“Please don’t say anything!”
“Oh, I won’t, your secret is safe with me.” Her hands were folded and resting in the lap of her red linen pants. She looked hungry, most certainly ready to take lunch.
“No, I mean don’t say anything to me.”
“Oh, whoops. I guess it’s too late for that. That little wow just slipped out.”
“Please!”
“How about this. Since we’re in confession mode, how about I make a confession?” She scanned the room. For better or worse, we were alone.
“Okay.” What else could I say? One of the perils of confessing is that one runs the risk of inviting one’s confidante to confess.
She leaned forward and put one hand on either side of her mouth as if mimicking one who is soon to yell and then whispered, “I don’t really like children all that much!” (Did she honestly think she’d been keeping that a secret?) “And if I have to wear that Corduroy costume one more time I’m going to slit my wrists!”
I confess I laughed then for the first time since the young man’s death. Perhaps that’s what she had been intending, I couldn’t tell. Was I self-pitying to have expected silent sympathy, if not a little grief counseling? (I had, after all, demanded her silence. And I had kept her from her lunch.)
While her confession lightened my mood for the moment, my transaction with the seasonal Japanese restaurant worker later that afternoon deepened my despair. I retained a first-person memory of how attractive he had been in years past, and I could, even in the present moment, see that he was an attractive man (his thick hair impossibly lustrous, his eyes so black as to be blue), but I felt nothing in my body. My pulse was faint, my heart sluggish, my thin blood had slowed to a trickle. One did not express one’s loss of feeling outright—one continued to play the role of concerned and interested librarian—but the message I have died a thousand deaths since last we met. I am dead and without desire. was clumsily conveyed.
Soon after, the children’s librarian resigned from her post in order to run a Guatemalan orphanage, making it both difficult for me to confide in her further and tempting to wonder if my confession had sent her running for the border. In truth, she was probably just glad to bequeath the furry, sweat-soaked costume to the next child-loving librarian. Though I imagine she must have, if only for a moment, said a prayer to God, asking that it please not be Mayumi Saito.
* * *
“You know you never say his name,” Siobhan remarked one September evening while we were lingering on the front steps of the library. “Why don’t you ever say his name? Is it a habit left over from your secret-keeping days? You can relax with me, I know everything now, remember?”
“To name is to kill,” I said, though I longed to hear his name uttered. I studied the flecks in the concrete, the nearby soil of the flowerbeds, Siobhan’s sandaled feet; I had adopted his habit of never focusing my gaze on a single object for very long.
“What am I, chopped liver?” she held a hand out and glanced upward as if testing for rain, afraid, I think, I had lost my mind.
“No, definitely bangers and mash. But that’s different, you’re still alive.”
“But he’s already dead! You can’t kill him again, can you?”
“Perhaps not,” I said doubtfully. “But I’d rather not risk it. To be quite honest, I tried never to say his name when he was alive.”
“But why?” I saw her pale green eyes swiftly assess me. Grief must have been cruelly imprinted upon my middle-aged face or in the way I barely held my body upright—my back rounded, my shoulders hunched and drooping, my feet heavier than they had ever been during pregnancy—because she ceased to question me further.
“There’s his memory to consider, you know. It’s a living thing.” It was difficult to convey why I remained so devoted to the memory of a high school student with whom no future for me existed, more difficult still to explain why when he died (and therefore became even less of a prospect) I became more captive still.
“I’m worried about you, your lowness” she blurted out in a shrill voice. When Siobhan was anxious she always grew shrill.
“Pem, that’s not funny anymore,” I sighed.
“Watch it. You’re killin’ me!”
“Ha ha.”
“I’m not joking! If to name is to kill I don’t want to be named either. Funny how all the plants in the world have names but they keep on growin’.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
“You’ve got to get over this.”
“I am. I will. I’ll be all right. It’s just difficult. I was just beginning to cope with his being gone—that was difficult enough—and now I have to cope with him being dead. It’s only been a month or so, for God’s sake. If Nick dropped dead this evening do you think you’d be finished grieving in a month’s time?”
“But Nick’s my husband.”
“Tell me you didn’t just say that.”
“I didn’t just say that. Husband being beside the point, I was referring to time spent with a person.”
“I ought to get going,” I huffed and wiped my brow with my wrist. “God, I loathe this humidity!”
“Did I say the wrong thing?” she asked. “I mean, just sayin’, you only knew him for about six months.”
“Darling, if I could approach my situation with your highly practical sensibility truly I would. Unfortunately the notion of time only worsens matters for me.”
“But have you read the theory about grieving and time? It’s something like, you need a month for every year you were with the person to recover from the loss of them.”
“I believe that was in the context of breakups not corpses, love.” She seemed not to hear me; she was as focused on fixing me as I was on being broken.
“And if you only knew him for six months well that would mean technically you could get over it in two weeks.”
“Pem! You mustn’t continue!”
“Okay, I’ll stop. I’m just worried about you. Maybe because I was in the dark for so long I just don’t get what you’re going through.”
“That is a distinct possibility. In any case, I love you but the Kokeshi King beckons.” I pulled out my running shoes and began to put them on.
“Uh-oh, I know I’ve put my size-ten foot in my mouth when the Kokeshi King beckons.”
“Indeed.” I stood up to go.
“Wait, I almost forgot! I brought you something.” From her worn madras tote bag, Siobhan produced a large bar of imported chocolate. Valrhona dark, not the sort he ever brought me, but still the sight of it was like a hand around my throat.
I smiled the young man’s pained smile and kissed her sun-burnt cheek. “Thank you,” I whispered and then rushed toward the museum path, not wanting to cry in the presence of one so intent on happiness.
* * *
Walking among the statues of women and birds, I thought of the silent pledge I’d made when the young man announced he was leaving: I too will leave this island. If then the idea had been my only solace, now it was what saved me. I decided to honor my pledge. I would put my unmentionable sadness to use. I would board a light aircraft and take to the skies; I would watch the island grow smaller beneath me. I would live in another time zone, sleep in a strange bed, I would stare at indecipherable street signs without straining to read them. I would eat foods I normally only dreamed of in the company of people I loved but rarely saw. I would do what he’d done. I would leave.
Upon arriving at the apartment I locked myself in the bedroom and googled “Japanese language programs.” I clicked on “The Yamada Institute” then “Japanese Language School” then “Clear History.” I was beginning to think I could no longer stay on the island. Yet I had no desire to go to the mainland either. I wanted to go somewhere that felt like home but I was not sure if such a place existed. Japan at least was homey if not
home. There were the many aunts and uncles who had fawned over me as a child and whom I knew would be just as eager to lavish affection upon Maria. I wanted to speak Japanese, to hear the sound of others speaking it. I wanted Japanese ways of thinking and being, I wanted Japanese food, cherry trees, the Pacific Ocean. I wanted life on an island other than the one upon which for the first time I felt stranded.
At eighteen I spent a summer in Tokyo, in part because I had grown up with a coffee table book called Tokyo: The Most Beautiful City in the World. During grade school, I often pored over its color photographs and imagined myself there. My father made arrangements for me to study Japanese while living with a local family during the week and with Aunt Tomoko on weekends. I have never been lonelier than I was in Tokyo, though it was, as the book promised, a beautiful city, and though he never said so, my father was bursting with pride upon my return to England. How he loved to hear me speak Japanese and how deeply disappointed he was (though he never showed it) when I discontinued my studies.
After spending time in a foreign city I was no longer afraid of American cities and moved to New York. How provincial and cozy it seemed to me in contrast to Tokyo—a city made of antique buildings bearing perfectly comprehensible signs in English, its busy streets and many skyscrapers populated by people who spoke English or who were at least accustomed to hearing its alien sounds spoken. It was in this comfy American context that I found myself better able to discover cultures other than my own: the Portuguese-speaking Igreja Católica Apostólica Brasileira where I met Var, next door to the public library where I checked out British novels, across from the Chinese restaurant with its menus printed earnestly in f.o.b. English. It never dawned on me then that New York too was an island. The pattern was set unconsciously.
I felt a new curiosity about death, as if it were a place I had never traveled to, the only place where I might possibly find the young man, a place that might feel like home. This curiosity, which might be more aptly described as longing, collided with my efforts to care for Maria. There was no way to accomplish the two things at once. Between my longing for death and my longing for Japan, the latter seemed the more life-affirming destination.
I stood in the doorway of Var’s room, feeling faint, a bit torn, and watched him carve a sash for his kokeshi. “I’ve got to get off this rock,” I said, using a touch awkwardly the young man’s phrase yet feeling for the first time I understood its meaning. How much larger the impossibility of being with him seemed on this particular island. It was as if he existed somewhere else in the world and if I were to leave the island I might find him.
“Why? What’s wrong?” Var asked. I had at last shocked him into inquiry, though I no longer cared if or what he asked. To make matters worse, he placed his large, soap-scented hand on my shoulder. It had been years since he’d done that. I felt at once disturbed by his return to that old gesture and lulled by its deep familiarity. For a moment we were having one of our vintage, quiet chats that had been a signature of our university years together. When I searched his face for a change, it only looked more familiar and kind, the way it had then. “Is there someone else?” he asked. I thought of confessing to him, in the spirit of honesty or to establish a closeness between us, but decided it was a selfish impulse, that the truth would only wound him unnecessarily. Then again, perhaps he knew already, perhaps he had sensed it and had been waiting for the trouble to pass.
“No,” I sighed, dismayed by the awful truth of my answer. If only there were. The Varian phrase “A day late, a dollar short” floated cloudlike across the sky of my mind and then out of sight. “I want to learn Japanese,” I said. “And I want Maria to learn it too. There are no Japanese here. It’s depressing.” Like me, Var spoke only English and had learned about his dark ancestors from an American university.
“What about Chieko?” he asked.
I sighed again. I suddenly felt very tired and wondered if I truly had the will and stamina it would require to leave the island. “You know what I mean,” I pressed on. “Chieko’s down-island. Besides, even if she lived downstairs, I wouldn’t expect her to be my Japan.” One Japanese British wash-ashore plus one Japanese Brazilian wash-ashore does not a Japantown make.
“I know,” he said sheepishly, as if he had known all along I could not be persuaded and had tried anyway to persuade me, as if he knew that if there had been a Little Tokyo down the road I would still go.
Var consented to Maria and me spending a month in Japan, enrolled in a reputable Japanese language academy, while he stayed behind. We would stay two weeks with my father’s youngest brother Tadashi and two weeks with Aunt Tomoko. To this day I feel grateful to Var for his lack of interference.
It seemed wrong that I should leave the island without first checking on Violet. For all I knew she lay shivering in a bathtub or slumped in a chair, for all I knew she’d taken her own life. But every time I approached the phone I began to shake. More than once I lifted the receiver then dropped it clattering to the floor. If I had known she would call I would have sat calmly by the phone waiting for her ring. Instead I approached the phone repeatedly. I held the receiver intending yet unable to complete the call. Until, as sometimes happens to one in the habit of holding the phone, I pressed the button to engage it and she was there. The phone never rang. It merely acted as a conduit, a tunnel that had always been there waiting for us to enter.
“Mayumi?”
“Violet.” How quickly her voice stilled me.
* * *
When I told her I would soon be leaving for Japan she suggested we meet. I couldn’t refuse. My desire to see her was stronger than my fear.
Her face, very white with a round, red mouth, brought to mind the Japanese flag. She stood leaning against the café, wearing a tan P.I.P. shirt. The cursive lettering, the twin plums on their stem, looked as if someone had drawn them on with a dark chocolate pencil, an edible pencil. Her arms dangled like a girl’s from the cap sleeves.
“You look so thin!” I cried with alarm, even before we embraced and I felt the skeletal fact of her.
“So do you.” I nodded but the weight I’d lost was nothing in comparison.
The café was crowded, clamorous. I felt immediately our choice of such a public location had been a mistake. It was not the time or the place for any confidence. I could see that Violet would not have the opportunity now to say, when did it begin, were you ever going to tell me.
She exercised an excessive amount of politeness upon me, every gesture, every word, another stone she placed on the wall between us. If these stones were her protection she could have them. I would have given her much more had she asked.
“Which table would you prefer?” she asked.
“Anywhere is fine.” She stood in the doorway waiting for me to choose. How many of the people within that small room knew?
The lone waitress burst out of the kitchen like a cuckoo and fluttered over to us. She greeted Violet by name and showed us to a window table.
“Would you and your friend like some water?”
“None for me, thanks, but my friend might like some,” Violet winked. I thought fondly of Siobhan, of my abiding affection for lady winkers.
“No, thank you.” Like a criminal I felt pressure to conform.
“Thanks for coming on such short notice,” she said.
“Don’t be silly. I’d meet you anytime.”
“You would?”
“Yes, I would.”
Violet clasped her hands and tilted her head slightly to one side to rest upon them. She gazed at me as if I were a place in the distance.
“So you’re leaving.”
“Yes. But only for a short time.”
“Let’s hope the weather’s good.”
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
“You don’t really know.”
“Okay.”
“What abou
t your family?”
“I’m bringing my daughter along. The relatives are thrilled. They haven’t seen her since…” I winced at my own mention of traveling with Maria, my living child.
“You’re smart to bring her.”
“Yes, well, she’s only five.”
“I take it your husband isn’t coming. You do still have a husband?”
“Yes, I do. And no, he’s not coming.”
“Still, it’s smart of you to bring her.”
“I don’t feel very smart.”
“Well, you are. I’m the one who was stupid.”
“Violet.”
“Don’t.” She held up her hands.
I ordered a salade Niçoise and she ordered the lamb burger, together we ordered a side of cooked greens; together we experienced a momentary surge of appetite. We ate the greens diligently as if they were medicine but left the rest of the food untouched.
“I have something for you,” she said and set down a small, white box, the sort that typically holds jewelry. My first thought was that she was giving me something of his: a pair of cuff links, a tiny toy, a ring.
“Did you know that my son always wanted to go to Japan?”
“No, I didn’t know that. I had no idea.”
“Ever since he was a little boy he’d wanted to visit every island in the world. But he especially wanted to go to Japan. He loved Kurosawa, he loved Misumi’s Lone Wolf and Cub.”
“But I…” I didn’t want to pick up the box.
“It isn’t much,” she said, picking it up and setting it down again. “It isn’t heavy.”
I had the bitter thought that we were at last having lunch together. And in a restaurant no less. Despite everything, Violet had kept her word.
“So will you do it?” she leaned closer. I had never seen her looking so greedy. I couldn’t answer. I was determined never to cry in her presence. What right had I to sadness in the face of her loss?
“It’s the least you could do for me, you…” she cut across herself.
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Page 25