If You Follow Me

by Malena Watrous

  By the time I reached the faculty room, the door was closed and I could hear the vice-principal droning on about something, which meant the morning meeting had already begun, which meant I was late. The secretary slipped out with the faculty attendance sheet. She made a tardy mark beside my name, then popped her head back in the room and called out in a shrill voice, “Miss Marina just arrived. May she enter?”

  “Yes, but tell her to hurry up,” the vice-principal said.

  As I walked into the room, my eyes locked with those of Miyoshi-sensei and I could tell that he felt as nervous as I did. He stared down into his tea, blowing into it and fogging his reading glasses, and I sat at my desk chair, my back to him. I’d expected a little teasing from the other teachers, some lifted eyebrows or elbow nudges, but they all went about their business as usual, making copies, gathering supplies, hurrying off to teach their classes. I sat there with my pulse racing, my hands clammy, and my mouth dry, waiting for Miyoshi-sensei to approach me so that we could plan our lessons. But the minutes ticked by and when I finally swiveled around I saw that his desk was deserted. I found him standing by the windows in the freshman secretarial classroom, gazing out at the depressing brown stubble of the rice fields. He registered my arrival with a slight nod, still avoiding my eyes.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “And you?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Fine,” he repeated, loosening his necktie with one finger. I didn’t want to think about kissing him, but I couldn’t stop looking at his mouth, remembering its pressure on mine. “I should warn you about something,” he said. “According to vice-principal’s command, all oral communication must stop from now.”

  “You mean we’re not supposed to talk about what happened?” I whispered.

  “No,” he said, blushing and reaching a finger in his shirt collar to loosen it. “It means that until the prefectural exam, our oral communication classes must stop.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling the blood rush up to my own face. “Okay.”

  He explained that last year, on these same exams, Shika High School came in number fifty-nine out of the sixty schools in the prefecture, ranked only above the fishing and cannery high school in Wajima. “To avoid a humiliating repeat,” he said, “vice-principal wants students to use English class time to study.”

  “Okay,” I said again. “How can I help?”

  “Just answer questions,” he said, hurrying to the assistance of a girl whose hand was in the air before I could ask any more questions of my own.

  And that was it.

  In the days and weeks that followed, Miyoshi-sensei no longer waited for me to walk to class with him. He no longer approached my desk after school to ask if I wanted a “cuppa’,” or reprimanded me for throwing the wrong trash away. I was surprised to find that I missed his gomi letters, not the corrections, but the personal stuff that seeped through the cracks. The school days suddenly seemed very long and boring. I missed things about him that I hadn’t even realized I liked: his vivid gestures, his way of prefacing difficult statements with “maybe,” his odd English metaphors and funny translations of Japanese idioms. One of the idioms he taught me early on is “hiru andon,” which means “daytime lamp” and refers to people who take up space in a room with no vitality or purpose. Sitting on the faculty room couch, Miyoshi-sensei and I had pointed out the daytime lamps burning weakly around us, uninspired teachers, civil servants nearing retirement. “I really don’t want to be like that,” he confided in me once while we shared a smoke between periods. “I became English teacher because I love English, and I want to share this. Shika High School students are poor. They feel they have no use for English. So it’s good you came here, ne?” I nodded, assuming that he meant that I gave the students a reason to practice their English. “At least I can share my love with you,” he said.

  But suddenly Miyoshi-sensei had become a daytime lamp. And I felt like one too, at the end of a month of team-teaching without teaching. Maybe I had been the one to kiss him, but he had kissed me back. We were two adults. It was only a big deal because he was making it into one. Still, I kept replaying the moment, the feel of his heart beating beneath my palm, the way we’d breathed into each other and kept our eyes open the whole time. Had I forced myself on him? I didn’t think so. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the misunderstanding was cultural, that if he could only explain to me what exactly I’d done wrong, what line I’d crossed, then we could move past it.

  On the Friday before winter break, at the end of our semester’s final English class, I followed him out of the classroom calling, “Miyoshi-sensei! Miyoshi-sensei!” as he sped ahead. Students poured into the hallway and I slalomed through the obstacle course. “Hiro!” I yelled, just as he was about to duck into the men’s room. At the sound of his first name, the one he gave me permission to use for the first time on the night that we kissed, he finally wheeled around and said, “What?” I crossed my arms so that he wouldn’t see them shaking. You would think that after all that time, I could have planned out what I wanted to say to him, but I found myself at a stupid loss for words.

  “How are you?” I said.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” he replied, sticking his own hands in his pockets.

  “You don’t seem fine,” I said, as students continued to stream past us, as oblivious to our little drama as a river splitting around a boulder. “I think we should talk.”

  “About what?”

  “About what happened,” I prompted him. “After the enkai?”

  “Miss Marina,” he cut me off. “A Japanese enkai is a kind of…parallel planet. What happens on this planet has no consequence on earth.”

  “But you seem upset,” I protested. “You’ve been avoiding me for weeks.”

  “How do you mean, avoiding you? Every day we teach side by side like futago. Like a twins. I could not avoid you, even if I wanted to.”

  “I’m sorry if I crossed a line,” I said. “I felt close to you. I thought you did too.”

  “A Japanese enkai is a parallel planet,” he said again, leaning backward so that he pushed open the door to the men’s room, exposing a row of urinals. “Working together in narrow space, pressure builds. So we need enkai to release steam. To release steam, we couldn’t worry about…how to say…risky behavior.”

  “Risky behavior,” I repeated.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Therefore, at Japanese enkai, there is no risky behavior. Do you catch my meaning? Do you understand how this is possible?”

  “Not really.”

  “Because we never talk about what happened there.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  hazukashii: (ADJ.) shy; ashamed; embarrassed

  This morning, at the elementary school, I’m scheduled to teach two sixth-grade classes in a row. In the first, I sleepwalk through the greetings and recite the questions on my self-introduction test by rote. When I was a kid, I used to repeat the same word over and over until it became meaningless, an empty bag of sound. After repeating this lesson so many times, the same thing has happened to these facts about myself. Even my name sounds funny, like a foreign word that can’t quite sink in.

  In the second class I am paired with a young and attractive female teacher. Literally paired. We happen to be wearing the same pink chenille sweater, purchased from a sale pile at Jade Plaza, and while her gray pencil skirt bears little resemblance to my gray thrift store corduroy, the girls keep exclaiming, “pe-a-sutairu!”—pair style—a term reserved for best friends who dress identically. As the teacher tells them to quiet down, I walk around to put distance between us and the unflattering comparison.

  “Is my name Miss Marina?” I ask the class.

  “Yes!” they shout as a group.

  “Am I…”

  “You’re twenty-two years old!”

  I return to the front of the room and ask the teacher if I’ve already taught this lesson to her class. She nods and my face heats up with s
hame, not only for repeating myself but also for having managed to forget this whole group of people.

  “What am I doing here?”

  “Wakarimasen,” she says, which can mean “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand.”

  “Why am I here?” I try, “mo ichi do?”

  “To…pray…with the children?” she says, shrugging helplessly.

  In the faculty room, the vice-principal sits with his hands clasped on his large wooden desk, which has a patent leather shine. The air is redolent with citrus oil, and the smell turns my stomach.

  “I already gave my self-introduction lesson to that class,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says, smiling. “I know.”

  “I wish you’d told me,” I say. “I felt foolish repeating myself.”

  “Foolish?” he repeats.

  “Hazukashii.”

  “Fool-ish,” he says, writing the word down on his special eikaiwa notepad. “Repeating is best way to learn new language. You always say so. Don’t be fool-ish.”

  To calm myself down, I picture him behind the wheel of an Airstream, sitting on a phone book to better see the horizon, coasting through Nebraska with his wife by his side. He didn’t mean to humiliate me. He doesn’t know what to do with me either. He and Miyoshi-sensei agreed that I should stay here until I have given my self-introduction lesson to every class. Surely I’m close to that point. I ask if he found “the count” and he nods.

  “Mmm,” he says. “Good job. You finished already.”

  I feel like a character in a fairy tale who just completed some mythically tedious task. Like if I had spun a room full of straw into fool’s gold, fooling no one. “Then I guess I’d better go back to the high school?” I say hopefully.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But I should speak to Miyoshi-sensei before I release you.” He claps his hands. “So…how about today’s weather?”

  “It’s cold,” I say.

  “It is cold,” he agrees. Ding-ding-ding. And we enter the ring for another round.

  My teeth are killing me. My whole jaw aches like I got punched. The pain gets worse when I chew, so I only eat soft foods, things I can swallow whole.

  “Can’t you eat fish?”

  It takes a moment before I realize that Kobayashi-sensei is speaking in English and looking at me. I’ve been using my chopsticks to scrape the flesh from a fried sardine, its desiccated head emerging from a golden turtleneck of batter. The second-grade teacher sits at a diagonal from my assigned desk in the elementary school faculty room. I can see the framed pictures of him and his university sumo team, two rows of fat guys in loincloths. Keiko Ishii’s desk is next to his, directly across from mine, as covered in piles of drawings and baskets of art supplies as mine is bare. In the six weeks that I’ve been coming here, Keiko hasn’t been very warm to me. Back in November, Miyoshi-sensei told me that I off ended her when I didn’t return to her ikebana club a second time. “In Japan,” he said, “you shouldn’t attend a club you don’t wish to join. Otherwise the teacher will lose face.” But how could you know whether or not you wanted to join a club without first trying it out? “Be careful what you start,” he warned me.

  “In Japan we eat fish like this,” Kobayashi-sensei says, popping a whole sardine into his mouth. I smile dutifully, trying to tune out the crunch of tiny bones being ground to a paste. He turns his chopsticks around, pinches his pickled plum between their ends, and then reaches across our desks to drop it on my bowl of rice. “I remember from your self-introduction lesson,” he says. “Miss Marina can eat umeboshi.” I only included that item on my worksheet because it annoyed me how often I was being asked whether I “can” eat Japanese foods. I don’t have a four-chambered stomach. When I tell people that I’ve been eating Japanese food since I was a kid, they always say, “But American Japanese food is so different…”

  “Dame!” Kobayashi-sensei suddenly calls out. It’s forbidden!

  “What?” I ask, before realizing that he’s looking not at me but over my shoulder. I spin around, coming face-to-face with Koji, who is making bunny ears behind my head. He is still wearing those ski gloves. I wink and grin back at him.

  “Go back to class,” his mother tells him.

  “I already finished my lunch,” he says. “I’m bored.” He tries to climb onto her lap but she swivels out from under him, reminding him that they’re at school, where he has to act like a student, not a baby. “Why don’t you practice your characters,” Kobayashi-sensei says to the little boy, uncapping a pen and drawing a vertical rectangle with a horizontal swish through its center. I recognize the kanji for day.

  “I don’t like to copy,” the boy says.

  “This is a problem,” Kobayashi-sensei says to Keiko.

  “Can you show me?” I ask Koji. “I don’t know how to write in Japanese.” He squints at me for a moment, trying to decide if I’m pulling a dirty trick, before he takes the pen. “Like this?” I ask, copying his character, and he nods. Keiko smiles at me over the bent head of the little boy, who is now showing me all of the other characters he knows, one after another.

  When the bell rings at the end of the lunch period, two sixth-grade girls return to collect our trays. One is tall, her new breasts pushing at her uniform blazer, while the other is as thin as a straw and needs her suspenders to hold up her skirt. The larger girl points to my untouched seaweed jello, studded with purple adzuki beans, and tells me that it’s delicious, the best part of the lunch.

  “Dozo,” I say. “You can have it.”

  Kobayashi-sensei clears his throat and tells the girl that perhaps she shouldn’t eat so many sweets. “You are already so…big size,” he says in English. “So are you,” Keiko says, and I laugh. She tells the girls that they may share my jello, but to eat quickly. The bigger girl cuts it in two and they lean over my desk as they chew. I notice that the littler girl is wearing a “Kitty-chan” barrette in her hair and I tell her that it’s cute. “Kitty-chan is your favorite karakuta,” she says, and I feel happy that she remembered this, even though I only put it down on my worksheet to have something in common with 99 percent of the girls here. The bigger girl says that she loves Kitty-chan too.

  “No way!” I pretend to be blown away. “What a coincidence!”

  “Coincidence…” Keiko repeats. “A lucky accident.”

  “Wow,” I say. “You have a great memory.”

  “Thank you,” she says. Her ability to take a compliment is refreshing. It’s nice not to follow the script for once. She picks up a pencil and begins sketching a cat head with two far-spaced ovals for eyes and another oval turned on its side for a nose. A thin circle loops through the right side of this nose, a nose ring like my own. “Wah! Marina-kitty!” The girls clap their hands. The bigger one picks up the pencil and begins copying this drawing, but the art teacher tells her to draw her own picture, to try to draw what’s really in front of her. The girl bites her lip and shakes her head.

  “It’s too difficult,” she says.

  “What do you mean?” Keiko says. “You’re an excellent artist.”

  “But her face is too 3-D.”

  “Too 3-D?” I repeat, laughing.

  “You have a tall nose,” Keiko says. “Folded eyes. It’s new experience.”

  She calls out to the vice-principal, who makes a rare appearance from behind his desk, rocking slightly on his feet as he listens to her with his head cocked to one side. “Miss Marina,” he says, “you have next period free. You could stay here with me, or you could join Ishii-sensei’s art class.” It’s not a difficult decision. I’d love to spend a period sketching with a bunch of kids instead of having yet another conversation about the weather.

  “Thank you so much,” I say to Keiko.

  “Thank you so much,” she repeats after me, bowing deeply.

  Instead of desks, the art room holds three long sawhorse tables. I lower myself onto a stool between two sixth-grade boys. The table is so low that when I try to cross my legs, I bump my knee
on the rough plywood and snag my tights. Otherwise, it feels strangely normal to be back on this side of the classroom, waiting for things to happen instead of directing them. While Keiko explains the lesson in Japanese, I stare out the window. The second graders are running laps around the empty swimming pool. I can see the tops of the kids’ heads, and the top of Kobayashi-sensei’s head too. He has a bald spot the size of a sand dollar and his scalp is bright red. It looks vulnerable, and cold.

  This makes me think of my dad, whose own hair was already thinning by the time I was born. For a long time this didn’t take away from his good looks. People said he resembled a young Marlon Brando. He had hooded eyes that could change from green to gray or blue as rapidly as his moods, and full, almost feminine lips, in contrast to his strong jaw. When I was little, he used to make me laugh by preening in the mirror and saying, “Who is that handsome devil?” as if he truly couldn’t recognize himself. I’d say, “You, Daddy!” and he’d say, “Damn, I’m good-looking.” Even after he lost most of his hair, he was still very handsome, right up until the last year of his life, when his skin took on the hue of wet clay and he started wearing a sad comb-over.

  The last summer I spent at home, the summer before he killed himself, my mom took an extra job as a camp counselor, leaving my dad and me alone together for a month. He had changed more than physically. He didn’t laugh anymore, or stay up sketching new inventions. He didn’t want to be left alone, but he was unable to keep up a conversation. He followed me around the house and tagged along when I ran errands. He even wanted to come when I went out with friends. When I was short with him, hoping he’d take the hint and back off, he only clung harder. My friends asked what was wrong with him. I said that he was having some kind of midlife crisis and they nodded, rolling their eyes knowingly. I wished he was having a midlife crisis like the ones their fathers had, that he’d do something—gamble the mortgage, buy a sports car, and take off with a girl younger than me—anything besides follow me around. All my life I’d been in awe of him. I didn’t want my new power.