My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

  Ever since the show with the lesbians, he had become withdrawn and silent, or drunk and gregarious, but always a nervous rage simmered right below the surface. His complexion had turned sallow, and he was losing weight. Akiko, on the other hand, had color in her cheeks, and her hipbones were once again integrated into the line of her figure. She noticed these things in the mirror, that she sort of had a figure again, that she’d lost the dark hollows under her eyes. Her mind dodged the thin white scar above her eyebrow. On the whole, looking at her body didn’t frighten her as much anymore, now that her bones were more covered up. Still, she thought critically, craning around to inspect her buttocks, she had a ways to go. The sides were not so concave anymore, but they were not round and plump, either. Not enticing.

  On the way home from the market, she passed the vending machines near the train tracks where she first bought condoms. She hadn’t bought condoms for two years, not since John decided it was time for them to have a baby. The machines looked much the same, except that now, in addition to the condoms, magazines, and batteries, there was a fourth machine, which sold sports drinks. Poccari Sweat. She stopped in front of the magazine machine, then stepped closer and peeked behind the foil. The women looked the same too: high school girls in their sailor middies, airline stewardesses, office ladies neat in polyester blouses and fake pearls. And the nuns. Akiko surveyed the women available, trying to see what was hidden under the foil. She had Bobby Joe plugged into her ears and felt quite bold. He was singing “Backwoods Preacher Man,” and she didn’t care which of the neighbors came by and saw her standing there, even in broad daylight. She pondered her choices. She was going to take her time.

  The nuns were out of the question, although she suspected that in disposition she might in fact resemble them most. The high school girls were too young and silly, and the stewardesses would require a uniform. There were S-M women too, bound and gagged, but their mute pain scared her and she didn’t even consider them, barely even saw them, in fact. That left the office ladies. She had sort of been an OL once, and she still had the clothes, although most of them would be too large for her now. She fed six one-hundred-yen coins into the slot and pulled the knob for the All Nudo OL Special! The magazine slid from the slot and she retrieved it, tucking it discreetly into her grocery sack, around the scallions.

  At home she took the magazine into the bathroom. She drained the old water from the previous week out of the bathtub, washed the tub carefully, then filled it again. It was early in the day for a bath, but it was part of the program that she’d studied in a women’s magazine: “12 Steps to a Sexy Feeling.” Step One was a hot bath to relax you, but you had to use brand-new fresh water and special-smelling spa salts. She’d acquired an assortment of these last week from the department store. When the tub was full and the water hot, she slipped in. She closed her eyes and tried to empty her mind of all her daily concerns, tried to be fully aware of the warmth of the water against her skin like the caress of a lover, tried to concentrate on her own sexy feeling. It was difficult. She opened her eyes again and decided to take a breather. She put some water on her face, then sat in the deep tub with her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking gently so the warm, scented water lapped her shoulders. The bathroom was pleasant, and the cedar drainboards on the floor gave off a nice smell when they were wet. The sun shone through the lace curtains, which fluttered in the breeze from the open window. The breeze felt good on her face too, fresh, brushing away the warm steam. It was nice to take baths in the afternoon sunlight, Akiko thought. Not so sexy, maybe, but pretty and bright.

  She remembered the magazine. She propped it on the edge of the tub and started to flip through, looking at the pictures. The OL were quite young, maybe just out of college. Ten girls were featured, and each one had a little story and several pictures with different poses. The stories were very authentic and told what company the girl worked for, when she had started working, and what her main office duties were. Then it told about her hobbies and what kind of boyfriend she liked and what she liked to do with him on the weekends. The first picture looked like a normal snapshot of the girl at work, sitting at her desk, or taking dictation from her boss, or answering the phone. But as you turned the pages, the poses got more and more risque. Sometimes the girl was sitting on her desk instead of behind it. Then she was unbuttoning her blouse and taking off her brassiere. Her skirt was pushed up high around her thighs. She looked straight at you, like you were the man she was undressing for. It was disturbing, but at the same time Akiko was intrigued.

  The girl was coy, reluctant to show you her breasts at first, and she kept her hands cupped over them, which sort of pushed them up and made them look bigger on top. Akiko stood the magazine on the faucet, against the taps, and tried this. It sort of worked, although her breasts were somewhat smaller than the girl’s. Still, it made a nice little swelling.

  In the next picture, the girl had dropped her hands. Her nipples were soft and pink and perfectly round. They were cute, like tiny lips, pursed for a kiss. Her eyes were downcast—she was too shy to look directly at you—and her long black hair curtained her blushing cheeks. By the next picture, though, she’d gotten over her embarrassment: she reclined back on the desk, legs spread, papers pushed onto the floor. She was wearing only a garter belt and panties, and one hand was pinching her nipple and making it erect, while the other hand tugged at the front of her panties, bunching the fabric together to make it narrow, so that it sort of fit up in between. She didn’t have any hair down there at all. Her head was tilted back and her eyes were closed, but she kept her mouth open a little, biting her bottom lip. In the next picture she was on her knees on the desk, with her bottom looming up in the air, toward the camera. Her breasts hung down in front, and she was twisting her body to look back over her shoulder. She had reached one hand up from below, to cup herself between the legs. Her fingernails were long and manicured and looked dangerous, like they would hurt if she weren’t careful. Looking at the fingernails, Akiko suspected this wasn’t a real office lady at all. How could she type?

  After her bath; Akiko stood with her back to the mirror, wearing a lace garter belt and pearly white nylon stockings that she’d gotten from the lingerie boutique at the Ginza. She pushed her bottom out to make it look bigger. She reached down and touched herself between her legs with her finger, checking the girl in the picture for reference. The girl stared boldly at her. Akiko stared back, moving her finger around a little. She liked looking at the pictures. Even though they weren’t so authentic, she found them sexy—but she was not sure whether she wanted to make love to the girl or simply to be her.

  JANE

  I called Sloan collect from the town jail.

  “Well, it’s one of those good news/bad news situations.... Yeah, well, I’m in Montana.... No, that’s fine, because you’re not invited. I don’t think you’d particularly like it here.... It’s a long story. I’m in jail. I’ll tell you about it sometime.... No, thanks. Kenji’s wiring bail.

  “Anyway, that’s the good news. The bad news is—well, you remember that time in Fly, Oregon? Yeah, well, I didn’t think it could happen, but I’m pregnant.... I know. I thought I was sterile too, believe me.... I know.... I know.... I know.... Well, I am sorry too, for what that’s worth. Far sorrier than you ...

  “Yeah, well, that seems like the only sensible thing to do, right? I mean, I can’t really see us raising a kid in a Motel 6.... Yeah, well, I thought you’d agree.... Also, I guess, I think we should kind of take a break, not see each other.... Fine. And the last thing is the cost. I’ll send you a bill for your half....

  “Okay. Well, bye....”

  I had access to a pay phone and time on my hands—jail was the perfect opportunity to take care of some of those nagging things that I’d been putting off, didn’t want to deal with, didn’t want to think about, even.

  There had been this small confusion with a freight train, but I really blamed our predicament on Gulf War fever, which stil
l held the country in its grip and made everyone see ghosts. We had been standing by the railroad tracks, shooting scenery in a remote part of Montana, when the train went by. Spotting us, the engineer radioed the dispatcher and reported our coordinates, describing us, somewhat hysterically, as a band of Mexican terrorists with a rocket launcher—a logical mistake: He’d never seen a Betacam on a tripod. The dispatcher called the sheriff, who brought a posse to arrest us.

  “Mexican?” I asked as he confiscated the Betacam. “Mexican terrorists?”

  “Aw,” said the sheriff, “y‘know ... engineer prob’ly just got the news confused with some old TV western.”

  At the police station, I convinced him the Betacam wasn’t loaded with anything more incendiary than Mrs. Payne from Peerless—a normal American carnivore—and her Blazing Steak on a Plank. Well, maybe she wasn’t so normal—she did make the Beef Fudge for dessert.

  Anyway, by the time I got hold of Kenji, the sheriff had dropped the conspiracy charges. The trespassing was still under negotiation. We were waiting for the bail money to arrive.

  The jail was small and clean, just a couple of cells at the back of the renovated police station. I had one of them to myself for two nights, and like an unscheduled stopover at an unfamiliar airport, it gave me time to think—an activity I’d been carefully avoiding.

  When I first learned I was pregnant, I just assumed I would abort, either spontaneously or deliberately. Then, after the ultrasound, there were those suspended weeks when I was working with Lara and Dyann and just couldn’t think about the pregnancy at all. The fetus was there, growing, but I had been unable to act, to make the call, to terminate. Now I had reached the twelve-week mark and was pushing the deadline for a safe abortion.

  If the impregnation had paralyzed my will, it had also quickened my emotions, but I failed kindle a like response in Sloan’s lackadaisical heart. After New Jersey, I had waited for him to call. I phoned him once, maybe twice, but he was always busy on his cellular phone, driving in and out of roam. And eventually I got the message. Sloan was making it abundantly clear that a loopy, random orbit was all he could sustain. It became more and more difficult to tell him about the pregnancy.

  Why couldn’t I tell him? What was I afraid of? On an obvious level, I didn’t want him to think I was one of those women who would get pregnant to entrap a man. But more than that, I knew he would want me to abort, and I just didn’t want to hear him say the words “You’ll have an abortion, of course ... ,” as though it was a foregone conclusion. So when he did say it, over the phone at the jail, it just confirmed how painfully little our relationship meant to him. But the odd thing was that I realized simultaneously and with shocking clarity that my pregnancy was no longer contingent upon him.

  I had wanted a child so badly at one point in my life and that much desire is hard to erase. Maybe it was Dyann and Lara, and all their love and self-sufficient fertility. Or Gracie Beaudroux and her ever-growing brood. Or Miss Helen Dawes and her softball team of tall, strong girls. Even Mrs. Bukowsky, with only one crushed child of her own, and enough love to nurture the hundreds who showed up on her doorstep. All my American Wives and their brimming, child-filled lives had awakened my desire all over again. So by the time the sheriff released me and the boys, I was considering motherhood seriously enough to call it quits after only two shots of Jack Daniel’s.

  We were sitting at the hotel bar, celebrating our freedom and the dismissal of all the charges against us. The sheriff was a nice man after all and bought us all the first round of drinks. In halting Japanese he made a toast to us, a phrase he had learned from Suzuki in jail, along with the numbers from one to ten and the names of the most interesting parts of the human anatomy. Oh was cradling a tiny kitten, the offspring of the jail cat, who had given birth to a litter on Oh’s sweat-shirt, then abandoned this one as the runt. He’d adopted it, named it Butch, and fed it with an eyedropper that the sheriff’s deputy brought from home. The sheriff told him he could keep it as a souvenir of Montana, and Oh was beaming and cooing like a proud mom. The bartender had gotten some heated milk for him from the kitchen, and now Oh was dipping his little finger in the milk and letting the kitten lick it off.

  After watching Suzuki knock back a fourth shot, the sheriff went home for dinner with a warning not to celebrate too strenuously. But Suzuki was determined to make up for two nights on the wagon.

  “Jane-chan, nomé!” he ordered, drunk as a monkey. “Drink! Drink!” Tennessee whiskey had made his blood boil and stained his face like a new bruise. He lifted his shot glass and drained it, summoned the bartender and ordered another round.

  “Kampai!” he cried, picking up one of the brimming glasses that were aligned in front of me, untouched. “You are not keeping up!”

  “Suzuki-san,” I began, “cbotto, damé—I can’t drink....”

  “Can’t drink!” He exploded with drunken laughter. “Don’t make me laugh! Of course you can drink. You are a splendid drinker! For a girl, no less! Most girls haven’t got what it takes, but you! You are the finest—”

  “Suzuki-san ... ninshin da yo—I’m pregnant.”

  The news stopped him dead. He stared straight ahead, then slumped against the bar; his head thumped solidly on the counter.

  “Suzuki-san?” I placed my hand on the back of his sweaty neck. “Daijobu desu ka? Are you okay?”

  And then he surprised me. Straightening up again, he swiveled on his stool to face me, draped his arms around my neck, and pressed his shiny forehead against mine.

  “Takagi-san,” he announced, in slurred Japanese, “you will never have to worry about the child as long as I live. I will marry you tonight if you wish. Whatever you want, you must simply tell me and I will do it for you. If your baby needs a college education, I will work hard to provide one. You are my dear comrade, and I will always support you.”

  And with that, he slid off the barstool and fell to the floor.

  There’s a fairy tale about the first Japanese wanna-be astronaut, another drunken monkey, who saw the moon in a deep and quiet pond and bragged to his friend the badger that he could fly all the way there and bring back that moon in a bucket. He drowned in the attempt. I suspect it was the lunacy blooming in my face that galvanized Suzuki. His offers were sincere and I was touched. I got him back onto his barstool, thanked him warmly, and left him there, staring gloomily into the bottom of his glass.

  The next morning we went to Cemetery Hill to shoot the panoramics of the town. It was one of those beautiful Montana mornings, when you wake up and walk outside and it hits you: Oh, right, this is why they call it Big Sky country. I mean, the sky is so big and so blue, you can’t really think about anything else.

  Cemetery Hill wasn’t much of a hill at all, but it provided enough of a rise to simulate a vista. A chain gang was working at one end of the cemetery, weeding and tending the graves, though most of the men were just enjoying the weather, smoking and sitting on the headstones. These guys were from the penitentiary, where at one point the sheriff had threatened to send us. I recognized a deputy, who waved to us. After a brief discussion of my editorial needs, I left Suzuki to get the shots of the town. He tends to work better on his own, especially when he is hungover, which is most of the time.

  Two white moths were chasing each other, and finally they locked together and tumbled out of the air, landing on the thick green grass of a grave, where they fluttered and mated, then came to rest. The small battered headstone read:our

  Belov’d daughter

  Ann Wren

  born March 10, 1848

  died March 24, 1848

  Ann Wren. It was a sweet, plain name. Her parents had given it to her, known her for two weeks, fourteen short days, before she slipped away from them—buried here, belov’d for eternity. I wandered on, moving from stone to stone, reading off the names of the early settlers and the dates of their lives and deaths: Nathan Field, 8 years old; Jasper Beckwith, 3 months; Elsa May Foster, 2 years.

 
So many children.

  There were adults buried here too.

  But the tiny, crooked headstones were the ones that drew me.

  Then suddenly it came to me, why I was here.

  Whispering the beautiful names of these dead pioneer children, I was testing them for sound, invoking their identities, trying them on the nascent son or daughter who had settled inside me. It was unreal. Name is very first thing. Name is face to all the world.

  But you shopping for one in graveyard?

  I could hear Ma’s horror and it made me smile. One thing was finally clear—I wanted my baby.

  AKIKO

  The loose bow at the collar of Akiko’s silky white blouse looked like moth wings, glowing in the flickering candlelight. She sat primly at the kotatsu next to John, like an OL or a hostess at a bar, adding ice cubes to his glass. As she leaned forward with the whiskey bottle to pour a drink, the loopy wings closed, and as she sat back, they softly opened again.

  John was big and bombastic, and his face was maroon. He grabbed the bottle of Suntory Old from her hand and poured a huge swig into her glass.

  “Drink,” he slurred. “Drink up. It’s good to see you having fun. I like having a wife I can drink with.”

  Around her neck she wore a choker of pearls, and a pearl-studded barrette held up her hair on one side. Tucked about her knees was a straight, rose-colored skirt. Underneath it was the garter belt. Just before dinner she turned off the overhead fluorescent light and lit the two candles, which she placed on the kotatsu.

  She had intended to tell John about her periods right after dinner, but it was so hard to bring up such topics of conversation. So then she thought perhaps a little whiskey would make it easier, but even after several drinks, she hadn’t spoken. The candles had burned down and the wax was hardening onto the tabletop. Still hopeful, she was reluctant to break the mood to clean it up.