My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

  Grace paused. Joy had ducked her head again, furiously digging the straws of the broom between the floorboards to dislodge every last bit of dirt. Was she annoyed? embarrassed? pleased? Grace couldn’t read her. When Jane called, Grace had asked her to look after Joy for the week she would be in New York, but this would certainly rouse Joy’s fury if she knew. She did not like being looked after. But it was a perfect trade. Jane would keep an eye on Joy, and Grace would take care of Akiko.

  “When’s she getting here?” Joy asked.

  “Akiko? She’s coming in on the train. We’ll go pick her up in New Orleans. You wanna come?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  Joy stood up and dumped the dust from the pan into the garbage bag. “I’m gonna be real busy in New York, Mom. Should I really call her?”

  “Well, actually, she wanted to ask you for a favor.”

  “She did? What?”

  “She’s thinking about adoption and wants to talk to you about it. She asked me, but I told her she should really talk to you. You’re the expert. I mean, you know more than just about anyone else, from every angle....”

  Joy looked genuinely pleased. “Yeah, sure. I’ll call her. I’ll talk to her.” She brushed her thick black bangs from her forehead. “So she wants to adopt, huh? Cool.”

  JANE

  Editing my meat video was hard. It was not a TV show, which was what I’d become accustomed to. It was a real documentary, the first I’d ever tried to make, about an incredibly disturbing subject. There were no recipes, no sociological surveys, no bright attempts at entertainment. So how to tell the story?

  Information about toxicity in food is widely available, but people don’t want to hear it. Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control.

  Coming at us like this—in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge—so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness. I have heard myself protesting, “I didn’t know!” but this is not true. Of course I knew about toxicity in meat, the unwholesome-ness of large-scale factory farming, the deforestation of the rain forests to make grazing land for hamburgers. Not a lot, perhaps, but I knew a little. I knew enough. But I needed a job. So when My American Wife! was offered to me, I chose to ignore what I knew. “Ignorance.” In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence.

  I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes pro-active, a political statement. Our collective norm.

  Maybe this exempts me as an individual, but it sure makes me entirely culpable as a global media maker.

  So editing my meat video was hard. It was not a TV show: just the feedlot with its twenty thousand head of cattle, and Gale talking about food and drug technologies; the drugs in the feedmill, and Rosie and her bright-blue popsicle; the cowboys with their hypodermic needles and the aborted calf fetus; the slaughterhouse, and the vat of hormone-contaminated livers, oozing viscous yellow; and Bunny, talking about Rose, who was sleeping. I still couldn’t imagine what I would do with the tape, once I’d finished editing it. I mean, who would want to see it?

  Well, Bunny, for one. I wrapped up a copy of the tape and sent it to her. And Dyann and Lara. I sent them one too. And Sloan.

  AKIKO

  The train crossed Lake Pontchartrain on a low, narrow bridge. The tracks were so close to the blue water, and the water was so vast on either side, stretching as far as she could see, that Akiko felt like she was riding on a magic train, skipping across the surface of the ocean.

  Leaving Louisiana, the train headed back up north, into Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas. As she stared out the window, she whispered the names of the Deep South to herself, matching their syllables to the rhythms of the train. No wonder people sang songs about these places: deep-blue swamplands cloaked in tattered mists; enormous fields of tobacco and cotton and wheat, forming horizons, bigger and more American than anything Akiko had ever seen before.

  The approach into the small towns was heralded by the quick accumulation of wooden shanties lining the tracks, where men and women sat outside on crooked porches and children played in the street. Mangy dogs ran loose, and sometimes she caught sight of a chicken in a yard, pecking in the gravel by the skeletal wreck of a car. The cars parked along the streets were old and rusty too, as were many of those she saw actually driving down the dirt roads. Akiko had never seen a rusty car, and she realized with a shock that the people who lived here were poor. She’d never thought of Americans as poor. Maybe in the past, or in the movies, but not now. Not these days. Not in real life.

  Many of the towns were too small to have stations anymore, but the train still stopped in the larger ones. Most of the passengers who got on and off were black. Families hauling huge bags and suitcases with broken latches and lots of children. There were some single men and women, traveling home, or away from a home, perhaps. Akiko tried to imagine it. Like herself, they were on the road, taking the train to find their happy life.

  It was time now, eight weeks, and her breasts were tingling. Time to settle down. Oddly, she’d suffered not a moment of nausea during the early weeks, but instead felt a more or less continuous flush of well-being, which had ebbed and flowed from the moment of conception. Alison Beaudroux told Akiko that she’d had a terrible time with morning sickness. Her son was eight months old now, a plump, blond, bouncing ball of a baby, tossed from lap to lap around the dinner table by his adoring aunts and uncles. A rough ‘n’ tumble family. They were authentic, exactly what Akiko had seen on TV, what she’d traveled thousands of miles to see for herself, in person.

  She’d never had meals like that before, platters passed around the table, heaped with steaming mashed potatoes, chicory and kale, and Vern’s prize-winning kudzu-fried chicken. But the biggest surprise had been a turkey! Golden, glazed and resplendent, carried triumphantly to the table by the eldest boys and placed in front of Vern, who presided over it. Wielding his carving knife like a sword, he addressed the bird, but before he did so, he saluted Grace across the length of the table, where she sat, regal, her contentment running deep and feeding them, all fifteen members of the Beaudroux family and Akiko too, like a taproot. There was singing afterward. It was Akiko’s first Thanksgiving.

  When Grace learned that Akiko was pregnant, she offered the cottage and pressed her to stay, to have the baby there. It was tempting, but Akiko declined.

  “If you ever change your mind,” Grace said, “you are welcome to come and live here for a while.”

  Akiko was stunned at this generosity, this amplitude of feeling and the openness of Grace and Vern’s life. She promised to return and accept the offer sometime. It was nice to have options, Akiko thought, as she watched the varied scenery go by. She’d never had any before. Now she had two.

  The train families had settled noisily into their seats. The children were frothing with activity, climbing over the seat backs, falling in the aisles. The parents, laughing and screaming at the kids, unpacked their toys and coloring books, blankets and pillows, card games, tape decks, and bags and boxes of delicious-smelling picnic food. They knew this train, Akiko thought. Treated it like home. They reminded her of c
ountry people in Hokkaido when she was a child, off to the seaside or to a hot-springs resort, with their ekiben lunch boxes and bottles of hot tea and sake, bought from the train girls who came right to your seat with carts that they wheeled up and down the narrow aisles. There were no train girls dressed in neat cotton uniforms and pillbox caps who came to your seat on Amtrak. On the trip south, Akiko had waited for several hours for one to appear, growing hungrier as the miles slipped by. In Japan, the ekiben lunch boxes featured regional specialties of the areas through which the train traveled, and Akiko had been looking forward to her first taste of Southern cuisine. But she soon discovered that the Amtrak train served only microwaved hot dogs or cold ham and cheese sandwiches, and you had to go to the lounge car to buy them.

  The Amtrak coach attendant on the southbound train had been kind enough to explain this system to her. The attendant on this train going back north was equally kind, a wiry black man, wearing an apron over his navy-blue vest. Three hours out of New Orleans, and he knew every person’s name, even Akiko’s, which he’d pronounced “A-KEE-kow.” His name, he told her, was Maurice. Now he was carrying a broom and a large garbage bag, and as he sauntered down the aisle, collecting the trash, he stopped to talk to the passengers seated on either side.

  “Well, now, Miss A-KEE-kow,” he drawled, perching on the armrest and leaning on the seat back in front of her. “I can tell you’re not from around these parts. Where y’all coming from, anyways?”

  “I coming from Japan,” Akiko said.

  “Whoooey! Y’all hear that?” He stood up and addressed the passengers seated around her. “This young lady here’s come all the way from Japan!” He turned back to Akiko. “You ain’t come all that way on this here train now?” Everyone laughed, and Akiko shook her head.

  “That’s still a real long trip, I’d say,” Maurice continued, raising his voice for the benefit of the people seated in the far rows. “So the rest of you, I don’t want to hear any of you complaining ‘bout how long this train’s taking and how many hours you been riding now, ’cause I’m just gonna send Miss A-KEE-kow over to give you a talking-to, y’all hear me now?” The people laughed and craned their necks to take a look at Akiko. They smiled at her, and she blushed and smiled back.

  “You know what train you’re ridin’ on?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry?”

  “You know what this here train is that you’re ridin’ on?”

  “It is train to New York, I think?”

  “Well, that it is, but it’s more than that. This here’s the Chicken Bone Special, Miss A-KEE-kow, and you know why that is?”

  Akiko shook her head. The passengers up and down the coach car were hooting and calling out things to Maurice, egging him on.

  “It’s called the Chicken Bone, Miss A-KEE-kow, because all these poor black folks here, they too poor to pay out good money for them frozen cardboard sandwiches that Amtrak serves up in what they call the Lounge Car, so these poor colored folk, they gotta make do with lugging along some home-cooked fried chicken instead, ain’t that right now?” The passengers cheered. “Which one of you’s got a piece of home-cooked fried chicken to share with Miss A-KEE-kow who’s come all the way here from Japan? Give her a taste of some Southern hospitality now....”

  And as soon as he said this, suddenly Akiko was surrounded by people offering her drumsticks and paper plates of potato salad and chips and pickles and drinks of soda, and Maurice, giving in to the demand of the crowd, had retreated to the head of the coach car, where, with an ear-splitting screech and clatter, he activated the train’s public address system. Clapping his hands and slapping his knees, he started the passengers chanting a background chorus, chicken bone chicken bone chicken bone chicken bone ... and then he joined in:Let me tell you a story ’bout

  train one-nine—

  She’s a mighty old train

  But she’s runnin’ just fine,

  An’ the folks who ride her,

  They have a good time,

  on the Chicken Bone, Chicken Bone, Chicken Bone Special!

  Akiko clapped her hands in time and looked around her at the long coach filled with singing people. This would never happen on the train in Hokkaido! For the second time since she left Japan, she shivered with excitement. She’d felt it at the dinner table at Thanksgiving, and now, again, even stronger—as if somehow she’d been absorbed into a massive body that had taken over the functions of her own, and now it was infusing her small heart with the superabundance of its feeling, teaching her taut belly to swell, stretching her rib cage, and pumping spurts of happy life into her fetus.

  This is America! she thought. She clapped her hands and then hugged herself with delight.

  JANE

  “Lara, pick up the other phone!”

  Muffled, on the other end, I heard Lara call out, “Just a minute ... ,” and then her voice came through the receiver. “Hello?”

  “I’ve got Jane Takagi on the line,” Dyann told her. “She wants to know if we’re still mad at her.”

  “Oh,” said Lara.

  This did not sound good. I had sent them the fax and the tape of their episode with the BEEF-EX commercials, but they’d never acknowledged either. Nor had I gotten any response to the Bunny and Rose tape. I don’t know why acquittal meant so much to me—from these ghosts, in particular.

  “Well, are we?” Dyann said.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I dunno. I mean, it was a pretty lousy thing to do, tricking us into being spokeswives for the meat industry....”

  It was lousy, but I’d admitted that already and apologized.

  “Yeah, but look how subversive we got to be.” I thought I could detect a trace of amusement in Lara’s voice.

  “I suppose ... but she could’ve told us, you know,” Dyann countered sternly. “Beforehand.”

  It’s true. I agree. There’s no excuse.

  “Yeah. But she did apologize.”

  What else could I do? I was wrong.

  “Yes, but was she really sincere?” Dyann’s voice was warming up.

  “Hard to say,” said Lara.

  “Yeah, it’s that inscrutable Asian thing....” They were both laughing now.

  “Excuse me,” I broke in. “When you guys get finished here, just let me know....” They only laughed harder. “I almost got fired trying to air your show,” I continued, somewhat indignantly. “I got in deep shit with the ad agency. ‘You can’t put vegetarian lesbians in our Saturday-morning family meat slotl’ That’s what they told me. It was hell.”

  “Sorry, Jane. But you deserved it.”

  “I know. I know. I’m sorry. How many times do I have to say it?”

  “Basically, forever, I’d say. What do you think, Lara?”

  “Yeah, forever should do it.”

  “Fine.” I was relieved but edgy still, so I went straight to the point. “Did you see the other tape?”

  The pitch of the conversation shifted, and silence filled the wires.

  “The tape was remarkable,” said Lara, finally.

  “Very fucked up,” said Dyann. “Very, very disturbing. It’s what convinced us you were really serious about being sorry.”

  I sighed, partly with relief, I think. And contrition, and a lot of sadness, which just wouldn’t go away.

  “What are you going to do with it?” asked Dyann. “It’s going to be hard to get it shown, don’t you think? I mean, it’s pretty intense for TV....”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t thought that far ahead. I’m still waiting to hear back from the woman, the mother. From Bunny.”

  “Oh, good for you. You sent it to her beforehand.”

  “Dyann, lay off,” Lara chided.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “It must have been hard to make,” said Lara.

  “It cost me everything,” I answered, without thinking. Then I realized I didn’t want to go into it. “It’s a lon
g story. I’ll tell you the whole thing sometime. Listen, there’s something else. Remember I told you in my fax that the reason I wanted to broadcast your show was that I thought it was important, that it would make a difference in Japan?”

  “Yeah ...” Dyann sounded apprehensive.

  “Well, apparently it did.” I didn’t know exactly where I was going from here. It wasn’t a situation like the Beaudroux family. Welcoming strangers into their home was a way of life, and an extra body was negligible. This was different. “Uh, I have something else I want to send you,” I concluded gracelessly.

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” said Dyann. Her tone was ominous.

  “She’s a young woman. Japanese. A fan ...” There was very little response from the other end. “She’s a friend ... of a friend ... sort of. She saw your show and then appeared on my doorstep, looking for you guys. She’s run away from her husband, who beat her up pretty badly, and raped her too. But the point is, she wants to meet you. You guys meant a lot to her. Gave her the courage to leave a really bad situation. She wants to come to Northampton....”

  “Fine,” said Lara.

  “Lara!” said Dyann.

  “What?” said Lara. “We have a guest room. She can stay with us.”

  “Oh, all right,” Dyann groaned. “How long is she coming for?”

  “Well, that’s the thing.” Now I was in real trouble. “You see, she’s pregnant....”

  LARA & DYANN

  When she hung up the phone, Dyann tracked Lara down and cornered her by the extension in the kitchen.

  “Do you really think that was wise?” she asked.

  Lara leaned against the kitchen counter, cocked her head, and considered the question.

  “Yes,” she concluded.

  “Okay.” Dyann shrugged and sat down at the table. “You know, when Takagi calls, we should learn to be really on guard with her. She gets us into these damn situations.”