The week before he killed himself, he got a haircut. I didn’t actually see it—not while he was alive anyhow—but he described it to me over the phone. This was to be our last conversation, although I didn’t know it at the time. He always went to Supercuts, to the same girl, but his usual hairdresser was on vacation that week so he’d gotten a trainee who butchered it. That was the word he used. He said that he looked like a marine, that he’d been scalped, that he couldn’t even recognize himself in the mirror. He sounded devastated, ridiculously upset over something so trivial, and I felt claustrophobic listening to him complain, the same way I’d felt all summer when he trailed after me.
“It’s just a haircut,” I said impatiently. “It’ll grow back.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I look bald.”
“Dad,” I said, “you are bald.”
For a moment he didn’t speak. Then he said, “I guess you’re right. I’m not a handsome devil anymore.” He didn’t sound like he was angling for a compliment, just stating a fact, and I didn’t contradict him. Of course later, thinking back on that conversation, I wished I’d told him that he was wrong, that he was still handsome. I wish I’d said a lot of things. I also wondered why he got a haircut right before he committed suicide. It seemed like such a waste, especially for a man who hated to waste a dollar. It seemed like a sign that he had wavered in his decision until the very end, that something or someone could have changed his mind.
“Marina-sensei,” Keiko interrupts my reverie. “Could you please come up here?”
I turn away from the window to see that the students have already passed baskets of charcoal and acrylics and they all have sheets of paper in front of them. When I reach the front of the room, I assume she’s going to give me a sheet of paper of my own, and translate the directions into English. Instead she backs away, leaving me alone.
Now the students pick up their sticks of charcoal.
Now I realize what I’m here for.
The art teacher stands with her back to the window, chin in hand, appraising me along with them. “How about…relaxing?” she says at last, making a Vanna White sweep of her arm across the surface of the table.
“Relaxing?” I repeat weakly.
She opens an art book to a painting of a plump white woman lying on her side, wearing only a black ribbon tied around her throat. She tells me not to worry; I don’t have to take off my clothes. The kids laugh. An eerie feeling comes over me as I climb up onto the table, which hammocks under my weight. My scalp prickles and I feel like I’m floating outside of myself. My mom has a story she likes to tell about the day of my birth. There were complications, she had to have an emergency C-section, and in the middle of it she started to regain feeling. The doctors administered a shot of anesthesia that went to her heart, stopping it for a full minute, in which she was technically dead. She swears that she remembers rising above herself and seeing the heads of the doctors and my own head being lifted out of her, and fighting to get back into her body. She says that it felt like trying to swim down to the bottom of a pool.
Slowly, in bits and pieces, I watch my portrait take shape on paper. One little boy draws only my hair, a floating yellow wig. Another starts with my feet, which take up two-thirds of the page. But most begin with my nose. By all accounts, I’m overdue for a nose job. It could hold up a heavy winter coat.
“Draw what you see,” Keiko keeps telling them. “Don’t make a karakuta.”
As she passes by the table where I’m reclining, I notice scratch marks rising out of the collar of her shirt, ascending her neck to the base of her earlobe. It looks like she was attacked by a cat or something. “I don’t like to teach sixth-grade art,” she says. “I prefer younger children. They still see something new. By twelve years, they only copy.”
“But I don’t look like that,” I say. “At least I hope I don’t!”
“They copy idea of you,” she explains. “They know Western face has tall nose, folded eyelid, so they draw tall nose, folded eyelid. They can’t really see you.”
At the end of the period, after the students file out of the room, I stand beside her as she leafs through the stack and I see what she means. In picture after picture, I’ve been turned into a cartoon version of myself, my eyes two hooded balloons, my nose a big 7, with no mouth to speak of—or through—just like Kitty-chan. Keiko sighs, shuts the classroom door and turns the bolt. Then she raises the window, rummages in her Vuitton shoulder bag and pulls out a pack of Dunhill’s. When she holds it out, eyebrows lifted, I nod and she sticks two cigarettes in her mouth, lighting them off the same match. I remember how Miyoshi-sensei once told me that women teachers here never smoke. I’m glad to meet another exception to the rule.
“Secret from principal,” she says, handing me one. “Secret from husband too.”
“Shhh,” I whisper and she laughs, curved lines like parentheses cupping her mouth. “I don’t smoke often,” she says. “But when Koji runs away I feel so frighten. Kobayashi-sensei gives me cigarettes, to help relax.”
“I’m so sorry you were scared,” I say, “but Koji didn’t run away. He just wanted to show me the rabbits. I was with him the whole time.”
“Mmm,” she says. “This time yes. He’s with you. But last week he runs away after school and we can’t find him until morning.”
“Shit,” I say. “Are you serious? He was missing all night?”
“Mmm.” She takes a drag, the ember lengthening from her deep inhalation. I ask where the boy was and she says that he was down by the sea. “Shit,” I say again. The cliff s in this part of town are so steep that I get vertigo just thinking about the edge. “Children have no idea how vulnerable they are,” I pronounce. This is something my mom used to say when I was little and did something stupid, like jumping from roof to roof on our block.
“Vulnerable means what?” Keiko asks me.
“They don’t know how easily they can get hurt.”
“He knows,” she says. “He wants to.”
“He wants to get hurt?” I repeat, certain there’s a language gap here.
“Mmm.” She nods again. “It’s how to get my attention.”
When the bell rings to signal the start of the next period, Keiko says that I can return to the faculty room if I’d like, or I can stay and pose for a third-grade class. I opt to stay with her. The kerosene heater is right behind me, bathing me in waves of oily heat, and the fumes go to my head in a not unpleasant way. I stretch out my arm for a moment, rest my cheek on my shoulder, and Keiko tells me to go ahead and shut my eyes, telling me that my eyes are hard to draw and it will be easier for the kids this way.
Before long, I feel myself drifting into a shallow dream. I know that I’m dreaming, but this doesn’t justify the fact that I can’t think of the words for the most basic things, like the pronged metal instrument that carries food from plate to mouth, or the numbered grid of paper where people write their schedules. My father is there with me, testing me in a laboratory that looks a lot like the elementary school art room. He holds up one object after another while I tell him to wait, just wait a minute, to give me time to think. “Umhmm,” he says, jotting something down. “And my name is?” I try to bargain my way out of this one. “Why do I need to know that anymore?” I ask, and when he says, “What do you mean?” I realize that he has no idea he’s dead. I don’t want to break the news, good or bad.
I wake to the feeling of fingers running through my hair. My teeth ache from grinding them in my sleep. Koji Ishii is standing beside me, studying me with his wide-set gray eyes. I want to grab the little boy and hold him tight like a teddy bear. Instead I grip his hand and he flinches. I sit up and find that the art room is almost empty. The sky outside is skim-milk white with a cast of blue, and already it’s dark enough that shapes are becoming blurry, indistinct. Kim is the only other child in the room, drawing by herself at a table. Keiko stands facing the window, hanging pictures from a clothesline while gazing outside.
&n
bsp; “I’m sorry I fell asleep,” I say, standing beside her. “It’s so late!”
“It’s fine,” she says. “I have to clean up. Kim and Koji make your portrait.”
“You drew me?” I ask the little boy, placing a hand on his silky head.
“Not draw,” his mother says. “He won’t draw. Only koraji.”
Koraji must mean what it sounds like, collage, because the boy has assembled my portrait from scraps. The body is a triangle of paper torn from my own self-introduction worksheet, the face that of a Japanese model cut from a magazine, with green construction paper circles glued over her eyes. For hair he used a few sprigs of hay that must have lined the rabbits’ hutch, and I’ve got two American flag stickers—pilfered from my own box of props—for feet. “Kawaii,” I say, wishing I knew a better word than “cute” to let him know how much I like this piece of art. I feel like that, I want to tell him: piecing together an identity, cobbling a self from scraps. Then I remember the word Keiko taught me after I attended her ikebana club that one time.
“It’s very wabi-sabi,” I say. Perfectly imperfect.
“You’re right,” Keiko says, smiling. “You have good memory too.”
I tell him that I will hang it in my kitchen and think of him whenever I look at it.
“Ah, you want it?” his mom says. “I had better ask.” She crouches and addresses her son in Japanese. He brings his gloved fingertips to the bridge of his nose, then shakes his head slowly. “Koji wants to keep portrait of Miss Marina,” she explains. “I think he likes you so much,” she says. “Usually he resists a teacher.”
“Maybe that’s because I’m not really his teacher,” I point out.
“So desu ne,” she agrees.
Kim gets up and hands me her drawing. She has given me a stick-figure body and a smiley face, devoting her artistic energy to sketching the school’s two rabbits on either side of me, scaled big as dogs, discernible by their tall ears and cotton-ball tails, and by the fact that one is fat and smiling while the other looks like a bunny skeleton with fangs.
“Kurai,” Keiko says. Dark.
“Someone should really help that poor rabbit,” I say.
“What can we do?” she asks me. “When vice-principal buys him, he is cute baby. Since then his teeth don’t stop growing. He becomes rabbit monster.”
“Maybe he should be put to sleep,” I suggest.
“I think he sleeps at night,” she says.
“No,” I say. “Put to sleep…Like…Forever?”
“Kurai,” she repeats. “In Japan this is forbidden.”
“Even for rabbits?” I ask.
“What if you are rabbit next time?”
“But if he’s suffering,” I say. “If he’s going to die…”
“This is part of life,” she says with a shrug.
“Are we taking Kim home?” Koji asks, interrupting.
“Of course,” Keiko says. “We take her home every day. You know that.”
“But which home are we taking her to?”
“What do you mean, which home?”
“Kim has two homes,” he says, looking at me. “No one lives in the other one.”
“That’s not true,” his mother says. “She has only one home.”
“Too bad.” The little boy sighs. “I thought I could go live in the empty one.”
“That’s not very nice,” Keiko says. “I’d be lonely, you know.”
“You could visit,” he says. “But only you. And Miss Marina.”
“Arigato,” I say, allowing my hand to fall on his silky head once more.
Keiko tells the kids to get their stuff and meet her in the parking lot. I try to give Kim back her drawing but she won’t take it. “Dozo,” she says in her gravelly little voice.
“For me?” I say, to make sure, and she nods. “Arigato.”
“Arigato.”
The kids have barely closed the door before Keiko turns, seizing my shoulders. “Kim can speak Japanese! She says dozo and arigato! You are good teacher, Marina-sensei!”
“I didn’t teach her those words,” I protest. “I hardly speak Japanese myself!”
“Maybe that’s why,” Keiko muses. “You can’t speak much Japanese, so she must try harder to speak with you.” I laugh, once more impressed by her willingness to say it like it is. She peers at me with gray eyes as focused and hypnotizing as her son’s. “Marina-sensei,” she says, “do you have any free time?”
“Sure,” I say. “I have lots of free time.”
“How about coming to my home one evening after school?”
“I’d love to,” I say, not bothering to conceal my eagerness. After six months here, I still don’t know where Miyoshi-sensei lives, or which apartment behind the grocery store Noriko rents. Back at our teacher training seminar in Tokyo, we were warned that the Japanese seldom entertain at home, that only a person who wants to be your close friend will invite you over for dinner. This has yet to happen, to Carolyn or me.
“How about Thursday?” she says. “Five to seven okay?”
“Thank you so much,” I say, thinking it funny, charming, and very Japanese that she is already setting a cap on our time together.
“Thank you so much,” she repeats, bowing deeply.
CHAPTER TEN
kamoshirenai: (EXP.) maybe; perhaps; possibly
On the drive home, I feel happier than I have in a long time. I love the big, dilapidated houses, the steamed kitchen windows with their tempered glass to prevent people from seeing inside, the fox-shaped dogs that howl and chase after my car. I love the road, the way it bends around the cliff s and follows ancient property lines, the magnificence of the sea absorbing the swirls of falling snow. I turn on the tape deck and listen to the mix Carolyn made for me after we got here. One side is labeled, “Way to school,” the other side, “Way back home.” Wistfully I listen to side two. Between songs, she speaks. “Hurry home,” she says. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
I am looking down, hitting Rewind just to hear her say this again, when my seat belt snaps taut. I slam on the brakes and sit up as an avalanche of giant orange hail pelts my car. It takes a moment before I realize they’re sweet potatoes.
Stopped on the road ahead of me, the speaker bolted to the yam truck keeps repeating the same line over and over. “Oishii o-imo. Oishii kamoshirenai.” When Carolyn and I first heard this, sung by an old man with a warbling tremolo, we thought we were listening to the chanting of a monk from the temple down the block. But the truck kept passing our house at the same time every evening, its speaker blaring the same two lines on a loop, and one day I found myself suddenly able to decipher the words.
“Delicious potatoes. Delicious, perhaps…”
The song cuts off and the driver steps out of the truck. He is an old man and he’s wearing a neck brace, a big, stiff, plastic cone that rises from the collar of his shirt and pushes at the underside of his chin. I climb out of the car window, slipping on a sweet potato that squishes under my foot.
“Gomen nasai,” I say. I’m sorry. “Shitsureishimashita.” But I’ve committed more than a rude this time. Without speaking, he walks around the back of his truck, surveying the damage. To my relief, his vehicle looks more or less intact. It was protected from the collision by the heavy metal staircase welded to its back, leading up to the bed where a charcoal grill was roasting the sweet potatoes now covering the road. But the front of my car is crumpled, pushed in like a bulldog’s snout.
“Itai?” I ask the man. Are you hurt?
“I…can’t…speak…Englishverywell,” he manages.
In Japanese I ask if he’s okay and again he tells me in English that he can’t speak English. I wonder if he can’t understand my Japanese. Maybe my accent is that bad, or maybe he’s so flustered to find himself in a fender-bender with a Westerner that he can’t even register the fact that I’m trying to communicate in his language.
“How are you?” I try.
“I’mfinethankyou,” he sa
ys, “and you?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “How is your neck?”
“Your neck,” he repeats.
“Your neck,” I say, pointing to his brace. “Fine? Not fine?”
“Not fine,” he says, shaking his head and then wincing. “Not fine!”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “It was all my fault.” I don’t know how to say this in Japanese, though it’s another line I should have mastered. He squats to pick up the yams. He bends from the knees and keeps his torso perfectly erect and still, like someone trying to balance a pot of boiling water on top of his head. The sappy skins of the yams are coated with grit from the road. He tries to polish one with his flannel shirttail, tearing the skin. “Your car not fine,” he says, and Miyoshi-sensei’s words come back to me. Temporary people probably shouldn’t own a car here. The rules are different, the roads are narrow, and what would you do in case of accident? I don’t know the numbers of any tow companies. There’s no AAA. And if I call the police, they will call my supervisor. I can’t bear the thought of seeing him again, for the first time in months, at the scene of an accident I caused. So I’m thankful when I lean into the window, turn the key in the ignition and the engine starts.
“It’s fine,” I say brightly. “Daijoubu.”
Then he says something in Japanese that I don’t understand. I think he’s telling me that without filing an accident report, I won’t be able to collect insurance. “Daijoubu,” I say once more. He frowns as he takes one of the yams and throws it back onto the grill. Not knowing what else to do, I follow his example, throwing yam after yam into the back of the truck until we have cleaned the mess off the road.
“Delicious potatoes. Delicious, perhaps…”
When I get home, I hear Carolyn upstairs in the bedroom doing the Tae-Bo videotape my mom sent us. She is stomping overhead, practicing high kicks as Billy Blanks calls out, “repeater, repeater, repeater,” over a pornolike soundtrack of synthesizer music and studio audience groans. I wonder if the noise bothers the neighbors, what they think we’re doing in our windowless home. Not what it sounds like.
If You Follow Me Page 14