by Kyoko Mori
“No, it’s not. Besides, you could never look ugly.”
“I must have acted ugly,” Yuko insists. “Otherwise, Dan wouldn’t have fallen in love with someone else.”
“It doesn’t work like that. You can’t blame yourself for the wrong things he did.”
“You think it was wrong for him to fall in love? Dan talked about his affair like it was the bravest thing he’s ever done. ‘For once in my life,’ he said, ‘I’m not afraid to accept that someone really loves me. I don’t have to run away.’ Can you believe that? He’s making himself out to be a hero.”
“Regardless of what he says, what he did was wrong.”
“Because he was married?”
Maya shakes her head. “No, because he was married to you. How could he be married to you and not see how lucky he was?”
“He said he never loved me, not like he loves this woman—Meredith. He didn’t know what love was till he met her. The moment he saw her, he had this incredible feeling he’d never known with me.”
They met in September when Dan went to buy two tickets for a play he had meant to see with Yuko. Meredith was working at the ticket office. He called her the next day and asked her out to lunch. By the time he told Yuko in early December, they had been lovers for two months and already talked about getting married as soon as he was divorced.
“Tonight, he confessed,” Yuko continues, “that he’d only agreed to see the marriage counselor so he could leave me with a clear conscience. ‘I didn’t want to rush things with you and start my life with Meredith on the wrong foot, but I can’t wait anymore,’ he told me. Then he had the nerve to cry about how much he cared about me and didn’t mean to hurt me. He’d spent the whole day packing his stuff. He must have been planning his getaway for some time. But he wouldn’t shut up and go away. I had to ask him to leave. I wish he’d taken off before I got home.”
“Yes, that would have been better,” Maya agrees. Her mother had simply loaded her clothes and books in her car and driven to Park Ridge when she left Bill. She’d stopped in Milwaukee at midnight to tell Maya. Until then, Maya had had no idea, and from what she gathered from Bill, it was a complete surprise to him too. Kay had done the same thing when she left Osaka. She’d pretended she was going to the States to finish her doctorate and would be back in two years. She was gone a year before she wrote to Maya’s father and asked for a divorce. She had made a clean getaway, which at least allowed everyone else to hold on to a sense of dignity, while Dan had lingered and talked, making things worse. Perhaps there is no connection between people’s intentions—kindly or selfish—and their ability to hurt others.
Yuko pours the wine into the two glasses. “When I chopped off my hair, I meant it to be a ritual. Remember when we read Genji in college? Women were always getting their heads shorn when their husbands left them or died. They were going to renounce the world and join a nunnery, which I’m not, but it doesn’t matter where they were going. They were trying to move on, and so am I. Cutting their hair meant wanting to be free.”
“All right.” Maya picks up her glass and touches it to Yuko’s. “To your freedom, then.”
“And to us. You’re still with me. You’ll never lie to me and take off.”
“Of course not.” They clink their glasses and take a sip. Outside, the snow continues to fall.
* * *
The room where Maya goes to sleep is the same one she lived in twelve years ago with Scott. Yuko has converted it into her music room, but the green wallpaper—patterns of men in red coats on horseback, chasing foxes—is the same. Maya turns off the light and lies down on the futon couch. She can still see the red riders in the light from the windows.
She closes her eyes but can’t sleep. Yuko would never have met Dan if it hadn’t been for her. During their sophomore year, Maya told her mother she was living in the dorm with Yuko, but she had moved in with Scott. They lived in a dilapidated three-bedroom house on the lower east side with Dan and another roommate, Peter. Yuko was at the house almost every day.
Dan had a girlfriend then, a theater student named Judy. At a party in March, a friend of Judy’s told her that someone in their English class had a crush on her. “The guy thinks you’re gorgeous,” she said. “Who is it?” Judy jumped up and shrieked, clapping her hand to her mouth, and the two girls began to whisper even though Dan was standing next to them. “Let’s go out for a smoke,” Maya said to Dan and Scott. Judy came to the porch after a while, hooked her arm through Dan’s, and reached for his cigarette. Taking a long drag, she smiled sweetly at him. The next morning, she was sitting in the kitchen, wearing one of Dan’s flannel shirts, while Dan cooked some eggs and bacon at the stove.
At the beginning of the summer vacation, Maya and Yuko were walking back to Scott’s house from a grocery store when Yuko stopped abruptly on the sidewalk and cleared her throat.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. “It’s about Dan.”
“What about him?”
“I’m in love with him.”
“You’re what?”
“I’ve had the biggest crush on him since the first day I met him.” Yuko blushed.
“That was nine months ago.”
“I don’t give up easily. I’m pretty persistent.” With her white sneakers, she kicked a broken branch lying on the sidewalk.
“But you never let him know how you feel. Persistent means keeping at something for a long time. You haven’t started.”
“What am I supposed to say? Long-suffering? That makes me sound like a martyr.”
They walked on in silence.
“He wouldn’t notice if I disappeared tomorrow,” Yuko said. “I know that. I think about him every minute, and he never thinks about me.”
“But he should notice you. We’ll make him.”
Yuko cocked her head slightly. “Of course, he has a girlfriend. That’s a hitch.”
“Judy treats him badly. We shouldn’t feel guilty if he broke up with her and went out with you.”
Yuko shifted the bag of groceries in her arms. “You know that ritual group I go to?” She belonged to a women’s group at the Unitarian church that met once a month. “Next week is the summer solstice. We’re going to do a love ritual because solstice is the time of high female power. Everyone’s going to bring a love charm: a piece of their hair and a piece of their lover’s hair, braided together into a knot. We’ll throw the hair into a fire pit and say words of empowerment. It won’t make Dan fall in love with me, I know, but it might give me courage when I’m around him. Right now, I can’t carry on a decent conversation with him because I feel light-headed and woozy the moment he comes into the room. The ritual can change that.”
“How are you going to get his hair?” Maya asked.
“I need to ask you a big favor. It’s something only you can do, because you live with him.”
“You want me to bring you a piece of his hair?”
Yuko nodded.
“Just a few strands from his brush?”
“No. It has to be long enough to braid. I’ll cut my hair so you can see.”
“Oh, Yuko.”
“I thought of staying at your place and tiptoeing into his room at night with the scissors. But I can’t. What if he wakes up and sees me?”
“He might wake up if I do it, too.”
“But if he sees you, you can tell him you need his hair for an art project. You can say you were too shy to ask. You’ll have a perfect excuse.”
When they got to the house, Yuko took the scissors from Maya’s sewing basket and cut her hair from the back. The piece she cut off looked like a kitten’s tail. “Here, you keep this for me. And use the same scissors for his.”
Maya wrapped the hair in tissue paper and put it in the box under Scott’s bed where she kept her clothes. As she pushed the box back under the bed, she remembered a braided cord her father had made from the first cutting of her baby hair. He kept it in a blue porcelain box in his drawer, along with the
other things he treasured: a framed photograph from his wedding, the green agate cuff links Kay had given him on their first anniversary, a postcard announcing his thesis exhibit in Philadelphia, the amethyst prayer beads that once belonged to his mother, who had died when he was eighteen, two months before he left to study in America. Her father used to take the things out of the drawer and tell Maya a story about each one. Maya loved to hear about what a colicky baby she used to be—she had howled in the middle of the night, so loud her father was afraid the whole neighborhood could hear her. Listening to his voice, she would touch the black braid with her fingertips in wonderment, as though it were a part of an animal she used to be but wasn’t anymore. “You are such a quiet girl,” her teachers said to her. They had no idea that she used to cry all night, announcing her unhappiness with earsplitting wails.
* * *
Every night when Maya walked into Dan’s room with her sewing scissors, something went wrong. The floor creaked when she took the last step and she lost her nerve. Or she found him sleeping on his back so she would have to lift his head and slide the scissors between his neck and his pillow. She might nick his scalp or earlobe. Dan would wake up swearing in pain, and in spite of the lie Yuko had concocted, he would sense that something suspicious was going on.
Earlier that year, when Dan’s old girlfriend, Sheila, came to visit, the two of them spent every afternoon listening to their favorite albums from high school—R.E.O. Speedwagon, Foreigner, Clash—smoking cigarettes and nodding in silence. At night, Dan gave up his bed to her and slept in the living room. “Sheila and me, we’re just good friends now,” he said. Scott snickered. “They’re so mellow it’s sick.” Dan liked Judy because he mistook her indifference for independence. If he ever found out that Yuko was trying to work a love charm on him, he would move to another country just to get away from her.
Maya’s high school home ec teacher used to say that good cooks can make a substitution in any recipe, using honey for sugar or an extra egg when caught short of baking powder. A love charm wasn’t much different from a special dinner. If the hair was a stand-in for Dan’s heart, then something else could be a stand-in for the hair. Dan had a Brewers cap he wore every day. It would have to substitute for his hair.
Yuko’s ritual was scheduled for Friday. On Thursday morning at two, Maya entered Dan’s room and snatched the cap from the closet door. Sitting at the table where she worked on her art projects, she cut a piece of the blue fabric from the back of the cap. Then she put half of Yuko’s hair, coiled tight and knotted, into the folded cloth and made a small heart-shaped amulet. She undid the necklace Scott had given her on Valentine’s Day and sorted out all the red glass beads that looked like seeds. Embellished with the beads, the heart resembled a ripe fruit. Maya cut another square from the cap and sewed a second amulet exactly like the first, so Yuko would have one to burn and one to keep. By the time she was done, it was six, already light out.
Maya hid the cap at the bottom of her box of art supplies. She got dressed and walked the couple of miles to the dorm. Yuko came to the door in her green terry-cloth bathrobe, rubbing her eyes. Maya took the two amulets out of her pocket and handed them to her.
“I couldn’t cut his hair, so I sewed yours inside the cloth from his favorite cap,” she said. “I made two, one to use in the ritual, one to remind yourself of the courage you’re supposed to get.”
Yuko threw her arms around Maya and hugged her tight. She was holding the amulets in her right hand, making a soft fist around them with her fingers curled loosely. Maya remembered that gesture: it was the same one Miss Larson, their fourth-grade teacher, had made to show how big each human heart was.
* * *
The next evening, the sun was just setting as Maya and Yuko stood holding hands with eleven other women around the fire pit. One by one, the women went up to cast their love spell. Yuko declared in her strong voice, “I, Lucy Yuko Nakashima, want Daniel Johnson to fall in love with me and love me for the rest of our lives.” She dropped one of the amulets into the fire and stepped back into the circle.
After the sun disappeared, the clouds continued to smolder in the low sky. Maya was the only one who had come without a spell to cast. A woman in her mid-forties said, “I want my husband to be passionate toward me. I want him to fall in love with me again.”
As the woman rejoined the circle and the next went forward to say that she wanted one of her coworkers to take notice of her, Maya thought about Scott. If he hadn’t noticed her, she would have gone out with someone else or been happy alone. If they broke up, she would move back to the dorm to live with Yuko. She wouldn’t keep talking about him for weeks and months, and she would hope he’d get over her too. When Maya imagined her future, she didn’t picture Scott in it. He wanted to move to northern Wisconsin after graduation and teach at a country school; she would never go with him. They had met because he was taking a class called Art for Elementary School Teachers, which was held the hour before her drawing class in the same room. The day he got his clay camel back from the kiln, he stopped her in the hallway and asked, “Excuse me, you’re an art major, aren’t you? Do you think this looks like a camel?” She examined the clay model the size of a football with a long fragile neck. “No. A camel has ears. Your animal looks more like a dinosaur. You’re lucky the neck didn’t break in the kiln.” He joked about how his camel-a-saurus had brought them together. She liked him when he told that story, but not when they were alone and he suddenly looked at her as though he could see nothing else in the whole room. “I love you,” he whispered. “You are so beautiful.” Maya stiffened and pulled away. “Don’t be so melodramatic,” she told him. “Talk to me like a friend.”
The women kept stepping forward with their wishes for love. They stood tall and determined, but their heads were bowed with sadness. Their voices cracked because they wanted something they might never have. The burning sage, oak, and hair filled the air with a sharp scent that was both sweet and acrid. Even Yuko seemed far away, her eyes to the sky, dreaming about love. Maya tightened her grip on Yuko’s large square hand, calloused from years of guitar-playing. There were plenty of boys who saw Yuko performing with a garage band and went crazy over her, a tall Japanese girl in blue jeans and a plain white T-shirt strumming the bass next to the boys in leather jackets. She could have had all kinds of boyfriends, and yet she had to fall for someone who paid no attention, who made her nervous and quiet instead of her usual talkative self. Maya imagined Yuko rising up to the sky like a balloon filled with hot air. If she didn’t hold on, Yuko would fly away, leaving Maya alone on the ground.
* * *
Scott worked the graveyard shift at a factory for the summer, so he slept all afternoon and was gone at night. Peter had moved most of his things to his girlfriend’s house. It was easy for Maya to invite Yuko and throw her together with Dan. But the love spell seemed to be having the opposite effect from what Yuko had intended. She was more nervous than ever—too chatty one day, too silent the next. Something had to happen soon, before Dan began to think of Yuko as high-strung and moody.
In July, Maya asked Yuko and Dan to see a movie at a nearby theater. She made dinner beforehand, and just as they were clearing the dishes she said she didn’t feel well.
“I have a headache. I have to lie down. You guys go to the movie.”
“No,” Dan protested. “We can’t go without you. Seeing the movie was your idea.”
“But you can’t help me by staying. I’d feel better if you were gone.”
In the end, Yuko was the one who insisted on going. She knew Maya hated to be fussed over when she was sick.
“Let’s get going,” Yuko said to Dan. “We’ll be late.”
“See you guys later,” Maya said, walking toward the bedroom. “I’ll be okay.”
* * *
After the movie, Yuko and Dan called from a diner.
“Maya.” Yuko spoke first. “We stopped for some coffee. Do you feel better? Why don’t you walk ov
er and meet us?”
“We’re at that Greek diner next to the theater,” Dan added.
Maya pictured the two of them standing in the dimly lit corner, leaning toward the receiver to hear her answer, their hair touching. The love charm was beginning to work. In a few weeks, Yuko would start visiting the house for Dan instead of for Maya. Maybe she would stop spending time with anyone except him. In ninth grade, when Doris Sugiyama stood them up because a boy had asked her out that afternoon, Maya and Yuko had promised that they would never do that to each other, but Yuko might have forgotten. When Maya spoke, her voice came out shaky as though she were really sick.
“I’d better go back to bed.”
“Do you want us to come back?” Dan asked.
“No. Don’t come back. I’ll be sleeping.”
Yuko was saying something, but Maya hung up without hearing her.
* * *
Yuko and Dan talked for hours at the diner and went for a walk in the park, where they stole three lemon lilies planted by the pavilion. They came into Maya’s room at one, with the lilies in a glass jar.
“Go back to sleep,” Yuko said, putting the lilies on the nightstand. Dan was standing in the doorway.
Maya turned over and closed her eyes. After Yuko and Dan were gone, she lay awake, looking at the stolen flowers. She didn’t hear him come back.
The lilies lasted a week. Before the yellow petals shriveled and shed like dropped feathers, Maya saw Judy storm out, carrying a box of clothes and kitchen utensils. On the sidewalk, she glared at Maya and quickened her steps. By the end of the summer, Yuko had moved in, Peter had gone to live with his girlfriend, and they were a household: two young couples living together. When Yuko and Dan got married after graduation and moved into another house nearby, Maya and Scott went with them. She was convinced by then that Yuko’s marriage didn’t diminish their friendship. There are things between friends even a husband can’t replace.
* * *
When Maya wakes up in the middle of the night, she can’t remember where she is until she is sitting up, looking across the room at Yuko’s stand-up bass propped against the wall. The white T-shirt Yuko gave her to sleep in is tangled around her legs. The blankets and sheets are falling off the bed. Outside the door, the stairway light is on.