“What’s that?” I’ve been trained to know a secret when I see one.
She looked at me long and hard, then sighed and gave in. “After losing number four baby, I try new method....”
“Yes?” I prodded. “What was that?”
“You know Japanese go-en?” she asked.
“You mean the five-yen coin? With the hole in it?”
“Yes. You know what other meaning for go-en?”
“What, like a connection? Like when you have a good connection or relationship with someone?”
Ma nodded grimly. “I think I need go-en with my number five baby, so I put it in my mouth when I sex with your father. But I not have real go-en from Japan, so I use American nickel instead. I think, This is America, so close enough.” She shrugged.
“You mean you had sex with Dad with a nickel in your mouth?!” I burst out laughing. “Ma, that’s crazy.”
She looked at me, distant and haughty, then suddenly she smiled. “Dad think so too. He wonder, ‘Why you don’t like kiss me anymore, Michi?’ ”
“Ma, how long did this go on?”
“Long time. Every time. And every time it not work. But I never give up, you know? I think, This is my good idea. And then one night was ... special night. And then you came!”
As an editor, I knew she had jumped ahead in her story and was forcing the conclusion. The note she ended on rang false. She was leaving something out. “Ma, what do you mean? What was special? What happened?”
She paused and took a long sip of tea. And then another. Then she poured another cup.
“Not your business,” she concluded, and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. But I was not going to give up on this one. I don’t know what I expected. Some clue to my own reproductive difficulties, perhaps. Or maybe it was just a prurient interest in my own conception.
“Forget it, Ma. It is totally my business. I need to know about this. You have to tell me.”
She sighed again. “Dad, he come home with bottle of France wine and say he going to make me romantic again. Make me want to kissing again. And he give me France wine, much too much. And then we get ready to bed, so I look all over house for nickel to put in my mouth, and finally I find one and go up to bedroom and lie down. And then we sex, and just at that time, he kiss me so hard I swallow my nickel just like that! And that was night you are made.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “I can’t believe this, Ma.”
“It is truth. I swallow nickel and you come. And stay with me for whole time. We have go-en, you see? Next time, you try with your husband. It work, you see.”
“Ma, you know I’m not married. And I’m sorry. I just don’t believe in these ancient Oriental superstitions.”
Ma stiffened. “What ancient?” she replied.
“You know what it means—like ‘old-fashioned.’ ”
“I know meaning of ‘ancient,’” she said, affronted. “Nickel in mouth is not ancient custom.”
“I thought you ...”
“No,” Ma answered. “I am modern woman. I just make it up.”
I don’t know why I got so annoyed. Maybe because she was so stubborn, so adamant, so sure she was right. Or maybe because she was so credulous, which is why she would have taken the DES in the first place. Or maybe it was her carelessness I blamed her for. Or maybe mine.
“Ma, I have something to tell you. You say the medicine that Dr. Ingvortsen gave you didn’t matter, but that’s not true. It did matter. It made me sick, when I was still inside you. That’s why it’s been so hard for me to get pregnant. That’s why I miscarried this baby.”
Ma just stared at me.
“The pills damaged my uterus and my cervix—inside me, all the parts you need to make a baby, Ma. They never developed properly. Do you remember the tumor I had operated on in Japan? That was part of it. I had cancer.”
Ma shook her head. “Why Doc Ing-san give me bad medicine?”
“He didn’t know. Nobody knew then.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “No,” she concluded. “It is not possible.”
I lost it. “How can you sit there and be so sure?” I shouted. “You think you’re so smart, that you know everything. But you don’t. You just did whatever people told you to—Dad, Doc Ingvortsen, Grammy and Grampa.... The drug was a hormone. It fucked me up so I’ll probably never have a baby. And I could get cancer again. When I’m in my forties, the risk increases again. I could still die of this, Ma.”
Ma sat very still. “It is my fault?” she asked quietly. She looked so little all of a sudden, and crestfallen, but her spine was still ramrod straight and her hands were folded tightly in her lap. I couldn’t look at her.
“Jane-chan, I feel sorrow for you. But why you blame me? Only I try everything possible to make healthy baby—maybe take some pills, maybe swallow nickel. I try everything. Did you?”
I couldn’t answer.
“I am sorry for taking bad medicine that hurt you, Jane. I did not know it. But you are wrong for blaming me.” She reached over and held my wrist. “I never blaming you. I not blaming you for being too big baby that break me to pieces inside when you come out. Doc say I almost die. And bleeding and bleeding, so he take out my inside woman parts. No more chance for babies. All gone. But it’s okay, I think. Because I am so lucky to get my big, tough American baby like you.” She smiled at me and patted my hand proudly.
I put my head down on the linoleum tabletop and cried. Ma didn’t say anything, just kept patting my hand.
I stayed in Quam for two weeks. Ma and I didn’t talk too much about the sad stuff anymore, but we were gentle with each other and she made all my favorite Japanese foods, the ones she used to make when I was little and sick—savory egg custards, rice gruels, pickled plums. We ate quietly and talked about the past a lot, because the future had been taken away. But I couldn’t forget it. My breasts were swollen and painful and leaking a little, and I was still bleeding heavily. I drove to the county clinic where I’d first gone to get the pregnancy test, and remembering made me cry again, and I sat in the car in the parking lot until I was finished.
The doctor examined me and said the bleeding was normal, and he gave me a prescription that he said should ease the swelling in my breasts. I had it filled at the pharmacy and on the way home I stopped at the Quam Public Library.
The interior hadn’t changed since I was a child: the same heavy wooden furniture, the same smell of sunlight striking dust. I had spent many hours here, studying mankind in Frye’s Geography, designing my progeny and daydreaming about a future, far away from Quam. And here I was, back again, bitter and aborted. The irony was not lost on me. I went to the reference section and found The Complete Home Reference Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and hauled the enormous book into an empty corner. My prescription was for a medication called Tace, a hard, two-tone green 25-milligram capsule, made by the Merrell Dow Company. I found it under “Estrogens.” It was related to the generic drug diethylstilbestrol. Among the indications, the reasons to prescribe the drug, was “post partum breast engorgement.” That was mine. The list of indications took up about one-quarter of a page. The remaining page and three-quarters consisted of warnings, precautions, adverse reactions, and contraindications, the very good reasons never to prescribe this drug. Among these was “known or suspected estrogen-dependent neoplasia.” That was mine too.
Dust motes shimmered in the afternoon sun, gave body to the angled shafts of light. I sat there for a long time, watching the air drift until the sun sank below the horizon of the leaded window and the librarian told me the library was closed. Then I drove home. I emptied the vial of Tace into the toilet and started packing. It was the beginning of a new month, time to return to New York.
I told Ma at dinner, and she nodded approvingly. “No good you just stay home with mama like little baby,” she said. “You fall off horse, you get back on top and riding again.”
“Sure, Ma ...”
“No ‘sure Ma’
to me! This is true thing I say to you. You go back to baby’s father, you get on top and try again. Maybe get married this time.”
“Ma, I don’t think I want to....”
“This is trouble with you. You think you want, you don’t think you want—always back and forth. Me, when I want, it is with whole heart. I look at wanted thing with eyes straight on. But you! Neither here or there. Your looking always crooked, from side of eye. It has no power to hold. So wanted thing, it slip away from you.”
She was right, of course. I’ve always blamed my tendency to vacillate on my mixed ethnicity. Halved, I am neither here nor there, and my understanding of the relativity inherent in the world is built into my genes. Nothing is absolute, and certainly not desire. But knowing this was not enough anymore. It was time to suspend knowing and decide, What do I want? What do I want, absolutely, with my whole heart?
When I left the house, Ma and I hugged, and when we separated, she held on to my wrist again and slipped something into my hand. It was a shiny nickel. I burst out laughing. Ma looked offended, then she shrugged.
“Maybe it work. Maybe nothing, only Oriental superstition, but American doctor Ing-san not so smart, either, after all. So you never know.”
She was dead right about that too.
AKIKO
The door swung open and clanged against the cinder-block wall. Akiko listened. The apartment sounded hollow and still. She took a step into the genkan. Inside, it felt damp, and chilly too, the way concrete apartments get when the heat’s been off for a while and no one’s been living in them. Akiko felt like a small mouse, perched at the threshold, peering and sniffing at the unfamiliar air. She took off her shoes and stepped up, listened again, then switched on the overhead fluorescents, waking the room with the flicker and hum.
“Tadaima ... ,” she called softly. She was just testing, but there was no response. That was how it should be. Still, she needed to be absolutely sure. Clutching her bag, she tiptoed from room to room, checking in the closets, in the bathroom, behind doors. No one. No sign of him. She relaxed. She went into the kitchen and put her bag down on the table, then put on some water to boil.
The phone rang while she was pouring the tea. She took her cup and stood in the living room doorway, listening. The answering machine clicked on and played her own recorded greeting. When she heard John’s voice on the other end, she walked across the living room and picked up the receiver.
“Hai,” she said.
“Ah, iru ka. You’re there,” said John. “I heard the machine pick up and thought you hadn’t returned yet.”
“I just got back.”
“How are you feeling? Have you recovered? You must be feeling better if they let you out.”
“Yes.” She took a slow sip of hot tea. It scalded her tongue.
“Still angry, huh?”
She didn’t answer.
“Well, I don’t blame you. You have a right to be.”
“No, I’m not angry.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.” He paused. “Did you get my note?”
“Yes, I got it.”
“I meant everything I said in it. I’m very sorry I hurt you. I give you my word it will never happen again. But now there’s no more secrets between us. Now we can start over. Start fresh. I’m sure we’ll be successful this time. We’ll be more scientific about it, and make a chart and time things precisely.... I am quite confident.”
“Yes, so am I.”
“Good, I’m glad. I’m glad you are committed to trying again. Now, I’m in New York and I will have to stay here for another couple of weeks—we have decided to do the edit here. I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped. But I’ll be back on November twenty-first. Can you manage without me for that long?”
“Oh yes. I’ll be fine.”
“What will you do with yourself? Will you find enough things to keep you busy?”
“Yes. I will clean the house and get it ready for your return.”
“Fine. That’s just fine.”
When she hung up, she pulled out the phone directory and looked up Travel Agents.
“May I help you?” the agent asked.
“I’d like to buy an airplane ticket, please,” she said. “To New York.”
“Certainly, and the date of travel?”
“November twentieth.”
“And the return?”
“Oh. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.”
The first thing she did was to throw out all her maternity magazines. Then she cleaned the house from top to bottom, beat the futon, washed the tatami, and arranged all the cookbooks on the shelves. On her hands and knees, she scrubbed the surfaces of the bathroom until every trace of her misery was washed away. She even dusted the shelves and the tops of all the bottles of John’s mouthwashes in the medicine cabinet. Then she practiced packing all her clothes and her CDs and her Shōnagon and her pillow book (she’d found it hidden in John’s golf bag), until she could fit everything she owned into two suitcases. What wouldn’t fit she threw away.
In the evening, she prepared simple meals for herself, consisting of small, calcium-rich fishes, steamed vegetables, and a pickled plum to help her digest.
At night she lay in bed and watched her baby grow. At seven days, it was a single-layered ball of cells that folded over and over again to form layers of cells, the outermost of which, at thirteen days, began to bulge; it was the primitive streak, a marker for the main axis of the body, tracing the path for an eventual spine. The organizing design principle of human symmetry was now in place.
At eighteen days, the embryo entered the neurula stage, initiating the development of the nervous system. By the end of the month, it had grown from a single microscopic cell of perfect simplicity to an exquisitely intricate organization, the size of a grain of tapioca. Now millions of differentiated cells performed diverse functions: nervous, digestive, muscular, vascular, and skeletal.... There were rudimentary indications of eyes, whispers of ears, and even the whiff of a nose.
At twenty-two days, she watched as a nonfunctional set of kidneys appeared, looking like those of a primordial eel. (Later, she knew, these would be displaced by another pair, like the ones found in fishes and frogs, until finally the human kind developed.) The embryo now grew four pairs of gill arches and even a temporary tail; like the tadpole it resembled, it would lose both. The foundation for integrated human complexity was laid. Her baby-to-be was full of promise, from the tip of its tail straight through to the beginnings of its chambered yet primitive heart.
Akiko didn’t turn on the television, not even once.
Two days before she left, she invited Tomoko for dinner. It was her friend’s night off, and Akiko had prepared a wonderful meal: glassine mung bean noodles served cold, with crumbled bean curd and julienned vegetables in a tart, savory sauce; sliced lotus root, lightly fried with chili peppers in peanut oil, then steeped in soy sauce and mirin wine, and finished with a dash of Szechwan pepper; a sweet sesame goma aie, made with steamed chrysanthemum leaves, mildly bitter to offset the sweet; and a piece of cod, marinated for three days in sake and mild white miso, and then broiled until the skin was crisp but the insides were still succulent.
It was a party of sorts, Akiko mused. A party to celebrate their new friendship. But it was also a farewell party. And a birthday party too. Akiko took out a package she’d bought at the pharmacy and showed it to Tomoko. It contained a home pregnancy test kit.
“I want to prove it to you. So you don’t think I’m crazy.”
She went to the bathroom and urinated, then Tomoko came in and helped her with the test. It was positive. Akiko smiled.
“See? I told you.”
“I believed you.”
“It’s going to be a girl.”
“How do you ... ? Forget it. I believe you.”
Akiko cleaned up the packaging and threw it away, then wiped the sink. They stood side by side, leaning up against the bathroom counter and talking to each other in
the mirror.
“That’s why I’m going to America,” said Akiko. “It doesn’t matter so much for a son, but since she’s a girl, I want her to be an American citizen. So she can grow up to become an American Wife.” She had told Tomoko all about the program.
Tomoko frowned. “She doesn’t have to be a wife at all, you know.... She could be a nurse, or ...”
Akiko reached over and took her friend’s hand and turned to face her. “I know. I’m just kidding. Sort of.” Then she took her other hand.
Tomoko looked away, but Akiko leaned over and kissed her cheek. Then she kissed her lips, once, very lightly. Tomoko’s lips were shockingly soft. It was hardly a kiss at all. Akiko pulled away and regarded her.
“Are you a lesbian?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” answered Tomoko. “I’ve never thought about it.”
“I have,” said Akiko. “I’ve thought about it. But I don’t know, either.” She squeezed Tomoko’s hands again and then let go. “I don’t know if I’m really going to stay in America. Maybe I’ll come back after she’s born. Anyway, you can be her aunt.”
“I’d like that,” said Tomoko, following her out of the bathroom.
The day before her departure, Akiko went to her bank branch office and withdrew exactly two-thirds of the money in the joint account she had with her husband. She converted a little over five thousand dollars into U.S. currency, which she thought would do for the time being. Then she went home and reserved a taxi for the following morning.
The following day, she took the taxi all the way into the city, to the Hakone City Terminal. It cost hundreds of dollars, but she didn’t want to take any risks, lifting her heavy suitcases on and off the trains and subways. At the terminal, the driver helped her to the baggage check-in line. Then, with just a small knapsack and her CD Walkman, she boarded the limousine bus for Narita Airport. She found a seat at the back of the bus and checked the outside pocket of her knapsack for her airline ticket and her passport. Tucked inside the passport was a fax, carefully folded. She unfolded it now and glanced at the last line for reassurance. “P.S. If there is ever anything I can do to help...” She folded up the paper and put it safely away. She would telephone Takagi-san from inside the airplane, once it was too late to turn back.
My Year of Meats Page 30