by Kyoko Mori
“Do you remember the dream I told you about?” he asks, after they sit down on the bench.
“About waiting for the ferry?” She rests her head against his shoulder. Through the tiny holes in his black T-shirt, she can see his skin like distant stars.
“We were sitting on a bench like this.” He tightens his arm around her shoulder. “I didn’t tell you before, but we were kissing in the dream. I was hoping we’d missed the last boat because I wanted to go on kissing you. I didn’t want to stop.”
“I guess I knew that.” Maya leans up and kisses him. She is letting herself back into his dream. She imagines the water lapping at the shore, gulls screaming in the distance. It could have been the lake, or the ocean, or the blue water of the inland sea she saw from the plane. She pictures tears falling from the sky and turning into the blue salt water below. “Was it like this?” she asks, kissing him again and again.
“Yes. When I dreamed about it, that wasn’t the first time I wanted to kiss you. The morning you brought me back here in your car and hugged me, I wanted to. I couldn’t think about anything else for hours afterward.”
“Why didn’t you kiss me?”
“Because I didn’t want you to think I was bad. You’d just told me that you were married. I guessed that you weren’t happy. You looked so sad when you pointed out your finger without a wedding ring.”
“I stayed at Yuko’s last night. I didn’t go home. I never will.” Maya looks down and kicks some pebbles with her shoe. “But I meant to go away without seeing you. That’s why I came in early. I was going to ask Peg for time off. I would have left you a note but I wouldn’t have said where I was going.”
“I knew you were saying good-bye to me last night. I came to wait for you because I figured you’d have to get things squared away before you could leave. You wouldn’t just take off.”
“I wouldn’t?”
“No. You’d never do that to Peg or your cat, or even to me.”
“Leaving you the note would have been the hardest part.” She looks away. “Now I don’t have to do that because I’ve told you everything I would have written. I can’t tell you anything more. I’ll be gone by the end of the week.”
He puts his hand under her chin and turns her face gently toward him. “Do you love me?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“So why won’t you come with me to Vermont? Are you afraid because we only met last month and it’s such a long way to go? If you are, we can stay here until you feel ready.”
“That’s not what worries me.” Maya takes his hand in both of hers. “I can’t go because it’s wrong. I don’t mean because I’m married. Jeff and I haven’t been very happy for a long time. His first wife is back in town, and she wants to be with him. We’d have gone our separate ways sooner or later. Afterward, I’d have lived alone, spent time with my friend Yuko, worked for Peg, and been content with my quiet life. If I left with you, I’d feel like I was running away instead of being alone to face things.” She pictures her father at his kitchen table with a pencil in his hand. He is drawing the long tunnel of solitude that stretches between this life and the next. “I just can’t go with you,” Maya says.
Eric leans toward her until his forehead is touching hers. It’s what her father used to do to see if she had a fever. “You feel a little warm,” he would say, going to get a thermometer, or, “You feel just fine. Nothing wrong with you.”
“Don’t go away. At least be with me until I have to leave. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t know.”
His hand behind her neck, he pulls her toward him. “You can’t deny how you feel.” Maya imagines the Nakashimas’ cabin, the lonely lake at night. She can hear the creak of the floorboards under her steps. That, or somewhere like that, is where she is headed eventually. But for now she can’t stop kissing him and wanting to feel his fingers touching her hair.
“Promise you’ll go back to Vermont,” she manages to say, “without me.”
“If that’s what you want at the end of June, I’ll have no choice.”
“And you won’t try to talk me into going with you.”
“No.”
“I won’t be able to tell anyone about us. Not even my best friend, because I don’t know how to tell her. You’ll be my secret.”
“I don’t care about anyone else.” His hands on her shoulders, he looks into her face. “Will you stay?” he asks.
“Yes,” she answers. “I’ll stay.”
Inside the barn, Casper is waiting at the top of the stairs. As soon as he sees Eric, Casper streaks down the steps with his tail puffed up.
“I was going to take Casper if I went away. He’d have been miserable without me.”
“He wouldn’t have been the only one.”
“I found Casper a month after my father died. I wanted to believe that my father had sent him to console me. A long time ago, my father took me to a weaving cottage, where we saw a beautiful black cat. Casper could have been his counterpart, all white instead of black. I loved traveling with my father. I was so proud to be with him.”
“I wish I could go back into the past with you,” Eric says. “If there was a time machine, that’s what I’d want to do—go back and see all the important moments of your life.”
Holding hands, they walk up to the loft, where she gets her clothes from the closet. He’s still holding her hand as she heads for the shower. He only lets go to take off her sweatshirt and pull his own T-shirt over his head.
“Before yesterday,” she says, “I never took a shower with anyone because I was too shy.”
“You weren’t very shy with me yesterday.”
“The faucet’s tricky. The hot water makes a very annoying noise. It whines, but in a very high pitch.”
“I don’t mind,” he says, pulling open the shower curtain.
Five minutes later, she’s not even hearing that high-pitched noise anymore as she leans back under the stream of water, her back toward him as he washes her hair.
“I haven’t had anyone wash my hair since I was four. I scarcely remember it.” All she recalls is leaning against the kitchen sink in her pajamas with eyes squinched shut, ears covered, while her father poured a thin stream of water from a basin. From this distance in time, it feels like a brave act of faith. “At my house, it was my father who took care of me when I was little. My mother wasn’t around much. She was taking classes and teaching at a university. Some days, I didn’t even see her. I didn’t miss her, but my father was a modest man, so I had to be on my own to take a bath or dress myself.”
“You’d have thought we were shameless. My brother, sister, and I used to swim naked in a little plastic pool in our backyard until we were eight or nine. Our mother was too naive to be embarrassed.” He turns her toward him and hugs her. “You’re beautiful.”
She reaches behind her and shuts off the water. The sudden quietness surprises her. Opening the shower curtain, he takes the large purple towel hanging on the rack and drapes it around her hair. The towel hangs over her shoulders, covering her almost down to her waist.
As he pulls her, still draped in purple, toward him, Maya remembers a woman in a magic trick she once saw. The woman lay down in a box, and the magician draped a cloth over it. He began his countdown and then sawed the box in half. When the cloth was removed, the woman reappeared, miraculously unhurt, though the box remained cut in half. During those seconds in between, the woman was in a secret place known only to herself and the magician, hidden, safe, and invisible.
16
In the foyer, Jeff’s faded running shoes are placed next to black patent-leather sandals with spike heels. On the antique hat rack Maya and Jeff never used, a floppy black hat perches like a crow. Maya crosses the foyer and climbs up the stairs, with Yuko following. At the top, she points to the spare room.
“My winter coats are in the closet in there. If you can grab them and throw them in the backseat, I’ll get the rest
of my clothes from the bedroom.”
Maya pulls open the closet door and finds a black camisole and boxer shorts hanging from the hook. The glossy synthetic fabric looks fragile but it’s probably tougher than anything. In the burn test that textile specialists use to identify fabric swatches, it would curl and shrink into itself with hardly a flame. Maya’s clothes haven’t been moved or touched. She gathers a whole row of dresses into one of the black plastic bags she brought. When the bag is full, she takes it to the stairway landing. Yuko is halfway down the stairs with an armload of coats.
“When you’re done with the coats, you can take the bags down. I’ll put them here.” She returns to the closet, where she collects the rest of the hanging clothes, then starts with the folded clothes on the shelves. One after another, she takes the bags and sets them on the landing so Yuko will be kept busy going up and down the stairs. She doesn’t want her to come into the room and see Nancy’s camisole and boxer shorts. Maya and Yuko have never owned underclothes like these. In the four years she lived here, Maya always got dressed in the bathroom with the door shut, unless she knew that she was alone. She slept in clothes she sewed for herself: cotton and flannel nightgowns with long full skirts, linen pajamas with pretty shell buttons and precise cuffs on the shirt-sleeves. Jeff hated the thick, quilted bed jacket she wore to read in bed. “It looks like you’re wearing a tent. It’s not exactly alluring,” he complained. The bed jacket has patterns of moons and stars, gold and silver against a deep blue background. The clay buttons she made are shaped like the planets. She’d had no idea how dowdy and foolish her clothes must have looked to someone who was used to black camisoles and spike heels.
The plastic bags bulge as though they contain garbage instead of clothes. Complete strangers used to stop her on the street to compliment her on what she was wearing, and she felt proud instead of shy. She never expected to feel ashamed of her clothes.
In the bathroom, boxes of rouge and makeup brushes clutter the shelf above the sink. A pink hair dryer is still plugged in. The bathtub has some plastic toys: a blue shark, a windup swimmer, a pair of yellow rubber ducks that remind Maya of her own childhood. Yuko is standing in the doorway. Maya takes down the oak jewelry case Dan made for her.
“I can get that,” Yuko says, reaching for the case.
As their arms come together to form a double V around the case, Maya feels her throat tighten.
“It’s okay,” Yuko says. “Dan did a good job on this. I’m glad you have it.”
Inside the case, Dan made various compartments for her earrings, necklaces, and bracelets, assembled from beads by herself or cast in silver by the jewelers she traded pieces with. Her whole history from the last ten years is contained in the box, but there is no reminder of Jeff. The only piece of jewelry that connected her to him was her wedding ring, lost several months before Nancy arrived back in town.
After the clothes and the jewelry box, all Maya has left in the house are the odds and ends in the kitchen drawer and her bicycle in the garage. Throughout her marriage, many of her things were in the loft above the store, and it seems only natural that she’s moving there. “I’d feel better about the store with you there all the time,” Peg said. “Remember when those kids knocked down a bunch of mailboxes and stole a case of beer from Natalie’s garage? You and Casper can keep the place safe. Free rent is part of the deal.” Peg smiled and held up her hand when Maya protested.
Maya follows Yuko down the stairs and opens the garage door. “I just have a few things in the kitchen. I’ll be right out.”
On the kitchen table, next to some picture books, there is a wooden puzzle where a child has to put brightly colored cutout pieces back into the board, matching the shapes. The yellow triangles, red circles, and blue squares remind Maya of landscapes painted in the first part of the century. Almost before she was old enough to read, her father taught her how the purple road and the green sky Gabriele Munter saw in Germany and the pink and blue mountains Georgia O’Keeffe painted in New Mexico were transforming themselves into triangles and squares, into pure geometry. “Look at the way that sky cuts into the road,” he would say. “Most of that composition is taken up by a shadow. All the lines come at the same angle.” While her mother made her learn English, her father taught her the language of colors and light, of shapes and lines and angles. Even in their short time together, he gave a legacy. Maya never looked at any landscape without noticing the fields of color, the shapes of light, the alignment of the world. Nancy’s daughter, when she is twenty, will see the wheat and cornfields outside the city and remember this kitchen where she learned the names of colors and shapes from a wooden puzzle. Maya picks up a yellow triangle that has not found its proper place. With its sharp point turned straight up, it fits perfectly into the shape cut out of the wood. She runs her fingers over it and closes her eyes. If she knew the right benediction, she would say it. May you learn the colors in peace. May you grow up in beauty. I give you my blessing and my goodwill. The yellow triangle will come back, again and again, in a pool of sunshine next to a window, the brightness at the heart of a lily where the petals are fused.
Mr. Kubo’s letter is still in the kitchen drawer. He has not written her a second time. Maya pulls out the drawer and empties its contents into a bag. Spools of thread, coloring pencils, a disposable camera—everything falls on top of the letter at the bottom of the bag. In the garage, she picks up her bicycle pump, binoculars, and helmet. Yuko has already put her bicycle on the roof rack. Maya shoves the last items in the car and then reaches into the glove compartment for her garage door opener.
Standing in the driveway, she takes her two house keys off the key ring. With the opener aimed at the door, she presses the button. There’s a whirr, and immediately the door starts coming down. Maya throws the opener and the keys into the garage and watches them slide across the concrete floor. They remind her of pebbles skipping across the waves.
* * *
“You don’t have to live here alone unless you really want to,” Yuko says, when they’ve unloaded the bags. “If you think it’s spooky to be out here, you can always come back to my place.”
“It’s not spooky. I’m comfortable here.”
Even the couch, where she is sitting with Yuko now, reminds her of Eric. The morning he had come to the store, she got dressed and ran downstairs when she heard voices. It was nearly eleven, and two women from Illinois were browsing through the store unattended. “Sorry. I was upstairs and didn’t hear you,” Maya said. Her face turned hot when one of them looked at her and smiled. When she went back upstairs, Eric had fallen asleep on the couch, and Casper was perched on the shelf across the room, looking down at him with his shoulders hunched. “Your cat looks like a gargoyle,” Eric said, opening his eyes. “He must be your guardian spirit.” When Maya sat down on the edge of the couch, Eric pulled her toward him. “Are your customers gone?” he asked. She nodded. “Good,” he whispered. “I don’t think it’s going to be very busy today.” Since then, she has gone to stay with him every night; most afternoons, he comes and sits in the store, working on his drawings and collages at the café table while she tends to her customers. Maya told Yuko that she changed her mind about going away. “Taking off from work didn’t seem like such a good idea after all. I still need to be alone to think, but I can do that without going all the way to Minnesota.” She must have sounded so wishy-washy.
Casper is scratching the door in the bathroom, where she’s locked him up. “I’m not alone,” Maya says to Yuko. There’s someone I need to tell you about, she might begin; I didn’t go away because of him. But when Yuko turns to her with a slight frown, Maya says, “There’s Casper.” The comment sounds lame even to herself.
Yuko laughs. “You and that cat. It must have been destiny that brought you together. He’s devoted to you.”
“He’s my guardian angel.”
“Come on. He’s more like the devil. I’m his godmother, and still he makes that awful noise at me. I s
hould have named him Damien or Beelzebub. You told me he’d settled down.”
“I thought he did because he runs away from the customers. But he must consider the upstairs to be his territory. That’s why he doesn’t want you up here.” Casper has taken to sitting at Eric’s feet, regarding him warily with his blue eyes.
“Do you want to go get something to eat—or see a movie?” Yuko asks.
“Maybe another time,” Maya answers. “I’ll take you out to dinner for helping me, but I don’t feel up to it tonight.”
Yuko pats her shoulder. “You’re not feeling so good, huh?”
Maya shakes her head. “I’m all right,” is all she can say.
“You want to be alone. I understand. You know you’re doing the right thing,” Yuko says, as she gets up from the couch. “Everything will be okay.”
* * *
The envelope her father sent is on the worktable. With her fingertips, Maya traces the pictorial letters he had written, spelling her name in Japanese. He had named her Mayumi, true arrow, because the name suggested strength and fidelity: a person who can fly like an arrow, straight to the heart of the matter. She has turned out to be more like the single arrow from another proverb: a single arrow is easily broken, but three arrows can withstand any force. She and her parents are three arrows that got separated and broken, one by one.
On the back of the envelope is a picture she drew last week. Sitting in the studio alone after Eric had gone to run an errand, she had wanted to record what was in her head, as her father had done every morning. She kept thinking of the sparrows that plummeted out of the sky and swarmed to the feeders outside the window at Eric’s mother’s trailer, so she drew them upside down, the way she saw them while she was lying down on the bed in that small room. At the top of the picture is the feeder, with its circle in the center and the straight lines of perches. Birds seem to be swimming up to these shapes and lines instead of flying down—they are fluttering upward, trying to surface with their necks outstretched and wings pulled back.