My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

  “Don’t run away!” he said softly, right behind me, and his voice was like chocolate. He overtook me, then, without breaking stride, he turned in his tracks to face me and ran backward, still matching my pace. I gave up and slowed.

  “Do you always chase after women like this?” I asked, querulous, out of breath.

  “Nah,” he said smoothly. “Women, they chase after me. I mean, look at yourself! Who is chasing whom now, I ask you?”

  His eyes widened in mock innocence, and when I scowled at him he threw his head back and laughed. It stopped me dead.

  “Are you a professional athlete or something?” I asked. Kyoto is a sweltering bowl of a city in the summer, and that year the heat had lingered, still and muggy, into the fall. The sweat ran down my forehead, stinging my eyes, but his dark face was perfectly dry.

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m an engineer.”

  Which perhaps explains why, when I eventually told him about it, months later, he approved of my experiment in biotech.

  “So that is the reason you chased me along the banks of the Kamogawa, then?” he said, rolling over onto his back. We were lying in bed, under the futon that was always too short and left our feet exposed down at the end, and it was winter now, and cold. “You spotted a handsome black man and recognized my genetic potential.”

  “Emil, I didn’t—”

  “Some people might call that racism, you know?”

  “Listen, you chased me.”

  “Well, I consent. I will gladly be the genetic engineer of our love, but perhaps we ought to marry first?”

  In racially homogeneous Japan, we were a radical couple. We waited until the following year, until Emil finished his master’s degree, and we got married in the spring. Immediately we set about the creation of our family, first with abandon, then with precision, and finally with despair, but to no avail. I couldn’t get pregnant. It wasn’t Emil, we were fairly sure of that. He’d impregnated a girlfriend in Paris, so it had to be me. I have thought of myself as mulatto (half horse, half donkey—i.e., a “young mule”), but my mulishness went further than just stubbornness or racial metaphor. Like many hybrids, it seemed, I was destined to be nonreproductive.

  I underwent a battery of fertility testing and discovered that I had a precancerous condition called neoplasia, an in situ carcinoma consisting of malignant cancer cells growing in the tissue of my cervix. In situ means that the cancer wasn’t going anywhere, and my Japanese doctor wasn’t worried. He also insisted that this wasn’t the reason for my infertility. But as soon as I could, I had an operation called a conization to remove the malignancy, and afterward the surgeon told me that he’d discovered something else. He showed me an X-ray.

  I’ve always pictured the triangular uterine cavity as the head of a bull, with the fallopian tubes spreading and curling like noble horns, and that’s what I was expecting to see. But when he showed me the filmy negative against the light, what I saw instead was less symmetrical. The left side of the bull’s broad forehead was caved in, less triangular, as though my uterus had been coldcocked.

  Still, we hoped. The doctor said I should be able to conceive, despite my diminished capacity, but he was wrong. We tried again and again.... No, that’s not quite true. I tried. And I made Emil comply. Every month I would monitor my temperature, time my cycles, and test my secretions until that magic interval of life’s potential opened its portals. Emil was a sport. He never made me ask, he never rolled his eyes or sighed deeply or made excuses or stayed late at school. He would come home and politely become aroused, and again we would try. And fail. As far as I know, we never even managed to fertilize an egg.

  Barrenness took its toll, infected my studies, and so when Emil received an offer of a job in Tokyo, I was more than happy to give up Shōnagon and her lists. Tokyo was a welcome change. I made friends with Kato, who gave me a job at his production company, translating English-speaking interviews for the Japanese subtitlers and dialogue editors. I cut off my hair and discovered androgyny as a tool for sexual politics in the workplace. Emil and I continued to try, but slowly, inevitably ...

  After almost five grim years, we woke to the realization that we just didn’t love each other enough. It wasn’t the frustration of our biological imperative; I think we could have survived that and accepted childlessness with grace. But neither of us could recover from the overwhelming sense of failure. It poisoned every single thing we tried to do as a couple. By the end we couldn’t even go out to dinner and think of the evening as a success. So we split up. He stayed on in Japan and later married a Japanese woman and had several kids. I moved back to America and into my tenement apartment on the Lower East Side of New York City, reconciled to my stubborn solitude and mulish sterility.

  In Fly, when I told Sloan I don’t get pregnant, this is what I meant.

  Call it censorship, but on that trip home to visit Ma after the Bukowsky show, I stole the Frye’s Grammar School Geography from the public library. It was the least I could do for the children of Quam. But to be perfectly honest, I wanted the book, and it’s not the kind of thing you can easily pick up at a Barnes & Noble superstore. It felt like antique pornography to me, with its musty old text, quaint etchings, and poisonous thoughts. From time to time I still pore over its stained, chamois-soft pages, satisfying my documentarian’s prurient interest in the primary sources of the past. Today, with a frisson of delight, I discovered the Preface, complete with typographical flourishes:In this book, man is the central thought. Every line of type, every picture, every map, has been prepared with a single purpose, namely, to present the earth as the home of man,—to describe and locate the natural features, climates and products that largely determine his industries and commerce, as well as his civic and other relations,—thus bringing REASON to bear on the work.

  It isn’t Mr. Frye’s use of the generic “man” for “human” that I’m interested in. Other women might object to his choice of words, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s an intraspecific quibble. The conflict that interests me isn’t man versus woman; it’s man versus life. Man’s REASON, his industries and commerce, versus the entire natural world. This, to me, is the dirty secret hidden between the fraying covers.

  Ma is waiting for me when I come back from the county medical center. It’s been three days since I’ve been home, and there is no hiding it from her. She’s seen me run to the toilet in the morning, she’s hovered by the bathroom door, listened as I retch. I’ve gone for a test, and it’s positive—I am one and a half months pregnant. When I walk through the door, Ma is standing hesitantly in the kitchen, supporting herself on the back of a stuffed vinyl kitchen chair. She is tiny, a miniature Ma, bent and gray and accusing.

  “Is the baby,” she declares. She has never learned to speak English well and is particularly awkward with her articles and prepositions.

  “Yeah,” I tell her. “It’s a baby.”

  She moves around the chair and sits down on the edge. “Why you get pregnant now? You not even married anymore.”

  “I should think you’d be relieved, Ma.” She had never met Emil. She refused to meet him. Before we were married I sent her a picture of him and me, in front of the Great Buddha at Kamakura. It was a great picture of the three of us: pitch black, pale yellow, and a looming greenish-blue. She wrote back that she would not come to the wedding.

  “Who is father? Is it another one of black Africaman?” That’s what she used to call him: never Emil, just “Africaman.”

  “No; this one’s green.” She drives me crazy. I mean, as the only Asian in a place like Quam, how could she still be so prejudiced?

  “Good. Is better you have green baby. Is matching stupid color of your hair.”

  She smiles grimly. She is impossible.

  “At least you tall girl. Big bones. Not so bad for you to have ...” She spreads her legs and makes a shooing gesture with her hands between them, pantomiming childbirth but looking more like she is chasing away flies. “Me, I have very bad
time. Very bad. You are much too big baby for me.” She looks at me accusingly.

  But I don’t really notice. Something is stirring at the back of my mind.

  “Mom, when you were pregnant, did your doctor tell you to take any medicine? Any pills?”

  She shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. Don’t remember.”

  “Come on, Ma, you must remember. Please. Think back. Little pills maybe you had to take every day, to help you, so you wouldn’t lose me ... ?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know. Everything crazy then, and I don’t speak good English at all. Maybe sure I take some pill, some vitamin, I don’t remember. It was bad time. Doctor say I am so delicate.”

  She looks so delicate, sitting on the edge of the chair, her callused feet, in their old rubber thonged slippers, swinging clear of the linoleum floor. Her hands are crossed in front of her on the kitchen table, fingers interlaced, like those of an obedient schoolchild at her desk, as she watches me expectantly. Suddenly it seems perfectly clear. I know what happened. The bludgeoning my uterus received occurred when I was still only a little shrimp, floating in the warm embryonic fluid of Ma. I can imagine the whole thing. Ma, frightened, pregnant, not speaking a word of English, sitting in the doctor’s office, maybe with Dad, maybe with Grammy Little. I sat in a doctor’s office today. I know how scary it is. Of course old Doc Ingvortsen, the family doctor in Quam, decided she was delicate. And from there, it would have been only a reasonable precaution. After all, he was used to treating large-bodied Swedes and sturdy Danes, with ample, childbearing hips—the farthest east he’d probably ever imagined was Poland or possibly the Ukraine. But Ma was Japanese. My birth certificate, signed by this doctor, lists her race as “yellow.” And she was narrow. Doc must have subscribed to the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, seen the ads. So he gave her a prescription, probably about 125 milligrams of diethylstilbestrol, otherwise known as DES, to take once a day during the first trimester of me. To keep me in place, floating between her delicate hips.

  “Ma, where is Doc Ingvortsen now?”

  “Oh, he long time dead.”

  “Who took over his practice? Is there a new doctor there?”

  “No.” She flapped her hand at me in disgust. “Old Main Street office long time burn down. No Quam doctor no more. Only brand-new, sooperdooper Medical Center. Too far away. But all doctor stay there together. I say, why need so many doctor in same sooperdooper place? Better to spread out, little doctor here, little doctor there. Better the old-fashioned way.”

  The next few days seemed like a dream—astonishing and senseless. I tried to track down Dr. Ingvortsen’s records, but they had been lost or destroyed in the fire. It was thirty years ago, after all. I searched Ma’s files and medicine cabinets but didn’t expect to find anything. I didn’t tell her about the DES. Maybe I should have, but I figured what good would it do? She would only feel guilty. She couldn’t really offer me solace. We just didn’t have that type of relationship. Later in the week we talked again.

  “Ma, I have to tell you. I don’t know if I can keep the baby....”

  She shook her head. “You keep, you throw away. Always you do only what you want. Not thinking about other people. What his father say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know father?” She turned away from me. “You are wicked girl.”

  “No, Ma. I know who the father is. I just haven’t told him.”

  “He nice man?” She turned back hopefully.

  “I don’t ... I mean, yes, I guess he’s a nice man.”

  “You tell him, then he marry you? Maybe?”

  “No, Ma. I don’t think so.”

  “Then he not nice man and is better you throw away his baby.” She narrowed her narrow eyes at me. “But you not sure, right?” she persisted.

  “That’s right, Ma. I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all.”

  It is my job to be sure about things. Every day, I must reassure my crew, my wives, the local sheriff who’s about to arrest us for trespassing, or treason, or public intoxication ... that really, sir, ma’am, everything is just fine, under control, the check is on the way, in the bank, whatever. I have an honest, earnest face. It’s the Asian-American Woman thing—we’re reliable, loyal, smart but nonthreatening. This is why we get to do so much newscasting in America. It’s a convenient precedent. The average American is trained to believe what I tell him.

  It can also be an occupational hazard. I am so good at convincing people that I know exactly what I am doing, I end up fooling myself.

  But here is a truth, regarding Sloan.

  At first he was a lark, primarily funny. I was twenty-seven when Emil and I got divorced. For two years afterward I didn’t date at all. My relationship with my body had been irrevocably altered by my failure to conceive. With a shriveled uterus and a predisposition to cancer, I was not in the mood for love. I was deformed, barren, and scared. I suspected I might die young, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to view sex as recreational again. Sex was about precision and despair, the antitheses of pleasure. It was a production, and I was the director and had run it ruthlessly. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe my little egg, in the middle of her placid descent, simply recoiled in horror when she saw these beleaguered genetic envoys, joyless and exhausted, bushwhacking their way up my tortuous reproductive tract. So when they finally arrived and came knocking, she slammed her door, and there they died, defeated in the murky, lukewarm threshold of becoming.

  Anyway, two years after the divorce, a girlfriend told me about Sloan. He was a good friend of hers. They used to discuss their sexual proclivities, as did she and I, and in a magnanimous curatorial gesture of friendship, she suggested to both of us that we might like to fuck. She thought we’d have a lot to talk about.

  She was right. We had that long prelude by telephone, and by the time we finally met, in Nebraska, we had talked so much and my defenses were so far down that the sudden embodiment of sex shook me.

  What hooked me was the suspicion that he was not equivalently shaken. This is not easy to admit. But I sensed it. Perhaps his sexual mastery and my abandonment indicated nothing more than the discrepancy in our desire. I should say, the goals of that desire: I am pretty sure that our enjoyment was on a par—at least he told me as much, and I had no reason to disbelieve him, but I soon suspected that we just didn’t want the same things to come of it.

  I started to realize that the world Sloan roamed was much larger and richer than mine. Although we normally met on my turf, small backwaters you could reach only by pickup truck or Greyhound bus, on a couple of occasions when I was in transit we met in L.A., which was one of his towns. He knew that I loved food. He took me to exquisite restaurants, where we ate rich urchin roe that melted like butter, and paper-thin fugu with chili ponzu sauce, and a thimbleful of black-market caviar, wrapped in a translucent skin and tied with a chive, then covered with trembling pieces of gold leaf; it was called a Beggar’s Purse and each one cost fifty dollars. After weeks of Denny’s, I loved it.

  He knew people. Everywhere we went. People whose names and faces I recognized but whom I had never seen in person before. Musicians. Film people. I got the sense he was showing me off, and I began to wonder if perhaps I wasn’t primarily a rustic curiosity, a story he recounted to his friends or his therapist. It was a point of pride with me to show up in his world covered in mud and chiggers, with torn jeans and a filthy T-shirt, traipsing cow dung across the cropped carpets of the Chateau Marmont. He liked this. I never had the right clothes, and he would take me shopping and buy me things so we could go out to dinner, and then he would take them off me later on. He had a few stores that he knew well—I mean, really knew: the collections, the designers, the girls. I got it. I am not stupid. Just underdressed.

  This type of relationship was normally not my style, but then again, nothing was normal in the Year of Meats.

  The episode in Fly undid me. The almost accidental conversation about trust r
eleased all these unexpected hopes. I’d thought they were all dead. That’s the thing about involuntary infertility—it kills your sense of a future, so you hide out in the here and now. Of course, lots of people choose a child-free life. But when you don’t get to choose, when it is thrust upon you, you equate the loss of posterity with the loss of hope.

  So there in Fly, I was overcome with this soft and screwy sense of hopefulness, followed by this titanic sex that laid me out, and when I came to, all these ifs were flying around, blackening the air like an infestation. When they cleared, they left me looking squarely at a brand-new desire. After resolutely keeping him at a distance, suddenly I knew that Sloan was important. He meant something to me. I’m not sure why, but I wanted him at the center of my life, not just orbiting its periphery like a spare moon.