I walked out into the hallway and looked at the time clock. 2:02 A.M. I punched out, and left.
THE DOUBLE YELLOW line shimmied beneath me like a snake as I drove home. Perhaps Hiro was still driving, too, heading down to Florida, the air slowly becoming warmer and balmier, the vegetation lusher and greener, his mood lighter. As he hurtled south, I thought of us both on the road, two points moving further and further away from each other.
The cool, damp evening buffeted the side of my face. I thought about the farmer in Hokkaido who had built a home for his family, never imagining that it would one day become a restaurant, transplanted from rice paddies to a quarter acre of grass facing a parkway. It would have been as unlikely a possibility for him as my mother’s house in Pleasant Springs being taken apart, moved to Turkey, and reconstructed as a modern American café, serving up burgers and fries to diners admiring the quaint suburban details. An identity cannot be changed so abruptly without the loss of a soul.
Maybe finding one’s true self is like building a house and then making it a home. The thought of studying architecture still frightened me, but now it was also exhilarating. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep from falling, but I knew I’d eventually make it to level ground.
FROM THE END of our street I could see the glare of the lamp from our living room split into straws of yellow light by the trees. I turned into the driveway with a dry mouth, imagining how it had been at Purchase: anxious music students turning away angry ticket holders; my mother’s silence while driving home. I imagined her crumpled on the couch in a wrinkled dress, Alex’s flawed handiwork surrounding her.
I parked the car in the driveway and walked up a pair of fractured slate steps into the backyard. It was a clear night, the early-morning sky the color of blueberries, the smell of grass mixing with the odor of fried meat that clung to my hair. The ground felt spongy. Pierre’s basketball hoop and backboard, still attached to a steel pole, lay on its side by the house, like something dead.
I crept up the stairs to the back door and looked in the window. I could see through to the living room, past the kitchen stove, where a blue flame glowed beneath a kettle. My mother was sitting on the far end of the sofa, her right foot tucked behind her left ankle, her eyes focused on the floor, her face expressionless. Then she shook her head in the way she used to late at night when talking in the kitchen with Charlotte and me, telling us whether or not she’d return to Japan after the divorce, or debating what to do with the rest of her life.
I raised my hand to open the door. But then my mother’s mouth moved, and I strained to hear.
What I heard was a deep baritone.
“Là ci darem la mano, là mi dirai di sì,” it sang, distinctly and loudly, although slightly off-key. “Vedi, non è lontano, partiam, ben mio, da qui.”
“Vorrei, e non vorrei, mi trema un poco il cor; felice, è ver, sarei, ma può burlarmi ancor,” my mother sang back, looking up, her face glowing. Suddenly she burst out laughing. Alex joined in, and they continued to laugh, their voices resounding in the nearly empty room as if they had just moved into a new house, most of their belongings still packed in boxes.
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
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a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
©1999 by Anna Esaki-Smith.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN 9781565127753
Meeting Luciano Page 18