Stone Field, True Arrow: A Novel

by Kyoko Mori

  Jeff sighs. “If you really want to bring him home, we can talk about it.” His voice sounds tired and resigned. If she insisted, he might give in. But Maya thinks of the day she found out about her father’s death. She and Yuko drove to the lake and sat on the bluff to watch the hawks migrating south on the stiff north wind; then they stopped for coffee, for dinner, for some mindless movie in a multiplex on the north side of town. It didn’t matter what they did. They didn’t talk about her father’s death after the first half hour, but Yuko was there with her and that was what counted. Maya couldn’t imagine wanting to be with anyone else that evening. When she came home at eleven, she felt calm enough. “I found out that my father died,” she told Jeff. “But it’s all right. He’s been gone a long time anyway.” “Look,” Jeff said before they went to bed. “If you ever want to talk about it, you can, with me. If something comes to your mind in the middle of the night, you can wake me up and tell me.” He put his arms around her and hugged her. Maya tried to see herself waking up in the middle of the night with a perfect sentence in her head—all her feelings summed up in a few concise words she could hand over to Jeff. She knew it would never happen.

  “Don’t worry about the kitten,” Maya tells him now. “He’ll be just fine here.”

  “Okay. Let me know if you change your mind.”

  “Thanks, but I won’t. I’m going to do some work now and stay over. I’ll see you tomorrow evening. I’m sorry we missed dinner.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. Something came up that you weren’t expecting. That happens to anyone.”

  “Have a good night.”

  “You too.”

  * * *

  Maya weaves for an hour and then lies down on the couch. The kitten settles in the crook of her neck. Listening to his purring, she closes her eyes. In a weaving cottage near the Japan Sea with her father, Maya once saw a black cat sitting in the window, eating fish from a bowl. It was the summer Kay left. Her father was delivering designs he had drawn for the weavers, an old married couple who owned eight semi-mechanized looms in a ramshackle building next to their house.

  Seven of the looms were working, the heddles moving up and down and going shuck, shuck, shuck. The cloth being formed on the loom near Maya had interlocking patterns of gold fans against a bright red background. Behind that loom, in the light from the window, the cat looked glossy and sleek. When he raised his face out of the bowl, his long whiskers glittered with fish scales like sequins. The woman turned to Maya and smiled. “You have such a lovely daughter,” she said to Maya’s father, who nodded and smiled too.

  Her father took pictures of the looms. One of them had the cat in it: he was on the window ledge, his back rounded, his face leaning down into the bowl. If her father had kept the negative, the colors would be in reverse so the cat would appear pure white instead of pure black. The white kitten continues to purr. Maya draws him closer.

  On the way home from the weaving cottage, the blue of the sea filled the bottom half of the train window. Her father told her a story about a fisherman who found a beautiful garment caught in the branches of a pine tree along the seacoast. As the fisherman reached out and took down the garment, a woman appeared, dressed in a dazzling white kimono. She was a tennyo, an inhabitant of heaven, and the garment was her hagoromo, a jacket of feathers. The tennyo asked the fisherman for her hagoromo, but he refused to give it back. He had fallen in love with her. If she couldn’t fly back to heaven in her hagoromo, he thought, she would stay on earth and marry him. She begged him for a long time, but he would not change his mind. Finally, with a sigh, she said, “Very well. Perhaps it was some fate from another life that has brought us together. I will stay here and become your wife, but you must grant me one wish. My friends in heaven will be sad to part with me. If you will let me have my hagoromo for a while, I will perform one final dance to bid them farewell. After that, I will become your wife.” Moved by her melancholy smile, the fisherman handed her the hagoromo. The tennyo put it on and floated up into the air. When she had risen above the treetops, she began to dance. The fisherman watched mesmerized for hours, never noticing that she was soaring higher into the sky over the sea. Finally, she disappeared beyond the horizon, leaving him with the afterglow of the sunset. Her dance had not been for the other inhabitants of heaven. All along, she was dancing her farewell to him.

  Across the room, the cloth on the loom has begun its transformation from blue to purple. The colors move in fine increments, each bar the width of a piano key. If the shades could make music as they moved toward pink, they would sound like the waves of the sea. The notes would glide across the blue silence, one wave overlapping the next until they reached the shore and found the pale pink of seashells. Maya pictures the finished jacket, its sleeves spread out. The jacket is already flying in her mind. In time, her fingers will set it free into the sky over the sea.

  3

  Yuko is waiting outside her house on the lower east side. It’s the house Maya lived in for two years after college, she and her boyfriend Scott helping Yuko and Dan with the repairs and the mortgage, but the neighborhood has changed. “Our area is the new yuppie frontier,” Yuko tells Dan whenever she sees a FOR SALE sign in Maya’s neighborhood across the river. “We should move to where Maya lives, a neighborhood that has old people and people of color.” Dan counters, “You can’t choose a house according to your political convictions,” though Yuko suspects that he’s just too lazy to move. “Change scares him,” she says. “It’s too big a drain on his energies.” As if to prove her wrong, Dan painted the siding a bright green instead of white. Even after six months, Maya still feels as though she’s come to the wrong house.

  Yuko takes off her jean jacket and throws it on the backseat. Crumpled up, it looks like a compact sculpture on top of Maya’s handwoven coat, which lies flat, its teal-colored threads glossy and smooth as calm water. Yuko is wearing jeans and a black turtleneck; Maya has chosen a lavender dress she sewed. They never dressed alike even as teenagers.

  “So where’s Jeff?” Yuko asks, as they start driving toward the freeway. He was supposed to come with them to the opening of Maya’s weaving show.

  Maya shrugs.

  “I knew he’d leak out on us.” Yuko blows air through her lips, making a whoosh sound like a tire suddenly going flat.

  “When I got home from work to pick him up, he was sitting around in his T-shirt and sweat pants. But he insisted he would come if I wanted him to. ‘It’s up to you,’ he kept saying.”

  Yuko rolls her eyes. “That is so lame.”

  “Actually, I’m glad it’s just you and me. If he came, he’d stand around looking bored. I wouldn’t know what to do with him. He doesn’t care about my weaving. He hasn’t even been to my studio lately.”

  “Dan hasn’t heard me play, either.” Yuko sighs. “For all I know, he still envisions me singing ‘I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover’ in that crummy variety band from ten years ago. I hated when he sat alone in the corner, staring at me. He’d order some wimpy cocktail and sip it through a straw. He’d come up and request all the songs I sang lead for. I was mortified. I wanted to go back to playing in the loudest garage band in town so he wouldn’t come any more. But now I’d be glad for some attention.”

  “Yeah, but attention can be such a burden. You were there when Scott used to explain my paintings to me. He had his own interpretation for every painting in my senior show. I felt like I could hardly breathe. I’d rather be with someone who leaves me alone.”

  “Why does it have to be one extreme or the other?” Yuko asks.

  “I don’t know, but it always is.”

  * * *

  “When we go to my parents’ next week,” Yuko asks, “can we take your car?”

  “Sure.” Maya accelerates into a less crowded lane. They are south of the airport, headed toward the Illinois border. This time of the evening, traffic moves as much sideways as forward. “Is there supposed to be a blizzard next week?” She is the d
esignated driver in bad weather. Yuko and Dan have both slid off the freeway into the ditch; their Barracuda bears the battle scars.

  “No, Dan needs the fish. He’s staying home.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s got a big job lined up, installing cabinets in a mansion on Lake Drive. He has to start right after Christmas, that’s when these people are going on vacation. They want the work done while they’re away.”

  “We can come back earlier than usual. I don’t mind.”

  “Forget that. Dan can fend for himself. I want to stay longer. We’re supposed to go to a New Year’s Eve party at Annie Weakland’s, and you want to spend time with Bill.”

  “That’s true.” When Kay left him three years ago, Maya’s stepfather stayed in Minneapolis alone. Now Maya only sees him once or twice a year during her trips with Yuko and Dan. Bill sold their old house and moved to a much smaller one; his hair has turned white. “I was thinking about him this morning because Jeff was listening to a talk show. Remember when Bill used to pick me up after my track practice? My mother was teaching, so it was his job to give me a ride?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I never told you this, but one of those times, I found him slumped over the steering wheel. He barely looked up when I got in. He was listening to a call-in show, and the voice on the radio sounded familiar. It was my mother. The topic was the stress of being married and working full-time. The show had been on earlier in the day, and the evening broadcast was a rerun. When I got in the car, she was saying that she and her husband weren’t fifty-fifty in sharing the household chores. ‘Even though we’re both college professors and work the same hours, I end up doing most of the housework,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind that so much. Only he’s a typical Minnesota man who doesn’t know how to say thank you. I feel very unappreciated.’ I knew it was my mother. I whispered to Bill, ‘Um, is this, you know?’ and he said, ‘Fucking-A, it is. She actually called me and told me to listen to this shit.’ He turned the radio off and started driving. We didn’t say another word all the way home.”

  “That’s awful. How come you never said anything?”

  “I was too embarrassed, but I felt worse for Bill. Some of his friends probably heard the show.”

  “Poor Bill. Your mother really did a number on him.”

  “I’m not looking forward to seeing her tonight. Now I know she’d been in touch with my father the whole time and she knows I know. But I can’t figure out how to talk to her about it.”

  “Maybe you don’t have to say anything today. If she’s been lying to you all these years, you can’t make her honest by having one talk. You have the rest of your life to confront her. It’s okay to procrastinate. Why do something today that you can put off till tomorrow? That’s my motto.” Yuko grins. “I should write it down and hang it on the wall. It’s good advice.”

  In spite of herself, Maya laughs. “Right. You always used to say that the world’s problems would go away if people had a good lunch and took a nap every afternoon.”

  “I still believe that.” Yuko pats Maya’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she says, “your opening’s going to be great. You’ll know what to say to your mother when the time comes.”

  * * *

  When they get out of the car in Evanston, a sickle moon hangs low in the sky. Lillian’s store is on a busy street near the El station. In the window, there is a neon sign shaped like a red lizard. The name of the store, SALAMANDER, is on the tip of its tongue.

  Lillian is standing near a table of food and drinks. All around the room, Maya’s jackets, vests, shawls, dresses, and scarves are hanging, some from the ceiling on piano wires and others on racks. A few women are walking around, stopping now and then to examine the garments; there’s classical music on the stereo. The poster for the show, displayed on the door, has a picture of the last jacket Maya made and the title HEAVENLY GARMENTS: HANDWOVEN CLOTHES BY MAYA ISHIDA. The jacket is hanging from the ceiling, its hem at the height of people’s shoulders. The colors have completed their journey from blue to pink.

  Lillian steps forward and hugs first Maya, then Yuko. Lillian used to own a boutique near Peg’s, but she got divorced and moved down to Evanston two years ago. Dressed in black with her hair put up in a bun, she looks like a ballet instructor. “Someone already put one of the shawls on hold,” she tells Maya. “She wants to show her husband.”

  “She needs his permission?” Yuko frowns.

  “She’s one of my regular customers,” Lillian explains. “About once a month, I let her take clothes home so she can try them on in front of her husband for his approval. The guy’s loaded. He seldom says no. I don’t know if the private showing is his idea or hers. It’s sick, but it’s none of my business.”

  “We see all kinds of strange things,” Maya says to Yuko.

  Only last week, a woman came into the boutique with her husband, who stood looking out the window. The man didn’t glance away from the window when his wife stepped out of the fitting room, wearing an elegant rose-colored dress. Standing in front of the mirror, clear across the room from him, the woman whispered to Maya, “My husband couldn’t care less about the dress or me, but I know a man who’d love to see me in this.” Her customers often confide in her. Maya learned long ago to suspend her judgment. As she walks around the exhibit and waits for her mother’s arrival, she remembers the moments when she felt compassion for these women. If she could pretend that her mother was a customer, maybe she could find the right things to say.

  * * *

  When Kay and Nate come in, the gallery is already crowded. Peg and Larry have driven down with one of their neighbors. They are talking in the corner with Yuko. Among the many women and the few men who fill the room, Maya can spot Kay and Nate right away: Kay in a conservative beige suit, her gray hair cut short in the style Yuko calls “the helmet”; Nate in blue jeans and a brown wool haori jacket he bought in Japan Town in San Francisco, his limp hair tied back in a ponytail. He is a washed-out blond version of her father: the dark jacket and blue jeans, the ponytail. At forty-three—fifteen years younger than Kay—he belongs to that in-between generation: too young to have been a full-fledged hippie, too old for much else. Nate is a travel agent and a Japonophile. He and Kay met four years ago on the afternoon Nate went to see an exhibit of Japanese foldout screens at the Art Institute. He stopped at the bookstore near the Water Tower, where Kay was browsing; she was in town to attend a political science convention. Within a year, Kay resigned from her teaching job in Minneapolis and moved to Park Ridge to marry him.

  After a lifetime of studying and teaching the politics of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, Kay works part-time as a consultant to Japanese companies in Chicago. The house she shares with Nate is full of memorabilia from Nate’s high school year in Nagoya and subsequent trips to Japan. Perhaps Kay is trying to regain her heritage, the way people in their old age often embrace the religious faith of their childhood. She has a long journey ahead. She has spent the last twenty-four years telling Maya how much she despises Japan. Asked where she is from, she always replies, “I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in Canada. My father was a diplomat,” conveniently overlooking her childhood in Tokyo, her first marriage in Osaka. To Kay, the past is a story on a cassette tape. She can rewind it and hear only the portions she wants to, skipping through the rest. The tape screeches forward before anyone has time to ask questions.

  Kay and Nate are making their way through to the back wall, where Maya is talking with a man who works in the textiles collection at the Art Institute. “I live a mile from here,” he says. “I came because I saw the poster. From your name, I figured you were Japanese. My specialty is Japanese weaving and dye techniques.”

  “I don’t know much about them. You can see that.” She waves her arm toward the jackets hanging from the ceiling, the scarves and shawls displayed against the walls. The only Japanese techniques she tried were indigo dying and ikat weaving, both of which she gave up after a short
time. The somber blue and brown fabrics they produced depressed her.

  The man squints behind his rimless glasses. He must be in his thirties, her age. His hair is parted on the side; his eyes are pale blue. He looks mild-mannered and studious—Yuko would say nerdy—like many of the people who want to talk to Maya because she is Japanese. She pictures him walking down the narrow streets of a Japanese city, trying to blend into the crowd even though his reddish hair would never allow him to. “Your colors,” he says. “Have you considered experimenting with more Japanese color juxtapositions?”

  “I don’t know. What are they?”

  Her mother is at her side, with Nate hanging back a little. “My daughter grew up in Minneapolis,” Kay chimes in, fixing the textile specialist with her direct gaze. “She’s been bilingual from birth. She lives in Milwaukee now. Why should she care about Japanese colors?”

  The man blinks a few times.

  “This is my mother, Kay Hayashi Mueller.” Maya gestures toward Nate with her hand, “And her husband, Nate Mueller. And you are—?”

  “Jim Paine,” the man says. “I’m a Japanese textile specialist.”

  “It’s not fair to assume that my daughter would know all about Japanese textiles just because she has a Japanese name, is it?” Kay asks him.

  “No, I suppose not.” Jim Paine shrugs. “So who are your influences?” he asks Maya. “You learned to weave at a craft school in the States?”

  “I didn’t go to a craft school. I studied art at college. One of my professors taught me to weave.”

  “Who were your favorite artists?”

  “It’s hard to say. The later Impressionists. The Blue Riders. Rothko and Pollock and Frankenthaler. Diebenkorn. You know, the usual.” As she rattles off this list, she glimpses the slivers and blocks of blues, lavenders, pinks, and greens in the garments against the wall. They are the colors of the landscapes by Pierre Bonnard or Gabrielle Munter—the paintings she saw with her father long ago in the museums in Kyoto. “My father was a Japanese painter,” she offers, “but he was trained in Western-style art. He studied in Philadelphia. I suppose his influences are mine.” She looks away from Jim Paine and meets her mother’s eyes. Kay’s jaw tightens, and the lines around her eyes deepen. The next moment, Nate is taking Kay by the hand and leading her across the room.