by Lisa Tognola
“I might be late to pick you up from school today. I have to take your brother to tennis finals.”
The room fell silent. I didn’t hear her explanation about why Adam’s match might run late, or the sound of Hilda’s relentless woofing and growling, or the frenetic pulse of my heartbeat, which thumped wildly in my ears. I suddenly felt off balance, as though I had crossed into another dimension; I stared at my mother through a blur of tears as she sat at the edge of her bed, a knee bent to her chest, slipping a nylon stocking over her toes.
“How late?” I managed to croak. But my only thought was, What if she never comes back?
Within weeks of that incident, even the briefest of separations became excruciating. I shadowed my mom around the house and refused to play with my best friend, Cassy, across the street. When she used the bathroom, I waited outside the door until she came out. Any time she left the room, I asked her where she was going. I skipped any activity that separated me from my mother for too long.
Adam stood in my bedroom one afternoon, thick tufts of dark hair peaking from beneath his white tennis cap. “Why do you always want to be with Mom?” he demanded. “Why don’t you go anywhere or do anything without her?”
His questions humiliated me. But what could I say? I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what a trauma was, or that I’d suffered one when I’d gotten lost on the beach in Florida. I didn’t know that when something triggers a reminder of the trauma, the intense fear returns. I didn’t know that I would carry my childhood anxiety with me into adulthood and that I might never fully bounce back from Boca.
My stomach began to churn the moment our car rolled out of the garage. “Please, Mom,” I pleaded as she drove me toward Hebrew school. “I don’t want to go!”
“We talked about this, honey. You can’t just stay home all the time,” she said, her voice characteristically calm and matter-of-fact.
I knew she was right. At eight years old, I was old enough to understand that my behavior wasn’t normal. But fear overrode my shame and embarrassment.
“But Adam doesn’t have to go!” I protested.
“Janie, I told you, your brother has regionals today.”
I could see in my mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror that I was getting nowhere. A wave of desperation flooded through me. I tried a different tactic. “If I go, will you stay?”
“Honey, I’m sorry,” she said, pulling into Robbie Sherman’s driveway, impatience rising in her voice. “I can’t wait around for two hours. I have to drive Adam to his match.”
I wanted to cry, but Robbie’s freckled face appeared in the window, obliging me to pull myself together. I slid over to make room in the backseat, pressed my forehead against the window, and stared off in the distance. My throat burned with sadness.
The twenty-minute car ride felt eternal. At the top of the hill, a square building draped in pale and tawny Jerusalem stone loomed. My mom pulled up in the drop-off lane, and I gave her one last pleading look. As soon as I closed the car door, the station wagon pulled away. I watched it make its way down the hill until its red taillights faded into blurry specks.
In the classroom, we sat listening to Ms. Hersh’s lesson about charity. She held up a colorful box covered with Hebrew words I couldn’t read, giving it a few quick shakes. “Who brought change from home for our tzedakah box today?” she asked.
Normally I wouldn’t have hesitated to drop in coins, rewarded by that delicate clinking sound, but today the word “home” prompted tears to stream down my face, tears that only fell faster when I saw the other kids watching me cry. How could I consider giving when all I could think of was how I needed my mother, how desperate I was to be home?
When I refused to go back the following week, my parents formed a plan that would help me tolerate religious school without tears—and, as it would turn out, without dignity. My grandma was recruited to attend with me.
For years, my grandma had volunteered at my public school library repairing books. She sat at a wooden desk, hunched attentively over the books, cutting, taping, and mending damaged spines. With patience and precision, she breathed new life into old books. I was accustomed to her helping out at school, and I even enjoyed her presence. The other kids did too. “Hi, Mrs. Schaffer!” they greeted her. She would look up from a broken book, pale hazel eyes smiling behind her bifocals, and respond, “Hello, hello,” always a double nod, and then she returned to her work.
At religious school, however, I resented her call to service and was ashamed that it was me, not a book, that was in disrepair.
CHAPTER 10: DON’T TOUCH MY MOUSTACHE
Tokyo – August 2001
Walking through the busy terminal, everything felt foreign, from the sterile, modern architecture to the signs written in vertical characters. We’d just landed and I already felt lost in translation.
We got into a taxi waiting at the curb. I was surprised when I reached for the passenger door and it swung open by itself; no one had told me that cab doors in Japan opened and closed automatically.
That wasn’t the only difference between this cab and the city cabs I knew. The taxi was spotless, lace doilies covered the seats, and a courteous driver sporting white gloves greeted us in Japanese.
“What did he say?” I asked Wim, who had warned me, before we’d gotten in, that cab drivers in Japan didn’t speak English.
“He asked, ‘Did you learn fluent Japanese on the twelve-hour flight?’” Wim joked.
We quickly learned that the language barrier wasn’t our only problem. Japan has a very different address system than the West. Streets in Japan don’t have names, and blocks are numbered in order of the buildings’ ages.
“New Otani,” Wim instructed the driver.
The driver spewed back exaggerated-sounding Japanese words. After several minutes of futile exchange, we handed the driver a map and pointed to our hotel. Finally, he nodded, and off we went.
For the next week, we surveyed dozens of four-bedroom apartments. One afternoon, we stood inside a unit at the Grand Tower Residence. I glanced around the room, which was accented with Asian accessories, and was reminded of a decorative fan that had once adorned the wall of our Rosemead apartment. If I had found it challenging making that place our own, what would it be like here?
“It feels spacious,” I said to Yui, our real estate agent. And by Tokyo standards, where most people live in apartments the size of college dorm rooms, it was. But I knew at first glance—observing the white living room walls and bland, soulless architecture—that I could never feel at home there.
We had barely crossed the genkan, the entrance area where shoes are taken off, when I felt an urge that couldn’t be ignored. I turned to Yui. “Excuse me, I’m going to need a private room that has an electrical outlet. One that will work with an American appliance.”
She led me to one of the bedrooms. I closed the door behind me, lifted a heavy black satchel off my shoulder, and sat on the floor against the wall.
My breasts were hard and swollen. I assembled the device, plugged in, and set the breast pump on the highest suction. I felt immediate relief as the machine siphoned out a day’s worth of milk from my breast—milk that was intended for my six-month-old daughter, which I would instead pump and dump. The breast pump whirred loudly in a syncopated, loud-to-soft rhythm. My body relaxed, but my mind wouldn’t. Nursing a plastic siphon while my daughter drank from a plastic bottle magnified the distance between us and exacerbated the misery of being so far from my children. As for my own parents, we already lived 3,000 miles away from them. Now I was considering stretching it 2,000 more. I played the same questions over and over in my mind: Can I really do this? Start fresh with a new home and new friends? Learn a language composed of characters? Master the metric system?
“How are you doing in there?” Wim yelled through the door.
“One down, one to go,” I yelled back over the whirring of the pump. I glanced around the bedroom of the current renters—fellow Amer
icans, I figured, based on the box of Cap’n Crunch I had noticed on the kitchen counter. I searched the room for clues to expat life. Before me was a blend of old and new: a modern platform bed atop an Oriental rug, no doubt a souvenir from a side trip. Did they send their kids to the American school we had interviewed? Did they belong to the American Club we had visited? Had making the decision to move here been as agonizing for them as it felt to Wim and me?
Even the idea of taking an elevator up and down each day to our “home” made my stomach drop. I had associated Tokyo living with backyard cherry blossoms and manicured gardens, not high-rise apartments and concrete terraces. The simple ride up to the Grand Tower Residence apartment had felt uncomfortable, and not just because the three of us—Wim, Yui, and I—had been compressed in a closet-size elevator.
I had noticed a missing number on the panel and asked Yui, “Why is there no fourth floor?”
“In Japan, the number four is considered unlucky, so the elevator is not marked for the fourth floor,” she answered in her impeccable English. “In Japanese, the word for four can be pronounced ‘shi,’ which means death. Giving someone four gifts is like saying, ‘I hope you die.’”
I considered the four in my address, the two fours in my middle child’s birthday, and the three fours in our phone number and pondered my expat fate.
Yui’s words continued to reverberate in my mind that night as we lay on the hard mattress in our hotel room discussing our prospects, something we had done nearly every night since Wim had been offered a job in Tokyo four months earlier. Should we move? Shouldn’t we move? So much seemed at stake. Our happiness. Our welfare. Our sanity.
I exhaled loudly. “Remind me why we want to move here?”
“Money. Culture. Adventure. Geisha girls?”
“Seriously, Wim. Say we really move here. When are we going to see our families? I can’t imagine your parents traveling to Asia to visit us. Your mother can’t even drive over the George Washington Bridge to visit us in Rye. I’m not even sure my folks would visit, and they’re thousands of miles closer. And what about my grandma Rose and Gram? We don’t see them enough as it is.”
“I’ve heard that a lot of people summer in the States because it gets so hot and humid here, so we’d see our family then.”
“Only once a year?” I groaned.
“This job would probably only be for three years.”
“But what if it went longer?”
I fidgeted under the covers as I thought about what two American couples had told us at dinner several nights before: how the first three years were the hardest, but once you got over the hump, it was tempting to stay longer. One couple had been living in Tokyo for five years, the other for seven.
“My salary will almost double and my company will cover our rent. And you can have your own cook, driver, full-time help—everything.”
“Can I get that without moving to Tokyo?” I was only half joking.
“If we lived here we could travel to other countries on holiday breaks. China. Thailand. Singapore. Everything is so close.”
“I know. But the kids are still so young.”
“There’s never going to be a perfect time, Janie. I only have one chance at this.”
The life he described sounded so good. But why did it have to be here?
The warm, peaceful environment of the hotel spa embraced us the moment we walked in the door, eager to vanquish the stress of last night’s conversation. The clerk greeted us with a bow and led us down a hallway of doors to our individual rooms. As I entered the dimly lit massage room, I took it all in—water trickling from a small corner fountain, the soft glow of votive candles perched on a bamboo accent table, the large, gold Buddha staring down at me from its high perch on a pedestal. I disrobed, stretched myself facedown on the padded massage table, and covered my naked body with a soft sheet. I heard a gentle knock at the door and, craning my neck, saw a petite young woman dressed in a crisp white uniform enter.
She bowed once she was in the room. Without speaking, she lathered her hands with massage oil. It smelled leafy and lemony.
She rested her warm hands on my back and I immediately felt yesterday’s tension melt away. The floor creaked under her feet as she glided her hands across my skin. She kneaded her knuckles into my flesh like it was putty, working it with strong, deep strokes. I thought of Wim and hoped he was relaxed and enjoying this as much as I was.
I sank into a light doze but was soon awakened by her movements, which had suddenly become too strong and too deep. I considered speaking up, but I was afraid I’d offend her. After a few more minutes, I cared less about her feelings and more about my pain.
“Excuse me, can you please massage more gently?” I asked. “Thank you.”
She paused and in a shrill voice shrieked, “Don’t touch my mustache!”
I raised my head but saw not a trace of hair growth on her flawless complexion. I sank back down and tried to focus on the soft music, but it was challenging, what with the heels of her palms digging deeper and deeper into the bony structure that was my spine. Her steely strength seemed incompatible with her five-foot frame. I felt less like I was getting a massage and more like I was having my bones reset.
“Gentler, please,” I urged. “Thank you.”
She paused again. “Don’t touch my mustache!” Then she began pounding me like a side of beef, karate chopping my back with the force and fury of a samurai warrior, until she had rearranged every one of my internal organs.
At last, she stopped and bowed.
I raised my head weakly and squeaked, “Thank you.”
“Don’t touch my mustache!” she squawked, then quietly exited the room. In her dainty hands she held a small object that was likely a crumpled towel but which I suspected was my spleen.
I lay in solitude, wallowing in my newfound pain. Finally, I mustered the will to rise and got dressed. I stumbled back to the lobby, feeling altogether broken.
Wim, sipping a tall glass of cucumber water, looked energized and refreshed. He took in my crumpled face. “You look like you were just stampeded by a herd of elephants.”
I shook my head and frowned. “Don’t touch my mustache.”
“What?”
“That’s what the masseuse said when I asked her to be gentle!”
“Don’t touch my mustache?”
“Something like that. ‘Don’t tashi mashie,’” I mimicked in a high voice.
“Do itashimashite?” Wim snorted with laugher. “That means ‘you’re welcome.’”
That night, under the crisp bedsheets of the New Otani, thoughts of my massage taunted me like a cruel metaphor. A move to Japan might be wonderful in theory but painful in reality. I feared that the massage represented just one of many future instances of misunderstanding.
After brushing his hair (a nighttime ritual I’d never understood), Wim climbed in beside me.
“I feel like I’m already caught between two cultures and we haven’t even moved yet,” I said. “I want to support your career. I just don’t want the journey to destroy our marriage and our family.”
He reminded me that we’d always enjoyed learning about different cultures and traveling. “We met when we were backpacking through Spain!” he said.
How could I impress upon him how scared I was to move so far from home, especially with three young children to take care of?
He fluffed his feather pillow and turned over. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow.” He kissed me good night and turned off the bedside lamp.
I was dreaming that my kids had taken the wrong bus to their new school and had ended up lost and wandering through unnamed streets when the phone startled us awake with piercing, high-pitched double rings that would have sounded unwelcoming at any hour.
Wim flicked the light on and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was or what bed I was in. I sat up and squinted into the bright light. The tightness of my swoll
en breasts told me that at least several hours had passed. The red lines on the clock indicated 2:44 a.m.
He shook his head. “Mom, do you know what time it is here?” After several minutes he cupped the receiver and whispered, “She’s really upset. It’s 105 degrees there, and she and my dad have been cooped up with the kids.”
I listened for a few more minutes, and then I slipped out of bed to use the bathroom. The marble tile chilled my bare feet as I stood before the mirror and unbuttoned my red silk pajama top. I reached into my bra, pulled out two circular nursing pads, warm and soggy with baby milk, and replaced them with two fresh pads, gently easing them over the painful mounds of hot marbles that were my breasts.
When I climbed back into bed, Wim was still on the phone, trying to offer his mother what comfort he could from 6,000 miles away. “No, Mom,” he said patiently, “we haven’t made a decision yet.”
That explained her outburst. Of course she was anxious about this move too. I’d been so concerned about how my family and I would adapt that I hadn’t stopped to think about the effect it would have on our extended families—missing birthday celebrations and bar mitzvahs, holidays and hockey games. Wim’s mother had literally just given me a wakeup call.
Wim hung up the phone. He looked shaken. “I’ve never heard her that upset before,” he said. Then he switched off the light and flipped onto his side.
“Wim?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to do it.” My voice cracked and tears spilled from my eyes. “Three years feels like too many to be so far away.”
“Are you crying?”
I nodded in the dark.
He reached over and wiped my tears with the edge of the comforter. “This decision has to be mutual. The move doesn’t just affect me; it affects our whole family. I can’t do this without you being on board.”