Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  In the clean spring air, we were all out on the baseball field, which was suspended out on a terrace perched over the city far below. We girls were in our skirted gym togs, cheering the boys, who were playing a Japanese team. I watched as Will, the golden one, walloped the ball across the field.

  At halftime, Will did something incongruous. I had to check behind me, just to make sure. But no. He was smiling like that at me—not at Agnes, not at Christy, not at Annie—at me! It had been ten seconds and he was still smiling in my direction. Frantic, I darted my eyes to the front and back, and tried to look out of the back of my head—without losing my lock on his gaze—but there was no one else here.

  It was like the plink of a raindrop. A quick intake that stops you to the quick, drops like a tear of gold to the exact center of you.

  And suddenly now, the world as I’d known it had vanished. The sounds of the baseball hubbub were gone. It was like Will Suzuki and I were standing in the emptied world alone, in air that had been scrubbed to a pure fineness. We did nothing, but our bodies seemed to float closer, without us and without anyone noticing (and somehow this seemed critical—as though if we made one false move the whole glass world we were in would shatter), and soon we were standing, in our gym clothes—me in my little black skirt and he in his shorts with the one-inch slits at the sides of his thighs—chatting idly about the game with our arms lightly brushing each other’s.

  Something startling had occurred: everything was shining.

  As the game rejoined, we cheered, Will yelled to his teammates, I waved to Annie, but each thing we did had one sole purpose—to return to that position where we were two marble statues with their arms ever so slightly touching.

  When he said good-bye, I vanished. I was nothing but Shakespearean fairy fluff: gossamer light, ethereal, a mere bubble rafting on the breeze. I left the ground, gyred upward, surged, mounted, gushed up the air. Now I was larking: springing, escalading, spouting from cumulus to cumulus. Now I broke through the prism into pure whiteness. The air and me.

  At dinnertime, weak as a spring willow branch, I wisped into the dining room, but I couldn’t possibly eat—not two grains of rice, not a piece of Sara Lee cheesecake, not one of Sara’s toaster-oven tuna melts, not ma po dofu, not even a single patate. I was, instead, a hollow husk. I didn’t need food or water or shelter—just the air I shared with him.

  When I got back to my dorm room, it was the same. All I could do was look out into the night sky. He was out there in this same air somewhere. This moon was his moon. Oh, just transport him to me!

  Can it really be true? God must exist. He likes me! He likes me. Will Suzuki likes me!

  This feeling was so intoxicating I was terrified. The sensation too tender to bear, too precious to touch. Like a tissue, it would disintegrate if I even brushed it with a fingertip.

  The next morning, I was trying to pull my jeans up my legs, but I was trembling so badly I could barely do it. My hands and arms were weak and tingling, and no longer belonged to my body. It was like this about everything, suddenly. I’d dropped my pencil three times while I was doing my math the night before, and now, putting on my shirt, I had to stab a couple of times before I could get my arm in the hole.

  I went down to breakfast in the dining hall and my fork clattered awkwardly against my plate as I tried to pierce a scrambled egg. I managed to take two bites, but I could eat no more.

  I half-listened to Dottie and Agnes talking about Zack’s messy hair—he never combed it—but it was like my whole being, not just my head, but my arms, my belly, and my legs were all thinking about Will: thinking about Will’s being in the world, and his inching closer to me, by the minute, as he rode through the Kobe streets toward school.

  After I brushed my teeth with my shaky hands, and checked the way my hair was tucked behind my ears, I picked up my books and set out for the classroom building.

  The air was spring-cool on my arms, and I was able to take one deep breath before the shallow breaths took over as I walked down the little road beside the boys’ dorm, toward the main building. And then, across by the gym, I saw him. He was sitting astride his red motorcycle—just poised there like glory, an arm dangled over the handlebars, a shoulder slanted, talking to Jack. His hand went up to brush a flop of hair out of his eye, and he tossed his gleaming head.

  Should I die, or should I try to keep these legs moving forward, and see if he sees me? I was forcing my legs forward, but I felt like I might throw up. Everything was in slow motion, like in a movie. It was like I was a cresting wave that was trying to spend itself on the beach, but couldn’t.

  And then, in the middle of his joking around with Jack, he turned his glinting head, and saw me walking, throwing up my heart. Next, as if everything was normal and it was just a normal cool spring day, raising his arm in a wave, he gestured to Jack to hold on a second, and walked toward me.

  As he got closer, I could see his face. It was smiling in that gentle way, his face beautiful as sunrise, his chocolate-kiss eyes . . . And as he touched my hair, the wave crashed. I was no longer twigs and twitches, but liquid gold.

  I lit up all over—each little twig of me, like some kind of Christmas tree who didn’t even know it had lights.

  “You and Suzuki the lady killer, huh?” Annie said at lunch, as if she’d never have guessed it. And then she put her arm around me. “There he is—comin’ out the door.” And there he was, that six-plus bundle of sinewy maleness, waving the minute he spotted me. And as he ambled over like some kind of easy-loping majesty, there went my stomach again, doing the flip-flop that in the last few days had come to seem its most natural rhythm.

  Until now, I’d always feared that if people really knew me, they couldn’t possibly like me. These days, I no longer wondered this. It didn’t seem to occur to Will that I was weird. He didn’t even ask about the hospital. Being with someone so normal made me feel normal myself. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I could relax. I had passed some test and would never go back to that girl hidden between two hanging-down hanks of hair—and I had Will and Dr. Cohen to thank for this gift of all gifts. Will was a gift my life gave me.

  I was in forest green batik. Will was in black. The whole evening of the prom was the two of us floating through a shimmer of phosphorescent darkness and twinkling lights. From time to time, between slow dances, we stood and chatted with other couples or got a drink of ginger ale from the refreshment table. . . . It was like all of Japan descended and folded its dark, velvet kimono-sleeved arms around us in tender, sakura cherry blossom protection.

  School was almost over and I was moving to Tokyo. My father had been transferred there, so that I could keep seeing Dr. Cohen. For my senior year, I would go to the American School in Japan, just outside of Tokyo near Tachikawa.

  I talked to Dr. Cohen about how sad it was to leave my friends at CA. In a year, all of us juniors would be dispersed across the world. Who knew what we’d all become. Some of the missionary kids reminded me of army kids I’d met in Europe. They had the same restless-eyed quality. Like migratory birds who’d lost their way, many of these kids would spend their twenties restless—zigzagging across the Pacific, trying to choose between the two shores. Back “home,” they, like I, would stand too close or too far, be too formal or too oddly spoken, always “too” something.

  But the agony was parting from Will. He was moving back to Colorado.

  Before he flew back to America, he came to visit me at our new house in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. We went to visit the Meiji Shrine, then a sea of iris in full bloom. Each iris was as crisp and individual as a person, sticking straight up as if making a speech to the sky. On a patch of grass outside the shrine, he lay with his head in my lap, drowsing in the sun. While his eyes were shut, I tried to memorize his face.

  On our way back to the house, we got our photos taken in a photo booth—hoping to fix time forever.

  When I saw him off, I was sure I would die. My heart was broken. There is losin
g one’s physical virginity but first there’s the first broken heart—another kind of broken hymen. Ever afterward, sense plays its hand. Reason messes with passion.

  I wrote to Will regularly throughout my senior year, and wore the medallion he’d given me until it slipped off my neck one day in a coffeehouse swirling with milling teenagers. I would only see him once again—when we stopped in Denver on our way back to Washington at the end of the year. We exchanged ardent embraces on a neighborhood sidewalk, but by then two other young men claimed pieces of my heart. My love for Will, however, had the pliant tenderness of spring’s first buds.

  Tokyo, decimated by firebombing during World War II, was all ultramodern glitter: high-rise department stores with thirty-foot flashing neon signs; mobs of sleek, long-tressed teenagers; elegant, mincing ladies in intricate kimonos; trim-suited businessmen; transvestites as thin as telephone poles, tottering in heels and gold lamé skirts. There were cozy tea shops and intriguing, high-fashion boutiques every few yards.

  The Tokyo house, hidden behind a stone wall on a back street only minutes from a main train station, was a beauty. An old-style Japanese abode, it was half-Western, half-Japanese style inside, with old, dark timbers and white walls. Andy’s and my rooms were tatami floored with shoji doors, and we slept on futons my mother purchased at Takashimaya. The house had both a Western and a Japanese living room. The latter was huge, with what seemed like an acre of mats and a beautiful, shadowy tokonoma at the back wall. The house had the hush.

  My father’s new job was to work in collaboration with the Japanese media to produce programs that supported U.S. positions in the world. He met with editors, newspapermen, and translators, informing them about what the United States was doing and why, and trying to influence them to give these activities a positive slant. “It’s fascinating,” he said, “because I have to be up on the very latest American actions and translate them to the Japanese.” My father was delighted to be back in his most favorite of all Asian countries—the place where it all began for him. The bounce was back in his step, as he gobbled up ancient Japan like he had old Europe.

  To distract me from mooning over Will, my mother arranged private Japanese lessons into which I poured myself. She and I took the family housing allowance and went out shopping for furniture for the new house.

  My father brought home Washington Posts and read from them as we ate the dinner our new cook Toshiasan had prepared in the small, Western-style dining room.

  The New York Times had recently published The Pentagon Papers, exposing secret discussions that had taken place during the Johnson administration. “President Nixon has become obsessed with leaks and exposure of ‘state secrets,’” my father said. “I hear from Headquarters that he’s begun to distrust not only us, but State, the courts, and congress.” Time would reveal that Nixon began to keep tabs on people he believed to be his enemies, and created a secret policing operation.

  In September, the “Plumbers” would break into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office (Ellsberg had found the Pentagon Paper). Nixon saw him as part of a Communist conspiracy. A White House assistant would say, “Anyone who opposes us we’ll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn’t support us, we’ll destroy.”

  One day my father showed us a headline: Nixon had announced that Henry Kissinger had made a secret trip to China. He was the first U.S. official to visit China since 1949. “Twenty-two years is a long time to not have relations,” my father, the China watcher, said. “This is good news. But Nixon and Kissinger are absurdly secretive. They love this kind of operation—back channels, secret meetings, surprising the world.”

  The American School in Japan, ASIJ, had a large and sprawling campus, like an American public school. Abroad, only American schools have these huge plants: Americans stake claim to vast open spaces and playing fields for their schools as well as their bases.

  After so many moves, I’d got it down. I knew how to be a stranger, a new girl, and I was not deferring anymore. In fact, during free periods, when I sat down outside on the grass, people seemed to gather around. Perhaps because I had Dr. Cohen, I no longer needed one, exclusive friend. Quickly I had a motley and lovely collection: a brilliant Japanese diplomat’s daughter with a British accent who could expound on Plato and Marx; a Norwegian diplomat’s daughter who sang like an angel; a missionary boy with strawberry-gold hair and dreams of blueberry and dairy farming in Hokkaido; a girl who’d renamed herself a bird; a lanky boy with a cooler-than-cool Indian fringed bag with whom I shared long, intense conversations about the lives we would lead after the Revolution . . . the list went on and I was intrigued by them all.

  I sat on the grass behind the school and wrote poetry. I reveled in how the words you used could cause meaning to slant: fierce versus stubborn, light-hearted versus shallow, delighted versus intense—and in the pure pleasure of a beautiful or thorny word: clandestine, bristled.

  This was a school influenced by the progressive education movement—for better and worse. We studied in modules and were allowed to do a certain portion of our work in independent studies. In an inspiring independent study with my English teacher, I wrote poetry. In a dubious one for biology, I read books on weather: the sky, the clouds.

  On the way home—it took three trains and an hour and a half to get there—I stopped with friends at tea shops where we listened to Beethoven or The Doors, depending on the shop’s theme, and drank mixed juice, a delicious blend of bananas and other fruits, or green tea. In these tiny, intimate realms, we leaned in close, discussing parents, term papers, and moods. These Japanese tea houses afforded an inviting niche for friendship and conversation like the pubs I’d discover in my twenties in Britain. In its headlong race for prosperity, American society had forgotten about the need for pause—there were no Starbucks then, even on the horizon—so these shops were a revelation.

  My whole family flung itself into Japan. My father’s passion drew us along. Inspired by the tastes I had had at CA, I thrust myself deeper into my apprenticeship in Japanese culture—an effort that would bear fruit. Japan would clarify for me who I was, what I believed, and how to live, supplying needed correctives to my American schooling—and completing the lessons on perfectionism, stoicism, and intimacy I’d begun with Dr. Cohen.

  Over the fall, as we explored our new metropolis, China and Russia were seeking rapprochement with the United States. My father brought home newspapers sent from Washington, and kept us abreast of the unfolding events. The troop withdrawal from Vietnam was continuing. By December, American troop strength would be down to 140,000. “Nixon’s approval ratings have spiked. Even if he’s the worst American president we’ve had in decades, I guess he is due some credit.”

  For a time, America faded; Japan’s curiosities were rampant. Around every corner crouched beguiling arts, symbols, and stories: blue-faced Kabuki ghosts; wild ginger festivals; brush paintings of “Fish, Birds, and Peach Blossoms”; sumo wrestling; full moon viewing; eggplants that symbolized an auspicious new year. . . .

  The train was rattling through gorgeous, vast padi lands dotted with faraway thatched farmhouses. Three hours of this, changing trains at smaller and smaller stations, and we dismounted at a post along the track and a small wooden bench—in the middle of brush-edged padi. We threaded our way on a slender path through rice fields toward a cluster of houses set along the dirt street that comprised the village of Mashiko. We selected one of the tile-roofed dwellings that rose like topsy to their rears in similarly tiled, stacked additions up the hillside. Upon entering we faced a potter bent over a wheel. Around him and in all the ascending rooms beyond were piled hand-thrown pots of all sizes: three-foot vases, teapots, and minuscule sake cups. One pile was the hue of moss darkened by rain, the next the autumn russet of persimmon, the next the brown of dewy chestnuts.

  I could taste refinement on my tongue, in the air, and sense it in the treasuring gestures of the potter’s hands on the wet mounds of clay.

  We bought a
set of ten cups the color of deep forest moss—the potter rolled each meticulously in rough paper—and carried them home on our backs, taking turns, in a basket pack made down the lane by another artisan.

  At home, my father held up a cup for me to examine. “Look at the tiny imperfections in the glaze,” he said. I saw a sliver of raw grey clay showing at the skirt of the cup, like a shoreline at which the sea flowed. “See how the catches and ripples and indentations—the mistakes—in the pot are part of its beauty? This is what makes it exquisite,” he said.

  Often, my father and I had talked about the importance of not being so afraid of making mistakes that you don’t learn or take chances. Ben Franklin had made a chart of virtues and whenever he made a mistake, he recorded it. Tracking my mistakes had long been my forte. Perhaps my urge for perfection had contributed to my hospitalization. In any case, since I was small, I’d been the queen of self-correction and second-guessing. But now, as my father talked, it seemed this American perspective was only half the formula.

  “To be human is to be flawed,” my father went on. “The Japanese believe it is right to forgive and embrace human imperfection. Each pot has its flaw; the mark of the maker. The flaw is integral to the beauty, is the beauty.”

  Mistakes that aren’t mistakes, flaws that aren’t flaws. Could it really be that we were all perfect in our imperfection?

  Years on, in my forties, confronted with another culture, in Paris, I’d be struck further by the complexity of the desire for perfection. While the Japanese embrace imperfection, at the same time they seek perfection, and they can, while gifted at beauty, be fastidious and finicky in its pursuit, like the French. And while Americans boast of perfection, they are also masters of the shoddy: building houses that begin to crumble in a year, purposely propping foreign policy, despite accurate intelligence, on posts of clay. Everything veers toward its opposite.