Scissors, Paper, Stone

by Martha K. Davis

  “Do we have to go up and knock?” Min asks. I don’t think she’s teasing me. She really doesn’t know.

  “Let’s find out,” I answer. I push my car door all the way open and stand up, dizzy.

  A man in shorts and an alligator shirt comes around the side of the house, striding barefoot over the lawn. He’s carrying a pair of steel brush cutters that dangle open, carelessly, in his left hand.

  I hear Min say under her breath, “The upper classes play at being useful.” Frowning, I glance back at her over the car roof. Neil is our host. He’s my father’s friend. She should be grateful that he’s offered his home to us.

  “Hello, hello!” he calls out. He has round wire-rimmed glasses and stormy-blue eyes. His wavy hair is reddish-brown and beginning to gray around the temples. He’s handsome, in a boyish way. I like him immediately.

  He stops in front of me, smiling widely, and shakes my hand. He’s tall, over six feet, and both his height and the firm grip of his hand around mine steady me, bringing me off the road to solid ground. I grin back. He covers my hand with both of his, welcoming me to Salt Lake City. “Did you get lost downtown?” he asks, his eyes amused, already forgiving me for being late. His eyelashes are reddish too, almost gold.

  “We took a few wrong turns,” I say. I can’t stop grinning at him. When he lets go of my hand I feel cast off. Behind me the passenger door slams. I turn toward Min and introduce them. They say hello in a muted way. I’m kind of glad he isn’t instantly into her. She doesn’t seem curious about him at all.

  I’ve never met Neil before. But I feel I know him because of the stories my father used to tell about their college days. They would get into long debates at dinner in the cafeteria, arguing philosophy and political science long after their classmates had gone off to the libraries to study. They would go to dances at the women’s colleges and make a play for the same girls. All this seemed boring when my father told it, and I would wonder if all guys were that competitive. But as Neil asks Min what he can carry in for us, I can see how that rivalry would seem exciting to my father, seducing him.

  Of all his stories, the one I remember best he told only once, after we moved to Mill Valley. Neil and my father were taking the final exam for a class on the British Romantic poets, a class my father was struggling in. As the time wound down, my father realized this would be the first exam he would fail. He saw that Neil was hunched over, working steadily away. When the two hours were up and the proctor started collecting blue books, Neil reached over and took my father’s exam, leaving his own on my father’s desk. My father watched Neil erase and write something in on the cover. He looked down at Neil’s blue book and saw his own name. He got an A on the exam, raising his average to a B. My father had never forgotten that. I was amazed nobody had seen, or if they had, that they hadn’t turned Neil in.

  Min and I haul our knapsacks out of the car and follow Neil into his house. Dropping the brush cutters on the front hall carpet, he closes the heavy front door behind us. Min stares up at the chandelier, looking around her like she’s entered a cathedral. Putting a hand on each of our shoulders, Neil steers us past the polished mahogany staircase back through the dining room to the kitchen. I like the relaxed contact of his hand and my feeling that all the decisions will be taken care of by somebody else for a while. In the kitchen, everything is in its place or put away, the surfaces all wiped clean. In the center, a large butcher block table takes up half the room. A woman stands on the other side, cutting up tomatoes and yellow peppers. I can’t tell if she’s his wife or the cook.

  “Our wayward travelers have arrived,” Neil announces as we come into the room. He strides over to the table and pops a tomato wedge into his mouth.

  The woman’s bobbed hair is almost totally gray, and her face looks pinched, like she is constantly turning over something worrisome in her mind. She wipes her hands on her apron, comes around the table, and shakes our hands, first mine, then Min’s. I realize this is Olivia, Neil’s wife. She smiles like it doesn’t come easily to her. I feel sorry for Neil.

  “We thought you’d ended up in the wrong state,” she says, looking over the top of her glasses at us.

  “It just took us longer than we expected,” I reply.

  “Did you have a good drive?”

  I remember David Bowie’s weird wailing songs and the road that never seemed to get anywhere and Min’s moodiness. But I tell them about the evaporated lake we glimpsed earlier this morning. I look at Neil and describe the huge purple desert plains dotted with low clumps of brush that stretched across Nevada, broken only by occasional small mountain ranges. I make it all sound beautiful. When I finally run out of steam, Olivia asks if we came across from California on Route 50, and did we see Temple Square on our way through the city. I look around at Min. She’s standing behind me slightly. Why is she being so quiet?

  Olivia moves closer to her husband and tucks her hands around his arm. “We were going to start dinner without you, so this is perfect timing, isn’t it, Neil?”

  He’s smiling, like he’s proud of having produced us out of thin air. “I guess I should get the steaks on the grill,” he says, moving away from Olivia without looking at her. “It’s the cook’s night off.” He slips behind me, resting his hand on my back as he moves toward the door. I can’t help that I feel special, singled out.

  After Neil leaves the room, the three of us are at a loss for words. It’s like the electricity’s been cut and all the lights and appliances have shut off. “Well,” Olivia says after an awkward silence, her face pinching in again, “I’m sure you two girls would like to put down those packs and freshen up a little. I’ll show you where you’ll be staying. It used to be my daughter Katie’s room. I mostly use it as a sewing room now.” She seems to be annoyed with us. I’m beginning to get the sense she’s that way all the time.

  Olivia leads us up the carpeted stairs and to the back of the house. The room has two twin beds with matching white bedspreads. Arranged on top of the bookcase and the bureau is her daughter’s childhood collection of dolls. Beneath one window on a table, the sewing machine sits among swatches of fabric and spools of thread.

  Min pulls her knapsack from her shoulder, dumps it on the nearest bed, and wanders over to the other window to look out. She has shown no sign of interest in either Neil or Olivia. I’m embarrassed that she isn’t even attempting to be polite, appreciative. “Thank you,” I say to Olivia, hoping to make up for Min’s obvious lack of manners. “It’s really nice of you to let us stay here tonight.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. Neil and your father go back a long way. Of course you’re welcome to stay with us any time.”

  “Thank you,” I say again. I’m at the end of my own repertoire of social skills.

  “Well, come down when you’re ready,” Olivia says, turning. She closes the door softly behind her.

  Once I’m sure she’s gone back downstairs, I go to the window and put my arms around Min from behind, pressing my body against the back of hers. I rest my lips against the nape of her neck. She brings her arms up and closes her hands over mine. I feel the car’s idling whirr inside me finally slow and stop. When I’m with Min, I don’t have to look around for landmarks to know where I am.

  I stretch forward and kiss her warm cheek. I say, “I love holding you. I want to hold you forever.” She doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t said much since we left the Dairy Queen. “Are you still mad at me?” I ask.

  She smiles and squeezes my hands, then lets go and pulls me around to stand beside her at the window. “Look,” she says, pointing. The yard behind the house is immense, bordered by more beautifully laid-out flowerbeds. In the gray light of dusk, I can still see the vibrant pinks and reds and yellows. A swing set and a shed are half-hidden in a grove of trees. Below us, on the lawn, Neil is standing over the smoking grill, poking at a slab of steak with a long barbeque fork. Tongues of flame rise around it. I watch Neil, feeling a small, secret thrill because he doesn’t know I�
�m up here watching him. He’s put on loafers, and he’s humming to himself.

  After a while I say, “The flowers are wonderful. Which one of them do you think is the gardener? I vote for Olivia.”

  Min turns to me. “Come on, Laura. She doesn’t do the real work. They hire someone.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You think Olivia gets her fingernails dirty? She just snips them and arranges them in a vase. Anyway, it’s too professional-looking. Look at how the hedges are trimmed.”

  For the first time since I’ve known her, I feel like Min thinks I’m stupid. I wonder why she became my lover in the first place if she thinks so little of me. I almost ask her, but I’m not feeling confident about what she might say.

  “Anyway, I like them, don’t you?” I ask. “At least him. She’s pretty much a cold fish.”

  “She’s lonely.”

  I stare at Min. Where did she get that idea?

  “Let’s take a shower,” I say. I’ve got to get out of my dusty clothes.

  “Why don’t the two of you stay an extra day?” Neil asks at the dining room table. There is candlelight and engraved silverware, and after three days of fast food, the steak tastes so good I could cry. We’ve been talking about the founding of Salt Lake City. Mostly Neil has been talking. I’ve been watching his face in the glow of the candles, and for a split second I wonder how it would feel if he kissed me. “Tomorrow we could show you the sights,” he continues, “the Beehive House, the Mormon Temple, anything else you’re interested in. You can stay here tomorrow night and get an early start the next day.”

  “I’d love to,” I say without thinking, and then I remember that it’s not my decision alone. I look over at Min. She’s busy eating her salad.

  Olivia puts a hand on Neil’s where it lies on the table. “We have golf with Ted and Thelma tomorrow, remember?” Her voice has that hard, warning edge in it, just like my mother’s. I don’t like her.

  Neil moves his hand, almost flicking hers off, and reaches for his glass of wine. “We can do that any time.”

  I look at Min again, wishing she would look up, join the conversation, help me. The thing is, I’m interested in seeing the city. In the car, I’ve been reading about Brigham Young and the Mormons. The AAA guidebook says Utah didn’t become a state until 1896, less than a hundred years ago, when the Church of the Latter Day Saints abolished polygamy. I remember the dried-out lake we saw and realize how short a time a century really is. The division into states, even the presence of people, doesn’t affect the land itself. That’s why I think it’s boring. You can travel an entire day and be in a different state by nightfall, but the geography is still the same. Min is entranced by the vast landscapes that stay unchanged for centuries. The mountains and deserts are too big to go away. But it’s the people I want to hear about, how they managed to survive the harshness of the land and the weather.

  “We’ll have to think about it,” I tell Neil. “Thank you.”

  “I’m a very good tour guide,” he says, smiling at me. “You would enjoy it.”

  “I’m sure I would,” I answer, smiling back. I really want to hang out for a day, take it easy. “I like historical stuff. Maybe I get it from my father.”

  Olivia offers me more salad, saying there’s more of everything if we’re still hungry. I scoop a second helping of steak and pan-roasted potatoes onto my plate and then pass the serving dish to Min. When our eyes meet, I try to communicate my need for her help, but I don’t know if she gets it.

  Neil leans forward and pours more wine into my half-full glass, then refills his own. “Did your father ever tell you about his visit to us in Japan?” he asks me, pushing his chair away from the table and hooking an arm around a chair post.

  “No,” I say. The only thing I know about Neil from after college is that he went to law school and married Olivia. My father was an army officer in Japan in the early ’50s, before he went back to school and became a history professor, but he’s never mentioned that he saw Neil there.

  “We saw him in ’51 or ’52, during the Korean War. ’52, wasn’t it, Olivia?” She nods, but he’s not paying attention to her. His eyes are squinting into the past. He’s like my father, feeling his way back there, searching for the memories that will trigger his story.

  “It was after the peace treaty was signed, at the tail end of the Occupation,” Neil continues. “As I remember it, your father was stationed in Japan a year before I was, to replace somebody on his MG team.”

  “Yeah, he was an education officer,” I say, remembering my father’s stories of visiting rural schools, where he set up their classes and made sure the children were fed. He would visit houses where the women washed the men’s clothes in separate washtubs from their own and dried them on separate bamboo poles. In the countryside where he was, the Japanese children were always clustering around the American soldiers begging for food and attention. And the adults stayed out of sight because they still were terrified of the enemy. I used to imagine those children racing up to my father’s Jeep while their parents hid inside their houses. I wondered what the parents and the children thought of each other. Of all the stories about his past my father used to tell, to me those were the saddest.

  “What does MG stand for?” Min asks.

  “Military Government,” Neil answers. “The MG teams moved in right after the war ended to help clean up, demilitarize the country, and steer the Japanese toward democracy.”

  “Sounds like brainwashing to me,” Min says as if to herself and goes back to eating her steak. Why is she being so difficult? If she’s going to speak at all, I wish she’d say something helpful.

  After a short silence, Neil goes on. “When I was there, I was involved in a number of court cases defending American soldiers. Your father took a short leave and stayed with us during one particular case. It was a big victory. I thought he might have told you about it.”

  “No, he never did.”

  “Well, the fellow was a private, stationed out in the Yamagata prefecture. Min, you’re not Japanese, are you?” From this angle I can’t see his eyes behind the reflecting surfaces of his glasses.

  Min puts her fork down. “No, I’m American.”

  “Of course you are,” Neil says, impatient. “I meant your country of origin.” All three of us are looking at Min expectantly.

  She stares back at Neil, her mouth set in a hard, unyielding line.

  I know Min hates being asked this question, in all its variations. But I can’t stand the silence hanging in the air. Why won’t she just answer him and get it over with? I open my mouth. “Min’s Korean,” I volunteer, my voice too loud.

  “Ah. It was your people who pushed the Americans and the Japanese into an alliance by starting a civil war. Interesting turn of events.”

  “It wasn’t a civil war, Neil,” Olivia says, gathering our dishes. “Korea was a formerly occupied country split in two by the Americans and the Soviets.” He doesn’t respond. When she stands up to take the dishes into the kitchen, I want to ask if I can help, but I think it would be rude to interrupt Neil.

  “Anyway, the incident in question took place one night when my client was standing guard at his base. It was late at night and he’d been drinking. A young Japanese woman wandered in. Apparently this happened all the time. Many of their men had been killed in the war.” Olivia returns with a cut-glass bowl filled with something chocolaty-looking. I’m half-distracted wondering if it’s a pudding or a mousse. I hate pudding.

  “So this woman spoke to him, but, of course, all she knew was Japanese and all he knew was English. He gestured that he didn’t understand, he gestured for her to leave. He was on sentry duty. It was against his orders to allow women on the base.”

  I glance at Min, who is sitting back with her arms crossed. She’s staring at Neil like she despises him. I wish I could reach out and unfold her arms, hold her hand in mine, soften her. Olivia passes me a small bowl of dessert. It’s pudding. I take a bite. I
smile at her. Then I realize I’ll have to eat it all.

  “The woman wouldn’t go. She pulled at his uniform, repeating the same phrases, and of course he still didn’t understand. But he thought he knew what she wanted. It was what they all wanted. He walked with her down the road. When they got to a field he laid her down and had sexual intercourse with her. He was surprised as hell when he was charged with rape. Her family took it to court.”

  “He was surprised?” I blurt out.

  “Sure. The Japanese all knew that the Americans were girl-crazy. Those girls loved the attention. In any case, we won.”

  “How?” Min asks flatly, challenging him. She’s still glaring. Then I realize she guessed the end of his story a while ago.

  Neil moves his head to look at Min. His whole face is soft with fondness for his memory. He pulls his chair up close to the table.

  “My winning argument was that a civilized society cannot convict a man of rape who had no idea he was raping anyone.” He says it gently, with finality, then sips from his wine glass. The candlelight from the table gives his face a sheen like sweat.

  “Civilized, shit. You let a rapist walk,” Min says.

  “It was my job,” he reminds her.

  “Did you think he was innocent?”

  He shrugs. “She did nothing to stop him.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “At no time did she make him feel that what he was doing was wrong.”

  I can’t stand this. Their antagonism is making me really anxious. I want to help Min make him understand, but I don’t want to offend Neil. He’s been very generous to us. I don’t say anything.

  Min takes a deep, slow breath, then says, “Think about it from the woman’s point of view. Her country had lost a war and was being basically ruled by the occupying army. She was in a deserted area with a man who was obviously stronger than her. She needed his help in some way. He didn’t speak her language, and he wasn’t trying to understand anymore what she was saying. You lived in Japan, you know the constraints of the culture. Particularly on women. If he didn’t mean to rape her, then why didn’t he make sure it was what she wanted?”