She was trying to take me by the hand and lead me to a precipice, to the edge of a darkness I dared not fall into. The image of my small life without the young man was one of a library with its doors locked, or, simpler and more terrifying, that of a book with half its pages missing.
“He’ll come back,” I said with false confidence as I moved toward the trees. But then, unable to leave it at that, I stopped and asked, “What makes you think he won’t?”
“Nothin’. Just that he hasn’t been by in a long time so I’m thinkin’ maybe he’s gone off to college.” His mother must have known but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
“But it’s the middle of the academic year.”
“Okay, or maybe he just moved away. Maybe he got a job on the mainland. I don’t know. I just want you to be prepared for what might happen.”
“I am prepared,” I said, startled by the sound of my own conviction. “I couldn’t be more prepared for his return.”
As Siobhan climbed into her car, I felt a moment of envy for her practical outlook, immediately followed by a surge of pity for her lack of relationship with the young man.
“But what if he never comes back?” she asked once more, her well-tended hands resting gently on the steering wheel. “Or what if he does? Then what?”
“He’ll come back,” I said, my vision of his return now so exact that I felt no need for verification. “And when he does, I’ll be at the ready.”
I said this as if speaking of a storm for which I had long been preparing. My hatches were battened, my provisions set aside; whether the storm was on its way or simply imagined, there was nothing left for me to do but wait.
WINTER
Somewhere the last leaf let go its stem and the snow fell fast upon all of us. The director took down the “Island Memories” calendar and replaced it with “Our Oceans’ Most Endangered Species,” whose local publisher had zealously donated copies for each of the librarians. I went on dutifully making miso and noodles, taking my sly morning walks, I went on ecstatically composing crass questions. I went on processing books with such fixed passion that when at last my young Odysseus returned, I was oblivious to his entry, so engrossed was I in the covering of young adult paperbacks with plastic laminate—my bland, unbeautiful weaving. Unnerving to think that he slipped past while I was smoothing an air bubble out with the bone folder. If it weren’t for Constance Whiting, who softly cleared her throat as she pressed the January issue of Elle like a cold lover to her cashmere bosom, I might never have seen him browsing the DVDs with his startlingly large back to me. Though the library thermostat was set to seventy-six, I felt chill. My many daily observations and nightly recollections notwithstanding, I wasn’t altogether sure it was him.
Beneath his black, unbuttoned coat, he was wearing an unusually filthy white T-shirt untucked, filthy jeans, and a stalwart pair of muddy blond boots. He had the look of a day laborer. His hair was longer, more disheveled than I had ever seen it, and most startling of all, when he turned to the side, was his girth. His chest, his back, his torso, were a man’s. If it was him, he had grown. Anyone who has known a child will recognize the sensation, the absolute shock and disbelief one feels upon encountering a child who has, since your last encounter, changed so drastically that he no longer looks like himself.
Nella shuffled in holding a chocolate bar in one hand, a large bag of cheese puffs in the other, and distractedly surveyed the circulation area. She, who had once been of the “I don’t need a break” variety, seemed to have made a resolution to reverse her previous behavior. Indeed it was the time of year to be resolute. Before she could reach her desk, I intercepted. I appealed to her in as much of a whisper as my excitement would allow. “Help! Is that him? I can’t tell!”
Nella peered over her glasses at the him. She knew exactly who I meant. “Let’s find out.” She quite generously set down her snacks, walked purposefully to the DVD corner and began to straighten Drama, which was adjacent to Comedy, the section in which the youth in question stood browsing. She shifted a chunk of movies decisively from one shelf to another then pulled two DVDs in a rather convincing show and came back. “Dreams really do come true,” she admitted briskly, sat down, and began at once to unwrap her snacks.
Before I could process her report, the young man appeared at the front desk. I felt keenly that the encounter I had been longing for with such fear and trepidation would take place too quickly. I felt the violent onslaught of its ending before it began. There was now no mistaking his face. I was lobotomized by the sight of it. I could not recall a single question from my absurdly long queue nor the appropriate sequence of words one ought to use to greet a patron. Neither did he say hello, which did nothing to help. (I would soon learn that he never spoke first, that the deference of speech was for him a form of politeness, his way of showing that I was to lead. Like a dancer’s pause or a dog’s crumpling to the floor, his silence was an act of submission.) As I tried quickly to take in the latest revisions to his being (the filthy shirt, the broad chest, the manlike flanks, the enormous boots—I learned later he’d been working in his mother’s garden) I also saw the young man I knew (the trembling fingers, the distorting lump, the dark eyes darting from object to object and then at last to meet mine). I wanted to shout with all the joy and fury in my librarian’s heart: I thought I’d never see you again! But instead I said in the lowest voice possible, “Have you ever been to the waterfall?”
He smiled a slightly defensive smile accompanied by a grainy chuckle, as if there might be a trick to my question.
“I don’t know,” he managed (looking back now I see he had to summon at least as much courage as I did!) and then added craggily, “I’ve been to a waterfall. I don’t know if I’ve been to the waterfall,” revealing at once uncertainty and a charming predilection for contradiction.
“Do you like waterfalls?” I asked rather idiotically, my mouth no longer mine but that of some ventriloquist’s dummy.
Quietly, as if I had shamed him into it, he said, “Yeah,” and hung his head in the familiar convict style of the previous October.
In the rush of silence that followed, I saw within myself a cup marked complacency and a cup marked disappointment, the contents of both spilling over. I saw that I had been staring impassively for years at the spectacle of my own pain overflowing, as if at a hideous waterfall. Now I turned my gaze toward the young man. As I spoke to him awkwardly, imperfectly, and yet effectively, saying only what needed to be said and in the hushed tone that was, in truth, rather counterintuitive, if not repellent to me (had I not renounced the library-like setting of my English childhood for the star-spangled vivacity of America?!), I saw that there was within me also an empty cup marked pleasure and I resolved at once to fill it. I refused to be thwarted. I heard myself say, “Tomorrow at 9:15.”
There was a hint of alarm in his eyes and I feared he would ask me the question why? but he did not. I waited for him to answer. The alarm receded like sunlight into the dark of his eyes. Later I would learn that he was seldom good at camouflage but when it came to the concealment of fear he was virtuosic. His look of fear was brief but I caught it and was unnerved by it. Perhaps because I was so frightened myself, I had not imagined I would frighten him. When finally he consented, I wasn’t sure if he had conceded as a minor to an adult’s request or if his answer had been driven by free will.
Having acquiesced, he stood erectly, moved his head back, his chin slightly down, his eyes to the carpet. He took a step back from the counter without taking the films. I pushed them toward him.
“Your movies are due in one week!” I said, now a pert Sybil, desperate to resume a more perfunctory mode.
His face looked drained of blood, a physical change which, though unsettling, did nothing to diminish his beauty. (On the contrary it gave him the look of an invalid, one who does nothing all day but lie in bed and desire.) I felt a double dart of guilt, one for
having ambushed him in public (possibly within earshot of Nella, who, though she showed no signs of having overheard my proposition, had the ears of a bloodhound), another for wishing that he would now get out of my sight so that I might recover in solitude. He grabbed the DVDs and nodded goodbye, as if any further utterance might induce him (or me) to vomit.
His departure was a relief. I felt a stringent need to be counseled which became more stringent still when I realized that it would not be wise to speak of my foray with anyone. I glanced back at Nella who was making a flyer for the Saturday craft. I tried in vain to read her face. It was inscrutable. Her left hand delved noisily into the cavernous bag of puffs while her right hand clicked the mouse. She might have continued these actions for the duration of our encounter, absorbed by her task, or she might have used them as a cover while listening intently. I was no stranger to such tricks of the librarian’s trade.
Of course it mattered little whether Nella had heard me or not. Nella, with her ever scanning yet half-mast eyes, her perpetually cocked ears and her silence, her insistence on a slow pulse, a flat heart rate, her refusal to fret over any library matter, should have been the least of my worries. What my lobe-less brain failed to compute that afternoon (paradox being an inaccessible concept to one as denuded of reason as I had become) was that by reaching out to the young man, I had made myself an island. With each passing minute I drifted further from the main, further from the familiar shore upon which Nella’s hand was partaking once more of the flame-colored pile as she contemplated clip art and fonts for her flyer, upon which Siobhan in the next room, with her long, graceful fingers and their fine, tapered nails, was gently setting still more green cards into the wooden tray in service of those whose desires required additional research, upon which our director, in the basement below me, her energy unflagging as that of a hired horse, stayed late most nights, cataloging new acquisitions, writing grants, making phone calls, paying bills, reassessing the budget, signing off every two weeks on the time sheets that would pay me my due. The shore upon which I too had once occupied myself with the tools of my trade—bone folder, X-Acto knife, scissors, book tape, scotch tape, paper cutter, paper shredder, countless rolls of stickers, and plastic laminate—was swiftly disappearing. I had crossed one chasm only to discover another. Between the receding shore of my former existence and the tiny green earth of my new life rose a dark, watery gulf. But I had yet to discover it. I was stranded in my joy.
When at last my shift was over, I ran to the apartment brimming with happiness. As nonsensical as it may sound, I couldn’t wait to see Maria.
She was in the garden. As soon as I saw her red coat I ran toward it. “Ave Maria!” I cried out.
“Mama!” she shouted. I knelt down and held her. She wriggled away. “Mama! Did you bring me something?” It was my daily habit to bring her a book. In my trembling, lobotomized state, I had forgotten.
“Oh no! I’m sorry, love, I didn’t have time.” My first lie. (I didn’t count the lie I had invented in order to procure an extra fifteen minutes for myself each morning. That was an innocent lie, invented for innocent purposes.) I don’t know why I didn’t simply tell the truth and confess that I’d forgotten. It was the beginning of my use of treachery to establish the appearance of truth.
“But you’re supposed to bring me something!” she whined.
“I know, I know,” I said quickly, too happy to get bogged down. “I’ll bring you two things tomorrow, I promise!” Though as yet I had committed no wrong, my guilt had already ignited in me a need to make reparations.
I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to know why I was happy. It was a stupid and dangerous desire to be sure. I quelled it.
“Will you put me in the tree?” she asked, sensing that I would do virtually anything for her.
“Yes!” I ran with her to the other side of the garden and lifted her onto the lowest branch of her favorite oak tree. A translucent net of fog passed over us, barely visible against the silver sky. “It’s such a lovely afternoon,” I said, squinting up at her. She growled at me, the way she did whenever I spoke to her directly while in fact preoccupied with other thoughts. I growled back and held her ankles. “Maria,” I crooned.
“I’m not Maria. I’m a leaf monkey. That’s a monkey the size of a leaf!”
At the top of the tree, there were three orange leaves, fluttering page-like in the wind. This surprised me for in my unscientific, melancholy state I’d thought every last leaf had fallen to the ground. But these leaves were still alive, their colors vivid as pumpkins. I felt the way I had at age eleven upon walking out of the optometrist’s office for the first time, at last seeing the world as others saw it: a world so crisp and colorful it was cartoonlike, a world with the look of a dream.
I began to climb; my climbing always pleased her. She clapped her hands and then laughed as she lost her balance and then quickly clasped the branch once more. “You look so big!” she observed.
I hoisted myself up to the branch above her and sat astride it. “I’m a big mama.”
“It’s a little tree.”
“It’s not that little.”
“Yes it is,” she insisted. “You’re not that big. The tree is little.”
“Do you always see things as they truly are?” I asked playfully.
She looked off in the direction of the road. “Yes,” she answered gravely. “Yes I do.”
That night in the dark she asked, “Did your mother love you?” We were looking up at the glowing stars that the previous tenant had pasted pell-mell to the ceiling. It was not the first time she had posed this particular question and at bedtime which, in general, was the time that she reserved for her most pressing inquiries about mortality and love. Before I could answer her she said, “I want to be under your arm.” It was a phrase she uttered nightly and always as I slid my arm under her warm body, I felt the urge to correct her sentence—for my arm was under her and not the reverse—but then as I pulled her closer to me, my arm curled and wound its way around her until she was indeed “under my arm.” Nightly I realized her sentence was correct and so was silent. “Did your mother love you?” she asked again.
“When I was a little girl you mean?”
“Yes. When you were a little girl.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose.”
“But she must have loved you. You were her little girl.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Probably you’re right. Probably she did, but I don’t really know for sure.”
“I know she did.”
“Really?” I smiled. “How do you know?”
“Because you love me.”
“You’re right, I do.”
“Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“You love me because I’m here. If I weren’t here, you’d love another child. You love me because I’m here and I’m here because you love me.”
I was silent, not so much because I disagreed but because I had found the less I spoke, the more quickly she fell asleep. “Really!” she said loudly, as if I didn’t believe her.
“Okay,” I said softly and kissed her head, the smell of which after nearly five years still brought me to a new brink of pleasure. “How did you know that?” I asked sincerely.
“I was born knowing a lot of things.”
“Yes, you were.” I wished then, rather selfishly, that I could ask her for the answers to other questions, questions about right and wrong, devotion and happiness, questions about what, if anything, would happen tomorrow between the young man and me. But I said nothing. We lay there for a few minutes in silence, perhaps contemplating together all there was to know in the world, and then her breathing slowed and became more audible. I picked up one of her hands and let it fall.
Sedated by the mere prospect of pleasure, I slept heavily, my subconscious journeying nine hours to some never before seen glitter
ing underworld, a place similar in location and intensity to hell and yet belonging visually and emotionally to heaven. When morning arrived, I swam directly to the surface of my dreams, bypassing countless sensual diversions en route, and burst like someone who has nearly drowned, panting and short of breath, into the bright bedroom air. Reality flooded my lungs like oxygen. I began at once to accomplish my morning duties. The sooner I accomplished them the sooner I would be released. After I had left Maria safely at the nursery, I prepared myself (as I had been taught by both my parents to do) for the worst: snow falling upon an empty street, no cars, no people, no birds, no one, not even a leaf waiting for me, and then I walked to our assigned meeting place.
* * *
It surprised me to find the young man standing on the very corner I had suggested. I could hardly believe that my words from the previous day had produced such an effect; I felt a touch of the conjurer’s power. He was wearing a dark blue hat marked by white snowflakes, the sort with earflaps that one puts on one’s child in winter. He looked heartbreakingly out of place, standing as he was so near to the school bus stop and yet frightfully far from that childhood destination. Part of me wanted to rush forward and warn him against people like myself, against the perils of meeting a stranger in broad daylight on a corner such as this, and part of me couldn’t be trusted.
As I drew near I saw that his eyes were sleepy slits, his upper cheeks puffy as peaches. He had the look of one who is not himself until noon. He smiled the family smile of happiness and pain. I smiled too, a smile that has taken some time to leave me, a smile that I can still retrieve in full.
“You came,” I said.
“I told you I would,” he sounded ever so slightly wounded. The words power differential returned to me and I quickly renewed my efforts at sensitivity.
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Page 6