by Kyoko Mori
WHEN I WENT TO JAPAN on my sabbatical trip, I was planning to start a novel about my family’s experiences during World War II. I came back with pages of journal entries from my conversations with Fuku. No matter how many times I went over them, I couldn’t piece together a novel. I couldn’t even manage a biographical account of Fuku’s struggles as a mother of six in the 1940s. I didn’t know my grandmother well enough to tell her story, real or imagined, that didn’t include me. I had returned to Japan hoping to understand my family as an adult, only to realize that I had become a stranger to them. Except in journals and in school compositions about how I’d spent my summer vacation, I had never written directly about myself, but this story of my trip was about me instead of Fuku, and it could only be told as a memoir.
If I could write the way I cooked or knitted—recreating the same pasta dishes and pullover sweaters with only minor variations—I would have. As much as other people yearned for adventure, I craved stability. The pleasure of following the same recipe or pattern was in noticing the special tang of basil from the garden in late summer or the particular delicacy of lace knitted in the palest shade of pink. I loved those quiet moments when things were almost but not exactly the same. But in writing, the best passages came to me either as a complete surprise—whole sentences effortlessly appearing in the back of my mind—or else they were the result of so many agonized revisions that, later, I couldn’t bear to recall how I’d arrived at the final version. Either way, the not-knowing was the price I had to pay to write the few sentences among many that gave me the most pleasure. Once I got something right, I couldn’t do it again.
After several false starts with the memoir, I began to see how my recent trip was a journey into the long-ago past. Unlike the novel, the memoir made me reflect directly on the events I had glossed over in my mind while I was experiencing them. Instead of moving sideways in a fictional maneuver to examine a situation like the one that had confused and pained me, I now had a chance to re-experience that same situation as time stopped on the page. In the quiet of my studio, under pressure from no one but myself, I could put aside the pretense and the self-delusion and finally examine my own true thoughts and feelings.
But understanding the past didn’t boost my courage to face the future. Every month when I leafed through the national job list from the writers’ organization, I decided my job wasn’t so bad and Green Bay was all right. When Chuck and I couldn’t repair our house, I’d assumed that our passivity was his fault or the pitfall of having to make a joint decision as a couple. As it turned out, I could immobilize myself all on my own. When my writing was going well, I was terrified of jinxing the good streak by attempting even the smallest change in my daily routine; when I hit a snag, I was too preoccupied to think of anything else.
Two summers after our divorce, Dorian died at eighteen, so I no longer stopped at the house on my way in and out of town to drop him off or pick him up. If I came to visit, I called ahead and knocked on the door like any other guest. The cat had been the keeper of our marriage’s afterlife. Although Chuck and I still played tennis and went to dinner, I understood it wouldn’t be forever. I didn’t know what was on the other side of that change, and I didn’t want to find out.
WHAT MOBILIZED ME AT LAST was a series of coincidences I could attribute to fate. I finished my memoir and Michael Collier, the new director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, happened to read it on a plane. When he telephoned and offered me a fellowship I hadn’t applied for, I accepted in surprise.
I had long admired the established writers who were on the faculty that summer, but during the two-week conference, I was too shy to approach them. Most of the other fellows—new writers with one or two books—were from New York or Boston. I ate my meals and took walks with the few others who were from small towns. On the last day, two writers from Cambridge were comparing their favorite places to walk with their daughters and promising to get together. I didn’t know anyone in town, besides Jim, who understood what I did from day to day. When I returned to Green Bay, I couldn’t help feeling that something was lacking.
So when one of the writers from Bread Loaf recommended me for a summer teaching job at the Loft in Minneapolis, I was eager to go. The people at the Loft introduced me to the local writers. In the classes I taught, the students were full-grown adults and very motivated. What I liked the best, though, was that no one looked at me as I ran or walked around the Uptown neighborhood where my apartment was. I couldn’t believe how comfortable it was to be left alone for thirty-one days straight—never stared at or asked to respond to a mangled greeting in Japanese. If I lived in a city, I could just be.
In early August of 1998, when another job list came in the mail, I had just gotten back to Green Bay from Minneapolis. As I read the ad for a five-year lectureship at Harvard to teach nonfiction writing, I remembered the two writers at Bread Loaf discussing their morning strolls around a reservoir. I typed my curriculum vitae, wrote a letter of application, and sent them off. A month later, when the department secretary called and said I should forward my dossier and send my books, I assumed they asked everyone who had applied.
I had attended schools no one had heard of and taught at one that was even more obscure. The only awards I’d ever received were from regional organizations like the Wisconsin Library Association. My dossier had letters from my current colleagues and former teachers in Milwaukee and Rockford. After forwarding it in early September, I heard nothing more about the job. Most schools waited until they made their final choice, then sent out mass mail announcing the result. In the meantime, no news usually meant you were already eliminated.
By the first week of December, if I’d thought about the job at all, it was to wonder where the mass mail was and if I’d remembered to enclose an envelope to get my books back. The message I found on my answering machine one night, asking me to come to Cambridge for an on-campus interview, shocked me. The next morning, when the secretary faxed me the names of the people who would be interviewing me, I realized why I hadn’t gotten eliminated. One of the writers on the search committee had been on the faculty at Bread Loaf the year I was a fellow, so she must have recognized my name and put my application in the pile for further consideration.
There were four five-year lectureships like the one I was applying for, and Henri Cole—a poet I knew from graduate school—was finishing his. I hadn’t wanted to embarrass him by asking about my application. Now that I was coming to town for an interview, though, I thought maybe I should call him. Two days before I left, I finally got around to it.
“I heard you were on the list,” he said right away. “I’m not a part of this search, but they really like you.”
“I didn’t call till now because I didn’t want to bother you,” I said. “I don’t expect you to help me.”
“You don’t need my help,” he said.
“It’s no big deal. I never expected to get this far. There must be a dozen other people who are better qualified.”
“Not anymore. You’re one of the three they’re still considering.”
I was too stunned to speak. The interview was scheduled for only one hour. I wasn’t being asked to teach a class or meet with anyone besides the committee, so I’d assumed this wasn’t yet the final round.
“It’s been a good job for me,” Henri continued. “The students are great, and I’ve had a lot of time to write. If they offered you the job, would you take it?”
“If they made an offer,” I said, “it would be like having a magic wand waved over me to change my life completely.”
“I hope you get your wish then,” Henri said. For the first time since I sent the application, I imagined myself living in a real city and teaching at an Ivy-league school. My apartment felt more cramped and shabby than ever. I had outgrown the modest life I’d made in Green Bay. But it was preposterous to wish for a teaching job at a college I wouldn’t have gotten into as a student. Like a foolish character from the Brothers Grimm, I w
ished I could take back my wish.
IN HIGH SCHOOL, I’d performed so poorly under pressure that my teachers started excusing me from tests and giving me take-home exams. Otherwise, I got nosebleed or migraine headaches, went to the nurse’s office, and fell into deep coma-like sleep I never experienced otherwise. In sports, in the final set of a close volleyball game, I lobbed an underhand serve I could get over the net with everyone watching instead of the killer roundhouse serve I had practiced for hours every week. Even as an adult, I could only win a 10K race by going out so fast that I didn’t have to see my competition after the first mile. If anyone was close enough to make a move in the last mile, I backed off and let her pass—no big deal, I told myself, the other runner cared more about winning.
I didn’t ask Henri who the other two candidates were, because if I knew their names I wouldn’t be able to get on the plane. The only way I could go to a job interview at Harvard was to pretend it was a practice run for the more likely jobs I might apply for in the future. Still, with only two days remaining, it occurred to me to find out more about the people who would be interviewing me. Even my college’s library had their books, so I checked them out to read on the plane. An hour before the interview, I was still skimming through the last one, but the hotel was directly across the street from the interview.
When I walked into the room, I was glad to have read the books. As I shook hands with the people on the committee, I felt less stupid for knowing their work. Surprisingly, I had an answer for every question they asked about my writing and teaching. At the end, the woman who had been at Bread Loaf hugged me instead of shaking my hand. The afternoon we’d met in Middlebury, in front of one of the houses on campus, a bird had flown into a window and fallen on the grass at her feet and she had screamed. That was the only time we actually talked. She must have been impressed to see me pick up that bird and take him back to my room. Most birds that hit their heads either fly away immediately or die in a few days. That bird—an Eastern bluebird—was no exception to the latter, but like a creature from the fairy tales, he had repaid me by making the woman remember me.
“You’ll get the job,” Henri said when I met him for dinner.
I laughed and shook my head.
“I’m staying in town next year to teach at Brandeis,” he added. “It would be nice to be neighbors again.”
The last time we’d lived in the same city, I had inherited his apartment and his furniture when he finished his master’s and moved to New York. The red couch Chuck and I sat on when we decided to move to Green Bay together used to belong to Henri. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad omen.
“You can have my office this time,” Henri offered.
The next day when I got home, the light was blinking on my answering machine. I walked in and played the message, already knowing what it was and not believing it at the same time. The chair of the search committee had left her home number so I could call as soon as possible to accept.
My superiors didn’t try to talk me into staying or offer me a leave of absence so I could come back. I had taught my last fall semester in Green Bay without knowing it. My friends said how much they would miss me, but they had been prepared for my departure. “I didn’t think you were going to stay here,” even Chuck said. I wrote my letter of resignation and delivered it in a daze. The biggest change in my adult felt more like an act of the fates than a move I had chosen and planned for myself—until I started looking for a new home.
THE SEARCH COMMITTEE AT HARVARD, who didn’t seem worried in the least about my giving up a tenured job for a temporary one, had emphasized how difficult it was going to be for me to find an apartment in Cambridge. The week before Christmas, I contacted the three lecturers Henri taught with and asked them where they lived and how much rent or mortgage they paid. I was quizzing strangers over the phone about their finances and living arrangements—during the holiday season, no less—but everyone was eager to tell their story. The woman I’d be replacing was a single mother with a small rental apartment far from campus; she was building a house in Alaska for the summers and didn’t care where she lived the rest of the year. “You should try Somerville,” she said, “where people are more working-class and less snooty.” If I preferred small, working-class towns, I would stay in Green Bay. The next person I talked to, one of the fiction writers, rented an old house on a beach in Cape Cod, two hours away, and slept in his office on the days he taught. He, too, said it was impossible to find anything near Harvard. The other fiction writer, the last to get back to me, told a different story. She had managed to buy a condo near campus even though, at the time, she had a terrible credit record and she was being audited by the IRS. I asked her to put me in touch with her realtor, whose name was Pebble.
Henri lived in a condo in Boston, in a gentrified neighborhood that had once been “marginal.” He, too, thought I should buy rather than rent. After examining the weekly property listings Pebble faxed me, I flew to Cambridge, where it only took a few hours to see all the nine listings in my price range. The first was a studio on the top floor of a four-story brownstone a mile from campus. It was divided into three separate spaces beside the bathroom: a living room, an alcove (a very small bedroom without a closet), and a galley kitchen. The large windows faced the east and overlooked the tops of maple trees. The neighborhood reminded me of Milwaukee’s East Side, with a mix of single houses and brownstones, a grocery store and a cafe around the corner. The other eight listings were lofts and efficiencies with the kitchen appliances crammed into the corner of the one big room. I marked their locations on the map Henri had given me, collected the realtors’ brochures, and took notes, but I couldn’t see living in any of these. Some had high ceilings and others had nice woodwork; one was on the river but the view wasn’t enough. Even my shabby apartment in Green Bay had more than one room.
I asked Pebble to take me back to the first place. This time, I noticed the pansies planted along the walkway to the beveled-glass door of the building, the polished woodwork on the stairway, and inside the tiny apartment, the hardwood floors and the built-in book case. The galley kitchen had roomy cabinets, a peg board, and enough counter space for baking bread or assembling a casserole. While the other listings were in old Victorian houses and small factory buildings that had been cut up into apartments in the 1960s, the studio was in a brownstone—built in the 1920s—that had thirty apartments of various sizes. The space I was standing in was always meant to be exactly what it was: a single person’s home.
Still, I didn’t make an offer right away, as Chuck and I had done in Green Bay. I waited a day and asked to see the apartment one more time with Henri. We even went back to the few others that had a good view or a nice closet, but that first apartment really was the only one I could see living in. There was no reason, then, to keep looking or to quibble over a few thousand dollars with the seller, who insisted on the full listing price. By the time I flew back to Green Bay, I’d met with the mortgage broker, walked through the apartment with a building inspector, and gotten the mortgage application approved and the purchase agreement signed. I called a moving company and set the date for mid-May so I could spend my summer settling in my new home instead of saying good-bye.
TO RAISE MY DOWN PAYMENT, I had sold the land on the ledge where Chuck and I once planned to build a house. I was getting ready to sell my Door County land, too, when Chuck told me he would refinance the house and give me the equity he owed me from our divorce. “Then you can keep your Door County land and still find a place to live out east. I’m planning to visit your summer house someday.”
Instead of waiting or thinking about it or wondering where to go, he called his credit union right away and got the money. If I had sold my Door County land anyway and added the proceeds to the down payment, I could have bought a one-bedroom apartment instead of a tiny studio. But my job in Cambridge was temporary. I had no interest in relocating permanently to the east coast. When my lectureship was over, I would find a ten
ured job in Chicago or Minneapolis and build my log house in Door County. Then I could have a big city life in the Midwest and a retreat in Door County, with the friends I’d already made. For the first time as an adult, I felt decisive and competent: I had a long-range plan instead of staying where I was by default.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE I LEFT, Chuck and his parents took me out to dinner to celebrate. His mother told me I should stay in touch and be sure to visit, and his father said he was proud of me. After they went home, Chuck and I drank coffee in my studio amid the moving boxes, talking till midnight about nothing important. When the time came for him to leave, he said, “I’ll come and visit you out east, so let’s not say good-bye.”
I walked him down the steps, we hugged, and then he drove away. On the cross-country move in my car, the first leg was the reverse of the journey the two of us and Dorian had taken with our boxes and plants when we’d moved to Green Bay. I was traveling backwards, alone. In Milwaukee, I stopped for coffee in our old neighborhood, and in Kenosha, at the Amoco station near where his sister Chris had lived for a year when her children were very young. I was in Ohio the next day, where the interstate was called “the turnpike,” before I knew, for certain, that I had left our old life and was on my own now.