Meeting Luciano

by Anna Esaki-Smith

  MARIKO WAS IN the pantry preparing salads, her thick brown hands fluttering like sparrows over the bowls. She was a plump woman, in her early forties, neatly packed into a sea-gray kimono. Her cheeks dimpled whenever she moved her mouth. Hiro and Mariko were the senior statesmen of the steakhouse, each having worked there for more than a decade, but while Hiro’s experience made him bored and jaded, Mariko retained the professional seriousness befitting a nun.

  I walked to her side and began topping each salad bowl with three tomato wedges and three red onion rings. It was always three of each, never four, she would say. Four, in Japanese, was a homonym for death. Mariko tucked her short, wiry hair behind her ears and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Gil’s dead,” she said.

  “Oh my God. What happened?”

  Mariko shook her head solemnly. “Car crash,” she replied.

  Gil was everyone’s favorite at the steakhouse. He was barely in his twenties, originally from the streets of gritty Osaka, and his only apparent goal in life was to own a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. At work, he wore cowboy boots with metal-tipped toes. His English was irregular and slangy. “Dudes! We’re gonna chop some steak bitchin’ all right!” he’d say to fellow chefs. Mariko’s face remained composed, as if we were discussing the weather, but I knew Gil had been like a little brother to her. And he had always been open about his affection for her, giving her hugs or winking at her, making Hiro and the others uncomfortable.

  “Fate is strange, don’t you think?” Mariko asked, peeling away the shriveled outer leaves of a lettuce head. “Why Gil? He never asked for much. It wasn’t like his desires were evil or extravagant.”

  “All he wanted was that motorbike.”

  “Yes. At least that’s what he’d say. But perhaps what he really enjoyed was the idea of wanting something. It gave him a purpose. If he actually had bought the Harley, I wonder what he would have done.”

  Mariko said the chefs had devised a new trick in honor of Gil—dousing shrimp with cheap sherry then setting them afire. I overheard Hiro telling a customer it was called “Fire of the Orient.” I followed Mariko back to the kitchen, carrying a tray of salads. Taped koto music twanged softly in my ears. The chefs wore the same colored hats as last year, with matching kerchiefs tied around their necks. The new one, Tetsu, was so thin that his belt, weighted by holstered knives, threatened to shimmy down his hips to the floor.

  “I get nervous out there,” he confessed as he prepared his cart, loading it with raw onion, zucchini, and steak. “So many things can go wrong.”

  “Just don’t think about it,” Hiro advised, tapping the metal tabletop with the blunt edges of two knives.

  Mariko pointed to bandages wrapped around two of Hiro’s fingers.

  Hiro snickered. “Par for the course, stupid.

  “You’re the stupid one,” Mariko replied.

  “You are more stupid.”

  I slid back into the old routine, hustling bowls of salad and rice out of the kitchen, brewing thin, bitter tea for eight people at a time. I wrapped rubber bands around my kimono sleeves and pulled them up over my elbows before scooping cherry pistachio from the freezer. My tips were good.

  At about nine o’clock, things began to wind down, and I went into the dining room to watch Tetsu and Hiro at their grills. They greeted guests with practiced smiles. Tetsu was obviously skilled, preparing the meat and vegetables quickly and carefully, never missing a plate when sliding the food off his knife. But Hiro put on a show. While stir-frying the zucchini, he did a frantic tap dance on the carpeted floor. He yodeled to Mariko for rice. After whistling to get Tetsu’s attention, he threw a salt shaker like a football, which Tetsu had to stretch to catch. When Hiro performed “Fire of the Orient,” he poured sherry recklessly, then set the entire grill aflame.

  AT FIRST, MY mother’s kitchen changed rapidly. Alex’s renovation schedule was propelled by great bursts of energy. He’d ring our doorbell at seven in the morning, and leave only after we’d finished dinner. His enthusiasm exhausted us to the point that my mother left the garage door open overnight so he could come in the next day unannounced. He painted the walls a luminous mint green in a matter of hours, and promptly replaced our bare light bulb with a Tiffany-style stained-glass lamp similar to one my mother had seen in a magazine. He installed new floor-to-ceiling windows in two days, opening up the normally dim room to the acre of grass and birch trees in our backyard. “Sometimes I’m so good I scare myself,” he said to me through an open window, smiling as he smoked a cigarette down to his fingers outside.

  I grew accustomed to having him around the house, listening to his deep voice and heavy footsteps contrast with my mother’s light, airy presence.

  But progress began to ebb. After putting in the new cupboards, Alex discovered that the doors were an inch too narrow, leaving a gap even when closed. He silently removed them. One morning, he inserted a melon rind into the new food disposal in the sink, and the grinding was so loud I could hear it through my shower upstairs. He blocked up light sockets with paint and misaligned tiles. Yet every day he presented the same ebullient optimism, as if everything was proceeding exactly as he had planned.

  “I think that’s mine, the mu shu pork,” said Alex, pointing to the aluminum container my mother pulled out from the bag. She passed it to him, and he opened the cardboard lid, releasing salty steam into the air.

  “I can smell mu shu pork a mile away,” he added brightly, peering at the dark, soy-drenched food. “I hope they didn’t forget the pancakes to roll this stuff up with. It’s no fun without the pancakes,” he added.

  “They’re right here,” my mother said, handing over a waxed paper bag of small, thin wheat-flour crepes. She paused, tossing packets of duck sauce and mustard onto the table. “Isn’t it amazing how many countries wrap up food with pancakes? The Mexicans eat tacos. The French wrap everything in crepes—”

  “And don’t forget the Turks and their kebabs,” Alex said. “Roast lamb in a pancake.”

  “The Turks wrap kebabs?” I asked, trying to catch Alex’s eye. “That sounds kind of strange.”

  Alex nodded his head. “They definitely do,” he said, although without much conviction.

  “Well, I am surprised at how wonderful this food seems,” my mother said, cracking apart her wooden chopsticks and shoveling a pile of white steamed rice from a paper box onto her plate. “I am pleasantly surprised.”

  “I thought you vowed never to buy from that restaurant. I thought you wanted them to go out of business,” I said.

  Alex neatly arranged a line of mu shu pork onto a pancake, dribbled on duck sauce, and rolled it into a tight cigar. “Why’s that?” he asked, biting off the end.

  “She thinks Chinese takeout is corrupting,” I told him.

  My mother, chewing a mouthful of rice, shot me a look. “No. I never said that.”

  I continued, ignoring her gaze. “You said a Chinese restaurant doesn’t fit in a town like this. You said it takes away the town’s dignity.”

  “Really? It seems like a decent place to me,” Alex said, rolling up another pancake. “They gave me a bowl of those deep-fried noodles while I was waiting.”

  “What changed your mind?” I asked my mother, cracking open a fortune cookie and pulling out the strip of paper. “Problems are often unique opportunities in disguise,” the fortune read.

  “I simply felt like Chinese food today,” she replied. “Nothing more.”

  “Could it be you’re tired of takeout from the diner?” I asked.

  My mother shook her head. “Oh, no, no, not at all,” she said.

  Alex stopped chewing and looked at my mother. “Oh, Mrs. Shimoda. You should have told me you didn’t like the diner’s food.”

  I sighed. “That’s not the point, Alex.”

  “No?” Alex raised his eyebrows.

  “I think we’d like, at some point, to eat something cooked at home.”

  “Of course. Everyone likes home cooking.
”

  “If we ever have a kitchen, that is.”

  “Just eat,” my mother told me, her chopsticks busy inside a container of sweet-and-sour pork.

  “Oh, I get it.” Alex plopped a pancake onto his plate, smoothing out the edges. “I get it. You’re trying to tell me the renovation is taking a long time.”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  Alex’s face twitched.

  “I agree, it’s taking a bit longer than I had originally planned,” he said. “But I haven’t encountered any problems that should concern you, I can tell you that.”

  “Where are all the cupboard doors?” I asked.

  “My supplier pal’s a bit slow. He promises me the doors will come in by next Wednesday.”

  I squirted a blob of duck sauce onto my plate. “Is your supplier pal responsible for getting us the oven that doesn’t heat up?”

  My mother made a choking sound, nearly spitting a small mouthful of food onto her plate. “This is terrible,” she exclaimed breathlessly.

  “Oh, Mrs. Shimoda, please. It isn’t that bad,” Alex said, his voice low and concerned.

  “No, no, look at this.” My mother picked up a newspaper from the floor, folded it, and showed us a page. PAVAROTTI FALLS SHY OF HIGH NOTE the headline read.

  “He missed the high C’s when singing the part of Tonio in Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment,” my mother said, scanning the article. “‘Mr. Pavarotti had not sung the Donizetti role in twenty-two years,’” she read, “‘and since then age and a heavier repertory have robbed his voice of some of its agility. It seems he has given up his crown as King of the High C’s.’”

  Alex looked at me and shrugged. My mother seemed lost in the words, reading on, breathing deeply.

  “Oh, poor Luciano!” she murmured, lowering the newspaper to the table. “It must be so difficult for him, getting older. So much pressure, and he’s such a proud man. But he has to remember one thing. He must remember.”

  “What’s that?” Alex asked, wiping the corners of his mouth with a paper napkin.

  My mother looked at both of us. “He is not a tenore di forza!” she nearly shouted.

  “He must remember that,” she continued in a lower voice, patting the newspaper against her palm and knocking her chopsticks to the floor. “He’s a lyric tenor, with a sweet, tender voice, always using his diaphragm lightly. Forget about those dramatic tenor roles! Forget Verdi’s Don Carlos! Forget striving for Otello!”

  She bent over, retrieved her chopsticks with a tiny grunt and waved them in the air in triumph. “That’s what I will tell him,” she said, straightening up in her chair. “I’ll tell him, ‘Luciano, you’re not a tenore di forza!’”

  And with that, she dug into her sweet-and-sour pork with renewed vigor.

  I wished then that I could be like my mother and find happiness in so many small things. Her passion seemed to give her heightened sensibilities while I felt I could never summon more than superficial pleasure—the brief, trancelike comfort of eating ice cream, the fleeting, artificial sadness of a sentimental movie. All I could really remember about my dreams of being an architect were my reasons for dismantling them: a fear of failing, a fear of not making enough money, a fear of discovering that I couldn’t love anything enough to make it the center of my life.

  As my mother and Alex ate their Chinese food, I felt faded, out of focus, like a photograph left too long in the sun.

  ONE NIGHT, AFTER a long dinner shift, I returned home so late all the lights were out on our street except for a dim lamp in our living room window. I trudged up the stairs from the garage, the smell of grease from the steak-house following me like a stray cat. I went to the kitchen, eager for something cool and clear to drink, but when I opened the refrigerator, I spotted the beer. It was wedged between a carton of juice and a jar of mayonnaise, and I reached out to touch the cold glass.

  Whenever my father mowed the lawn, he’d mow the entire yard at once, curving his way around the many trees and trotting down the straightaways as if led by an eager dog. He never stopped, unless the engine died, and then he’d pull the starter cord, yanking it furiously behind him while a great blue vein pushed its way up under the skin of his neck. Even when our neighbors graduated to tractor-like mowers, Pappa stuck by his greasy machine. During the summer he’d mow the lawn every Sunday before lunch, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of gray pants from an old suit.

  His reward waited in the refrigerator, a cooling brown bottle of beer. I was never sure who put it there to chill, he or my mother. Seeing a beer there now, years later, I had a sudden feeling that my father had returned home. That, of course, was impossible.

  The next morning I showered vigorously, washing my hair twice, massaging the shampoo into a billowing lather, scrubbing my skin pink with a rough loofah sponge. When I went downstairs, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with decorating magazines spread out in front of her as if the answers to all life’s questions could be found in one or another issue of Architectural Digest.

  “You must have come back late last night,” she said. “I was up until midnight, looking at these bathrooms.”

  I brightened. I’d always wanted a Japanese-style bath in our house, with a deep, square tub where you could sit up to your chin in hot water.

  “Do you think we might be able to install an ofuro? I’ve always wanted one.”

  My mother looked up and laughed. “Heavens, no! I’d much prefer a wonderful Italian marble tub. Much more impressive.”

  I shrugged, pulling a comb through my wet hair, and sat down, my stiff terry-cloth bathrobe bunched around my waist.

  My mother watched me, turning a page. “Did I get you that?” she asked.

  “A few Christmases ago,” I replied, checking for a crisp apple among the soft ones in the fruit bowl. Finding none, I poured myself a glass of juice and drank.

  “That’s a good bathrobe. It was expensive.”

  My mother folded a page corner and showed me a photo of a modern bathroom with a sunken green marble tub. “Beautiful, don’t you think? I never considered green.”

  “When did you start drinking beer?” I asked, combing my hair back with quick, wet slaps.

  “Beer? You know I don’t drink beer,” she said and looked up from her magazine for a moment, her lips slightly parting. “Oh, the beer,” she murmured, looking back down. “Alex is working today. I thought it might be nice for him. He works hard.”

  “The last thing Alex needs is to drink beer. He’s not so fantastic even when he’s sober.”

  “It’s just a gesture.”

  I got up, slid my empty glass into a bucket full of dirty dishes in the sink and filled a pot with water. As I set it on the stove I paused.

  “Something’s different,” I said, turning on the flame under the pot.

  “It’s a new kind of range. Special for entertaining.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s got a salamander broiler. High-heat glass jets. More space between burners.” My mother spoke methodically, as if reading from a list.

  “A what broiler?”

  “A salamander broiler. Very strong heat. So when I make my zabaglione, I can just stick it under there to brown before serving. So easy. I told Alex about my singing group gatherings, and he suggested it might make things easier.”

  “For your singing group parties? But you’ve never had more than five people over at a time.”

  My mother returned to her magazines, turning the pages at a leisurely pace. “He also installed a garbage compactor,” she continued, “and an ice maker that makes twenty-five pounds of ice a day.”

  “You’re planning to build an igloo?” I asked.

  “When the renovation is completed, I will want to throw a few big parties, in celebration of the new house. It’ll be worth it. I’m also thinking about adding a new bathroom.”

  “We don’t need a new bathroom.”

  “Of course we could use a new bathroom. We’ve bee
n talking about that for years.” My mother nodded blankly. “A big green bathroom,” she said, her finger tracing a photo of a cavernous bathtub.

  PAPPA NEVER TOLD me anything at all. He was an attractive man, slim with a large, intelligent forehead, so I assumed he never had problems with girls. He liked Western food. He once grabbed a pencil from me and drew my profile with just one dark stroke. (“That’s me, that’s exactly me!” I cried. He never drew anything for me again.) Occasionally he threw something from his past out to me, which I would grab and squeeze for all its possibilities.

  While watching television when I was seven, Pappa said, “We once took in a stray.” His lips left his cigar just long enough to say that. Then he got up and went to smoke in his den. I watched the rest of the program looking for dogs.

  A few years later, he told me in passing that he had had another brother. He mentioned it casually, as if remarking on the shape of a cloud. “It was an unusual situation,” he said while we were raking leaves in the backyard. “He was sent away. My mother couldn’t afford to keep three sons. She had to pick two of us.”

  He worked like a machine, systematically creating little leaf piles at various critical locations, then melding them together.

  His words were weightless as the leaves, and he kept working. Nothing in his face suggested to me that the memory was difficult; his eyes remained fixed on the end of his rake.

  “How?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

  Pappa began combining two piles. “She just did,” he said. “Those were difficult times.” Then he coughed with a burst of frosty air.

  We raked in silence after that.

  Months later, a call came early in the morning. Charlotte and I were eating breakfast, poking at bowls of cold cereal, while my mother ran upstairs to get my father, who was sleeping. They made a lot of noise, my mother telling Pappa to hurry and my father trying to wrap a robe around himself and secure his feet in slippers as he came shuffling down the stairs. I remember his face from that morning, his eyes swollen from sleep, his wavy hair matted against one side of his face.