The Good Shufu

by Tracy Slater

  Later, after he’d watched some TV, Otosan would flip on the gas water heater, run the tap until it steamed, and then wash the dishes, methodically scrubbing plate by plate. When eventually the weakness in his legs made standing harder, I’d wash up instead. Cleaning was my least favorite part, but even then, I felt a warm rush of gratification go through me, knowing I was helping banish Otosan’s loneliness and boredom a few times a week.

  One night, Toru and his father stayed at the kitchen table drinking the tea I’d served while I went into the living room. Earlier, I’d found more old family photo albums, and now I plopped down on the floor to page through them. Toru and his sister appeared in little yellow kindergarten caps, presumably from “sports day,” an annual school event that still continues: Toru’s legs pumping during some sort of race, Kei’s face upturned in song. In another album, the pictures were older, from before Kei was born: Toru as a baby at the beach, covered upright in the sand to mid-torso, pudgy arms resting on a soft shelf of grainy white, a huge complicit grin on his face as if he were actually the author of the prank; then Toru again, sitting in a red model car, fist outstretched as if to shift into gear, face and cheeks impossibly round and self-satisfied. Finally, I stopped and lingered over a photo of my husband as a newborn cradled in his mother’s arms, her gaze fixed on his little bow mouth, her expression as serene and full as I’d ever seen it.

  I felt a tug then, an unexpected hunger rising not in my stomach but higher, my heartbeat more a squeeze than a pump. The baby looked just like Toru still did, only rounder and quieter and his hair more sparse, his cheeks curved like fat, smooth stones. I suddenly longed for Toru not as an adult but as an infant, and then not as a wife but as a mother. The longing wasn’t so much a thought but a jolt of feeling, an ache in my arms, a twitch in my fists and in my teeth, as if I wanted to grab hold of his pudgy limbs, as if I even wanted to bite his baby flesh.

  My cannibalistic response shocked me less than my maternal one. I’d never really felt a longing for a child before. I thought about waking up alone in my apartment in Boston, the late-morning light across my bed, the utter luxury of lazy silence after deep sleep. Or doing yoga for ninety unbroken minutes in our tatami room in Osaka, candles flicking shadows on the wall. Booking tickets home, the long trip from Japan to the East Coast manageable only thanks to wine, movies, and the uninterrupted white noise of flight.

  An echo of my father’s voice came to me then, “Trebs, kids are like a life sentence!” and a memory of my mother staring blankly at her middle child. I’d always doubted I had a maternal instinct; maybe it just wasn’t in my genes. The responsibility of parenthood usually sent a shiver of fear and dread through me, my fiercest protective instincts trained not on the dream of an infant but on my own freedom from a lifelong commitment I had no guarantee I could keep.

  That night on the floor of Otosan’s living room, neither the fear nor the dread left me. But they were joined by an unexpected yearning for Toru-as-baby. I wanted to hold our infant in my arms, to gaze down into the pudgy face of our flesh made one.

  • • •

  TORU AND I had only ever discussed having a child in passing, never as an imminent endeavor, and the conversation always focused in part on how much time his father could devote to babysitting, even whether Toru and Otosan could care for a little one themselves in Osaka if I needed to go back to Boston without the baby or we couldn’t afford regular flights for two. But that spring and summer, we began questioning parenthood more realistically. Toru knew my reluctance, had understood it well before we were married, and we were both aware that my age could render the whole point moot. He wanted us to have a child but said he’d be content either way. “I love you first in world and always will,” he told me.

  One day we stopped for lunch in one of Osaka’s vast underground malls. We sat by a large window separating the café from the subterranean thoroughfare, eating rice bowls while torrents of people flowed past beyond the glass. Lingering over a cappuccino and remembering my own family, I gave voice to my deepest fear. “What if I have a baby and I don’t bond with it?”

  Toru tilted his head in thought a moment. He told me he was pretty sure I’d love a baby, especially if it came from me and him together. “Especially if it has your pea head!” he said, recalling how Japanese people would frequently comment on my “small face.” He would sometimes tease me that the Ph.D. in my professional title stood for “pea head.”

  The idea of a baby with my pea head failed to move me much, but I could still feel the tingling in my fists, that visceral itch to snatch and squeeze the baby in the photo at Otosan’s apartment. A little Toru. My little Toru. I felt a hot possessiveness. Then a jolt of something resembling joy rode along the current of that heat. I couldn’t tell if it was the caffeine from my coffee or the comforting rush of pedestrians streaming past us beyond the café window, a wave of noise buffered and made soothing by the large glass pane protecting us. Or whether I really was starting to feel joy at the prospect of having a child with Toru.

  “But I’ll be forty-one this year. That’s pretty old to have a baby. So we’d probably need to start soon.”

  “We have time. Not good to start until you’re ready.”

  Toru thought even though I was a few months past my fortieth birthday, waiting another three to six months wouldn’t make much difference. “Maybe too long to wait a year,” he said, but he urged me to take my time deciding whether I was actually ready to try.

  The rest of that year passed in periodic agitation, my temporary peace with Japan replaced by a new obsession: whether this whole house of cards, this whole bicontinental setup, would come crashing down if we procreated. I had so many questions beyond my bone-deep fear of not bonding with a child. Could we afford a kid? Forget about the cost of flights back and forth; was there even space in my tiny South End studio for me and a child? My mother’s warning to me before I got married ran through my head: you’ll be a foreigner half the year and a single parent the rest. I wasn’t confident I could handle a baby with Toru. Handling one on my own seemed insurmountable. Plus, I was pretty sure I didn’t have either the internal or external resources to maintain my freelance writing career part-time, take care of a baby, and find subletters or pay rent every month in Boston.

  When I flew back home that spring to teach writing again in the MBA program, the trip was extra long and tiring. I tried to imagine holding a baby on my lap in my tiny economy seat for the ten-hour-plus flight to San Francisco and then the six-hour leg to Boston. Going the other way, I knew, would be even longer. Something about the headwinds, I’d read, added an extra hour or two to the Asia-bound itinerary. On some flights, I saw couples with infants in the bulkhead seats, airline-issued bassinets tucked into the extra legroom in front. But that would only buy me a year or so.

  At baggage claim in San Francisco, I saw a blond couple with an infant. The father held the baby in a chest carrier, and the child tipped its towhead back as if it were a Chinese circus performer entering a backbend. Then the infant flopped forward into its father’s chest and gave a little shriek, legs kicking the air. The mother joined them, pointing to the luggage carousel. I couldn’t have said whether or not the baby was cute. All I saw was the look of pure exhaustion running shadows down its parents’ cheeks.

  I felt tears well up in my own eyes then. I was already tired out from the long, cramped flight, anticipating a two-hour layover followed by another cross-continental leg. Lugging a baby along with me? By myself? The entire idea struck me as demonic.

  • • •

  THAT SPRING in Boston felt idyllic, more so even than before as I began comparing the luxury of my single life to the severe limitations parenthood would surely spawn. My small apartment seemed to stretch out, spacious and peaceful. Even the sound of cars flowed evenly outside the tall, rickety windows of my ground-level unit. But could that soft static soon transform into something else? Traffic that wou
ld wake a sleeping baby? Infant screams shattering the night?

  Still, when I lay in bed reading or watching TV and I turned my head to the wall next to my long windows, I saw the pictures I had hung the previous autumn. Toru’s little newborn limbs always sent tiny sparks through my fingers, up my arms, across my chest. Sometimes, my teeth would hurt again with longing.

  Increasingly, I began imagining having Toru’s baby growing inside me. At my Boston gym, I ran extra hard on the treadmill. I’d raise the speed and pump my arms and legs and stare out at downtown Back Bay, the sun wrapping around the corners of Copley Place, and I’d feel my heartbeat climbing, climbing. I knew the more I worked out, the lower my resting pulse would become, and I thought about a tiny little being tucked inside my belly, absorbing, listening to the slow, steady hum I had made for it.

  In winter 2009, I was back in Osaka. That October I’d turned forty-one, and I knew Toru and I couldn’t put off trying much longer. Moments of terror over having a child would somersault into yearning, then back to terror again. The duality rubbed a raw friction in my chest. Is everyone this terrified of having a kid, even if they kind of want one? I wondered. Or is there something wrong with me? Other women I knew, most of whom were younger, were also thinking of having babies. Some seemed a lot less ambivalent. What’s wrong with these people that they aren’t more afraid? I’d think next. Who goes into such a momentous life change and doesn’t feel even a little terror, at least if they have their eyes open? I couldn’t tell if I was more limited or more enlightened than my peers.

  That February, the quandary over whether I could afford both my Boston studio and a baby was settled for me. I was in Tokyo again visiting Ariel when my landlords got in touch. They were putting the unit on the market. Because the apartment was old and needed a lot of refurbishing, they were offering a low price, especially for a South End property. Still, even with Toru’s company subsidizing half our Osaka rent, coming up with a down payment for the studio would come close to tapping us out. I’d always known we were priced out of buying in Boston. But since the current real estate market was so unstable, I assumed I’d have some time to figure things out. Even at a low price, I doubted my landlords could sell the unit quickly.

  I was still holding on to this assumption when I got a message a few weeks later telling me the apartment had sold. When I clicked open the e-mail, I read its words with shock. Then a graver thought formed, about how right I’d been months earlier when I’d feared that my whole bicontinental setup was just a house of cards waiting to collapse.

  5.

  THE AUTONOMY STAGE

  The persons who emerge from the detachment of stage one, the self-blame of stage two, and the hostility of stage three are in a position to build a new perspective between their former identity and the new host culture. . . . As in previous stages [though], it is likely that the individual will regress to earlier stages from time to time.

  • Paul Pedersen, The Five Stages of Culture Shock

  Smile, Think Positive, Let Yourself Relax, and Ready for Conception.

  • Slogan from IVF Namba Clinic in Osaka

  FOURTEEN

  THAT WINTER, I MOURNED THE loss of my Boston studio. Jodi, who was back in Osaka by then, tried to convince me that losing the rental was really for the best. Ariel reminded me how stressed out I’d been, needing to find subletters every time I came to Japan. Over Indian food one night, Jodi pointed out that not only had the rental situation been stressful lately, it would only become more so if I had a baby. “Seriously,” she said, stabbing a vegetarian samosa with her fork, “you want to worry about trying to get knocked up, and then maybe having some screaming infant, while either paying into someone else’s mortgage every month or trying to scrape together the cash to buy your own place?” She urged me to just give myself a break, take a year, and see what it was like not having my own place in Boston. “You can always stay with friends, or your mother or siblings.”

  Honestly, I wasn’t sure my mother would let me stay in her apartment, especially if she and my stepfather were away in Florida. Between them, there were ten adult stepchildren, although all the others had their own homes in the U.S. But I guessed my parents were reluctant to open their apartment to the sprawling next generation. When I admitted such to Jodi, she flared her nostrils, then stabbed another samosa. “I’ll never understand your family,” she muttered. Anyway, my friend Louise had a two-bedroom apartment in Jamaica Plain, a grittier neighborhood than the South End, that she was constantly struggling to afford alone on a new assistant professor’s salary, and I figured I could always sublet a room from her when I went home.

  A few weeks later, my friends Jenna and Matt packed up my beloved studio and moved my belongings into storage. Matt was in freelance construction, so the job gave him a chance to bring in some extra cash, although Jenna kept trying to lowball me. “You don’t need to pay us. Just pay for the rental truck and storage space!” I e-mailed Matt to ask what his hourly construction rate usually equaled, then sent a check, although I suspect he lowballed me, too.

  Toru tried to comfort me by telling me we could look for a cheaper apartment in a less upscale neighborhood when I went back to Boston next. “Well,” I said, “I guess especially if I don’t end up getting pregnant we may be able to afford that.” Over the next few months, even though I felt sad about losing my studio, the release from the responsibility did leave me with a clean new space in my chest that used to be filled with worry.

  By now, Toru and I had started trying to have a baby, or at least had stopped using protection. If it turned out I couldn’t get pregnant, we’d accept living childless. No invasive treatments, no medical acrobatics, we agreed. Still, I told Toru I thought I should get checked out, just to ensure I had no cervical cancer or other health issues that might complicate a pregnancy. I took a deep breath and scheduled my first visit to a gynecologist in Japan. Or rather, I found a women’s clinic reported to have English-speaking doctors (but not nurses or receptionists), and asked Toru to make an appointment for me.

  When I arrived for my checkup in late February, the receptionist handed me a questionnaire. In English! I noted with relief. She wore a dark blue uniform, straight skirt to the knee, with a white blouse and little blue handkerchief knotted at her neck. She looked identical to the other two receptionists busy filing paperwork and smiling, down to the clinic’s logo pinned to their collars, as if the women were flight attendants for the gynecologically inclined.

  “What seems to be a problem today?” the questionnaire asked. Then it gave me my choices: “infertility,” “gender selection,” “timing intercourse,” “IVF,” “AIH,” or “others.” I wasn’t sure what “timing intercourse” was, and I had no idea what “AIH” meant. I checked “others.” At the top of the form were fields for my height and weight in centimeters and kilograms, measurements I’d never used. I hesitated, then just filled in five-foot-five and 118 lbs. There was no mention of my blood type, but at the bottom of the questionnaire were boxes for “husband’s name,” his occupation, and his blood type.

  When the pink-and-white-uniformed nurse finally called me into the examination room, she motioned for me to remove everything below my waist, put on some pink fabric slippers, and seat myself in a large padded pink chair that monopolized the small space. It looked like a recliner with a polyester yellow curtain hanging over what turned out to be leg rests. I shuffled toward the contraption, the communal slippers uncomfortably humid around my toes, my midriff covered with a tiny pink towel. Once I extended my legs beyond the curtain, everything from my navel down was obscured, but I heard voices coming from behind the yellow expanse.

  “Um,” I called into the vacuum, but there was no answer. I peeked my head around and could see the nurse looking down the hallway beyond. There were no walls or doors blocking the view from my lap to the thoroughfare. “Open wa daijobu?” I asked quickly, in some kind of weird Japinglish, �
�Open okay?” pulling the polyester curtain aside.

  The nurse nodded, smiling, and then called down the hall, “Inoue-sensei!” “Dr. Inoue!” A white-coated woman came hurrying to my pink-chaired alcove. The nurse approached the recliner and stepped on some levers, and suddenly the top portion of the seat tipped back while the leg rests extended farther and opened into a wide V, the whole contrivance rising up to eye level. “Good morning, Mrs. Tracy!” the doctor greeted my splayed repose. Then she snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, pulled the little towel from my lap, and began her exam. The entire time, more pink-outfitted nurses clutching charts rushed back and forth down the hallway behind the doctor’s back while my naked feet flopped toward them.

  When I returned to the clinic to get my results, Inoue-sensei assured me I was healthy, but she clucked over my age. If I wanted to get pregnant, she urged me to get my hormone levels tested. By now, Toru and I had gone a couple of months without protection. “I’m not worried,” I told two foreign friends who went to the same clinic, but I agreed to have more tests “just in case.” Returning once again for the results, I was relieved when the nurse called me into a room without a mechanized pink recliner. I sat between the blank white walls of the doctor’s office and waited.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Tracy,” Inoue-sensei said, looking down, and she pushed a sheet with green and white boxes of lab results toward me. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, still staring at the paper, “but your hormones are . . . out of range.”

  Apparently, I had a significantly depleted supply of eggs, the doctor explained in broken English. “Every month, it’s precious now,” she said. She advised Toru and I start IVF immediately. She warned my chances of having a baby at all, even with medical intervention, were very slim.