by Ellis Avery
“It’s all right.” I shrugged.
“It’s just…” she said apologetically. “I wonder. About my mother.”
Ah, that was it. “I only know what I told you, Miss Aki.”
“Well, no one else will tell me anything,” she said loyally.
CHIO DIED A WEEK LATER, the day before classes began and the great canal waters opened. She’d gone to take a nap in the little hut off the kitchen, and when Kuga went to check on her an hour later, she wasn’t breathing. We all ran in from the sewing room: she was gone. She was quickly cremated, her ashes buried with Matsu’s in the servants’ quarter of the temple yard, everything tidied away before the students arrived, the boys dressed like bats, the girls like long-gone warriors. When I try to remember her last days, I see a swirl of sober hakama and falling petals, the water suddenly flowing high past Migawa and Canal Streets. I mourned her most the first week of school on a boat outing we took with the new students, on water that had just arrived all the way from Lake Biwa. Where Kato’s canal flowed widest, on the east side of the city, its banks were lined on both sides with newly planted cherry trees, pink as candy. She’d never see this, I thought. She’d seemed so old when I first met her, but I was thirty-five now, the same age she’d been then. I thought of her in the dim shelter of a room she rarely saw in daylight, laid out on her narrow futon beneath the sepia photograph of her son. There were fewer and fewer women who had grown up in the old ways, who had never stopped blackening their teeth, who disregarded, without affectation, the Western calendar. And there had only ever been one Chio. When we found her, Kuga drew a cotton robe over her shrunken body, her little claw feet, so that we could see only her face, both hard and soft, like weathered stone.
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS Chio had taught me was the importance of gifts, of maintaining social harmony. When I joined the Shin house as a servant, another little girl had already been put forward for my place, and Chio had forced me, my first night in the bathhouse, to bribe her and her mother with gifts of candy to sweeten the injustice. I had not understood the dire importance of this gesture: they were my sweets, I’d thought. Chio had given them to me; why should I part with them? And so Chio had roughly scrubbed at my selfish face, and Little Hazu had made faces at me from behind her mother Fujie’s sleeve.
And so it came to pass that Little Hazu, though four or five years my junior, grew up to be one of my greatest tormentors in the bathhouse, especially at puberty, as the vaporous lack of language that first marked my difference solidified into grown flesh. I had no accent, with time, but I had no husband, either, and no shame: hadn’t Hazu, hadn’t everyone, seen me in that queer Western dress?
My one saving grace, as Chio took pains to explain to the other women, was that I wasn’t being freakish on purpose. Okusama might be strange, but she had saved the household from poverty with no help from that merchant princeling, and if Western dress was what she chose for me, then that’s what I would wear; if Okusama said I wasn’t to marry, then unmarried I’d remain.
But with Chio gone, Kuga would not go out of her way on my account. And Hazu in her tiny clogs, with their fresh-from-the-shop-twice-a-month yellow thongs, was a jinrikisha man’s wife now, with four children of her own. The week I began following Yukako to the schools in hakama trousers, I was singled out for notice by Hazu’s youngest, whose shrill whine and itchy barbs won him for me the name Mosquito Boy. When I dropped my scrubbing-bag at the bath one night, he pointed his chin at me. “Pamari-sensei!” he cried.
Pamari? I had been snubbed and mocked in the bathhouse all my life, but no one had ever said I looked like that dumpy little missionary woman with the lapdog!
Hazu gasped and scolded her son indulgently. “That’s not nice,” she singsonged, taking a good look at me. “Pamari-sensei, huh?” she giggled. I looked away and adjusted the cloth tented over my hair. The streets were full of student girls in hakama now, but no one said they looked like foreigners. The last time I had seen so many hakama go by was in the Emperor’s first procession to Edo, back when it was still called Edo. Western clothing, and the girls who’d worn it, had garnered all kinds of scoffers, but this season, though everyone stared at the girls in men’s clothing, no one said a mocking word. It was as if wearing the clothes now forbidden to their fathers had conferred upon the girls a certain gravity, a certain sincerity of purpose. Why did hakama make them look earnest and me look silly? Now that they could compare me to real live foreigners instead of red-haired wood-block demons, did I seem less Japanese? Frances Parmalee’s sagging, jowly face sprang to mind unbidden: I’d once seen her mincing up the street in her buttoned boots and ruffled bonnet, basket tucked under her arm. A doggy sneeze scissored its way out of the basket, and Miss Pamari opened the lid and cooed at the ancient panting creature inside. She looked, as did many missionary ladies, like an old woman dressed as a doll: pale blue ribbons on her bonnet, her bustle, the handle of her basket, the hem of her skirt. Her dress swelled at the hips and bustle and again at the bodice, nipped in at the waist—just like me in hakama, I realized, blushing in the oil-lit dimness. We were small round women who did not look Japanese. I ducked under the water for a long moment, mortified. When I surfaced, I saw Mosquito Boy hugger-mugger with a friend. “Don’t drown, Pamari-sensei!” the boys called.
On the way home, Kuga walked fast, never turning to see if I was behind her.
27
1891
AFTER CHIO’S DEATH, Nao began working in a frenzy, rising as early as Kuga, who had inherited her mother’s sleepy eyes along with her kitchen. The glassy clink of charcoal on charcoal in the stove, followed by the wooden clonk of Jewel and Jade taking down the shutters, the distant whump of students folding up their cotton mattresses—all these were joined by the sounds of Nao scraping and planing and chiseling as he cut and fitted panes of glass.
Since her children’s move downstairs, Yukako had become fiercely protective of her morning sleep: while I lay awake for long minutes, listening for the stove and lacquer sounds that would mean it was time to bring Okusama her breakfast, Yukako dreamed on until I set down her tray and touched her shoulder. But something in the tinkling, scraping, squeaking work below made Yukako stiffen each morning; I could feel her heart beat faster and her body tense.
One such morning I was floating in a half-dream. Someone was plucking out a shamisen tune, Auprès de ma blonde, il fait beau, fait beau, fait beau. Half-awake, my bones liquid with longing, I clung to Yukako as she stirred in bed, to keep the music from evaporating. “Listen to that racket,” said Yukako’s voice, and I both knew, waking, that she was speaking in the room where we lay and wondered, dreaming, if she meant my mother’s tune. I felt her shake off my limp arm, and I woke fully: to Nao working a glass edge with a metal file, to Yukako sitting up in bed, peeved.
She dressed in a gust of irritation, put up her hair, and padded downstairs. I threw on my bathhouse robe and crept behind, blinking and yawning. In the dewy gray light, I saw that Nao had already taken down the wooden shutters that covered the sliding doors to the sewing house. The dew will damage the paper, I caught myself thinking—but there was no paper anymore, only glass and holes where glass would go. I rounded the house and saw Yukako, tall and formal in her kimono, Nao scruffy in his leggings and thick apron. She beckoned him away from the sewing house for a moment and spoke to him in a low voice.
“Did my son say you could begin work this early?”
“He never said anything either way, Madam.”
His downcast eyes and level voice incensed her all the more. “Are you aware that there are students sleeping directly above you? You’re disturbing them.”
“No one has said anything to me before, Madam,” Nao said, but not before noting, with one unedited glance, that she, and not a student overhead, was the one who’d risen to confront him.
“You never used to do this; I don’t see what the problem is.”
Nao met her eyes with a raw, flat, open-faced look.
&
nbsp; “I’m sorry about your mother,” ukako said, shamed.
“I’d just like to finish up here and get back to the other glaziers,” he mumbled. He didn’t say the other glaziers; he said uchi: my master, my guild. The word uchi usually meant my family or my home.
I saw Yukako take a half-step closer to him. “This place isn’t home at all?”
Nao looked everywhere but at Yukako and shrugged, head down. “No.”
In her elegant clogs, with her hair piled high, Yukako stood as tall as Nao in his straw sandals. She remained where she was, a little closer than was quite appropriate. “You were quick to go last time, too, right after Older Brother—”
“He was the only thing keeping me here,” Nao said. Oh, I realized. Just as Chio had been the only thing keeping him here this time.
“Older Brother died, Lord Ii’s son went to Edo, and you left,” said Yukako, her eyes shining with old hurt.
Nao’s nostrils flared. He gave Yukako a long, sullen look. “What do you want?” he said fiercely. I could see the blood beating in his forehead.
“I think you should put glass in my room too,” she said, half daring, half cajoling. Then, as if remembering her place, she angrily folded her arms across her chest.
“That’s what you want? Fine,” he snapped. They faced each other, breathing hard.
Yukako turned on her heel to go. “And don’t start work until you’re served breakfast,” she said.
AN HOUR LATER, when I helped Kuga lay out the breakfast trays, one girl was missing: Advisor Kato’s daughter Mariko. “Is something wrong?” asked Yukako when she walked by.
“She’s sick,” said Tsuko, Baron Sono’s girl, touching her abdomen and looking forlorn.
Yukako gave a quick, sympathetic nod: what woman didn’t know about menstrual cramps? But then Io Noda choked back a laugh. “What?” menaced Yukako.
“Too much sake!” Io said, and the other girls giggled, but nervously, quietly, watching Yukako.
“Well, her stomach hurts too,” said Tsuko, with an apologetic bow.
THAT AFTERNOON, when I followed Yukako to one of the schools, she talked about the incident with the girls at breakfast as if the exchange with Nao had never taken place. “Drunk at seventeen? Do you think her father knows? I wonder if Kuga’s selling her sake; I know the woman likes her cup. But it was decent of Tsuko to cover up for Kato’s girl. She framed it so she wasn’t quite lying, eh? I don’t know what Miss Noda thought she’d gain by tattling.” Her voice was reflective and convivial, but her eyes shone again with loss, as they had when she spoke with Nao. “It’s clear they all need more supervision,” she concluded.
That evening, while the girls were at their dinner, Yukako told me to move her ledger into Tai’s study. Then she had me crowd a bulky folding screen up the narrow, ladderlike stairs of the sewing house, followed by her futon and coverlets, her mirror and chests of kimono. As I huffed up and down the stairs, I thought about Nao’s word, uchi, and how lucky I was to have this one. This was mine, the woodgrain of the stairs through my worn brown split-toed socks, this very gesture of tying a carrying cloth snug around Yukako’s lacquer sundries box. These are her things, I thought, pulling the knot tight. These are her things and I belong here with them.
At the top of the stairs in the girls’ dormitory attic, Yukako partitioned off the far corner of the room with her screen and spread her futon on the floor. “Not bad,” she nodded to herself, looking around.
“Do you want anything else from the other room? Or should I get my futon now?” I asked, still a little winded.
“Why?” she blinked, pulling her lacquer box toward her by its striped cotton carrying scarf.
“Why what?” I echoed.
With one finger Yukako tugged open the cloth knot. “Why are you getting your futon?” she repeated, surprised. “If you sleep here, you won’t hear when breakfast is ready.”
I heard her very slowly, as if underwater. I formed a reply. “Then where am I to sleep?”
“With the others, silly,” she said, waving her hand in the general direction of the kitchen while their names came to her. “Jewel, Jade.”
“But what if you need something?” I asked, stunned.
“It’s time I started sending one of them for it,” she said, with a decisive nod toward the stack of student bedding. “I want to see what these girls are made of.”
In the dimming light, I looked down at Yukako’s long hands on the lacquer lid. I’d been wrong. Uchi meant one thing to me, I realized: the thing I had just lost.
BEFORE WALKING to the bathhouse, I dragged my futon down to the three-mat room by the kitchen where Jewel and Jade slept. I could hear Kuga and Aki serving Nao his dinner in the little house off the kitchen, just as Chio had served Matsu when I was young. I felt numb and remote as I spread out my futon by Jewel’s and Jade’s.
It was only in the bath, after I had unwound my tight obi and scrubbed away the dirt of the day, after I eased into the warm arms of the water, that I felt anything at all.
My breath came in little hiccups as I tried not to cry. Why had she left me? She didn’t really care about supervising her students, did she? I knew Nao had drawn her away, but had I pushed her? If I hadn’t reached for her, would she still have left? I remembered my dream that morning, of my mother’s voice when I was very young, remembered reaching for Yukako’s warm body in the dark. I wept.
WITH MY EYES CLOSED in the water, I became aware of a familiar, loathsome voice: Hazu had arrived with her clutch of children. I could hear her two older sons on the men’s side of the room, her daughter and youngest son, Mosquito Boy, nearby.
Though she was talking to her aging mother Fujie at that moment, I felt Hazu’s eyes on me as I sniffled, and I composed myself. “Tell Miss Momo about the Sneezing Girl, do you remember?” Hazu goaded her mother.
“It was the most selfish thing I’ve ever seen. Not long before the girl went off to get married in Osaka, she came to the bathhouse one night with a terrible cold and sneezed right into the water. Fum! Fum! Like a crack of thunder! And the slime that came out of her nose?”
“Ew!” cried Hazu’s daughter, rapt. Hazu’s friends gathered around her in the water, listening, casting occasional glances at me as I tried to control my face.
“Was it green?” asked Hazu’s son, the Mosquito Boy.
“Green and brown, and yellow! As big as a dragonfly! We had to drain the whole tub and scrub it out, fill it with clean water and heat it all over again,” Fujie concluded.
“Mother said it took forever before anybody could soak again,” Hazu added. “Can you imagine?”
Hazu’s friends leaned toward her as she shrilled with laughter, and their children followed suit. I felt them all looking at me. I sniffled again, bowed good evening, and slid up out of the tub to leave. “Do you smell butter?” one of the women giggled.
In their corner of the tub, Kuga, Jewel, and Jade looked uneasily from the laughing women to me, not wanting to take a side. I left, dried, and walked home quickly, in order to spare them the embarrassment of my company. I kept my lamp low so no one could see my face on the path, and I cried in peace until the others came home. I heard Nao’s low voice asking Kuga something outside and I felt a dull flash of hope. He won’t always be here, I promised myself. He wants to leave as much as I want him to. And won’t Yukako tire of playing mother to seven girls?
It occurred to me that though I had heard longing in her reproach that morning, Yukako might not actually know she desired Nao: she might experience her desire for him as irritation. She hated the sound of his glass and files, she said, but hadn’t she moved her bed that much closer to his worksite? Or maybe, with the small part of her that was aware of her own desire, she had moved because she feared it, because—far more than those students needed supervision—she herself needed a chaperone: a whole roomful of girls. Why wasn’t I enough? In my futon, I ground my teeth and wrapped my arms tight around me. When the other sewing-girls came in, I p
retended to sleep.
28
1891
I HAD NOT SEEN IT, but everyone wanted Nao to stay. Tai and the gardener’s grandson, Toru, though they had nothing to say to each other, could not stop talking around the man—Toru, his soon-to-be adopted son, acting more like a daughter-in-law, scurrying to and fro with the tobacco tray and teacups. He was the first out with a broom when Nao finished work on the sewing house, and the first up the staircase by the kitchen with a dropcloth when Nao shifted to Yukako’s vacated upstairs room.
Whenever he could steal away from his classes and duties, Tai scaled the kitchen stairs, too, and hung about as the tall man worked. He spoke to Nao in a manner I had never heard him use before, a gruff, offhand, masterful voice belied by the thirsty specificity of its questions: How do they control the temperature when they make glass? How do trains switch from one gauge of track to another? How much water has to fall through a turbine to generate electricity? When I passed outside, I’d see him slouching in the window frame, smoking a Western pipe—something he would have never done in his mother’s room had she still been there.
Even Kenji, when he wasn’t sequestered in the classroom with Aki, patiently correcting her as she read aloud, pausing to offer or elicit commentary on a passage here or there, would emerge to watch Nao from below, standing outside, shyly hypnotized. The radiant festival-child beauty of his boyhood was melting—no doubt from all that time at Sesshu-ji temple with his father—into something more hesitant and tortoiselike. I watched as he fingered the skin-thin peels of wood that drizzled down from the carpenter’s plane. “Have you smelled them, Aki-bo?” I heard him ask once, as if she were a much younger child.
Of course she had. Aki and Kuga doted on Nao, albeit with a certain injured remove, saying little, as if laying up a store of indifference in readiness for his departure, and yet every pot of seasoned rice, every kimono seam, every stroke of the rag across the tatami where he slept seemed like an act of worship. The new sewing-girls, however, felt no such ambivalence, and readily whispered about him into the night. “He likes you.”