My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Called your office. Told them I was the Kansas Film Commissioner, calling to complain that you hadn’t submitted your location permits. They faxed me your itinerary for the rest of the month.”

  I liked him. He produced records in New York, scored films in L.A., and his band, based in Chicago, played a dark, demented brand of postmodern jazz that was popular in Tokyo and Berlin. He was always flying across the country, so it was relatively easy for him to touch down for a night or two.

  I worried about the crew at first. The ex—flight attendant knew right from the start, but I bought him off by approving his phone sex. He smirked a lot, but he kept quiet. The directors from Japan changed from week to week, so they would never catch on. Suzuki and Oh were the problem, but somehow they never seemed to notice that the film commissioners from Kansas and Utah looked the same as the one from Nebraska, and Sloan changed his shirt and the shape of his tie on a state-by-state basis. I kept waiting for the boys to raise their eyes, to recognize his face, but they never did. Maybe they were just too drunk, or Sloan was too tall, or maybe it was that all Americans looked the same, so why bother? More likely, they just didn’t care.

  Sloan regarded these trips as opportunities for sex and sociological surveys. So did I, but that was my job. The sociology part, I mean. It’s not easy to find My American Wife and you have to initiate a broad base of inquiry. First we’d look for an area with distinctive geographical features and scenic appeal and then we’d undertake a survey : chambers of commerce, churches, PTAs,agricultural extension offices. The researchers would sit in the New York office, phoning these bastions of small-town culture; what I learned is that there’s precious little culture left, and what’s managed to survive is mostly of the “Ye Olde” variety.

  Main Street is dead, which is no news to the families whose families ran family businesses on Main Street. When I returned from Japan and visited Quam, I found that all the local businesses from my childhood had been extirpated by Wal-Mart. If there is one single symbol for the demise of regional American culture, it is this superstore prototype, a huge capitalist3 boot that stomped the moms and pops, like soft, damp worms, to death. Don’t get me wrong. I love Wal-Mart. There is nothing I like more than to consign a mindless afternoon to those aisles, suspending thought, judgment. It’s like television. But to a documentarian of American culture, Wal-Mart is a nightmare. When it comes to towns, Hope, Alabama, becomes the same as Hope, Wyoming, or, for that matter, Hope, Alaska, and in the end, all that remains of our pioneering aspirations are the confused and self-conscious simulacra of relic culture: Ye Olde Curiosities ‘n’ Copie Shoppe, Deadeye Dick’s Saloon and Karaoke Bar—ingenious hybrids and strange global grafts that are the local businessperson’s only chance of survival in economies of scale.

  Anyway, once we’d found a town, we’d start homing in on its married women. Using Tokyo’s list of Desirable Things, we’d extract the names of plausible candidates from our initial contacts—local clergymen and newspaper reporters made the richest sources—then we’d start phoning the wives. It was easy to get information from them about their families, hobbies, and favorite cuts of meats. Even wholesomeness could be ascertained over the phone. The challenge was to find out what they looked like. But there were ways. You could phone up the local Nu U Unisex Salon or Chez-Moi Hair Styling and Life Insurance and appeal to the owner as a colleague:

  “‘So, Cindy, you’ve known Mrs. Crumph for five years, you said? Great. Now, just between you and me ... you’re a beauty professional, and what I really want to ask you for is your professional assessment of her appearance.... I mean, this is television, and we need someone who looks attractive—not necessarily glamorous, but you know, not horribly overweight, or with a walleye or goiter or anything.’ ”

  “You really ask them that?” asked Sloan, bemused.

  “Of course. We need to know these things.”

  “You can’t shoot a wife with a goiter?”

  “No. The BEEF-EX people are very strict. They don’t want their meat to have a synergistic association with deformities. Like race. Or poverty. Or clubfeet. But at the same time, the Network is always complaining that the shows aren’t ‘authentic’ enough. Well, I’ve been saying if only they’d let me direct, I’d show them some real Americans. So this is it, Sloan. This is my big chance....”

  Sloan was entertained. I lay on the bed at the Outlaw Inn as he applied Wet ’N Wild nail polish to the reddened clusters of chiggers that were breeding all over my legs and thighs. They burrow under your skin and the only way to get rid of them is to cut off their oxygen supply.

  I got the chiggers in Texas, in a field outside Lubbock, but it was worth it. We’d been standing there for a good part of an afternoon, shooting a very small child playing with his piglet. In the background was a white farmhouse. The boy, whose name was Bobby, lived there with his parents, Alberto and Catalina Martinez. Alberto, or Bert, as he now preferred to be called, was a farmworker. He’d lost his left hand to a hay baler in Abilene seven years earlier, a few months after he and Catalina (Cathy) had emigrated from Mexico, just in time for Bobby to be born an American citizen. That had been Cathy’s dream, to have an American son, and Bert had paid for her dream with his hand. Since then he had worked hard in the fields to support the family, and Cathy had worked too, in factory jobs, and finally their efforts had paid off. They had scraped up the money to buy the little white farmhouse and a few acres of surrounding land, and the way I figured it, Alberto, Catalina, and little Bobby were on their way to becoming a real American success story. The problem was getting the chance to tell it. After four months, the BEEF-EX injunction on the demographics of our wives was still in effect, and we continued to shoot primarily middle-class white American women with two or three children. The Martinez family would obviously break this mold.

  To make matters worse, the director for the shoot was the bonehead Oda, back for his second round.

  “Takagi, don’t be stupid,” he told me. “The program is not called My Mexican Wife!, you know....” I had given up trying to sell him on the idea.

  But then the oddest thing happened. We had been filming in Oklahoma, the “Sooner State,” just across the border in a town at the tip of the Panhandle. Oda had this great idea that the entire meal should be cooked in frying pans with handles, and our wife, a Mrs. Klinck, agreed. She made German Fried Potatoes and Succotash and Griddle Biscuits, and her meat was a delicate Sooner Schnitzel, made with thin cutlets of veal, dredged in crushed Kellogg’s Krispies and paprika, then pan-fried in drippings with sautéed onions and sour cream. Mrs. Klinck insisted we try a cutlet or two, and to my surprise, Oda dug in with gusto. He had a fondness for German food, it seemed, but after the first few bites, he dropped his fork and clutched his neck as though he were choking.

  “Oda-san! Dame da yo! Stop it immediately!” I hissed at him, furious that he should make such cruel fun of Mrs. Klinck’s cooking. I mean, she was sitting at the table, facing us and watching to see how we liked her Schnitzel.

  But he didn’t stop. Instead, the strangling noises he was making intensified, and as Mrs. Klinck watched him, her eyes grew wide and round. She stood up, knocking her chair over, and ran from the room.

  “Call nine-one-one!” I heard her cry, and that’s when I realized something else was happening.

  Oda’s entire body had suddenly grown rigid and was starting to swell. Within minutes his windpipe had closed, and by the time the local paramedics arrived he could barely breathe. They gave him a shot of adrenaline and we airlifted him in a crop duster to the nearest hospital.

  “Anaphylactic shock,” the emergency room doctor said. “What was he eating when it started?”

  I described the menu in detail.

  The doctor shrugged. “Sounds a bit heavy,” he said, “but basically okay.”

  After the seizure had passed and I was helping Oda fill out the medical history forms, he answered yes to the questio
n about antibiotic allergies. When the doctor saw this, he nodded.

  “That’s it,” he said grimly. He was a young man just out of medical school and had come to Oklahoma from San Francisco. He was cute and really tall, so we’d been flirting a little.

  “What’s it?” I asked.

  “Antibiotics,” he said. He looked at me. “You’re a city girl. You’ve probably never been to a feedlot, have you.”

  “What, you mean for cows?”

  He rolled his eyes. “No, cattle. Meat.”

  “No, but it’s funny you should bring it up. What do feedlots have to do with anaphylactic shock?”

  “Well, if you’d been to one, you’d know what I was talking about. They’re filthy and overcrowded—breeding grounds for all sorts of disease—so cattle are given antibiotics as a preventive measure, which builds up and collects in the meat.”

  “But this was veal....”

  He looked at me. “Are you kidding? Especially in veal. Whew! Those calves live in boxes and never learn to walk, even—and the farmers keep them alive with these massive doses of drugs just long enough to kill them. What sent your director into shock was the residue of the antibiotics in the Sooner Schnitzel.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. What’s his name ... Oda? He must be the sensitive type.”

  “Oh, please ...” If he only knew.

  The young doctor’s smile faded. “You know, it scares me. I mean, allergies are one thing. But all these surplus antibiotics are raising people’s tolerances, and it won’t be long before the stuff just doesn’t work anymore. There’s all sorts of virulent bacteria that are already resistant.... It’s like back to the future—we’re headed backward in time, toward a pre-antibiotic age.”

  I remembered this conversation much later on, but at the moment all I could think was damage control. I phoned Kato in Tokyo to let him know what had happened, and to my immense surprise, he turned the shoot over to me. To direct.

  This was it. Without bothering to ask for anyone’s permission, I rerouted us south into Texas and straight into the Martinezes’ kitchen.

  Bert wore a mean-looking hook in place of his missing hand, and during lunch he had taught me how to two-step, resting its point in the middle of my spine, while Cathy took a turn around the kitchen table with Suzuki. They were excellent dancers. Bert used to play the guitar beautifully, Cathy told me, when they were still in Mexico, before the accident.

  “So now”—she shrugged—“in America we have not so much music. But we can still dance.”

  We filmed them stepping out on Saturday night, and on Sunday afternoon after church, Cathy prepared Texas-style Beefy Burritos, made with lean, tender slices of Texas-bred sirloin tips. The burritos were the symbol of their hard-earned American lifestyle, something to remind them of their roots but also of their new fortune. Afterward, Bobby wanted to show us his 4-H project piglet. So there we were, in the chigger-filled field, filming little Bobby in a sea of golden grass that rippled in the wind. Bert and Cathy stood arm in arm, watching. The piglet, whose name was Supper, was so big and heavy that Bobby could barely hold it up in front of him. Bobby was wearing his Sunday suit, a hand-me-down from a neighbor, which was still a bit big for him and the trousers flapped against his bony shins. His head was dwarfed by an old felt hat of his father’s. He had given the piglet a bath and the animal was still wet, sending glistening droplets into the sunlight as it squirmed in his arms. Bobby smiled at the camera, a little Mexican boy shyly offering his American Supper to the nation of Japan. Everything was in slow motion. It was a surreal and exquisite moment.

  AKIKO

  The alarm clock rang at seven-fifteen on Saturday morning. Akiko woke in panic, which subsided into gentle dread when she realized she was alone. She lay in her futon, staring up at the acoustic ceiling tiles and fluorescent light fixture. Out on the balcony, she could hear the dull rhythmic thump of someone’s wife beating the bedding hung over the balcony rail. Children were awake too. Their voices drifted up from the playground. When Akiko went to market, she always took great care to avoid the playground and the young mothers who congregated around its periphery, just inside the gate. Akiko found it difficult to walk by them along the path outside.

  Akiko found it difficult to do many things: to go to bed at a reasonable hour, for example, when “John” stayed overnight in the city or was out of town on business. The air in the small apartment smelled damp and sweet. Sweet poofy exhalations all the night through. She turned over on her side and spotted the squat little whiskey bottle that she’d emptied last night in her exaltation. It had felt so good to be alone. Unmolested. She felt the hard lump of Shōnagon under her pillow. Then she spotted her pillow book diary, its pages scrawled with her own pickled lists.

  Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster

  Rain clouds massing before thunder. To stand on one’s balcony looking toward the city. To see the dull green-ocher ring forming around the point of impact, that bruised sky, my Tokyo heart.

  To contemplate his key in the latch, the scraping of his shoe, his sock-clad heel hitting the hollow floor. To feel the sweet, humid steam from the meat bathe one’s face as one carries it in on the platter. To retreat, to purge—not a soul sees, yet these produce inner pleasure.

  It is night and one is feigning sleep. One becomes aware of his critical mind grazing one’s sparrow ribs, considering the cavity of one’s pelvis, fingering the knob of one’s spine, disdaining one’s breasts. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of his deep snoring.

  Soused, she’d had this dumb idea that lists could become poetry. She ripped out the pages from the diary and crumpled them in her fist, then made up another.

  Things That Give a Hot Feeling

  The shame of drinking.

  Disobedience.

  Drunken poetry, full of imperfections.

  She got up slowly, head pounding, and carefully folded the top quilt and the sheets. Then she folded the bottom futon and the thin foam mattress into accordion sections of three. She piled the covers on top of the mattress, laid the buckwheat pillows on top, picked up the entire heap of bedding, and staggered to the closet. She shoved it all inside, onto the shelf, and slid the door shut quickly to keep it from tumbling out. Then she boiled water for tea. By eight o’clock she was dressed and sitting at the low kotatsu table in front of the television. Toes tucked neatly beneath her, she watched the screen, where a young Mexican child stood in the middle of a waving field of wheat, smiling shyly up at her and offering her an enormous pig. It was squirming in his arms, so heavy he could barely hold it. He teetered back and forth on the tips of his toes. Then, in slow motion, the wind caught his big felt hat and blew it up into the air, the pig gave a wriggle and flew from his arms, and the little boy broke into peals of laughter as he chased them both in circles. Akiko felt the tears well up in her eyes as, pen in hand, she smoothed out the sheet of paper, ready to take down the day’s recipe, for Texas-style Beefy Burritos, on the back side of her crumpled poem. The haunting a cappella strains of “Amazing Grace” drowned out the noise of the Tokyo suburb.

  JANE

  FAX

  TO: S. Kato

  FROM: Jane Takagi-Little

  DATE: April 12, 1991

  Dear Kato-san,

  Thank you for your fax. I was very happy to hear about the high ratings for the Martinez show, and I want to thank you for your vote of confidence in allowing me to direct another episode of My American Wife! I will do my best to increase the Authenticity and GeneraL Interest of the program while maintaining the high standards of Helpfulness, Knowledge Enhancement, Wholesomeness, and of course Deliciousness of Meat.

  Please assure Mr. Ueno that I understand his concern that an American director might not be able to satisfy the unique sensibilities of the Japanese audience. I will do my best, and I will be sure to send you proposals in advance for your approval.

  Up until now we have chosen our American Wives based on characteristics t
hat market studies indicate will be attractive to Japanese married women. I think the reason the Martinez family show received such high ratings is because it was different. It widened the audience’s understanding of what it is to be American. I would like to continue to introduce the quirky, rich diversity and the strong sense of individualism that make the people of this country unique.

  Here is my proposal for the next show.

  BEAUDROUX FAMILY

  Askew, Louisiana

  OPENING: Imagine Gone With the Wind. The frame is locked and neatly circumscribes a classical Southern perspective. The long drive cuts straight down the center toward the house, lined on either side by ancient oaks whose branches are laden with beards of Spanish moss. The brick plantation house defines the end of the drive and plugs up its vanishing point. We hear a slow Zydeco “Valse Bébé” or a sliding Cajun blues riff like “Ma Petite Fille Est Gone” by Rockin’ Dopsie.

  An attractive middle-aged woman with faded blond hair and a glimmer of quiet humor in her eye enters from the Left of the frame. She turns to face the camera. “Hi, y’all,” she says, with a slow smile. “I’m Grace Beaudroux. I’m your American Wife today. Now, let’s meet the family.”

  Her words motivate a slow camera dolly forward to reveal a lanky, balding man, deeply tanned.

  “I’m Vern,” he drawls. “Gracie’s loving husband.”

  Again the camera pushes forward, this time to discover a fair-haired daughter, whose pregnancy burgeons at the bottom of the frame.

  “I’m Alison,” she says. “I’m the oldest.” The camera continues to move.

  “I’m Vernon,” says a tall, sandy-haired young man. “Junior. I’m the second.” The camera booms down to a considerably Lower angle, and suddenly an Asian teenager with raven-black hair and bangs cut low across her forehead confronts the camera.