by Tracy Slater
I began to wonder at the weirdness of calling the plane “she,” until his next words stopped my thoughts and filled the canned cabin air once more. I imagined him sitting upright, grasping a microphone with steady hand, silver-winged pin flashing smartly on his lapel. “It’s my call,” he announced, his tone now dipping low, a leader who would brook no dissent, “and that’s what I intend to do.”
Brief silence followed. Then, seemingly satisfied that they’d lodged their best protest, their dismal expectations of the airlines once more safely confirmed, the offended passengers sat back down. I fell asleep again to quiet grumbling and soft murmurs, the passengers secure in the knowledge that their complaints were entirely justified and widely shared with their fellow commercial aviation victims, stuffed with mutual crabbiness into seats all around them.
• • •
“HELLO, this is speaking Toru!” I heard on my voice mail two days later.
We’d mostly been playing phone tag and had only managed to talk briefly, quick snatches of Yes, got home safely, finally! Miss you; love you. I was surprised but also delighted that in the seventy-two hours we’d been apart and he’d been speaking only Japanese, Toru’s English syntax had already started to slip back into its charmed contortions.
That night during an early dinner with a few girlfriends, I played his funny message back, pressing my cell phone to their ears so they could hear, watching happily as their expressions morphed from squint-eyed concentration to open-faced amusement. So far, I seem to be able to balance this love in two worlds just fine, I thought with satisfaction and then a rising thrill.
Since arriving home, I’d had the uncanny sense of everything as both familiar and new. Each site I’d seen so often before now revealed a fresh dimension, an edge of foreignness sharpening customary contours. Boston and Cambridge looked so different from the landscape of Osaka: at once smaller but more spacious than the sprawling, densely packed Japanese city. In my daily interactions walking down the sidewalk or waiting in line at my morning café, I had the once normal but now remarkable sense of myself as unexceptional, merely one of the crowd instead of a mismatched silhouette. Suddenly, I was again just part of the backdrop, not an outsider to notice, ignore, or both.
I was also still flattened from jet lag, and as I drove home from dinner with my girlfriends, I lumbered slowly in my aging VW. Creeping down my neighborhood’s narrow streets, I peered through the windshield into the night, searching for the ever-elusive South End parking space. Turning a corner off Columbus Ave., I saw a car double-parked under a headlight, blocking the road. Still in Japanese public-decorum mode, I beeped softly, but the vehicle didn’t budge. I beeped again. Nothing.
Maybe they’ve gone inside an apartment? It was too dark to see the driver. Annoyed, I hauled myself out of my VW, preparing a polite request. Before I reached the other car, its engine suddenly started. Then I heard a furious honking at my back.
A man in a beat-up, dark blue sedan had pulled up behind me, bumper dented, air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. He must be beeping at that double-parked car, too, I thought, honking in support of my patient protest.
But then the driver behind me leaned out the window, jutting his head toward me in one angry thrust. “Jesus Christ!” he screamed. “Get back in the goddamn car, you moron. What are you doing? You’re blocking the whole fucking street!” I began feebly to protest, to explain I was only attempting to clear the road. In response, he slammed his palm back onto the horn, emitting another series of long, irate, and humiliatingly loud rebukes.
In a rush, my exhaustion overwhelmed me. I didn’t have the energy to absorb the full-throttled aggression of a Boston driver or the thick skin to deflect it—especially not after having floated in a bubble of extreme collective restraint for a month in Japan. I felt my cheeks flame in the night air, and then I burst helplessly into tears.
Suddenly, I longed for the more respectful, civilized manners of Toru’s homeland. What’s wrong with the people in this country? I thought as I hurried back to my car, slammed the door shut, and turned the ignition as fast as I could. What purpose on earth does it serve to be so rude? Why are people here so . . . so ill-behaved?
But as I drove away, the tears receded. An image of me startled and mortified under the streetlights flashed through my mind, and with it came a laugh, then a surge of release. This is my crazy neighborhood. I was finally back in a place allowing me and everyone around me to unleash whatever lurked inside; to display our internal states without a hint of shame; to announce ourselves and our minute-by-minute reactions to the world in a glorious rush of self-expression.
Sure, Japan’s enforced harmony had been soothing at times. But it had also been suffocating, I realized now, a wall of decorum sealing shut with hermetic insistence any signs of discord. Sitting in my aging car’s front seat, rumbling down my neighborhood’s liberally potholed streets, I loosened my lungs in relief and even in strange gratitude for the infuriated driver who had been cursing me moments before.
I’m in America, I thought, almost giddy.
Perhaps we could sometimes be rude, self-absorbed, inconsiderate. But I suddenly thought of Americans’ carefree expressiveness as our own curious form of mutual respect: an agreement to relinquish the façade of permanent politeness and bare our souls together. It’s a skewed species of respect, I allowed, but when it works, without devolving into injury or violence, we forge a generous, communal trust: you be you and I’ll be me, and somehow despite the annoyance and noise and clumsiness, we’ll have faith that we’ll all get by, ourselves, together.
• • •
MY NEW LOVE AFFAIR with the USA continued to bloom as I eased back into Boston life, although it emitted a patriotism that before had always seemed slightly tacky, wafting a subtle scent of the unintellectual or unexamined. Yet mine was a love affair made sweeter by the knowledge of distance, of difference. Everything continued to seem tinged with exoticism.
The streets are so wide! The cars so big! The supermarket aisles so enormous! Everything was suddenly not three- but four-dimensional. Even the SUVs, before always just annoying in their girth, had become interesting: unwieldy suburban gas-guzzlers transformed into culturally specific artifacts mirroring America’s vast land, optimism, and consumption, like an ugly stepsister whose skirts suddenly gave way to a golden slipper.
This wasn’t the first time I had traveled overseas and come home to see my world with fresh eyes. Besides having gone to East Asia the summer before, I’d been to Europe, the Middle East, Mexico, had even spent a college semester in France. But I’d always returned after playing tourist in lands clearly designated as not home. Now I realized how these places had always remained less real to me—partly because I had glimpsed many from resorts, but even more because I’d never imagined actually living there. I had certainly never considered adjusting to them as the new normal. In turn, they had never wielded the power to make me view my own world as potentially foreign.
Even more surprising yet harder to pin down was an abstract but unmistakable new sense of being at home. I quickly realized that just walking down the street in Boston or Cambridge felt different than it had in Osaka. My movements were the same. My gait, my breath, my heartbeat. But I felt different.
Was I unconsciously responding to the familiarity of the New England air, the particular calibration of its weight or humidity? Did hearing the flat sounds of American English or the consistent hum of some Northeastern traffic pattern send untraceable signals from my eardrums to my skull: that I was where I belonged, where I was most used to being? Was the force of gravity slightly different here, rooting my feet just so to the native concrete—and could my heart sense that, even though my brain couldn’t define it?
Whatever the specific cause, my sense of being at home felt distinctly different, more powerful, from my age-old certainty that Boston was where I wanted to settle because of its safe fam
iliarity. My attachment to the place and its pulse went deeper now. My home in Boston had become a part of me in an entirely new way: not only was it the city where I wanted to live, it was where I belonged, because I so clearly hadn’t belonged in Japan.
I had inherited a rare experience for a white, middle-class, educated American: that of being a minority, and how escaping that identity feels like nothing else ever will. After spending years of academic reflection on inequality, power, and belonging, of being appropriately guilty over my own privilege, I’d touched outsider status in a new way. At the same time, I realized how fundamentally far from this status I would forever stay, since it was something I could easily shed with a plane ticket and twenty-four hours of airport snacks.
Regardless, I was utterly grateful for this indefinable awareness of home—even as I acknowledged that its potency was fueled by the prospect of a life in Osaka. Ultimately, it was Japan that had made home coalesce into a new, more magical force.
• • •
NOT SURPRISINGLY, my family, and my mother in particular, found my budding enthusiasm for bicontinental living less than exhilarating. When I tried to explain my new postmodern theory of home—how the foreignness of Osaka only made my attachment to Boston that much sweeter, but, in turn, my enhanced love of home now depended on my simultaneous life in Japan—my mother was impressively, or perhaps just realistically, unmoved. She had hoped my coming back to the U.S. would cure whatever illusions I held about finding happiness with an Asian salaryman eight thousand miles away. But more than that, I was still her baby. She longed to protect me from what she saw looming, plain as any two-state solution for Israel and Palestine along pre-1967 boundaries, like a disaster on my horizon.
When I announced I had still not abandoned my plan to go back to Osaka that winter, and then again in spring to try settling there at least part-time, my mother’s eyes widened in alarm. “Give it a try, at your age?” she asked crossly. Then, “You’ll be almost forty after you experiment like this for just one year, if you persist in dragging out this arrangement with Toro.” She stared evenly at me, her eyes level with mine but still somehow seeming to glare down from a height of unappreciated wisdom.
“I know, Mom,” I said. “And his name is Toru, not Toro.” Her face remained immobile, a perfect mask of blazing eyes and pink lacquered lips drawn tight.
“Toro, just so you know, means ‘fatty tuna’ in Japanese, like the sushi.”
“And, in the best-case scenario,” she went on, ignoring my lesson in pronunciation, “if this, this situation, were to work out, and you were to actually marry, how would you have children if you spend six months a year alone in Boston? You’ll be a single parent half the year and an outsider the rest,” she warned.
I nodded simply, acknowledging that success, in this case and in the traditional definition of relationships, would surely doom me to some such fate.
“And if it doesn’t work,” she continued, her voice rising, her face reddening at the hairline, “if it falls apart—and in my world, spouses do not plan to live half their lives apart; it’s a sure recipe for disaster—what will you have then?”
The answer, I knew, was nothing. I looked silently back at my mother, her stare still fixing mine like an entomologist pinning a specimen to a sheet.
But as the days in Boston turned into weeks, as Toru’s visit passed in a blur of excitement, jet lag, and close-clasped limbs, and my return to Osaka loomed ever closer, it was a nothing I became increasingly willing to risk.
• • •
ANOTHER AVENUE where I confronted doubts about my relationship was in therapy. My shrink never voiced these misgivings out loud. In fact, I can’t be sure how many she herself even harbored, or the extent of them: predictably, or just appropriately, when I tried to ask her about them, she turned the issue back to me with a gentle yet firm suggestion of “projection.” As in, perhaps, I was projecting my own doubts onto a concern about hers?
What she did say was something like this: “Your fears about this relationship seem consistently focused on logistics. Where you and Toru will live. How you could possibly build a life with a man from Osaka. How to balance your image of yourself as an independent woman with the potential that you might give up your way of life for a man. But—and I don’t mean to suggest these aren’t important questions—they still all seem just a little . . . abstract.” In the pauses between her words I could hear traffic from the road below: honking, a lone siren going by through Cambridge’s Central Square.
Then she pushed a little further. She noted that I rarely mentioned any worries about whether Toru and I were interpersonally compatible. She wondered, did we ever fight? What did I do with my fears and feelings about him as a person and a potential partner, not just as a potential partner in a relationship with some pretty steep logistical challenges?
I shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it,” I admitted. “It’s not like we have a perfect relationship or anything. Neither one of us is a fighter, necessarily.” I tried explaining how when we had misunderstandings or frustrations, we often just went silent for a day or two, like we had in Beijing, rather than exploding in argument. “But I just don’t feel the worry, or at least not the terror, about us interpersonally, not nearly as much as I do about the geography and logistics. I guess I never really expected to be happy in a relationship, and for the most part I am now. Or at least so much more than I ever thought I could be.” I struggled to clarify to her, to both of us. I wasn’t sure this was the answer, or the full one. But however incomplete, it was the best, even the most honest, one I could come up with.
Of course I was lonely sometimes, thinking about how compartmentalized our bond sometimes felt, with Toru on one side and my friends on another, or how, despite our great affection for each other, because of the language barrier we didn’t share the kind of intellectual connection I always assumed I would have with a partner. But somehow the warmth and calm I felt with Toru outweighed everything else. Except for my fears about Japan.
I had to admit, sometimes it did seem like the country, or the whole “bicontinental issue,” was an animate object instead of a challenge of place or culture, like a loitering former lover, a tangible threat that got more of my attention than any dynamic between me and Toru. I didn’t know what to make of that realization, though. Neither did my shrink.
“Well,” she sighed eventually, “let’s keep an eye on this, keep talking about it.” She wondered if my expectations were low because of my family’s chaos, what she called “trauma,” although I still struggled with that word, especially in a context as privileged as mine. She offered that perhaps any relationship tipping the scales toward harmony felt like a bounty to me. Huh, I thought. Maybe I’ve been underestimating the benefits of childhood turmoil.
• • •
IN THE MEANTIME, while cracking my risk-averse heart open more and more to a life least expected, I latched on to a new obsession: starting a reading series in Cambridge. Due to her notable literary success, my sister Lauren had participated in many author events around the country, and she lamented how staid most were. She agreed to be one of my first readers, as well as help me contact other literary figures in the area.
I decided each event would be free, themed, and feature four published writers reading in a kind of evening salon. My friend Louise suggested the name Four Stories. And, Lauren added, why not include some type of entertaining question-and-answer feature, emphasizing the comical rather than the intellectual? I could run the events when I was home and put the series on hold or find other writers who could host when I was in Japan. Most important, the evenings would combine the two things I felt every literary scene required: alcohol and appetizers.
Throughout graduate school in my twenties, I had waitressed at an MIT-area bar called the Miracle of Science, where I’d worked with a friend named Gary, who’d now opened a lounge in Central Square, the Enormous Room. It
had soft lights; long, slouch-worthy couches; low Moroccan-style tables and cushions; a small stage backed by a great sound system; a whole menu of tapas and exotic fruit-spiked drinks with names like God in Small Pieces. It was perfect.
Another friend, Tim, who owned a popular local independent bookstore, helped me publicize. I planned to meet him for drinks one evening at a bar near his bookstore. “I always thought you and Tim would make a great couple,” Lauren said. He was Southern. “Very smart, sexy accent,” Lauren weighed in, “a real flirt, too.” I wondered if her words were more an attempt to persuade than caution.
Tim ordered a Wild Turkey, neat. I was driving, so I stopped at my first glass of wine, then ordered a soda water with a twist. We talked about literature, the MBA in nonprofit management he’d earned before he opened the bookstore. We laughed about Lauren—So eccentric! But successful!—and the literary scene in Boston. He gave me ideas about how to make Four Stories work and names of press contacts. He leaned in when I spoke, stared at me for long moments with his smooth brown eyes. He stroked his beard absentmindedly, gentled the air with his slight Southern drawl. Lauren was right: he was sexy.
But my heart didn’t pull toward him like it did with Toru. I was gut-deep relieved, but also confused, that a man with whom I had so much more in common, such a fluid intellectual connection, didn’t tempt me in any profound way from Toru. I could be attracted to Tim. Easily, I thought. But somehow, Toru was like a key whose crags and slopes, curved edges and empty spaces, fit inside my chest. I was driving back to the South End after meeting Tim when Toru called, and I told him Tim had given me lots of great contacts, that I had decided on the themes for all the fall events and had lined up most of the authors. “I think this might work, Tof!” I said. “I think I might have found a way to stay connected with the literary community here even though I may not be living in Boston full-time for a while.”