by Kyoko Mori
“After I graduated, it was depressing not to have a real job. My mother expected me to move back home and work at an advertising agency. My boyfriend wanted to get married and move to northern Wisconsin, where he could teach in a one-room country school. I kept waitressing and making clothes because I didn’t know what else to do. Then in September I met Peg.”
She describes the afternoon Peg came to the coffee shop to have lunch with a friend. She had just quit her job as a nurse to start her business. Peg noticed the woven linen blouse Maya was wearing and asked her where she had bought it. “I made it myself,” Maya said. “See the clay buttons? I baked them in a toaster oven. They’re a little lopsided.” Peg offered Maya a job at the boutique, which was under construction.
“I still have that blouse,” Maya tells Eric. “I wear it now and then for good luck.”
“I saved some of the paintings from my admission application for an MFA. They’re nothing special, but they got me out of Wisconsin to go to art school. It was the first time I left home. I was already twenty-two.”
“You lived at home till then?”
“I commuted forty miles to the university extension in Green Bay. I had to stay on the farm to help my father because my brother and sister had already moved out. When I left, one of my cousins was old enough to take my place for a while, but I knew that my parents would eventually have to sell the farm. I felt terrible, though I had no interest in farming. In fourth grade, my best friend Lee Hansen raised a pig that won a ribbon at the state fair. I didn’t know the pig was going to be auctioned off to be made into sausages. Lee went on to win all kinds of Four-H awards, but I was devastated. I cried all afternoon.” He shrugs. “I was a softhearted kid—my father wanted my brother and me to be tough, but we were both timid and studious.”
As a young boy, Eric would have had the same direct gaze. His left cheek would have dimpled when he smiled, making his slightly crooked teeth look endearing. They’re not so crooked that a farm family out in the country would send him to an orthodontist. She wonders what it would have been like to grow up on a farm, with a father who didn’t care how you did at school. It must have felt so lonely.
“I thought about you every day when I was at my mother’s,” Eric says. “I started wishing that we’d met earlier.”
“It’s never too late to make new friends. I’m thirty-five. I still have half my life left.”
“More than half, I hope. I’m a year older than you.”
“My father was sixty when he died.” She tries to smile. “But maybe my mother will live to be a hundred. She might come from hardy stock. I don’t know.” Kay used to get letters from her sister a couple of times a year, but she never mentioned what they said. As far as Maya knows, her mother hasn’t seen her family since she left Osaka.
When the waitress returns, Eric reaches for the check. “This is my treat.”
“Only if you’ll let me treat next time.”
“Good. That means you’ll have lunch with me again.”
* * *
Back at the store, Maya’s car is the only one out front. During the week, Peg stops by in the late afternoon to pick up the mail and to chat. She keeps the books and runs errands for Larry’s construction business.
Eric turns off his engine. “After we talked last time, I wanted to do some work. This morning I was setting up the studio the university gave me. I’m going back there now.”
“You must be in that old warehouse building on the lower east side.”
“Did you go there when you were a student?”
“Yes. Ruth—the professor I worked for—had a studio there too. I learned to weave in that building. I lived down the block.”
“That makes me feel good about going back, knowing you were there once.”
Maya doesn’t answer.
“When I was visiting my mother,” he continues, “I found some black-and-white photographs she took in her early twenties. Like my father, she grew up on a farm, but she wanted to be a photographer. Her family wouldn’t let her go to college or move to the city. So she got married, and pretty soon the only photographs she took were of us kids. But these photographs I found—they’re mostly of the places near her parents’ farm and of her relatives—they were good. I want to do some paintings based on them.”
“That must make her happy.”
“She was a little shy about it, actually. In a couple of weeks, when I get something done, I want you to see it. You really inspired me. If we hadn’t met, I’d still be sitting at home feeling sorry for myself.”
“No, you wouldn’t, but I’d love to see what you do.”
“You don’t mind my stopping here again? I feel a little strange about calling you at home.”
Maya remembers the white car parked in her driveway. She hasn’t thought of Jeff and Nancy in the last hour.
Eric turns away from her abruptly and stares straight ahead. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop thinking about you.” He doesn’t say anything more.
They are sitting only inches apart. If she reached out her hand, she could touch his shoulder; her fingers would connect the tiny holes on his black T-shirt the way the lines in her schoolbooks connected the stars in the same constellation. Maya imagines herself in the shaky cabin of a helicopter rising up to the sky. From the windows, the ground below would look heartbreakingly familiar. If she were up in that helicopter, she would not want to stay airborne in search of help that would most likely come too late. She would rather fall through space and meet her disaster head-on. Then she remembers Nancy screaming Jeff’s name. Two disasters can never cancel each other out.
“You’ll feel differently in a while,” she tells Eric.
He looks into her eyes and asks, “Do you really think that?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. You can’t talk this way.” As she turns to open the car door, he clasps her other hand and draws her toward him. His fingers are cold. “Good-bye,” she says, opening the door and pulling away. “I do want to see you again, but not like this.”
He waits in his car while she walks away. At the door, she waves without looking back.
* * *
Jeff is sitting in the armchair, reading a book. He gets up and meets her in the middle of the room. “I shouldn’t have told you not to come home. I was way out of line. I called you at the store around noon to apologize, but you were gone.”
“I went out for lunch,” she says. Her voice catches and sounds strange even to herself.
He puts his arms around her and hugs her. “I shouldn’t have been so angry on the phone.”
She rests her forehead against his chest. “So what’s up with Nancy?” she asks, after a while.
“Nancy shouldn’t make any difference to us.”
“That’s not what she thinks. She wants you back.”
“How do you know?”
“Come on, the whole neighborhood knows.” Maya pictures Nancy’s car in the driveway. But she says instead, “She was screaming your name yesterday for at least twenty minutes.”
“Let’s sit down.” Jeff takes her hand and leads her to the couch. “You’re right. Nancy asked me if we could be married again. But I said no. I’m married to you now. I went to her parents’ house with her last night because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But I also went because I was mad at you for walking away.” He pauses but doesn’t say anything about this morning. “Nancy has a four-year-old daughter. She came back to Milwaukee so her parents could help raise her. She’s in a very bad spot. She feels like she’s a total failure and no one cares about her except her parents. If it cheers her up, I wouldn’t mind seeing her now and then as a friend. But I need to talk to you about it first.”
“Why? I can’t help you with your problems with Nancy.” Maya can’t keep her voice from sounding cold. Right this moment, she could be at an important turning point where every word she says could change the direction of her life. If she says the right things, she and Jeff could go b
ack to the way they were in the first year of their marriage; or they could spare themselves years of unhappiness by parting now. It’s like landing on those squares in a childhood board game, where a ladder extends with an instruction: “Go back to the beginning” or “Skip forward to the next turn.” Only she doesn’t know in which direction the game is played. Is it better to go back to the beginning or to skip forward, to go up a new ladder or slide down an old one? “I don’t know what you want me to do,” she tells Jeff.
“Nancy and I parted badly. I was tempted to avoid her, but I can’t. She’s going to be living twenty minutes away. It’s probably healthier for us to get together now and then to talk.”
“Well, then you should,” Maya says.
Jeff leans down and peers into her face. “I want you to understand. Nancy and I never had a chance to discuss the things that went wrong between us. We were miserable for years and then she left me suddenly. It would be good for us to talk so we can forgive each other. Every time we tried to talk before, we ended up having a big fight.”
“Like at the tennis court yesterday.”
Jeff frowns. “It’s going to take us some time to change.”
“I don’t understand why you want to spend time with someone who screams at you.”
“It isn’t all her fault. She gets upset with me and then she gets even more upset with herself. Then I make things worse by trying to ignore her. I can’t just blame her. I did some wrong things, too.” He sighs. “Look. I once thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with her. Just because things didn’t work out, I can’t turn my back on her when she needs a friend.”
“If you feel so strongly about it, why even ask me?”
He takes her by the shoulders. “I’m asking because I don’t want to hurt you. If it really bothers you, I won’t speak to her ever again.”
“It shouldn’t be up to me.”
“But it is. I’m married to you, not to her.”
Maya sighs. “I can’t tell you not to see someone from your past.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” he says. “If you didn’t, it would be like me asking you to give up seeing Yuko.”
I would leave you in a second if you did, Maya thinks. She says, “One condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t come home and tell me what the two of you did, where you went, and what you talked about.”
“Why not? I don’t have anything to hide. I was going to tell you everything she and I talked about last night.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Maybe I am, but I don’t think you can really tell me everything. There might be things you won’t tell me because you think they’re not important, but then I’ll find out and be upset. It’s better if we agree to say nothing in the first place. Otherwise, no matter how honest you intend to be, there’ll always be something you skip over.”
Jeff doesn’t respond.
“Your problem with Nancy is none of my business,” Maya adds. “You can’t expect any help from me, but you don’t owe me any explanations. I trust you to do the right thing.”
Jeff pulls her closer. “I appreciate your trust, then. I won’t take it for granted.”
Her face buried in his shoulder, Maya closes her eyes tight. The jagged edges of yellow light inside her eyelids remind her of fire. Nancy is waving her flag of despair while a helicopter approaches above. Far away, Maya’s father continues to paint inside a burning building. Maya pictures Yuko taking the scissors to her long black hair, Dan picking up his own plate and placing it in front of Meredith like an offering, herself and Eric sitting in his car this afternoon. Maybe everyone is on the brink of some disaster, but Maya doesn’t want to think about it. She tries to put aside the feelings of doom she’s had since yesterday afternoon, when Nancy stepped out of her big white car and started calling Jeff’s name. With caution, she and Jeff can steer their way out of this bad stretch. All they have to do is keep looking ahead. It’s all right to ignore everything that falls by the wayside—they’re other people’s disasters. Her father gave her a single image, like a prophet’s dream, to take her into the future. Sometimes there is only one way to move ahead: don’t look back, don’t glance to the side, just keep going forward regardless of what you see out the corner of your eye.
10
Kay’s house in Minneapolis had been built during the Great Depression. In the basement, there were three windowless rooms that must have been intended for storing root vegetables and canned goods. Later, the people who owned the house during the Cold War might have stocked these rooms with bottled water and hermetically sealed food and prepared them as fallout shelters. By the time Bill and Kay bought the house, people had stopped believing they could survive a nuclear holocaust by holing up in the basement, though at school during bomb drills, Maya was instructed to crawl under her desk and cover her eyes so the nuclear flash would not burn out her retina. Kay and Bill had nothing to store in the basement except a few cans of insecticide.
For her time-outs, Maya was sent to the smallest of the three rooms behind the furnace. The punishment could come at any time. If she waited too long to answer a question or spoke too soon, too loudly, or too softly, her mother’s arm would come flying toward her and her strong, cold fingers would latch on to Maya’s wrist. Bill would mutter, “Take it easy,” “Everyone calm down,” or “Let’s slow things down a minute.” Paying no attention to him, Kay would drag Maya down the stairs. As Kay yelled and yanked Maya’s arm, Maya stayed absolutely quiet and concentrated on her steps. If she dawdled and caused her mother to stumble, they would fall headfirst on the concrete floor, her wrist still clutched in Kay’s grip.
In the basement, Kay threw Maya into the room and locked the door from the outside. Her steps punched up the staircase, swept across the kitchen, and became muffled once she reached the living room. Sometimes, Maya could hear Bill and Kay arguing. She waited until all was quiet before sitting down on the floor. Kay had taken the bulb out of the overhead light, but Maya wasn’t afraid of the dark. The running watch Yuko gave her on her eleventh birthday had a yellow light she could turn on by pushing a button. If she knew telepathy, she could flash the circle of light on and off around her wrist and send a message to Yuko. Down the street in the Nakashimas’ house, Yuko would sense Maya’s words without having to take her eyes off her homework or a game of Monopoly she was playing with her brothers.
Even without telepathy, the watch helped Maya pass the time. She would pick a color and try to think of as many things in that color as she could in three minutes. Or she would give herself ten minutes to remember the names of all the cities and rivers she saw in Japan, the painters and the sculptors her father had liked, the food he used to cook. She made a list of the third-grade students in her class in Osaka, the neighbors on their block. She could walk from house to house in her mind or stand next to each row of desks in the classroom and see who sat where. Only the same kids would not be at the same desks anymore, and the old men and women who walked with canes might have gone to live with their children in another city. Nothing stayed the same, in Osaka or anywhere else. Every semester in her geography class, there were new countries added to the world atlas.
The Zen masters in her father’s stories were always trying to teach the same lessons to the young warriors who studied with them: Be patient, because everything changes in time. The truly enlightened people were quiet. The most revered masters, who meditated every day, could slow down their heartbeats until they only had to breathe once every five or ten minutes. Sitting perfectly still in the lotus position, their hearts scarcely beating, they had dreams of beauty and peace. Maya counted her pulse as she sat with her legs folded. Her heart beat slow and steady. By taking deep, even breaths, she could make her pulse go down from sixty to fifty-five, fifty-two, fifty-one. But no matter how she tried, she could never make it slower than fifty. Forty-nine was the magic number. The day her pul
se matched that number, she might be granted an important wish. Her mother would decide that she and Bill would be happier if Maya wasn’t around. They would give her money to live wherever she wanted to for the rest of her life. Maya didn’t know where that would be, except that she would have a beautiful house, and Yuko and other friends would visit her there. By the time she was so enlightened that she could stop her own heartbeat, finding a place to live would be easy.
In an hour, maybe two, her mother came downstairs and opened the door. Her face streaked with tears, Kay would whisper, “I’m sorry this is so difficult for both of us. We have to try harder to get along. You and I—we have only each other.” Maya let herself be hugged because, if she didn’t, they would have to start over from the beginning, with her mother screaming and carrying on again. Some afternoons at school, Mr. Lloyd, the choir director, made the class practice the same passage over and over, each time sounding worse. As they walked home, Yuko would mutter, “It’s useless to go over that stuff. The only way we’re going to sound better is if we got rid of Tracy Hoagland, Mary Lou Price, and half the tenor section.” With Kay’s arms clasped around her shoulders, Maya felt as though she were being strangled. If she didn’t stay quiet, they would be just like a choir doomed to repeat the same terrible noise over and over because it had all the wrong people. While Kay went on about how they had no one except each other, Maya imagined being alone in a beautiful house by the sea.
* * *
On her drive down to Evanston, Maya keeps thinking about that basement. As she sat in the dark, trying to imagine a perfect home where she would be happy, she did not dream of being allowed to go back to Osaka to live with her father. When she made up the house in which she would live alone, she pictured Yuko, Yuko’s family, and several other friends visiting her. The house would have a white patio overlooking the sea, surrounded by flowers and tropical birds. Maya and her guests would have dinner, listen to music, dance, laugh, and talk. But her father never appeared in the house of her daydreams. Even there, she had to find explanations about why she didn’t have to invite her mother. She didn’t imagine that she would magically turn out to be someone else’s daughter or that her father would show up one day to take her home. In a few years, she stopped making any pictures in her mind about the future that included her father. The letters he sent back unopened were like leaves falling off the trees in autumn. They were unmistakable signs that any reunion Maya imagined was as false as the feeling people get on a warm day in September that just this year, summer might not end.