. Yuki ran down the first flight of stairs and jumped down the last three steps. She held on tighter to her white bead purse as she continued to run. Her mother had made it for her a long time ago. Nobody had objected to her carrying it to the wedding—her father probably didn’t even remember who had made it. He had met her and Aya at the train station and taken them out to breakfast. Nobody had said much, and he had kept looking at his watch. Then he left, saying that he needed to take care of some last-minute things, and Yuki went with her aunt to check into the hotel room where they were to spend the night. In the morning, her aunt would leave for Tokyo and her father and his bride would meet her in the lobby and take her back home. Yuki hadn’t been to the house since her mother’s death. She didn’t want to go back.
After the second flight of stairs, Yuki slowed down to a walk and clasped the purse against her chest. Inside the purse, she was carrying a small picture from her mother’s wedding. It was one of her favorite pictures of her mother; she could see everything without actually looking at the picture. Her father and her mother were standing in front of the main gate of a temple in Kyoto. Her mother had her hand on her father’s forearm and was leaning toward him. “If you look carefully,” she had told Yuki once, “you can tell I was standing on tiptoes and leaning on your father’s arm. The dress I rented turned out to be too long for me, and I didn’t want the hem to drag in the picture. I couldn’t do anything else about it at the last minute. We didn’t have a lot of money then. We got married Western-style because the rentals were so much cheaper that way.”
When she got to the first floor, Yuki walked to another wing of the hotel, where the coffee shop was. The shop was almost empty. Among the white tables and chairs and potted plants with shiny leaves like little palm trees, she could see her aunt Aya sitting by the window. Yuki went to the table and pulled out the chair opposite her. From the window, she could see the tall white buildings of downtown Kobe and the mountains to the north. The sea was on the other side.
“I ran out on her,” Yuki said as she sat down. She set her purse on the empty chair next to her.
Aya put down her coffee. She was wearing a peacock-blue suit, very much like the suit Yuki’s mother used to wear to concerts and plays. Aya was two years younger than Shizuko and just a little taller; they had the same light brown eyes and large hands with broad palms.
“Why did you do that?” Aya’s voice sounded more tired than angry.
“She wanted me to watch her get dressed and have her face done. It was embarrassing. Her other clothes were all over the chair.” Yuki rested her eyes on her aunt’s hands on the table. Finally, the rocking of the floor was going away. “Do you know what I have in my purse? A picture of Mama’s wedding. Do you want to see it?”
“Yuki, please don’t make this more difficult than it is.”
“I want to hear again about when Mama was young, about how she wouldn’t marry the rich man Grandma wanted her to marry. Will you tell me about it again?”
“I don’t know,” Aya said. “This isn’t a very good time for that story. I wish you wouldn’t be so difficult.”
“If you tell me the story again, I’ll behave better for the rest of the day.”
“Will you? You won’t make a fuss during the ceremony? You’ll sit quietly and not talk, or stand up when you’re supposed to be sitting?”
“I promise I’ll be good. But you have to tell me the story nicely. Don’t skip anything. Tell me nice and slow, the way Mama told stories.”
“All right, but you must keep your word now.” Aya leaned forward and sighed. “As you know, this all happened the year after the War, when we lived in the village where your grandma and grandpa are still living. Until that year, our family had been landowners in the village, as far back as anyone could remember. But the land reform had begun. The government people came and made us sell most of our land for next to nothing, to give it to our tenant farmers. You’ve studied this part at school. Maybe it was a good thing for many people, but it wasn’t for us. We were suddenly very poor. Our oldest brother had been killed in the War, and some of us were too young to be much help to our parents.
Your grandma, though, wasn’t completely discouraged. Your mother was now the oldest of us five children and she was seventeen, a good age to marry. So your grandma wanted her to marry the son of the richest family in the next village. She and Grandpa made an arrangement with the man’s parents, who said they would be delighted to have such a good daughter-in-law. This family, too, had been landowners, but most of their land was up in the mountains. It was timberland, so they weren’t required to sell. The government wanted only the rice paddies. Still, the man’s parents thought that landowning families should stick together and help each other. They gave our family some gifts to celebrate the engagement—a white ceremic vase and landscape paintings—and set the date for the wedding. Then Grandma went home and told your mother that she had arranged a splendid match for her. Your mother was furious. She hadn’t been told anything in advance. Grandma was furious also, and she said to your mother, ‘I’ve found such a nice match for you, and this is the thanks I get for it? If you really don’t want to marry the young man, you will have to take these gifts back yourself and tell his family about it. I’m not going to do it for you.’ Grandma never thought she would actually do it. But the next morning, your mother got up early before anyone else was awake to stop her, walked to the landowner’s house, returned the gifts, and told them that if she ever wanted to get married, she would find her own husband.”
Aya took a sip of her coffee and continued, “Later on, your mother told me that she had scarcely slept the night before she took back the gifts. She worried all night, thinking maybe she should accept the match to help us all. But how could she spend her lif
e with a man she had never met? She could never love him. She would be so unhappy. She couldn’t make a sacrifice like that, because she would live to resent it and turn into a bitter person. So she promised herself that she would work hard and help us in every other way, but not by accepting the match.” Aya stopped.
“That’s why my mother came to Kobe to work,” Yuki said. “She couldn’t stay in the village after the news got out about her outrageous behavior. In Kobe, she worked as a secretary for two years. She lived in a little attic room without heat because she was sending home most of her money. Then eventually, she met Father.”
“Yes,” Aya said.
“And Father had tuberculosis and Mama was at the hospital every day with him for a year until he was well again. She didn’t give him up even when people said that he was going to die anyway and she was making a fool of herself. She wouldn’t leave him because they were engaged and she loved him.”
Aya was silent.
“After all that,” Yuki said, “how can Father marry someone else in a year? It isn’t fair. And she’s such a ninny.”
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Aya said.
“But she is,” Yuki insisted. “She wanted us to be happy. She wanted me to watch her get dressed because we were all girls together.” She took a sip from her aunt’s untouched water glass. The water was lukewarm. “After all, you didn’t get married when Uncle died. I heard you tell Mama that you couldn’t even think of such a thing.”
“It’s different for men,” Aya said. “They need someone to take care of the house and their children.”
Neither spoke for a while. Then Aya said, “After this, you won’t see me very often anymore. Your things should arrive on the truck next week.”