by Kyoko Mori
On the days I didn’t teach, I sat in my basement studio, trying to write. Since finishing graduate school, I had written several short stories set on the south side of Milwaukee, the working-class neighborhood where I had never lived. Re-reading these stories, I couldn’t believe how bad they were. The characters were stuck in situations that had nothing to do with who they were. Their actions only complicated the already muddled plot. The few details I’d borrowed from real life seemed as implausible as those I’d made up.
I read again the four stories from my dissertation about a family in Japan who had lost their land after World War II. I had written the first during my second year in Milwaukee, when my grandmother Fuku’s letters reminded me of my childhood visits to her house. Hiroshi hadn’t allowed my grandparents to visit or write while I lived in his house. Two years after I came to the States, my grandfather, Takeo, died from a stroke. Fuku described burning incense for his spirit and bringing flowers to his grave. She was only waiting, she said, to join him. I wrote the short story, because I wanted to imagine what her life was like now that she was alone.
Even when I was a child, Fuku used to say that the purpose of our life was to endure our suffering with the help of the ancestral spirits who watched over us so we could be with them at the end. The old woman in the story lit an incense stick and contemplated her own death in the golden image of Buddha. Like Fuku, she took care of her youngest grandson while his mother worked in a factory. But her longing for beauty, her appreciation of the newly hatched cicada on her window screen, the small strawberry red patch on her quilt, the green tree frogs in the rice paddies—all that was more mine and my mother’s.
Takako had sighed impatiently every time her mother made her pessimistic remarks. At the end of our summer visit, when Fuku said she might not live to see us again, Takako laughed at her and said, “Mother, you’re perfectly healthy. You’ll live to be a hundred years old.” Later, when we were alone, Takako complained, “Your grandmother never wears that pretty maroon scarf I sent her because she thinks it’s too bright for her. She’s a great gardener, but she doesn’t really care about beauty. I can’t believe she used to write poetry before the war.”
The old woman in my story was the poet Fuku might have been. I imagined her trying to celebrate her birthday alone and being moved, in spite of her grief, by the blue hydrangeas in her garden and the cicada that left its underground home to fly into the sky. It was the first story I had written about Japan. The other three stories in the dissertation featured the characters who had appeared as memories in the old woman’s story—her husband who had been a former land-owner like my grandfather, her daughter who had chosen death over her unhappy marriage as my mother had done. By writing these stories, I was trying to understand something about my grandparents and my mother beyond what I knew about them as a child, but my imagination hadn’t reached far enough. The characters appeared only in extreme moments of grief, joy, and understanding. The most puzzling of all was the old woman’s granddaughter—a minor character so far—a fierce, all-or-nothing person utterly unlike myself. Ten years after her mother’s death, she sat at a Buddhist ceremony for her mother’s soul, with her back straight and her fingernails polished bright red. Surely, she wouldn’t be so unforgiving. She was a girl who wanted to be a painter.
Write what you know but don’t understand, my teachers had advised. I should have tried harder to understand these characters before moving on to new ones so removed from my experience. I had to go back and follow the family’s story from the beginning to the end instead of skipping around to avoid the difficult parts. Why did the granddaughter want to become a painter after her mother’s death? What comfort did she find in the pictures she painted? She must have wanted to forget as much as she wanted to remember. I wondered how her journey would differ from mine. She didn’t go to a private school. She wouldn’t be able to escape to a foreign country. My character would have to stay in the house where she’d grown up, watching her mother’s perennials blooming without her year after year. What would she realize and accept that I didn’t? That was the real story, the thing I was yet to understand.
Writing more stories about these characters would be like knitting the seamless sweaters I had been reworking: the same basic pattern and yet a possibility for learning something new each time. The four stories I had included in my dissertation would not be the main part of the sequence. I had so far made only the sleeves instead of the body. Now I could start over and knit my way to where the pieces connected.
IF I ONLY LOOKED AT THE MAPLES in the backyard and the garden Chuck and I had started, I could forget that I was living in a city with no downtown. I could write in my basement for hours. Chuck was often away, watching football or playing cards with his high school friends. The group went up to a cabin in the woods every February for their Lost Weekend, a tradition started in high school to get away from mothers and girlfriends. Chuck’s old friends still didn’t socialize as couples, and that was just as well.
During our first month in Green Bay, Chuck and I had stopped at one of their homes to drop off a wedding gift. The friend’s wife had moved in and redecorated the apartment, covering the walls with macramé owls. On our way home in the car, Chuck said, “Wow, she’s really moved in. I can’t believe all that stuff she brought with her.” He was making fun of the decor, so I said that maybe the couple was trying to be ironic. One of my graduate school friends had owned an old Sacred Heart painting in which the paint had cracked around Jesus’ eyes, making him look like he was wearing wire-rimmed glasses. I wondered if the macramé owls were supposed to be funny in a similar way. My comment led to one of the few big fights Chuck and I ever had. As we were pulling into the parking lot behind our apartment, he called me “a fucking elitist,” and I ran out of the car crying. I couldn’t believe how harshly he had criticized me when he was the one who first made fun of the couple’s apartment.
After a few months in Green Bay, where the lawns were decorated with plastic swans and squirrels, miniature windmills and wishing wells, I couldn’t help realizing how truly stupid my remark had been. Only a fraction of the population—the kind of people who studied creative writing at graduate school—bought tacky things at rummage sales as a joke. The rest of the world collected kitsch in earnest. Chuck’s friend and his wife were nothing like my graduate school friends. He worked on the railroad, and she cleaned houses. Their apartment was crammed with cheap new furniture, not the hand-me-downs Chuck and I accumulated which were our versions of the wire-rimmed Jesus (bad on purpose). I couldn’t really have thought his friends were being funny. Those macramé owls scared me. I didn’t want to admit that a couple who covered their walls with them were really my husband’s friends.
So I held up the memory of the Sacred Heart picture like an amulet to ward off his friends, to say that I had nothing to do with people who collected ugly things. My comment was a rejection of Chuck as well as his friends. By making fun of the apartment, he had been trying to remind me that he had more in common with me than with people who shared his background. Ever since he was a teenager he’d felt at odds with his friends, because they were growing up to be like their parents while Chuck read Walden and 1984 and studied Zen. I should have laughed and said, “Come on, those owls aren’t so bad,” then reassured him that, of course, he was different from his friends, but they were nice people, too. But now, there was no way to explain what I’d done wrong without admitting the truth: he was right, I did look down on his friends, and even worse, so did he.
The following summer, another old friend got married and invited us to the reception at the VFW Hall. Chuck didn’t introduce me to anyone while I stood by. After dinner, the men went outside for cigarettes and didn’t come back until the band was starting up. Chuck hadn’t smoked regularly in ten years.
“You just left me alone,” I said when he finally came inside. “You could at least have introduced me.”
“But everyone knows who you are. How h
ard is that to figure out?” he laughed. “You’re a sociable person. You can speak for yourself.” Then he walked away to jam with the band. He knew the musicians and had agreed to play a couple of songs including “Purple Haze” even though that didn’t strike me as an appropriate wedding song.
The men at the reception were working the railroad, construction, and factory jobs Chuck had quit years ago, and the women waited tables, cleaned houses, or did light factory work. I stood on the edge of the conversation, trying to ask an occasional question so no one would think I was stuck up—an “elitist”—though that was not a word Chuck’s friends would use. Since they didn’t read books and we didn’t watch the same TV shows or eat at the same restaurants, there was no fodder for small talk. The VFW hall was in the basement of a bowling alley—a dark, wood-paneled room with no windows. Chuck finished playing “Purple Haze” to a big round of applause and joined the guys standing around the bar. When I went out to the parking lot for air, the sun was still up. I wished Chuck and I had some mutual friends beside Dean and Katie so I wouldn’t always stick out while he blended in.
I THOUGHT THINGS MIGHT CHANGE when my college started hiring new people our age. One of them was an American studies specialist whose wife had a Ph.D. in history. The couple had left Oklahoma, where she was a tenure-track assistant professor and he an adjunct, because our dean had hinted that she, too, could join the faculty as soon as there was an opening in history. In the meantime, she taught at the state university across town and was trying to revise her dissertation into a book. She and I were the same age, she was childless and athletic, and neither of us had any family close by. She had grown up in Wales, attended college in England, and gone to graduate school in Indiana. We ran into each other on campus and went out for coffee.
At a coffee shop in the downtown mall, Catherine and I discussed everything from our exercise routines, favorite books and foods, to childhood memories. I hadn’t talked so much to another woman since graduate school. Katie was quiet—ten, fifteen minutes would go by without either of us saying anything while we knitted or cooked together. With Catherine, there was a new idea, story, or revelation every second. One moment, we would be debating the pros and cons of swimming for exercise, and the next, she’d be telling me about the afternoon her mother made fun of her for looking “big as a whale” in a swimsuit and her father “beat the crap out” of her with a belt for talking back to her. Catherine leaned across the table, her green eyes sparkling, her lips painted bright pink. Her dark hair contrasted with her porcelain complexion. She could never have looked “big as a whale.” She was scarcely five feet tall, though no one would call her “tiny,” either, since she was a body-building champion who had won trophies. In her green spandex top and tight jeans, she looked like a miniature Bionic Woman.
Catherine said she seldom wrote to her parents anymore. She had left home at eighteen, knowing she could never go back.
“I’d as soon shoot myself,” she said. “But I married Tom instead.” She cackled. “Don’t look so shocked. Tom’s okay. We get along.”
I, too, had married Chuck for my visa, but I wouldn’t have told anyone about it in such a flippant way. What Catherine said was unkind; still, I didn’t stop to think about it. Instead, I told her something I hadn’t revealed to anyone.
“The last year of graduate school when I was applying for jobs,” I said, “I had nightmares every night about being back in my parents’ house. I’d rather die, too, than live with them again.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “You and I really understand each other.”
By the time I dropped her off in front of the library, where we’d run into each other three hours earlier, I felt like I’d known her for decades.
“I had coffee with Catherine,” I told Chuck when I came home. “I think we’re going to be good friends. We have a lot in common.”
“How do you know?” he said with a snort. “You just met her. You scarcely know each other.”
Most of his football-watching friends had gone to kindergarten with him, and he had known Dean since the third grade, when they stood on the roof of their elementary school and one of them had asked the other, “Did you know that the universe has no end? What does that really mean?” I’d had a conversation like that with a girl in grade school, too, but I had no idea where she was now. For me, it was Catherine, someone else I scarcely knew, or nobody. The least Chuck could do was help me make new friends.
“Let’s have her and her husband over to dinner,” I suggested. “Then we can both get to know them.”
“Okay,” he said. “If you want.”
Catherine had told me that she was a vegetarian. I was thrilled to cook for someone who ate my kind of food. I made corn-and-avocado enchiladas from The Ananda Cook Book, published by people who manage a meditation center out west.
At dinner, we talked about the house Tom and Catherine had rented and then about the college. Tom was several years older than the rest of us. His hair was grey and his face etched with wrinkles. He dressed like an absent-minded professor from the movies in his white button-down shirt, navy dress pants, brown penny loafers, and tan corduroy blazer with leather elbow patches. His appearance allowed him to fit in at the college, but he was as bewildered as I had been my first semester. He couldn’t believe the prayers the campus chaplain said before our faculty meetings, or the comment the dean made about his wife taking his suit to the dry-cleaner’s. I described how everyone had rushed to pull out my chair and hold up my coat when I was new; then I started repeating all the sexist comments I could remember my colleagues making. Chuck abruptly stood up to clear the table. I hadn’t told him half the things I was regaling Tom and Catherine with.
After putting the dirty dishes in the sink, Chuck stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room instead of coming in. His silence felt like a pocket of cold air, but I kept talking. When I finished the story, Catherine said, “But it’s not just the college. This is the most sexist town I’ve ever lived in. Let me tell you what happened to Tom and me at the Y.”
I suggested moving to the living room. Chuck helped me bring the coffee and the dessert and then sat down in one of the old armchairs we had inherited from his aunt. I took the other armchair so Tom and Catherine could sit together on the couch. When we were settled, Catherine resumed her story. She and Tom had joined the YMCA. When they got their membership cards in the mail, hers had Tom’s last name printed on it even though she had written down her own on the application form. The membership coordinator refused to give her a new card, because she and Tom had a family membership, filed under the husband’s name. “What difference does it make?” the coordinator said. “It’s only a name. Aren’t you happy to be married?” A week later, when they took their cat, Sandburg, to the vet, the receptionist filed the records under Tom’s last name even though Catherine paid the bill with her credit card. “Even Sandburg has to have Tom’s name,” she said indignantly.
Tom said he’d had no idea that four hours north of Chicago, his hometown, he would find a parallel universe of pre-civil-rights prejudices. Their landlord complained that the Vietnamese immigrants were taking all the jobs in town. When a black friend of Tom’s came to visit from Chicago, neighbors gawked at him. “Even Norman, Oklahoma,” he concluded, “was more liberal.”
“Those people are such snobs,” Chuck fumed after they left. “Chicago’s completely segregated, and she’s from a little town in Wales. If a bunch of black people went to her hometown, I’m sure everyone would stare at them, too. They should have stayed in Oklahoma if they liked it better.”
“They’re new and we scarcely know them,” I said, throwing Chuck’s former comment back at him. “We shouldn’t be so quick to judge.”
He couldn’t argue with that, and I was surprised by how smug I felt about defending my new friends.
TOM AND CATHERINE HAD NO IDEA that they had offended Chuck. They thought he was such a nice guy, they couldn’t wait to
invite us to their house. We went a few weeks later and the conversation turned once again to the faults of Green Bay. I tried to change the subject but they didn’t notice. By the time we were drinking our coffee, Chuck wouldn’t meet my eye. He was fidgeting with his cup, then getting up to refill it instead of asking Tom or Catherine to do it. When he came back, he turned his chair sideways and sat facing the wall. Tom and Catherine kept talking.
As we were leaving, Tom said we should go see a movie the following weekend.
“We’ll think about it,” Chuck said. They hugged me at the door. Chuck stepped back so they could only shake his hand.
“You don’t have to go to a movie with them,” I said when we got into the car.
“Believe me, I’m not,” he said. “But you can go. Just tell them I’m sick.” He turned on the ignition and started driving.
“No, I should tell them the truth. I’ll remind them you’re from Green Bay and you don’t want to hear them trash it. I should have said something before we went to their house. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
“What good would it do to talk to them? They’re such arrogant, negative people. I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
Chuck himself did impersonations of the stodgy locals he encountered, like the guy who took offense when Chuck kept eating his bratwurst during the singing of the national anthem at the football stadium, or a fellow teacher who criticized the unfair trading practices of the Japanese and then turned to him with a condescending smile to whisper, “No offense” (“What do you mean?” he had shot back. “I’m not Japanese”). “Only in Green Bay,” he would say at the end of these anecdotes, shaking his head. But he was mocking his hometown while Tom and Catherine—and I—were outsiders.
When Tom and Catherine made fun of Green Bay, I should have said there were a few things I liked about my adopted home. Then I could have defended Chuck and his town without calling attention to him, but I hadn’t been quick or considerate enough to think of it. In fact, I was secretly thrilled by how freely Tom and Catherine criticized, how little they cared about sounding like snobs.