Shizuko's Daughter

by Kyoko Mori

  “I don’t think it’s anything very serious,” the doctor was saying to Yuki. “But he should come in for a checkup.” He turned to Masa. “Are you all right, Mrs. Matsumoto?” he asked. “You must have been frightened.”

  Masa nodded.

  “You’d better take good care of your grandmother, too,” the doctor said to Yuki as he got up.

  “Thanks. I will,” Yuki said. She stood up to show the doctor to the door.

  * * *

  Yuki returned with another glass of water and put it next to Takeo’s futon. He was sleeping now, his face a little flushed, but his breathing easy and even. Yuki and Masa sat on the floor across from each other, leaning over Takeo.

  “I’m going to call home,” Yuki said. “I should tell them that I’m taking the afternoon bus and train instead. I don’t want to leave until Grandpa wakes up and I can talk to him.” She paused. “I forgot about the phone when I saw Grandpa fall. It was like when I was in grade school and you didn’t have a phone. I ran all the way to the doctor’s.”

  “It was as well,” Masa said. “He was here so soon. I almost forgot about the phone too. By the time I tried to call him, you were already on your way.”

  “I told him it was an emergency. He took his motorcycle and made me ride on the back. I think I kept screaming in his ear. My throat feels scratchy.” Yuki touched the edge of Takeo’s futon. “When he was leaving just now, the doctor told me that in the three years he hadn’t seen me, I had come to look more like Mama. He said I was lucky, Mama was so beautiful. He also asked me if I still chased dragonflies and ran into glass screens.” She looked at her watch. “I’d better go call. Then I’m going to pick more strawberries. The doctor and I stepped all over the ones Grandpa picked. You want some, don’t you?”

  Masa nodded, but Yuki had already sprung to her feet and gone out of the room. Masa sat and watched Takeo sleeping. He had fallen forward just when she had been angry at him about his diary entry, almost as though her resentment had tripped him. Masa put her hand on his forehead, which was comfortably cool now. I am sorry, she thought. I know you’ve suffered too. You were picking strawberries for Yuki because you wanted to cheer her up. She moved the water glass closer so he could reach it easily and walked back to the kitchen.

  In the kitchen, now bright with morning light, Yuki was washing the strawberries under the faucet. Masa went and stood beside her at the sink.

  “I’ll take the two o’clock bus,” Yuki said. “Maybe Grandpa will wake up before then. If not, I’ll leave even later.” She stopped the faucet and turned to Masa. In the sink, half of the strawberries were drying in the colander; the other half, with their stems, floated in a large wash basin. “I was scared that Grandpa would never speak again.” She dipped her hands in the basin.

  Masa nodded.

  “I want to tell you something,” Yuki said, her fingers moving the strawberries around in the water. “It’s about Mama.” She glanced at Masa a moment and then looked down at the strawberries. “The afternoon Mama died, I went to my piano lesson after school, like I always did on Wednesdays. Miss Uozumi was late, so her mother let me into their house and asked me to wait. I called Mama to tell her that I was going to be later than usual. It must have been right before she was going to do it.” Yuki paused. “Would you rather if I didn’t talk about this?” Her hands continued to swim in the water among the strawberries.

  “It’s all right. Go on,” Masa said. Her throat felt tight.

  “She sounded kind of strange over the phone,” Yuki said. “Just before she hung up, she said, ‘Be good. You know I love you.’ I could still hear her voice saying that. It was something she might have said on any other day. It’s just the way she said it, like she meant it for more than that one afternoon. It bothered me, the way she said it. But I didn’t go home right away. You know, I even thought about it.”

  “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” Masa said. She knew about regrets. Even now, she stayed awake some nights feeling that she should have prevented her daughter’s death, although she could never think of how.

  “I don’t blame myself,” Yuki said. “Not really. Maybe I would have been too late even if I had left Miss Uozumi’s house then. I know Mama meant to do what she did. If it wasn’t that day, it might have been another time. But what bothers me is something else. When I got home, Mama was unconscious. Soon, she was turning cold. Father came home with the doctor in about a half hour, but she never spoke again. So I had been listening to her voice over the phone but not seeing her. And then a few hours later, I was seeing her body but no voice ever came again. It’s like I can’t remember her whole.” Yuki pulled her hands slowly out of the water. “I remember her voice without her body and her body without her voice. Sometimes, I dream that her voice has been trapped in the telephone line somewhere, and I try but I can’t help her. I just can’t help her.” She stared at her hands. “I wanted so much to help her.” She shook her head and covered her face with her hands, her fingers pressing hard against her eyes.

  Masa fumbled for a towel and handed it to Yuki. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, Yuki.”

  Yuki wiped her face with the towel and looked up. Her eyes were red. “But I didn’t tell you all this so you’d feel sorry for me. What I started to say was that I was sorry.” She dropped the towel on the counter and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. “When I saw Grandpa fall, I thought I might never hear his voice again, just like I won’t hear Mama’s. And I had been so awful to him and to you.”

  Yuki turned away from Masa toward the window. Her shoulders were shaking. Masa remembered the tight feeling in her stomach as she had stood in the yard and watched the small child fall from the chestnut tree into the firemen’s net—and the moment when, frozen in helplessness, she had watched the same child run through the glass screen.

  “I’ve been so awful,” Yuki said, turning back to Masa, “ever since Mama died. I don’t know why. It’s like I just can’t stop being that way. Everything seems so terrible, I don’t know what to do except be awful myself. I’m sorry I said that Mama was a coward. But some days, I’m angry at her. I know she didn’t mean to hurt me. She thought I would be better off without her, somehow. She was wrong. Still, she loved me. I know that, but it’s hard.” Yuki took a deep breath. “I get mad at everything and everyone, even you. I don’t know what for. But I do love you and Grandpa. I think of you all the time in Kobe and miss you. Do you believe me?”

  “Of course I do,” Masa said. She put her hand on Yuki’s back. “I do.”

  Masa drew her closer. Yuki leaned fiercely into her shoulder and hugged her tight. “I’m so sorry, Grandma,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Masa said. “It’s all right. I understand.” As Masa patted Yuki’s back, she could feel the hard bones under her T-shirt. Yuki had always been very thin. Masa remembered how small she had looked standing on one of the top branches of the chestnut tree with her arms wrapped around the thick trunk while the firemen were telling her to walk out to the end of the branch and jump. “I can’t move,” she had said at first. “I’m too scared.” Then finally, she teetered to the end of the branch and stepped out into the clear space with nothing below her. It must have felt like a long fall toward the safety of the net. Masa closed her eyes and held her tighter. Yuki’s cheek was warm against her shoulder and her hair smelled of sunlight and early spring.

  8

  GRIEVANCES

  (May 1973)

  Because the doctor’s appointment had been in the morning, Yuki’s stepmother, Hanae, was unable to begin cleaning the house until one o’clock. As always, she started in the kitchen. After she swept and mopped the floor, she polished the stove, the refrigerator, the table, the cabinet. It was important to clean every day. Overnight, dust accumulated on all horizontal surfaces. Fingerprints smudged the refrigerator door because her husband, Hideki, and her stepdaughter, Yuki, never learned to hold the door handle with their fingers cur
led in rather than spread out.

  Some women, she thought as she proceeded to the bathroom, let their houses get dirty for two, three weeks before they got around to cleaning. Yuki’s mother, Shizuko, must have been that kind of woman. When Hanae married Hideki three years ago, Yuki was already thirteen. Yet she had not been instructed in the proper ways to clean the house, to wash the dishes, to write up a shopping list.

  “Whatever did your mother teach you?” Hanae had asked her once.

  “She taught me things you wouldn’t know about,” Yuki had said. “She taught me to draw and paint. She taught me the names of flowers and stories to tell from memory. She knew things no one else knew.”

  “She has not taught you good manners, it seems.”

  “No. What do I want with good manners? Why should I pretend to be nice to people when they don’t like me and I don’t like them? It’s not honest.”

  Yuki had then looked her right in the eyes, something most children were taught never to do.

  Hanae knelt down and ran her fingers over the bathroom floor to pick up the strands of hair that accumulated every day. They were too fine for the broom; wet rags made them stick harder to the tiles. Most of the hair, Hanae saw, was Yuki’s. It was much blacker than her own, each strand almost twice as thick and shiny. Yuki had never been taught to brush her hair properly—with even strokes that made the loose strands collect between the bristles. During their first month together, Hanae had been sickened by the sight of long, tangled hair, in the bathroom, the hallway, even the kitchen. It was a good thing Yuki had cut her hair very short since then.

  After flushing the hair down the toilet, Hanae went back to the kitchen for her bucket and rag. She stopped by the cabinet and squinted at the persimmon belly of the teapot. Six round cups and saucers were arranged in a circle around the pot.

  Hanae had thrown out and replaced everything else in the kitchen to avoid cooking and serving with another woman’s plates and utensils. Her husband had come home just as she was cramming this tea set into a box to carry to the dump.

  He had looked at the china for a long time, hesitating. Finally, he said, “Were you going to throw these away?”

  “Would I pack them like this for any other purpose?”

  “Maybe you should save them. They were her best tea set.”

  He frowned slightly as he said this, never mentioning his dead wife by name. Hanae made no comment.

  “Good pottery like this should be passed on as heirlooms,” Hideki said. “From mother to daughter. You could put them away if you don’t want to see them yourself.”

  Hanae ripped open the box and put the large teapot back on the shelf, not saying a word. She made a point of arranging the cups and saucers around it exactly as they had been.

  “You needn’t display them in the cabinet,” Hideki said. “Why don’t you put them in the attic, where you wouldn’t have to see them?”

  Hanae turned her back to him and began to polish the glass doors of the cabinet. Hideki gave up and went back to his study.

  The attic was already full of one thousand worthless things saved for Yuki. Hanae remembered the first time she went up there, at the end of her first day’s cleaning. She had simply stood in the middle of the attic and stared. First, there were three wooden boxes of the dead woman’s clothes. But that wasn’t all. Other boxes were stacked up along every wall. Each had a label written in a neat feminine handwriting, undoubtedly the dead woman’s: Yuki’s Baby Clothes, Yuki’s Childhood Toys, Yuki’s Crayon Sketches, Yuki’s Music Books, Yuki’s Essays, First Through Third Grade, Yuki’s Watercolors, Fifth and Sixth Grades. Since that first time, Hanae had gone back twice hoping to throw out one thing or another, but each time, she came down without accomplishing a thing. There were so many boxes she didn’t know where to start. It was irritating to see Yuki’s name repeated in the woman’s handwriting, see the order in which everything had been arranged, the logic of it. Hanae couldn’t stay in the attic for more than five minutes without thinking of the eight long years she herself had spent seeing Hideki only in secret. All that time, the woman had had a house to herself, an attic to fill up with all the silly things she felt like saving. The thought made her so angry that soon Hanae gave up the idea of cleaning the attic and avoided going there at all. Some mornings, though, while she cleaned the rest of the house so it was spotless, Hanae felt suffocated by the thought of the dust in the attic above her. The house never felt completely clean. She would go back to all the rooms twice or three times to check every corner. Finding a dustball underneath a bookcase where she had just spent ten minutes cleaning, she could almost see how it had descended from the attic and crept underneath her furniture as soon as her back was turned. Her head spun with rage.

  The tea set had remained in the cabinet because Hanae was not going to add to the dead woman’s collection of things in the attic to be saved for Yuki. Besides, she could not put it out of her sight after her husband had made such a feeble, awkward attempt at saving her feelings—repeating twice that she need not see it herself, as though the dead woman’s tea set might cause her to have any special feelings. That was ridiculous. After all, it was just a pile of old pottery. Still, seeing it again this afternoon made Hanae feel as though a piece of metal was lodged in her rib cage.

  She turned away from the cabinet, grabbed the bucket and the rag, and went back to the bathroom. As she knelt on the floor and squeezed the rag, her knuckles went white and sweat poured down her back. She was thinking about the doctor again.

  He had told her that she would never have a child.

  “I’m afraid,” he had said, hesitating as though he was embarrassed, “that it’s too late. You should have come to see me when your periods became so infrequent.”

  “But that was six years ago,” Hanae had said. “I couldn’t have had a child back then. I didn’t know I would ever be in a position to have his child.”

  The doctor looked away in clear embarrassment. He knew that six years ago, Hanae had not been married.

  As water poured back from the rag into the bucket, Hanae thought of Hideki. Why hadn’t he let her have a child back then? He was already making enough money to help her quit her secretarial job and have his child. Many men with his income had done that rather than divorcing their wives and causing scandals. They kept a second household. It was a perfectly acceptable alternative. Hideki was wrong, Hanae thought, in not having offered her this chance six or seven years ago, when they had been lovers for over two years. Even back then, he could have seen that Shizuko might someday commit suicide. To do such a thing, she must always have been unstable, strange. Why couldn’t he have seen that her life might end in just such a way, leaving him to marry again?

  Instead, he had kept their affair a secret. When Hanae began to miss her periods, he was worried at first that she might be pregnant. He sent her to a clinic in Wakayama, two hours by train, to find out. He didn’t want anyone in town to know in case she was pregnant. But month after month, the test was negative. Soon, he wasn’t worried anymore. When she suggested going to a doctor to see if anything was wrong, he said not to worry, she was perfectly healthy. She had believed him. He had allowed her to turn into a barren woman.

  “There must be something I can still do,” Hanae said to the doctor. “People take medications for that, don’t they, to be able to have children?”

  “I couldn’t recommend that for you, Mrs. Okuda. Treatments like that could take years, and there’s no guarantee that they would work. It might have been different, had you been younger. But you’re thirty-six and you’ve never been pregnant. I’m sure any other doctor will tell you the same thing. Let it be.”

  To her chagrin, Hanae had started crying right in the doctor’s office.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “I suppose you wanted to give your husband a son.”

  Hanae gritted her teeth to stop her crying.

  “If it’s any consolation,” the doctor went on, “most people nowadays t
hink that a daughter is just as good. Especially in Mr. Okuda’s case. I hear that his daughter is exceptionally bright. My girl, you see, goes to the same school as your stepdaughter. She’s a year younger. She really admires Miss Okuda. Last year, when Miss Okuda became the president of her class for the second time, my girl talked of nobody else.”

  Everyone admired Yuki—so bright, so talented. Hanae was sick of the compliments—compliments that implied that she was fortunate to have such an exceptional stepdaughter. Above all, she was sick of not being able to contradict them. She had to thank the admirers with a smile and never let on that she and Yuki hardly spoke to each other.

  She had thanked the doctor as best she could and hurried out of the office.

  As she continued to clean the rest of the downstairs—the bedroom, the living room, Hideki’s study—she couldn’t help repeating in her mind the things that had most annoyed her in the last three years. When she was going up the stairs to clean the rest of the house, she became aware of the dull pain in her jaw and realized that she had been clenching her teeth.

  * * *

  By the time she went into Yuki’s room, it was past four thirty. She always saved Yuki’s room for last, just before she swept down the stairway, mopped the downstairs hallway the second time, and put away her broom, bucket, and rags, all of them thoroughly cleaned.

  As usual, Yuki’s room was clean. The desk top was free of the books and paper she used to leave scattered all over it. Hanae could see that Yuki had dusted the shelves before she went to school. The floor, too, was clear of the clothes and books she used to leave there. Yuki had cleaned the carpet with the small vacuum cleaner kept in the hallway closet. She did this every morning before going to school not because she wanted to learn to clean properly, Hanae felt, but to keep her out of the room as much as possible. Hanae tried the desk drawers. As always, they were locked. Yuki must be keeping the keys in her schoolbag. No matter how carefully she looked through the room, Hanae could never find them.