by Kyoko Mori
“I didn’t think you would remember talking to me.”
“I do. It’s what I remember most about yesterday.”
She can feel his eyes on her face. “I learned to weave from one of my professors. I was her intern the first semester of my senior year, helping her with a big installation she was putting together. We made bags sewn from handwoven materials. They were supposed to look like rocks in a Zen garden.”
Maya can still picture that installation from thirteen years ago. The bags were meant to evoke peacefulness, but they reminded her of bodies. The material was a mix of silk and linen, flecked with gold, yellow, and ocher. It was somber but beautiful on the loom. But once they cut and sewed it, the colors seemed unforgiving. Scattered among the sewn forms her professor, Ruth, placed silk cocoons in small wooden crates. To Maya, the cocoons looked like tiny eggs that would never hatch. The installation made her think of grief without an end. She imagined her father alone in his garage, painting those desert colors and swirls of white light. Day after day, he was still out there, trying to capture his sadness through the shapes on his canvas. No matter how many paintings he finished, his loneliness would never go away, and yet he kept painting. Maya didn’t have that courage.
She could tell which of her friends then would become artists. One of them took pictures of himself and superimposed them over the skyline of Chicago. The expression on his face and the altered sizes of things left no doubt about his feelings. He glared down on the John Hancock Building, where his father lived with his new wife. His foot hovered over the Lincoln Park Zoo, where children were playing. He was a giant of rage; he wasn’t afraid to show that. Maya had been painting meticulously executed landscapes, detailed studies of plants, still lifes with wrinkled cloths blooming with blue shadows. Her work didn’t show how she felt about anything.
The students who were going to be artists didn’t flinch from the things that scared them. If they weren’t painting, they stayed up all night talking about nightmares or death or the end of the world or all the ways in which their parents had let them down. When they turned to Maya, she made a lame joke and waited for someone else to speak. She was thankful to come home to Yuko, Dan, and Scott, who were playing cards, watching TV, and laughing about something. If Yuko talked about the end of the world, it was to crack jokes about what canned fruits she would have in her fallout shelter, which Rolling Stones albums and Jane Austen novels she would add to her doomsday library. She amused her friends with wicked impersonations of the musicians in her garage band. “Those guys are all jerks,” she’d say, “but I don’t care, just so we have a drummer who can keep time.” In the house they shared, even the unexpected disasters were minor and comical, like the time Dan came home drunk and stuck his foot in the rotting step on the porch and it took Maya and Yuko half an hour to get him out.
Soon after she finished working with Ruth, Maya quit spending time with the art students. Then she stopped painting. She already had enough work for her senior show. Although her paintings—a series of small oil landscapes showing unplanted fields, many of them with rocks that rose up to the surface year after year—were voted the second-best student work, she never painted again. With her graduation money from Kay and Bill, she bought a floor loom and a new sewing machine. The jackets, shawls, and vests she made were inspired by the same sadness she saw in her father’s work. Dedicating herself to their modest beauty seemed like the only tribute she could pay him from far away.
Halfway to Peg’s house, Maya is still talking. Eric listens quietly. Even Yuko doesn’t know all the reasons Maya stopped painting and became a weaver. Maya is not sure what she wants from this sudden disclosure to a near stranger, except a form of forgiveness. Her father told her the story of Mary and Martha. When Jesus came to their house, Mary listened quietly to his words while her sister, Martha, bustled about, distracted by a hundred trivial chores. Maya wishes she had remembered that story in her senior year. Becoming a weaver was to be like Martha, who chose busywork over truth: she’d settled for second best when the most important thing was within reach.
“I wish we had met earlier,” Eric says. “You’re the most thoughtful person I’ve met in a long time.”
“That can’t be true. If I were really thoughtful, I wouldn’t have given up so easily. I would have tried to paint like the other students who weren’t afraid to show pain or ugliness. My work was pretty without any depth.”
“Maybe the others were self-indulgent. Being obsessed with pain isn’t the same as being brave.”
“I was running away from the things in my head that scared me. I acted like a coward.” I betrayed my father, Maya thinks. Her father had the courage to take up his pencil every morning and draw pictures of his thoughts. If she had learned to do that too, it would have been like stepping back into the tunnel and meeting him there. At least in her work, she would have found him waiting for her after all those years. Instead, she has chosen the comfort of weaving, the obvious beauty of fabric and beadwork. The garments she makes cover up the sadness he laid bare in his drawings and paintings. Instead of being a tribute to him, her weaving denies the things he valued most. When he showed her his favorite paintings and sculptures in the museums they visited together, he pointed to the subtle shade of blue in the background of a painting or the simple shape of the pedestal at the base of a sculpture. “That’s a brilliant solution because it’s not an easy answer,” he said. Her life without him has been a series of easy answers. Even when she walked out on Kay, she was only making an empty gesture. If she’d cared about the truth, she would have gone back inside the restaurant and confronted her mother.
“You’re not a coward,” Eric says, laying his hand on her arm. “But I know about running away. I’m tired of it too. I’m so glad we met.” She keeps her eyes on the road ahead. None of the snow seems to be sticking, but in the gray light she is not certain.
* * *
Eric’s is the only car in front of Peg and Larry’s house. Maya parks next to it on the grass. “Will you know how to get back? It’s only a couple of turns to the freeway.”
“Yes. I was paying attention this time. I’m going to drive up to see my mother.” He takes his car keys out of his pocket but does not get out. “I want to take you out to dinner for all the trouble. Are you listed in the phone book?”
“Yes, but not under my name.”
“Why? You have a pseudonym?”
“The phone number is listed under Jeff Schiller.”
“Who’s that?”
“My husband.” Blood rushes to Maya’s face. “I guess I forgot to mention him when you asked if I had family nearby.”
They are silent for a few seconds.
“I’m not related to him like I’m related to my mother.”
Eric starts laughing.
“No matter how many times I leave my mother at a restaurant, she won’t stop being my mother. She and I are related whether we like each other or not. That’s not how marriage works.” Maya looks down at her hand. Eric is looking too. “I lost my wedding ring. Maybe I set it somewhere while I was weaving and my cat knocked it down. I decided not to get another one. I don’t need a ring to remind myself that I’m married. My husband and I have our ups and downs like any other couple, but we get along for the most part.”’
“You don’t have to explain. I was married once to a woman I grew up with; we sat next to each other in kindergarten and her dad was my dentist. We got married right after college and moved to Vermont together, and as soon as we were settled there our marriage imploded.” He shakes his head. “She lives with her parents, not far from my mother’s trailer, but I haven’t seen her in years. We said all the things people say about wanting to stay friends. I guess it seldom works out that way. Now I just date women who treat me badly.”
“Sylvia is bad news.”
“I know. I’m not stupid. We only went out twice, counting last night. Someone set us up a couple of months ago, but neither of us got in touch afterw
ard. Then she called me at the last minute to invite me to the party.”
“I thought you were desperately in love with her. She’s so beautiful.”
Eric shrugs. “She made me feel terrible. While I was watching her flirt with everyone else, I started thinking about all the things that are wrong with my life. I hated moving back here last fall. I’m sick of teaching kids who couldn’t care less about art. I haven’t been able to paint, and my father doesn’t recognize me anymore. Last month, he called me Spotty—that’s the name of our dog from twenty years ago, one he ended up having to shoot because he got distemper—and I had to laugh, but cry too. Now I’ve turned into the kind of man bad women choose to pick on. That depressed me no end. So I started drinking and couldn’t remember where I lived.” He stops, his face flushed. “You probably think I’m really messed up.”
Maya puts her hand on the small of his back. “I don’t think that at all,” she says.
They sit without moving. Her gesture seems momentous—till he moves closer and puts his arms around her. It’s an awkward hug, in a small car with the gear shift between them. A head taller than she is, he has to hunch down to reach her. Maya doesn’t pull away. Her cheek pressed against his chest, she can hear a heartbeat and is not sure whether it’s his or her own. He sighs and holds her tighter.
Finally, they pull back. “I’d better leave,” Maya says. “I’m going to drive over to the store. I work in the studio upstairs. That’s where I spend most of my free time.”
“Can I come and see you there sometime?” he asks.
“Yes, of course.” He still does not move. “Drive carefully,” she says. “Don’t get lost.”
“I won’t. I’ll call.”
She watches as he walks to his car, waits to hear the engine start. As she drives toward the store, she can see his car in her rearview mirror, getting smaller and disappearing.
* * *
Casper sleeps on her lap while Maya works on a beaded necklace. Every ten or fifteen minutes, she finds herself looking out the window at nothing. She hasn’t called her mother in three weeks now. Kay will never telephone her. Once Maya left home for college, Kay didn’t visit so they only saw each other when Maya came home. Maya couldn’t stay for more than a few days at a time because Kay criticized everything she did. Months would go by before they met again, but nothing ever changed. After five minutes in the same room, they would be saying all the wrong things—the same wrong things they’d already said a thousand times. The only way they can be at peace might be not to see or talk to each other ever again.
When she finishes for the day, it’s already dark. Peg and Larry are still out, so Maya has nowhere to go but home. Driving back the same way she came this morning, past endless strings of stubble fields and strip malls, she thinks everything she told Eric was absurd. She shouldn’t have talked so much about the choices she made in college. When people dwell on the past, it’s a sign that something is wrong right now. The regrets she feels about her father, about not becoming an artist, even about having introduced Yuko and Dan, must be distractions from the real problem she hasn’t wanted to face. She and Jeff are stuck in a bad place, unable to move forward or backward, beginning to act like two animals trapped together.
Maya’s downstairs neighbor at the efficiency had two cats who’d grown up together. They’d gotten along fine until a stray cat began to prowl the neighborhood and they could see him lurking beyond the screen doors. The house cats started fighting every day, scratching and biting, pulling out huge clumps of fur from each other’s necks and backs. One stopped eating and chewed up his own feet, leaving bloody footprints all over the apartment. After the humane society came and trapped the stray cat, everything went back to normal for the house cats. “My husband and me,” their owner told Maya one night in the laundry room they shared, “we were just like those poor cats. We hated our jobs, neither of us could stand our own parents, not to mention the other person’s, and life was stressful all around. Instead of sticking together, we started tearing each other into pieces. It was ugly and sad, what we did.”
Maya pictures a wild beast lurking in the dark. That’s what her marriage has turned into. She and Jeff will go on hurting each other until they can get away from it and be alone. She parks her car on the street and marches into the house. Jeff is sitting in the armchair in the living room with a book. She takes her seat in the straight-backed chair near the door.
“Hi,” she says. “I hope you’re ready for that talk you mentioned this morning.”
He puts down the book and glances up, his eyes without his reading glasses round and tired-looking. They are the eyes of someone who is easily hurt.
“I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon,” he says quietly. “I guess I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be.”
Maya grips the arms of the chair, suddenly feeling as though she were about to fall into a big black hole. She imagines herself catapulting over a large dark space. “So tell me what you thought about,” she manages to ask.
“I don’t know. Maybe you should go first.”
The only light in the room comes from the lamp above Jeff’s chair. The light angles down toward his face but leaves her in the dark. He might be too scared to talk, or he might be too angry.
“We haven’t been getting along for quite a while,” Maya says. “We can’t go on like this.”
“I agree.”
“So what do you want to do about it?” she asks.
“You tell me. Do you want to do anything about it at all?” he asks back.
“I don’t know.” Her voice sounds frightened and unsure. This is nothing like how she planned to talk. “I don’t know why I have to be the one to decide. You told me this morning that I should go and be by myself. Do you still feel that way?”
“Of course not,” Jeff replies. “I spent the afternoon thinking of how much I wanted us to get along. But you apparently don’t feel the same.”
“I never said I didn’t want to work things out.”
“Listen to that double negative.” He clicks his tongue. “You sound like my students when they don’t want to commit to any position.”
Maya takes a deep breath. The room doesn’t seem to be spinning anymore. “I want us to get along too,” she says.
“How do I know you really mean it?”
“You’ll have to take my word for it.”
Jeff begins to list all the things they could do better. They should be more considerate but give each other space, they should do more things they enjoy together, take some trips or at least plan special evenings every month.
“I think we’ve gotten to a really stale stage of our marriage,” he concludes. “We need to pay more attention. We can’t take each other for granted the way we’ve been doing.”
“You think we can be happy if we do all these things?” she asks.
“It’s worth a try. I was in a bad marriage before. Nancy and I brought out the worst in each other. We couldn’t stop hurting each other, no matter how we tried. You and I are different. We can get along.” He shrugs and doesn’t elaborate.
“I have nothing to compare this to. I was never married before.” I know all about bad marriages too, she wants to say. My mother had two of them while I was growing up. But the thought of her mother gives her pause. After months of avoiding Kay, Maya always visits her again, wanting to get the better of her or wanting to make amends or both, even though neither is ever likely to happen. Her marriage isn’t like that at all. Jeff has never said anything to belittle her the way her mother does. He knows how to compromise and forgive.
They sit leaning back in their separate chairs. Finally, Maya says, “You’re right. I should have been more considerate. I’m sorry about this morning.”
“That’s all right,” Jeff replies. “I shouldn’t have driven away in a huff.”
“You don’t have to apologize. I made you angry.” Maya stands up and grabs her keys. “I should move my car off the street. I’ll
be right back.”
* * *
Taking the small binoculars she keeps inside the car, Maya walks to a park down the street and stands on a low hill above the playground. In the western sky, the comet is much hazier than it used to be. Her father might have gone out to see the same comet in Japan if he’d lived. They once climbed to the roof of their house to watch a total eclipse of the moon. Through his binoculars, the disappearing moon looked like a pearl dropped into blue ink. Overhead, the sky is quiet. It’s too early in the year for bats and nighthawks.
When she comes back, Jeff is already upstairs. His footsteps move from the bathroom to their bedroom and stop there. It’s only nine o’clock. She fills a glass with ice cubes.
As she closes the freezer, she remembers the last fight she had with Scott, on the afternoon she’d gone to sign her lease at the efficiency. The week before, he had asked her to marry him, though for two years she’d told him she wasn’t ready. “I don’t want to move up north anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to live without you. We can get our own place in the city.” She came home that afternoon and told him she planned to move. “I don’t want to be the reason for you to give up your plans,” she said. “You shouldn’t change your life for me. I wouldn’t change mine for you.” Scott stood in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen, talking about how he could make her happy if she would only give him a chance. “But I’m already happy alone,” she said. She was standing under the kitchen light. She felt dizzy; they hadn’t eaten since breakfast. When he stopped talking for a moment, she politely asked him to step aside. “We can’t go on talking like this,” she said. “I’ll fix something to eat.” He walked away from the fridge, only to march out of the house, slamming the door behind him. Later, he said this was the moment in which he realized the hopelessness of his situation. “You have a heart of ice,” he said. The calm manner in which she offered him food was more upsetting to him than anything else. He would have felt better if she had yelled at him and cried.