by Kyoko Mori
Maya shrugs. She was going to use only soft, washable wool to make the afghans. But she couldn’t resist putting in a few strands of dark-gray mohair threads because they made all the muted blues and greens come together; without them, the whole thing looked pointless and bland. She should have known how sensitive Kay is to any thread with a coarse texture.
In the foyer, Maya takes off the slippers. Stooped over, she has to fumble with the straps of her sandals. When she straightens up, her mother is standing next to the door with her hand on the knob. Like a gate-crasher being shown the way out, Maya leaves without saying good-bye.
* * *
When she gets home, the red light is flashing on the answering machine in the kitchen. Maya pushes the button. It’s Dan, asking Jeff if he wants to go golfing with him and Meredith on Saturday. Maya reaches for the message pad on the fridge. The yellow pad already has something written on it—the word Hi with a big exclamation point, the letters stretching long and tall and taking up the whole space. The pencil mark is thin, so the word looks like a long shadow cast at day-break or dusk. Maya doesn’t know why Jeff would write that. It has to be some joke she isn’t getting. As she turns away, she notices the photograph tucked under the dinosaur magnet from the museum. All she can see under the green ceramic T. rex is a bright yellow bottom edge.
Maya moves the magnet aside. The photograph fits perfectly in her hand. Its bottom half is taken up by a yellow crocheted blanket in which a baby is wrapped. The woman holding the baby, the blanket covering parts of her arms, is Nancy. She looks fuller-faced than when Maya saw her at the tennis courts, and her cheeks are rosy. The baby must have been only a few weeks old; her face is red and wrinkled, her eyes dark and opaque. Holding her in a sunny room, Nancy is smiling, radiant with happiness. In the corner of the photograph, Maya can see the tip of the shadow cast by the person behind the camera—her mother on a visit, perhaps, or her second husband. On the back of the photograph, words in black ink say, For Jeff, from Nancy and Brittany.
Cradling the photograph in her hand as delicately as if it were an egg, Maya examines the light falling on Nancy’s hair and her white blouse. It’s a beautiful image, and she can see why Nancy would want Jeff to have it—she is giving him the best of who she is, a loving mother. Maya tries to see herself grabbing the opposite corners of this photograph and tearing it. The edge will waver slightly, the shiny surface ripping more unevenly than the white back. The line will run right down the image, splitting Nancy’s face and the baby’s face in two. Maya stands there thinking about it for a long time. When she practiced her high jump on the track team, her coach used to tell her to visualize as she approached the bar: make a picture in her mind of every movement of her arms and legs going over. If you can see it, he said, you can do it. Visualization helped with the bars she could have cleared anyway, but there was a limit to what the coach called the power of the mind. Eventually, she got to bars she couldn’t clear no matter what she visualized, because they were simply too high. She could picture herself flying up to the sky and her leg would still catch, sending the bar clattering down. The power of the mind cannot overcome the laws of gravity.
If she put the picture back on the refrigerator, Jeff might not notice it right away. Even if she left and came back, there is no guarantee that he would find it and put it away. Instead, he might see it as he was setting the table for their supper or getting her a drink. He would take it down and look at it, and by the time he turned back to Maya, his face would be full of pity or guilt. He might feel compelled to offer explanations or apologies. The whole scene would make her feel like someone standing in the way of another woman’s true love.
Holding the photograph in her hand, Maya goes upstairs to the spare room and opens the closet. Hanging on the pole are her and Jeff’s heavy winter coats and jackets in the plastic sheaths from the dry cleaner’s. Maya puts the picture in one of the empty shoeboxes from the shelf above the coats and slides it on the floor to the back of the closet, where it is hidden behind the longer coats. In six months, when it is cold enough to bring out these coats again, she may be gone, living somewhere else, or Nancy may have given up and moved on. One of those things will have happened before then. Maya wishes the closet was like a crystal ball, a cup of fortune tea, or a sky full of flying birds so she could augur the future by the arrangements of the coats on the rack. A small forest of winter colors in April, the coats offer her no answers.
Instead, Maya pictures her father on that winter day when he took her to the airport. Surely her mother was wrong to suggest that he didn’t love Maya because he refused to give up his art. There are things people cannot do no matter how much they try to imagine doing them. He could no more become a businessman than she could tear someone else’s picture or hold on to her lead in the last stretch of the race with another runner struggling for breath right behind her. People cannot do things against their nature.
Standing alone in her own empty house, Maya thinks of her father returning to their house on that afternoon. After Maya had walked through her tunnel into the airplane, he would have gone up to the observation deck and waved to her even though he knew she could not see him. He would have stayed until the airplane taxied off and tilted up into the sky, turning into a silver charm—the kind a woman might wear on a chain around her neck for good luck. Then he would have taken the train back to the house and entered its quietness. He wouldn’t have cried; he wouldn’t have thrown or broken things the way her mother did in her anger. Instead, he would have gone into Maya’s room and opened the closet. The day before, he had packed Maya’s suitcase with her favorite dresses, sweaters, skirts, and trousers, folding them neatly, tucking in the sleeves so that each little figure bowed at the waist, embracing itself. Now, with her gone, he would have stared at the clothes that were left in the closet, all of them facing the same direction on their hangers like children marching off into the woods, leaving their fathers and mothers, the houses where they were once happy. He would not have been able to put the clothes away that day or the next day. It would have taken him a long time to go into her room again. It is impossible to forget someone you used to love—their traces are left forever in the house you shared with them. If they came back suddenly, the love you tried to forget would come back, too.
Maya closes the door gently. Her father didn’t have to tell her anything. She knows how to go on living with a quiet and empty heart.
11
The cold weather has returned, though it is the first week of May. All around the neighborhood, the trees have begun to bud. Half in, half out of their scaly sheaths, the new leaves look like scratchy lines drawn in crayon between the gray-brown branches. Maya stands shivering in the doorway while the furnace starts up, sending a hiss of dry air from the basement.
Mr. Raine is kneeling in the foyer over the metal parts he has taken off the front door. His ad in the phone book said FRED RAINE, LOCKSMITH—at your service rain or shine. From the leather tool belt he wears over his blue work clothes, Mr. Raine takes out a screwdriver. His brown work boots are scuffed; his white hair is thinning on top. Every week, he must get calls from people stranded in parking lots with their keys locked inside their cars or afraid to go home because an ex-boyfriend has a garage-door opener. Maya wonders if he has ever changed the lock to protect someone from unwanted photographs and notes coming in through the door—fragments of the past like beach glass, the edges worn smooth and made prettier by the passage of time.
The last photograph Nancy left, two days ago, was a recent one of herself and her daughter sitting side by side in front of a mottled aqua backdrop. Nancy was wearing a tight black dress; the child was in a white dress with a flouncy tiered skirt. Maya held the photograph in her hand for a long time, unable to stop looking at it. Nancy and her daughter reminded Maya of the same person split in two in an allegorical painting: she was the body with its adult temptations, the little girl was the pure, angel-like soul inside. Though they were dressed in opposite ways
, they both had the same bright red hair cut in layers, big ear-to-ear smiles, pretty green eyes. On the back, Nancy had written, To Jeff, with love from his family. Nancy and Brittany. The name of a studio downtown was stamped under her message.
Like a history lesson, the photographs have followed a chronological order. After the first one of Nancy with her newborn child, there was another of Brittany being fed something orange—mashed carrots or pumpkin—out of a baby food jar; next, she was in a high chair holding her own spoon over a green plastic plate. Then there were several snapshots of her crawling, standing up, starting to walk. Nancy posted pictures the girl had colored, one of which had a unicorn solidly filled in with black, the strokes of the crayon going both horizontal and vertical, crisscrossing over the slender body of the animal. She left notes on pink stationery about how they had gone to the park or started the baby swimming class at the Y. All the notes ended with We can’t wait to spend more time with you. Love, Nancy and Brittany.
When there were only two or three photographs, Maya could have put them back on the fridge and gone back to her studio, giving Jeff a chance to discover them in her absence. But after she came back, Jeff would have to show the photographs to her and they would have to talk. Or he would have to hide them and pretend that they never existed. Maya wasn’t sure which would be worse. If he wanted to talk, she would have to act as though she were seeing the pictures for the first time. If he didn’t say anything, she would notice him glancing toward her with guilty looks. She hesitated until there were too many photographs and notes for Nancy to have left on the same day. Like so many things Maya didn’t do, putting back the pictures ceased to be a possibility while she was still thinking of all the ways things could turn out so she could make the perfect decision. She had no choice but to go on accumulating Nancy’s messages in her shoebox as though the two of them were sharing secrets.
When Nancy left the last picture from a studio in Milwaukee, Maya knew that the first round had been completed. The studio picture was taken in the last few weeks. It brought everything current, to the sum total of where they were now. After that, Nancy would have to leave entirely new pictures—she would bring recent snapshots including Jeff, or else she would return to the past she and Jeff had shared, chronicling their marriage in the way she had Brittany’s life. Snapshot after snapshot, Jeff’s past would reassemble itself in the shoebox Maya had hidden.
“You’ve got to call a locksmith,” Yuko said, when Maya told her what was happening. “How do you know this woman’s not going to walk in someday and hurt you?”
“I don’t think she cares about me. She already acts as if I didn’t exist—she comes in whenever she wants and leaves notes on the fridge.”
Yuko narrowed her eyes and tilted her head a little. “Are you sure she’s leaving that stuff for Jeff? She’s like an animal marking its territory. Maybe the pictures are meant for you.”
“No.” Maya tried to laugh it off. “She saw me at the tennis courts. I’m sure she’s dismissed me as being no real competition.” Still, she couldn’t help picturing Nancy inside the house. As she stopped in the living room on her way in, Nancy might examine the shawl draped on the straight-backed chair, a book left on the table. She must see that Maya’s presence in the house is already fading away. Like the neighbors who heard Nancy beeping her horn and screaming in front of their houses, Maya is no more than a helpless bystander. But people who create a spectacle are nothing without an audience. Nancy is acting like the girls Maya and Yuko knew in high school—the very popular ones—who stared at the other girls for a few seconds and then pointedly looked away. “Those girls,” Yuko had said, “they want to have it both ways. They can look down on us all they want, but they need us, too. They can only be better because we’re here to be worse.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Maya admitted to Yuko. “Nancy wants to ignore me, but at the same time she’s showing off to me, too.”
Mr. Raine finishes the front door and goes to work on the back door. His truck, parked on the driveway, has the word LOCKSMITH painted in big red letters. If Nancy was driving by, she would get the message. She would understand that if she wanted to write to Jeff, if she wanted to have him back, she would have to pursue him where Maya wouldn’t have to know: she could not expect Maya to be both witness and obstacle.
* * *
When Jeff comes home, Maya is ready with the two extra keys taped to the lid of the shoebox. Side by side, the keys look like primitive figurines or charms. She opens the door as soon as he pulls up. He gives her a hug, puts down his book bag, and runs upstairs to change into his sweats. He returns to the living room and sits down next to her on the couch but doesn’t see the shoebox on the coffee table. Maya points to it.
“I changed the locks, front and back. See the keys?” She puts her finger lightly on the two keys, secure under cellophane tape. “The locksmith just left. What’s inside the box is why I changed the locks.”
Jeff sighs but makes no move to open the box. Too late, Maya wishes she hadn’t closed the lid. The shoebox looks unnecessarily sinister, as though it contained something dead—a bird, a kitten—unrecognizably mangled.
“They’re just some photographs and notes she left for you. I took them off the fridge and put them in the box. Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
“You changed the locks because of Nancy.”
Maya nods. “I found these things on the fridge. Maybe she told you about them and you were wondering what happened to them.” She can’t help blushing. “You didn’t ask and I didn’t know how to give them back. I didn’t mean to interfere.”
Jeff shakes his head. “Why didn’t you say something? We could have talked. You didn’t have to handle this by yourself.”
“What is there to talk about? She has a right to contact you, but she doesn’t have to leave you notes where I can find them. I don’t want to be involved in what’s going on between you. She should leave me out of it.”
“There’s nothing going on.” Jeff glowers at Maya and won’t say anything more.
“If there’s nothing going on, why are you so upset?”
“I’m upset because you won’t talk to me. Every time something goes wrong, you act on your own. You don’t give me a chance to explain. You assume the worst and come up with some weird solution. You’re worse than Nancy. At least she screams at me about what’s going on in her head. You do things without telling me.”
“If it’s so much better with Nancy, you should go back to her.”
“You know that’s not what I mean,” Jeff says, reaching toward her. Maya leans out of his reach. “You have no reason to be jealous.” He sighs. “The other day I told her I was committed to you and couldn’t go back to her, ever. She started to cry.” Jeff pauses, but Maya doesn’t say anything. “I felt terrible about making her cry. Nancy’s in rough shape right now. She’s really down, to the point where I’m worried about her safety. If she did something drastic, I could never forgive myself. I’m asking you to be patient. I need your understanding. Instead, you go your own way as if we weren’t together. You pretend that what happens to me doesn’t affect you at all.”
Maya pictures Nancy crying at a coffee shop—putting her elbows on the table and covering her face so all Jeff can see is her hair falling over the table. He must have wanted to reach his hand to smooth her hair or pat her shoulder. Maybe he did, or else he politely looked away and lifted his coffee cup to his lips, wanting to give her some privacy. The waitress would have stood in the corner and wondered what was wrong with the couple at her table, why the man was making his girlfriend cry. Oblivious, Nancy would have kept crying, pressing her elbows harder against the table to support the weight of her misery.
Maya shakes her head, trying to clear the pictures that clutter up her mind. “Remember you weren’t going to tell me about your meetings with her? I really don’t want to hear.”
“That has to change. I need to be able to talk to you. Nancy’s in much worse shape than I
thought she was. It’s going to take me a long time to work things out with her. Right now, she says the only time she’s happy is when she’s with me. She needs me even though that’s wrong. I want her to settle into some kind of a life here and leave me alone.”
“That’s never going to happen. Look at her notes and tell me if you really think she’s going to give you up. If she’s the kind of person who’s afraid to be alone, she’ll always try to latch on to you. How do you know she’s not manipulating you by pretending to be so depressed? Her notes just sound chatty. They don’t seem that depressed to me.”
“For someone who doesn’t want to know the details, you must have read her notes pretty carefully.”
She has practically memorized them. But that’s exactly why she wanted to know nothing in the first place. She can’t stop halfway between knowing everything and knowing nothing. Once she starts, there will be no end until she can picture every detail as though she had been there herself. Knowing something that hurts you is like standing on the edge of a tall building. It’s better not to go near the edge because, once there, jumping seems like the only natural thing to do. It’s impossible to resist all that empty air below, calling you to fall. If you don’t want to jump, the only solution is to stand back a safe distance. Jump or don’t jump, know everything or nothing—the choices are clear. But Jeff could never understand. He doesn’t even see that, for Nancy, having him back or not seeing him ever again are the only options. Being his friend isn’t acceptable to her. Nancy wants Jeff to give his life—all his love and devotion—to her and her daughter. If you feel that way about someone, friendship will never do. It’s just like when Dan told Yuko how much he still cared for her. It would have been better if he’d told her she meant nothing to him.