by Kyoko Mori
PART THREE
15
Cornfields stretch in every direction behind the gas station. The lot has three pumps and an old-fashioned phone booth with a door. Only someone hopelessly far away from home would use the booth. Their shoulder pressed against the plastic wall, they would hear the phone ringing hundreds of miles away in another climate.
Inside the store, deli containers of bait are stacked next to the soda cans in the cooler. “This is my hometown.” Eric laughs. “You can buy night crawlers anywhere.”
“Are you a good fisherman?” Maya asks.
“My brother and I used to fish in the pond near our parents’ farm. We stopped because neither of us liked cleaning the fish.”
“You don’t like to inflict pain.”
He tightens his fingers around her hand. “I don’t want you to be hurt by what we did.”
“I’m not easily hurt.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You’ll have to. Otherwise, you’d feel bad.”
“I want you to come with me to Vermont.”
The soda cans behind glass are bright red, green, and orange. Each row is neatly lined up, the same colors following each other all the way to the back. Eric is about to say something, but Maya places her index finger on his lips. “Please. Can we not talk about this right now?”
He opens his mouth and moves his tongue slowly across her finger. If her fingertip could make music, it would sound like a violin solo underwater. “You didn’t make love to me like that without caring about me,” he says, when she tries to pull away.
Instead of answering, she opens the cooler and takes the nearest cans. “We should go.”
The man behind the cashier looks up as they approach. Maya puts the soda cans on the counter. The man pushes his gray hair out of his eyes and squints at her.
“Hi. Gas over there and these sodas,” Eric points to his car outside.
Without speaking, the man takes the twenty-dollar bill Eric has pulled out of his pocket. As he turns away to make change, Eric puts his arms around Maya and kisses her. “I love you,” he whispers, and kisses her again. With his hand on her back, he turns as if they were slow-dancing and places himself between her and the counter. They are still kissing when the man slams the change on the counter. Eric takes his time collecting it, one arm wrapped around Maya’s waist. They walk away, still holding each other.
“Thank you would have been the right thing for him to say,” Eric whispers, as the door closes behind them. “I’m sorry.”
“People always stare at me in small towns. I’m used to it.”
“People should only stare at you because you’re pretty.”
“He was just curious.”
“The first time I saw you, you were standing by a window talking to one of your customers. You looked so delicate and pretty. The woman you were talking to was towering over you. I wanted to stand next to you and put my arm around you like this.”
“You thought that when you were with Sylvia?”
“Yes. Sylvia noticed me staring at you. Maybe that’s why she got so mean.”
“No.” Maya shakes her head. “Sylvia’s always moody and mean. That’s just how she is.”
* * *
Dusk is falling when they get back to Peg’s store. Maya has been lying across the seat with her head on his lap. Half asleep, she could feel his fingers smoothing her hair and stroking her face. When the car stops, she sits up. Neither of them speaks for a long time.
“I don’t want to let you go,” he says finally.
“You have to.”
“Will you be all right?”
“I think so.”
“When can I see you again?”
“I don’t know.” She opens the door. “Promise that you won’t call or come looking for me.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure if I can see you again.” She pushes the door wider.
Eric puts his hand over hers. She doesn’t resist when he pulls her back toward him. “I don’t know what your situation is at home, but I don’t think you’re happy there. I want you to come with me.”
“I can’t do that. But you have to call your friend and tell him you’re moving back. I won’t be able to forgive myself if you don’t go.”
“I can’t imagine being there without you.”
“If you stay, I’ll never see you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes, absolutely.” She gets out of his car without another word.
* * *
The familiar highway at dusk looks like a foreign territory. Off the exit, her own neighborhood comes up first, but Maya keeps driving. She parks in front of Yuko’s building and runs up to the fourth floor. No one answers the door, but the spare key is on her key ring. She unlocks the door and goes in.
Several boxes from department stores downtown are scattered around the living room. Yuko’s parents have been in town since last week. Maya sits down on the floor and closes her eyes. She can see Eric’s face as though he were only an arm’s reach away. “I’ve wanted to touch you like this for so long,” he said. When he lay on his back and held her above him, the wrinkled blue quilt under them reminded her of the waves of the sea. All afternoon, she felt as though they were swimming and flying at once. Even the tiny shower stall, where they stood shivering and kissing as the water turned cold, resembled an underwater chamber or a capsule inside a spaceship. If they’d met earlier, she might have slept in his arms every night and dreamed about secret rooms where she could stay, breathing perfect air under the sea or up in the stratosphere. When Eric kissed her at the gas station, her hair was still damp from the shower; they stood surrounded by the faint apple smell of the shampoo, as though they were holding each other inside an invisible net. In the car on the way home, he traced the shape of her cheekbone, the curve of her lips and eyebrows, as though he meant to memorize her face by touch.
Maya turns on the desk lamp Yuko has placed on the makeshift shelves and picks up the telephone from the floor. She dials the number and hears the phone ringing. As usual, the machine comes on.
“Jeff,” she says, “it’s me. Pick up.”
“Where are you? It’s almost eight o’clock.”
“I’m at Yuko’s.”
He doesn’t respond. She can sense the silence thicken around them. It’s as though they were sitting next to each other one final time.
“I can’t come back. I’m sorry.”
His breath scratches against the phone when he sighs.
“I know we promised to talk if one of us decided to leave. But I can’t. I don’t know what there is to say.”
“I’m not surprised. With you, there’s no discussion ever. It’s time for you to go, so you go. You couldn’t care less that I’m not ready.”
“But you would have been ready sooner or later.”
He doesn’t answer.
“You aren’t ready. That’s not the same as saying you want me to stay. We were coming to the same decision. What difference does it make whether we talked it over or got there separately?”
“I want to ask you one thing.”
“What?”
“Did you ever really love me?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a simple question. Yes or no.”
“I didn’t love you in the way I should have.”
“Well, that’s all I needed to know.”
Before she can say anything, he hangs up. She puts down the receiver and pushes the phone away. She pictures Jeff sitting alone in the kitchen. On the table, the violets they picked from the lawn faded overnight; the petals shrank into fragile sheaths that resembled insect wings. In ten years, Maya will have almost nothing to say about Jeff. So many of her good memories from the last four years are about being alone in the house: making bread in the late afternoons while she waited for him to get home, gardening on summer mornings while he read the paper in the living room. They are only about him indirectly. On
ce, a divorced woman who came to the store said about her marriage, “There was nothing really wrong with it, but there wasn’t much right with it, either.”
In his apartment, Eric, too, might be staring at the telephone, trying to will himself to call his friend in Vermont, believing Maya has gone home to her husband. If she called him now and told him that she was at Yuko’s, he would ask her to come to him. She would tell him that her marriage is already over. In a month, she could follow him to a place where no one would know her. When people asked her where she was from, she could reply, “Oh, Wisconsin and Minnesota and, before that, Osaka.” She would smile mysteriously, implying that there was more to the story but she wished not to discuss it. Her mother uses that smile when she tells people that she grew up in Canada. Inside her own head, Maya would hear the screech of the tape fast-forwarding through her life before Eric. The thousands of evenings she and Yuko had driven around town looking for something to do and come home perfectly contented after just a cup of coffee, the weekend afternoons she’d sat in the store with Peg, their numerous parties, and the hours she’d spent weaving in her studio—all would become a blur of vague memories. In her new life, Maya would be no one except through Eric. Like an invisible friend a child makes up, she would be nothing even to herself.
Maya wonders what Yuko would think if she told her the truth. “You’re out of your mind,” Yuko would say. “You can’t move across the country with someone you’ve just met. Maybe you love him now, but what if you changed or he did? You’ll end up alone in a strange place.” So far, the two of them have been proof that a friendship can outlast any change. Since the first hour they sat next to each other in Miss Larson’s class, their friendship has felt like a perfect duet: Yuko’s rich alto intertwining, conversation after conversation, with Maya’s tremulous soprano. No matter what changes they have gone through over the years, their voices have kept weaving around the same basic harmony. Maya cannot separate her own thoughts from Yuko’s anymore than she can distinguish the voices from the sound they make together. Every opinion she has, even those they don’t agree about, has a part that comes from Yuko. If she went to Vermont with Eric, her life with him might be the same way. Year after year, she would feel the different variations of that moment he touched his warm fingers to her wrist in his kitchen and her heart beat so fast she could not speak. If their feelings for each other were as unchanging as the friendship she has with Yuko, Maya would come to believe that she was always meant to be with him and no one else. Yuko would then become nothing more than a childhood friend whom Maya might visit once or twice a year. That must be how most married women think of their old friends. For them, any friendship with another woman, no matter how close, is only a rehearsal; once they are married, their husbands are the center of their lives, and everyone else is just someone from the past. Kay must have thought so every time she started a new life with a new man. After each marriage, she became a different person, while Maya’s father spent the rest of his life drawing in his diary and painting in their old house in the shade of trees. He chose loneliness over happiness that requires erasing the past and forgetting who you used to be.
Maya gets up and goes out the back door to the roof. The comet is long gone. Instead, in the southern sky, there are two planets. One is brighter than the other, but both shine hard and cold without flickering and blinking like stars.
* * *
When Yuko comes home, Maya can hear her steps on the metal rungs of the ladder.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” Yuko says, hugging Maya. “I went out to dinner with my parents.”
“I figured that. I’m glad you gave me the key.”
“Let’s go downstairs,” Yuko says.
In the kitchen, Maya sits down at the table while Yuko makes tea. The note she left is still on the counter: I’m up on the roof. I made my decision. Yuko pours the tea into two cups, hands one to Maya, and sits down. The sharp ginger flavor of the tea reminds Maya of the Thai restaurant they used to go to in Minneapolis. Maya has lost count of all the times they have sat together like this. Their sophomore year in high school, Yuko found a picture postcard of two very old women in identical straw hats and gingham dresses seated in front of a birthday cake. Even though one woman was much taller than the other, their wrinkled faces—with eyes almost disappearing into their sockets and lips stretched into loose, big grins—looked very much the same. Yuko tacked that postcard on the wall in the kitchen where she and Maya baked their cakes. “This is us in eighty years,” they used to say, and laugh.
Yuko is smiling at Maya in an uncertain way, waiting for her to speak. Maya puts down her teacup but doesn’t know what to say. Leaving a marriage is one thing: without Eric, even without Nancy, Maya and Jeff might have come to the same end sooner or later. That isn’t true at all about her friendship with Yuko. Without Eric, Maya would never consider moving away from Yuko only six months after Dan left her. She and Yuko could travel, share a house, or go into business together like some of the women from Peg’s town. Theirs would be a good future, an equal measure of solitude and friendship. If she hadn’t met Eric, Maya wouldn’t want anything else. But the moment she thinks about him, Maya feels as though she were only half here, drinking tea with Yuko. The other half of her is still in that room, her arms clasped tight around him. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with love: being in love can make you hurt everyone except your lover; a person in love is even more selfishly alone than someone who chooses simple solitude.
“I take it that your decision was to leave Jeff,” Yuko says.
Maya nods. “I already called him and told him I’m not coming back. He hung up on me, but he didn’t try to stop me.”
“You’re not disappointed that he didn’t try to stop you, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s good. Dan wanted me to cry and beg him to stay, I’m convinced of it. Even though it was his idea to dump me, he wanted me to say I was miserable, too. He wanted us to have that one final agreement before he could leave me.”
Dan’s actions might have been the result of a warm heart gone wrong. Perhaps he couldn’t tear himself away because he was overwhelmed by pity. Maya can’t recall a time when she was overwhelmed by any feeling toward Jeff. Every time he seemed upset about something that happened at school or at his parents’ house, she turned away politely, believing she was giving him privacy. This afternoon, when Eric’s eyes were red from the tears he was holding back, she wanted to put her arms around him and hold him close until the hurt look was gone. There’s an expression she’s heard many times and dismissed as an exaggeration: My heart went out to him. Just like that, she felt her heart jump out of her body, leaving behind an empty skin. Everything about her felt transparent; a single match could light up all the dark corners.
“I need to stay here for a few days,” she tells Yuko.
“You can stay longer than that.”
“I might go away, though. If Peg can give me a month off, I’ll go somewhere to be alone. I’ll come back in July to settle things with Jeff and look for an apartment.”
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere.” She can hardly visit her mother for two days. If Lillian lived anywhere but in Evanston, she could stay with her, but her place is too close to Kay’s.
“You can visit my parents,” Yuko offers. “They’ll give you a key to the cottage if you want to be alone. No one goes there during the week. You can take your cat, even. I’ll come up to visit you.” Yuko frowns uncertainly. “Unless, of course, you want to be absolutely alone. Then I won’t bother you.”
“Oh, Yuko, of course I’ll want to see you. I didn’t mean it like that.” Maya touches Yuko’s arm.
Yuko smiles. “Good. I don’t want you to turn into a hermit.”
The Nakashimas’ cottage is an hour north of Minneapolis on a small lake. It will be easy to stay there until Eric has gone back to Vermont.
“Do you want me to ask my parents? The
y’re here for another day. I can bring my mother to the shop if you’d rather ask her yourself.”
“I’ll talk to Peg tomorrow and arrange for the time off first.” As she puts her arms around Yuko’s shoulders, Maya thinks of the note she will leave for Eric on her way out of town. If she doesn’t tell Peg where she is staying, he will never be able to find her.
* * *
The blue sweatshirt and pants Yuko lent her are too long, making Maya look floppy, like a rag doll, but she has enough clothes in the loft to go away for a month. “I’m leaving Jeff, and I need a retreat,” she will tell Peg. “I don’t want anyone but Yuko to know where I am. I’ll call you so you won’t worry.” If Peg needs someone to fill in, she’ll suggest Jennifer, who’s been complaining more and more about working for Sylvia.
Maya turns the wheel around the last bend in the narrow road. When she sees a car parked in front of the store, she doesn’t immediately understand. Then she notices him sitting on the bench, exactly where he was yesterday. Maya looks back over her shoulder. The road is too narrow to turn her car. In high school, in driver’s ed, everyone had to drive backward for one hundred yards. Maya loved the high whine of the gears and the scenery reversing itself. She could drive backward faster and more decisively than anyone else in her group. But Eric is running toward her. He stands next to her car and taps on her window until she turns off her engine and pushes the door open.
He steps back to let her out, but the next moment his arms are around her and he is holding her tight. His lips graze her hair when she turns her face away from his kiss. She doesn’t realize that she is crying, until she hears him murmuring, “I’m sorry.” He is touching her cheek and his fingertips are wet.