by Kyoko Mori
“I don’t blame you for being upset,” I said. “But Tom and Catherine will invite us again. I don’t want to keep telling them that you’re sick. They’ll think you’re a total invalid.”
He didn’t laugh. “Then tell them I don’t want to see them because they’re snobs. If you’re so interested in being honest, that’s what you should say.”
I MADE ONE STAB AT HONESTY the following spring, when I was having dinner with Tom and Catherine at their house.
“I can’t imagine being in this town without you,” Catherine said in the middle of dinner. “I know we’re going to be friends for life.”
She and I had been meeting for coffee every week at the same cafe in the mall. I was mesmerized by the stories of her childhood. Her mother had constantly put her down—calling her fat and stupid—and her father had beaten her with a belt. She had divorced her first husband, who was English, and married Tom so she could stay as far away as possible from her parents, but now that she had her green card, she was bored with him. Once she’d turned her dissertation into a book, she might look for a job “at a real research university, not at a rinky-dink place like this.” A man she’d met at an academic conference had started calling her. “He’s married, too,” Catherine said, “and has three small kids, so things can get a little sticky. He’s beautiful, though. We were undressing each other with our eyes the whole time I was having a drink with him and his friends.”
As Catherine and I walked around the shopping mall, heads turned our way, and for once, no one even noticed me. Unlike the people who stared at me, those who couldn’t stop looking at Catherine were all men; they narrowed their eyes appreciatively and smiled. She smiled back, turned to me, rolled her eyes, and whispered, “Men are such pigs,” in a small bright voice that was equal parts delight and disgust. I floated beside her like a peasant boy in a fairy tale with a magic cape that allowed him to disappear whenever he put it on. Safe in my invisibility, I walked, talked, even laughed. My plainness set off Catherine’s beauty, but it also protected her. So long as she could tell me how bored she was, she could stay where she was with Tom instead of running off with a married man with three children.
Their dining room was decorated with the photographs Tom had taken: close-ups of her face, a shot of her in a mini-dress leaning against their car, another in a low-cut evening gown. The whole apartment was a shrine to her beauty. I couldn’t picture her living anywhere else.
“I’m really glad we met, too,” I said to her across the dinner table and she smiled back.
Tom piped up, “I’m sorry Chuck couldn’t make it. Catherine and I really like him. Too bad he’s sick so often.”
I stared down at the vegetarian lasagna he had made for me. He had no idea what his wife had told me. When our eyes met but I didn’t say how sorry I was, too, he frowned and the lines around his mouth deepened. I had been to their house several times by then, without Chuck. Catherine and I were thirty-two. “Friends for life” meant the next forty, fifty years. That was a long time for Chuck to be sick when he really wasn’t.
“You know, Chuck’s not sick,” I blurted out.
They both looked up from their plates but said nothing.
“He didn’t want to come because he doesn’t feel so comfortable with you guys.”
“What do you mean?” Tom asked.
“When we were both here back in October, we talked about Green Bay, remember? Well, Chuck grew up here. I told you before you met him the first time. Anyway, he felt kind of defensive.”
“But we didn’t mean anything about him. We know he’s not like the rest of those people,” Catherine said.
“If it bothered him, he should have said something,” Tom added.
“He didn’t want to make a big deal out of it,” I explained. “He didn’t know you guys well enough to argue with.”
Catherine put down her fork and squinted at me.
“I don’t think Chuck’s ever going to come here,” I continued, “but maybe that’s okay. You’re my friends. You can invite me by myself. Then I won’t have to keep making excuses for him.”
We finished the meal in silence before Tom and Catherine got up and went to the kitchen. They didn’t come back for a long time. Finally, I left the table and went looking for them.
“We wish you hadn’t told us all that stuff,” Tom said. He and Catherine were standing at the counter. They hadn’t loaded the dishwasher or started the coffee.
“About Chuck?” I asked foolishly. “Yeah,” Catherine said.
“Now we feel weird about him.”
“We had no idea he didn’t like us,” Tom said.
“I’m sorry,” I offered. “But I didn’t want to keep pretending he was sick.”
Tom and Catherine never invited me to their house again. I left messages on their machine, asking Catherine to meet me so we could talk things over, but she didn’t respond. After telling me all her secrets, she couldn’t accept the single truth I’d revealed. Early in our acquaintance, we had stopped at my house on our way back from the cafe because she said she was eager to see the sweaters I’d made. As soon as I took a few pullovers from my dresser and held them toward her, though, she started sneezing. “I’m really allergic,” she’d said, gasping and wheezing and scratching at her arms. What was harmless, even comforting, to me was poison to her, but she could have warned me. It was unfair for her to ask to see my clothes that would make her sick, or say we were friends for life so I’d feel obligated to share the truth she couldn’t tolerate.
Chuck might have been relieved, then amused, to hear how she and Tom had been dumbstruck by his dislike and hidden out in the kitchen. The failure of my friendship with them could have put us back on the same side. But if I started talking about Catherine, I would start crying. Chuck would criticize and make fun of her, and I would feel angrier with him than with her. In spite of everything, I missed her. I was stunned to realize how lonely I had been.
I no longer told Chuck how hurt I was when my colleagues acted sexist and patronizing, because every time I’d come home upset during my first semester, he’d scowled and mumbled, “What did you expect?” He hadn’t moved back to his hometown for my job to hear me complain. Instead of consoling me, he speculated about what I might have done to provoke the comment or gesture that upset me. So I stopped confiding in him.
Now, when other new people on the faculty invited us to dinners and parties, Chuck always gave the same excuses: he was tired, he was busy, he’d rather stay home and read. I went alone and was relieved that he hadn’t come along. Practically all the new people made fun of Green Bay. Unlike the older professors who’d been raised in the Midwest, most of the new assistant professors had grown up out east. They were bitterly disappointed to be stranded in Green Bay. I couldn’t say to Chuck, “You shouldn’t write off all the new people. They’re not like Tom and Catherine.” Actually, they were worse—Tom was from a working-class Polish neighborhood on Chicago’s south side and Catherine from an impoverished coal-mining town in Wales. At least they hadn’t talked about their favorite restaurants in New York, the summer resorts on Cape Cod. The City, the new people said, or the Cape, as though there were no other cities or capes on the entire U. S. map. Even I cringed at their snobbishness, but I had no one else to spend time with. I said to Chuck, “You don’t have to come with me. You probably wouldn’t like these people. I understand.”
“Good,” he replied. “I never thought we had to socialize together.”
“I hope you don’t mind if I go. I don’t have old friends like you do.”
“That’s up to you,” he said stiffly. “I don’t care who you’re friends with.”
Sitting alone among the new couples, I told sarcastic stories about the strangers who stared at me and practiced the few Japanese phrases they knew. People in Green Bay couldn’t get over the fact that I was an English professor. “You mean you teach English to Americans? Well, I guess that’s all right. You do speak pretty good,” they said
. Every time I heard someone say good instead of well, or borrow when they meant lend (“Can you borrow me a pen?”), I wanted to leave town and never come back. My new friends chuckled approvingly and added their own anecdotes. Driving home from their houses, I felt like a comedian on late-night TV. But when I got home, I didn’t feel any more like myself.
TIRED OF WORKING AS A HOSPITAL NURSE, Katie decided to go back to school to become a counselor. She and Dean rented out the schoolhouse and moved to Albuquerque. Now, Chuck and I had no mutual friends left. Neither of us liked to plan outings, so we only went anywhere when our separate friends were in charge. Every six months or so, we resolved to “do more things” or “make some plans,” only to revisit the same round of restaurants, see the few decent movies and bands that played in Green Bay, and decide it was easier to stay home.
After dinner, I got out my knitting while he chose a movie for us to watch. We sat side by side on the couch with Dorian and the knitting on my lap. One winter, we watched all the episodes of “Twin Peaks” we had recorded. When we were done, Chuck decided we should watch the PBS Civil War series. When we got to the grainy photographs of the field hospitals where soldiers were getting their legs amputated, I told him the documentary was too violent to watch after dinner.
“How could this be any worse than ‘Twin Peaks’?” Chuck asked, pointing to the scene of the amputations at which he had paused the tape. “Even the people who were alive then are dead now.”
“But this was real and ‘Twin Peaks’ was make believe,” I told him.
“This picture is only in black and white.”
“That makes no difference.”
We laughed and argued. Our ability to argue good-naturedly, we still believed, made us special among the couples we knew. The fight about the macramé owls had been a huge exception. Most of our disagreements ended with one of us saying, “Let’s talk about this later.” We were able to stop so easily because we only argued about things that didn’t matter: what to watch on TV, whom to vote for on the city council, which one of us should stay home to meet with the plumber. About as personal as it ever got was when one of us didn’t like the other’s favorite book or movie and made fun of it. We didn’t consider why we were being so cruel, why we bothered to criticize so harshly. “I’m not being personal,” I claimed. “I’m only being honest,” he insisted. “Well, we can agree to disagree then,” we concluded. Though I complained about the amputation photographs, I didn’t confide in Chuck about what really frightened me: the prospect of spending the rest of my life in his hometown and failing to make something more of myself than a small-town English professor.
In the few months Catherine and I had been friends, I had told her more about my childhood memories and current worries than I had ever revealed to Chuck, but it still hadn’t been an equal exchange. I offered her a few of my stories because she had confided in me first, talking about her parents’ abuse without any prompting from me. After so many years away from Japan, I was no longer completely secretive about my mother’s suicide or my father’s remarriage but, to most people, I only gave the basic facts and quickly concluded with, “But all this was a long time ago.” Catherine had emphasized her anger and bewilderment instead of downplaying them, making them loom so large that I could present my stories as small tokens in return. Still, I had never initiated a painful conversation or an exchange of confidences with her or anyone. Even with my mother it was this way. She told me she had wasted her life and I responded, was responding still. I had grown up to be exactly who I was the day she died, a person who kept everything to herself.
In the 1930s, an anonymous contributor to The Atlantic Monthly complained that when a woman brought out her knitting, a man felt bored and shut out. As the couple sat together, the woman silently counted her stitches instead of talking to her mate. “She is absorbed by an occupation he cannot share. She is in a sanctuary where he cannot follow.” Fifty years later, as I sat next to Chuck, I was doing the same thing. My fingers repeated the same stitches over and over, knit, purl, knit, purl—an endless string of zero’s.
My knitting and my writing were the only things I really cared about. Every afternoon in my basement studio, I was puzzling out the stories and beginning to understand what it was like to be my grandfather when he walked through the rice paddies his family had lost, my mother when she decided she was freeing me through her death rather than abandoning me, or even myself, had I been brave enough to stay and grieve for Takako instead of running away. The things I’d made up—the pictures my character drew of her mother’s dresses, the vest she sewed from her grandmother’s old kimonos—were intertwined with the memories I wanted to keep from my childhood. I was stitching my past into the stories for safekeeping.
But I never told Chuck what I was writing. Although I hoped to publish the stories someday, I was still struggling to understand what they meant to me. I couldn’t sit at my desk and scrutinize my past, both the beauty and the pain, unless my everyday life was like a period of rest after a hard run. I couldn’t live with someone who asked about my writing and demanded to share my thoughts.
Like the spy knitting in plain sight, I was hiding my secrets in my balls of yarn. Knitting was a pantomime of writing. In both, I longed to make a seamless whole—to combine fact and fiction, imagination and memory, color and texture, beauty and form, repetition and invention. But in the rest of my life, I only knew how to keep things separate: my job, my writing, my marriage, my past, my present, all like pieces of cloth cut up beyond repair. Chuck gave me the steady everyday life that counter-balanced my writing, but he could only do that by not knowing the truth. I was turning him into what he said his parents were: boring and harmless, a person who left me alone. How could he forgive me if he knew?
He restarted the tape, setting in motion more pictures from the war that had nothing to do with my past. “Have it your way,” I said with an exaggerated sigh, pretending to give in. My fingers slid back and forth over the yarn, and the stitches kept multiplying.
Shawls
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY in Europe, wearing a shawl gracefully was considered a mark of good breeding. Even rich women lived in poorly insulated houses, and the Empire-style dresses of the period were thin and low cut. In England, knitting lace shawls became a popular hobby among the leisured ladies who sat all day in their drawing rooms.
Lace is produced by deliberately creating holes in the fabric, by knitting two stitches together and looping the yarn over the needle to make another stitch. The holes are repeated at regular intervals to form scallop shells, frost flowers, trellises, peacock feathers, maple leaves, waterfalls, and so on. Lace requires very fine yarn, and the yarn-over stitch is not firmly anchored in the stitch in the previous row, so it’s easy to snag and tear. Only well-to-do women could wear lace shawls or knit them as a hobby.
Young English ladies were taught to hold their right-hand needle daintily and unsteadily like a pen instead of grasping it firmly under the palm. Lace-knitting was supposed to show off their pretty hands and downcast eyes to any suitor sitting nearby. Like the flower arrangement and tea ceremony lessons my friends took in Japan in the 1970s, knitting prepared a woman for marriage. Downcast eyes were popular in our century, too. An article I read in a teen magazine said we should look at a boy’s throat while he was talking to us so he would be smitten by our modest downcast eyes. This advice was accompanied by instructions—complete with a diagram—on how to put on mascara, eyeliner, and eye shadow.
If I had to look at a boy’s throat instead of his face, how would I know when he was finished speaking? Even if his voice had trailed off, maybe he was only pausing to collect his thoughts. Without eye contact, a face-to-face conversation was no better than a phone call. I wondered how anyone could read advice like this and not feel hopeless. I gave up on the makeup because I couldn’t close my eyes and still see where the eye shadow should go. Short of making a life-size copy of the diagram and holding it up to my face like a stenci
l, the whole maneuver was physically impossible.
Since I attended an all-girls school, there were only two boys my age I ever talked to—brothers who used to live next door to my family until the younger of them, Tadashi, and I were ten. Our mothers had stayed friends beyond the move, and because their father, Mr. Kuzuha, worked with mine, they were among the few old friends I was allowed to see after my mother’s death. When I visited their house, their mother cried and reminisced about Takako. I listened to music, watched TV, and played cards or board games with Tadashi and Makoto, who had grown up seeing my mother every day. At their house, I could mention her any time I felt like it. “Remember that hike we went on when it got really foggy? My mother was sure she knew the way but we were actually walking around in circles?” I could ask, and the boys would nod. “When the fog cleared, we were standing almost exactly where we’d started out and she was the first to laugh about it.” “Yeah,” one of them might answer. “We sure got lost a lot when we went anywhere with your mom.”
Tadashi had spent two weeks at my grandparents’ house one summer with my mother, brother, and me. Wherever we were, he was my ally growing up. Makoto, three years older, tried to boss us around, but I sympathized with him, too, for being the older of two children. Between the brothers, I was an honorary middle child, a peacemaker instead of the outcast I had become at home. After Takako’s death, Tadashi and Makoto were more like my brothers than Jumpei, who followed Michiko around as though she were his real mother. I couldn’t imagine not looking them in the eye as we talked. If I stared at their throats instead, they would think I’d lost my mind.
Michiko must have known how important the brothers were to me. When I was sixteen, she told my father that their mother had discovered me writing love letters to Makoto’s roommate at college—a boy I’d only met once at their house and whose face I could not even remember. Hiroshi believed her lie and never asked me about the supposed letters. He just said I was no longer allowed to see the family.