“Mom, this is David Havermeyer. He’s a contractor who built the addition to the O’Brien house last year.”
“I see. How do you do?”
David nodded, depositing the groceries on the kitchen table. “I asked David to take a look at our house,” I continued.
“Is that so?” My mother pulled out a carton of milk from a bag and put it in the refrigerator.
“I was worried that Alex wasn’t doing such a terrific job, but I wanted to get a professional opinion. Just to make sure.”
“I see.”
Nobody spoke. David, his eyes moving from me to my mother, hesitated before holding his hands out in front of him, as if ready to catch a ball. “There’s a lot I can say,” he began.
My mother waved her hand in front of her face. “David, I am sure you are a very good contractor. And my daughter seems very interested in your opinions. But I am confident the renovation is going well, and have no worries. No worries at all, in fact. So feel free to discuss matters, but please excuse me.”
She left the room and started up the stairs toward her bedroom. I chased after her.
“Mom!” I whispered loudly. “I think you should listen to this guy.”
She turned to me, her eyes wide open and angry, her lips a strained line. “Why are you checking up on Alex?” she asked.
“I don’t trust him,” I replied. “I’m concerned about you, too.”
She snorted a laugh. “What makes you so sure he’s honest?” she said, nodding toward the kitchen.
“Well, he came recommended.”
“But how do you know he’s not eager to criticize Alex so that maybe we’ll hire him, instead?”
I paused. “He doesn’t seem like the dishonest type,” I said. “I can tell by the way he talks.”
“You’re as bad as I am,” my mother said, turning her back toward me and marching into her bedroom.
• • •
ALEX ARRIVED IN a happy mood, whistling and singing what sounded like a Greek melody as he came up the stairs. He opened the refrigerator and was looking for the bag of apples and oranges that he kept there when I heard the doorbell, and through the glass door made out the wilted figure of our former gardener Lou. He stood in profile, his body slumped into a question mark, as if he was not meant to be as tall as he was. My mother had discovered him when his business card arrived in our mailbox announcing the services of “Lou, Gardener Extraordinaire.” For two years he mowed our lawn unevenly, pruned the shrubs into amorphous shapes, and fertilized only when something died. It wasn’t until Charlotte came up for a weekend and caught him stealing rakes that my mother decided to let him go.
But he kept returning. I suspected my mother had been one of very few regular customers, and somehow he believed that by simply appearing when he used to, he’d blend seamlessly back into our lives. He broke out into a wide grin as I opened the door. “Now there’s a sight for sore eyes,” he declared loudly. His irises swam behind his thick glasses, and he smelled of fresh dirt and gasoline.
“New frames,” I said.
Lou nodded. “When I see better, I work better,” he replied.
“Why are you here, Lou? We’ve gone over this before.”
“Grass is looking long,” Lou said, lifting his baseball cap and combing his fingers through whatever hair remained underneath. “Grass doesn’t look good when it’s so long.”
“My mother’s not going to change her mind,” I said.
Lou checked his watch, and shook his head slowly. “It’ll be tight, but I could squeeze in a quick mow now, in between appointments,” he said.
His knees were slightly bent, his shoulders hunched, as if straining under the weight of all that had come before. Hours spent under the sun left dark, blurry spots on his skin, and his fingers were curved even when at rest, as if molded to the handle of his lawn mower. He traveled with a whiny mutt in the passenger seat of his truck and a pair of stuffed dice hung from his rearview mirror.
Lou stuck the toe of his mud-encrusted workboot into the open door space. “Something has to be done about that bad-looking grass,” he muttered. His boot scraped against the door, sending bits of dried mud falling to the floor. We both stood in silence.
“Hey, watch the door. I just put that in.” Alex spoke from behind me, and I heard him walk toward us with long strides, covering the distance between the kitchen and the doorway in about four steps.
“Do you mind?” Alex asked, pointing to Lou’s foot.
Lou squinted at Alex, his eyes darting wildly, as if trying to take in all the components of his face.
“The lawn is a mess,” he announced, straightening up to his full height, which was a few inches taller than Alex.
“You’re the mess,” Alex said. “I know about you. Get lost, buddy.”
Lou lifted an eyebrow and shifted his weight onto his right foot. “You working for her now?” he asked.
“I said, get lost.”
Lou smiled, and started to laugh. He looked at me and jerked his head toward Alex. “You’ve hired this guy?”
I heard coins jangling in his pocket. Alex wiped his hands on his jeans. “What does it matter?” I asked.
Lou snorted. “After all these years, your mother’s my concern, of course. And in this world, you’ve got to be careful.” He shifted his gaze to Alex. “She never asks any questions, does she? How much things cost, what needs to be done.” And to me he said, “There are people just waiting to take advantage of a woman like that.”
He straightened the cap on his head and looked back at Alex. “Are you treating her right? If not, I’ll be coming after you. You can count on that.” He shook his head slowly and said, “You just don’t know about people,” his lips stretched tight across his gums.
Alex and I watched Lou go down the stairs, his boots thumping loosely against the slate. He got into his truck, swatted at his dog, and, after a few stuttering tries, started the engine. A lawn mower jiggled uncertainly in the back as the truck lumbered down our driveway and onto the street. I heard the engine pop somewhere in the distance.
“Well,” Alex said, as we returned to the kitchen. “That’s that.”
I sat down and stared at the white tabletop, listening to Alex as he put on a pot of water to boil and searched the cabinets for a tea bag. I knew that in my mother’s village in Japan, doors were always flung open to welcome anyone who might feel like passing through. Fishermen, vegetable vendors, children, dogs, and chickens wandered in and out freely. Plumbers became friends, handymen practically family. But that was a safer place and a safer time.
“IS MRS. HANAKO Shimoda there, please?” the voice over the phone asked.
“Yeah, hold on.” I dropped the phone into the lap of a kitchen chair and opened the door to the backyard. My mother was bent over at one corner of the property, a hand on her lower back, the other prodding the ground with a finger. The leaves of a maple tree fluttered over her, the tree’s branches reaching in four directions like street signs. A hot sun baked the entire yard.
“Telephone,” I called out.
“Somebody ate the tomato tree I planted yesterday,” she announced, standing, brushing her hands on her pants. “Alex was right. I do need fencing after all.”
“It’s the telephone.”
“Coming.”
My mother rushed across the yard, as light on her feet as a little dog. Where she was raised, her family grew everything from the pumpkin they stewed with soy sauce and sugar to the giant radishes they pickled and ate with rice. But she’d never done more than sprout an avocado pit in a glass by the kitchen sink.
She bounded up the back-porch stairs, huffing slightly, and rubbed her hands together when she got into the kitchen.
“Such a lovely day,” she said, taking the phone. “Hello?” she said in her happy voice, the word coming out more like “Hellew?”
I pulled a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator and poured a glass. My mother motioned for me to pour one for
her, too.
“Yes, speaking. Yes. Oh, my.”
I handed her the glass, and she brought it to her lips but lowered it before drinking.
“How kind. How wonderful. Simply wonderful. It will be a great pleasure. Please give my best regards to Mr. Pavarotti. Yes, thank you very much for calling.”
She hung up the phone softly, downed the entire glass, placed it noiselessly on the table and burst into song.
“‘Come, my dear treasure! I’ll change your fate,’” she sang, slapping her thigh. Barely able to contain herself, she shook her head and flapped her hands in the air, as if drying polish on her fingernails.
“Ha!” she exclaimed. “My ticket will be waiting for me at the box office. An orchestra seat. See?” She swung at the air in triumph, as if giving an invisible chin a solid punch. “Pavarotti remembered. He’s coming to my house. He’s definitely coming!”
MANY EVENTS IN my father’s life occurred out of my sight, in hotel rooms or offices, and involved people I didn’t know. Even when he was at home, he retreated deep within himself, to his den, his presence reduced to a bar of dim light under his door. I’d press my ear to the wood and make out the occasional crackle of paper or a deep exhalation as he smoked. After his mother died, my mother would tell me Pappa had grown proud, thought he was too Western for her, believed he had outgrown us. “You wouldn’t believe the things he says to me,” she’d say, and, in fact, I couldn’t as they came from my mother’s lips, anger shaking her voice. “He said to me, ‘Look, I can get an American woman.’ Can you believe that? How can he say that to me? I should just go back to Japan. How would that be? Bringing us here, to America, and us returning without him. How would that look to everyone?”
My parents would fight after I had gone to bed, Charlotte in her room and me in mine, both of us pretending to be asleep as we listened to muffled shouts downstairs. My mother’s high shrieks contrasted with the low growls of my father. Pierre was closer to them, one floor below our room and one floor above the kitchen. I wondered what he could hear, hoping he didn’t know enough Japanese to make out what was being said.
The explosive nights were followed by quiet mornings of coffee and eggs. Occasionally, my mother would greet Charlotte and me with a brief, terse synopsis of what had been said the night before. She barely ate, existing only on coffee and Japanese tea. Pierre practically lived in his room. Pappa never explained his side, but his silence was almost a relief compared with my mother’s emotional volubility.
When my mother was at her most fragile point, crying and alone, her family and childhood friends thousands of miles away, my instinctive sympathy made me believe that misfortune, with the encompassing force of a natural disaster, had ambushed her.
She had always operated from the vantage point of the privileged class, something she reveled in. When she recounted stories of her youth, growing up wealthy in a small fishing village, she made little attempt to disguise the joy she felt then at being elite.
But wealth muddles destiny. After the war, my mother’s family was stripped of most of their assets, and none of my mother’s siblings were able to recreate the family’s past grandeur. There have been squabbles about how property should be divided, further eroding the dignity of the family legacy. The feeling surrounding the family now is one of melancholy, of greatness gone. My mother’s marriage to my father gave her another brief surge to the top. But her husband’s success, large in material terms, never surpassed the glory of her youth—something that chafed at him.
Now I can see her life as the result of a simple series of choices: to marry my father, to agree to move to America, to remain with him when he decided to stay. In her fifties, with my father gone, only her sense of entitlement remains.
ONE EARLY MORNING when I was eight years old, I found my mother on the floor of the hallway bathroom. From my bedroom, I had seen that the light was on. I peeked inside and saw her asleep on the pale gray tile, curled around the toilet. She was wearing a white flimsy nightgown, and her limbs were strangely askew, like those of a sleeping child. I stood at the doorway for a moment, mesmerized by the glowing peach walls and this apparition, looking more like a wounded fairy princess than my mother.
Over breakfast, she told me she had spent the better part of the night throwing up. “Your papa and I ate raw oysters at a party last night,” she said weakly, her face a bluish white. For some reason, Pappa escaped unscathed and slept until noon.
When I was in middle school, my mother inexplicably covered the bathroom’s peach walls with wallpaper, patterned with pink, white, and blue geometric shapes that gave me a headache if I sat on the toilet too long.
But as I sat on the toilet seat, now, watching Alex scrutinize the bathroom, I suddenly became frightened by the changes I had demanded.
“Well, this wallpaper all has to come down,” Alex announced, pointing to the corners of the room, where the paper had started to curl.
“Of course,” my mother replied. She opened one of the bathroom drawers and began removing its contents: rusted razors, a tube of hair cream, frayed toothbrushes, an old hairpiece she used to pin on as a bun when going to parties. She tossed the items onto the counter as Alex continued speaking.
“Bathrooms are funny,” he remarked, leaning toward the mirror and adjusting the part in his hair with a fingernail. “They’re supposed to be private places, but people do them up. You wouldn’t believe some of the bathrooms I’ve worked on. Waterfalls and fourteen-karat-gold faucets.”
My mother nodded, staring at the countertop, absent-mindedly fingering the misshapen hairpiece. Then, as though awakened, she suddenly snatched it from the counter and crammed it into her pants pocket.
Alex bent over the tub. The faucet leaked in big drips, leaving a rust-colored stain above the drain. The grout was deeply mildewed. He tried the shower, which released a fine, gossamer spray.
“Should we concern ourselves with this right now?” Alex asked, his voice echoing in the tub. “I mean it’s not like Luciano is actually going to take a bath. Not unless you’re really lucky.”
My mother laughed delightedly. “What a thought!” she exclaimed. “I’d have to get a bigger tub!”
“This is ridiculous,” I said, rising from the toilet seat. “You’re both acting ridiculous.”
My mother shot me a look. “You’re being very rude.”
“Rude? You two are embarrassing.” Alex looked up from the tub. “It’s embarrassing,” I told him.
My mother lunged and slapped my shoulder, as if aiming for a fly. “Shush!” she said.
I left the bathroom and vaulted instinctively up the stairs to my room, slamming the door closed. Moments later, my mother spoke to me through my door. “Please apologize to Alex,” she said.
I was lying on my stomach on the bare mattress, the first time I had been in my own bed since coming back home. “No!” I called out, watching a wasp bounce off the window screen. I lifted my head from the pillow, trying to hear her.
“Alex is a good man, please believe me,” she said. “He’s not a minaccia.”
I rolled out of bed and opened the door so quickly that she jumped back in surprise. “It’s all wrong, can’t you see that? And cut it out with the Italian, will you?”
We stared at each other for a few seconds, my mother’s gaze unflinching.
“Why can’t you believe something good can happen?” she asked. She stood with her legs apart, as if ready for me to push her.
“Good things happen to your father,” she added.
“God,” I said, flopping back on my bed. “Please don’t start on that.”
“Why not? Why do you accept it when good things happen to him, but fight against something good happening to me?”
She turned and walked heavily down the stairs. A moment later, I heard her speaking to Alex in the bathroom, and from the sound of their voices, they were acting as if nothing had happened at all.
I LAY IN bed for a long time, staring at my ceiling.
When Charlotte, Pierre, and I were little, my mother let us paint our rooms whatever color we wanted. The huge range of possibilities paralyzed me, and I only managed to venture a girlish pink. Charlotte, on the other hand, chose bright yellow walls, and matched them with magenta and green curtains. Pierre opted for a matte turquoise and kept his windows bare.
My room was the smallest: a tiny, perfect square the size of a large closet. When I was younger, I found comfort in the pale symmetry of its four walls, a soothing pink sea that enveloped me as soon as I closed the door. Boxes of college textbooks and term papers took up much of the room now, along with clothes not worn since high school. But as I lay there, I began to sense the calm that the room had given me as a child.
My mother never said she wanted her children to stay close by. Even when she was at her most depressed, she insisted she didn’t want to be a burden on her children. But a sense of obligation drew me back home. Now I wasn’t sure if it was generated by my mother, or if I used her as an excuse to disguise my own lack of direction.
I examined a beige water stain in one corner of the ceiling and strained to hear snatches of conversation from Alex and my mother. I fell asleep, and when I awoke, the late-afternoon sun cast warm squares of amber light against the wall.
I thought of a game I used to play before getting up for the day. I would lie in my bed and imagine what it would be like to live in somebody else’s house, with somebody else’s parents, my mind traveling the neighborhood’s streets, visiting various households, bland and bizarre.
If I awoke in the yellow colonial around the corner on Blue River Run, Mr. and Mrs. Ericsson would be browning English muffins in their shiny toaster, waiting for the imported coffee dripping into a spotless glass pot. They were a handsome Nordic couple who had mastered a number of activities as a pair: waltzing, tennis, bridge. I remember skating on a crowded lake one winter and everybody, from rowdy hockey players to wobbly children, stopped when the Ericssons took the ice. They skated together in silent unison, as if the same melody played in their heads, their blades cutting perfect curves into the ice. But the Ericssons were Christian Scientists. For them, prayer cured everything. I imagined myself as a teenager being reprimanded by Mr. Ericsson, not for smoking or drinking, but for taking a Tylenol.
Meeting Luciano Page 10