When I jump out of my car window, he laughs. “What are you doing out here?” I ask, afraid that he’s running away again. He tells me that first period was suspended so that the kids could play in the snow. When I say that I don’t see anyone, he explains that they’re all on the playing field. “Come on,” he says, as he takes my hand and pulls me past the staircase leading to the front doors, past the ducks and the rabbits in their hutch, around to the back of the school, where I’m relieved to find that the playground is in fact swarming with kids. In the swimming pool, an assembly line of children is building an assembly line of snowmen, screwing limp carrot noses—clearly the rabbits’ leftovers—into round white faces. Other children grab sleds from a rapidly shrinking pile, throwing themselves down the snowy banks. Their bare legs look sunburned, they’re so red from the cold. I don’t understand why an exception to the rule can’t be made on a day this snowy.
“Let’s go, Marina,” Koji says, picking up a sled with his free hand. Kim is sitting by herself on the edge of the pool, eyeing us wistfully, and I suggest to the little boy that he ask her instead.
“She’s too scared,” he says dismissively. “She won’t do it.”
“Just ask her,” I insist.
“Kim-san,” he says dutifully, “Do you want to go with me?”
She hesitates for a moment, then shakes her head, an almost imperceptible no.
“I told you,” he said. “She’s too scared. I need you.”
None of the other teachers are sledding. I don’t know if I’m even allowed to be out here, or if there’s something I should be doing inside. I glance up at the faculty room and see the vice-principal staring out the window, his breath fogging the glass. He seems to be waving at me, probably waiting for me to come inside for yet another conversation about the weather. It is very snowy day! There are no other teachers playing with the children. But then again, that’s what I’m supposedly here for. He says so all the time.
“I need you,” Koji repeats with an earnestness that melts the ice of my heart.
“Okay,” I say to the little boy. “Let’s go.”
Koji places the sled right at the cusp of the slope, jutting over the edge. He sits down, turns around, and pats the remaining couple of inches behind him. I straddle his body, cupping his frame with my knees, my arms wrapped around his shoulders, trying not to squeeze him too tightly, aware in a new way of how very small he is as he lifts his feet and we begin our rapid descent. The slope is steep and as the snow unzips beneath us I hold my breath until the ground levels out and we bounce and jolt to a halt. “Mo ichi do!” he cries out immediately. Lungs burning, I push myself to my feet and follow him back up the hill, slipping back half a step for every step forward. By the time we reach the top I’m winded, my core burning, my extremities freezing. This time I sit in front while he sits behind me, his arms wrapped around my waist, his cheek pressed to my back. At the bottom of the hill, the sled tilts to one side and tips us into the snow and I lie there for a moment, just catching my breath and taking in the blank hugeness of the sky. The same shade of white as the falling snow, it looks like it’s all coming down. Koji climbs on top of me and places his hands on my face. He leans close, his expression almost ardent as he gazes into my eyes.
“Mo ichi do,” he repeats.
Exhausted, I tell him to go by himself, saying that I don’t want to slow him down. “You don’t slow me down,” he says. “You’re very heavy. Together we go much faster!” I laugh and he says, “I need you,” and then again, “I need you!” So I follow him back up the hill and down again, up and down, again and again. After a while, the repetitive slow climb followed by the repetitive rapid descent makes me think of Sisyphus and his rock. Sure, pushing it up the mountain over and over must’ve been a drag, but maybe, on a good day, he derived some pleasure from watching it roll back down, feeling his own body give in to gravity’s pull as he followed.
Koji is getting frustrated, impatient. The more times we sled down the hill, the faster he wants to go but the less fun he seems to be having. The other kids are laughing, throwing snowballs at each other, making snow angels and Hello Kitties, but he is weirdly single-minded, almost obsessive, a sledding machine. Every time I suggest that we call it quits, he begs me to go one more time, with an intensity that makes it hard to say no. Finally he plants the sled at the top of a swath that’s been traveled many times before, the snow worn down to a slick chute of ice. He waits for me to climb aboard, then sits on my lap and hugs his knees. He’s so skinny that I can feel the point of his tailbone, although he barely weighs more than a big cat. As we careen down the slope, he stands up abruptly, leaning forward like the masthead of a ship while I grab the back of his uniform jacket.
“Sit down!” I cry, just as the sled catches on a clump of grass or submerged rock and catapults our bodies into the air. In the moment before we hit, it’s not that time stands still, only that my mind empties and my senses take over. I hear the jangling of a school bell, I see children scatter, trying to get out of our way, I see the knobs at the top of Koji’s spine, the bones like a strand of pearls, so small and close to the surface, his skin as thin as tissue. I clutch his body to mine and lean backward, and when we crash my body cushions his and his head slams into my mouth. Luckily, he is wearing his yellow hat. I am not so lucky. A spike of pain shoots through my mouth. I spit blood in the snow, cover the spot with my hand so he won’t see it.
“Daijoubu?” I say to the little boy. Are you okay? He is crying, crying quietly like a grown-up. When he doesn’t answer I answer for him. “Daijoubu. Daijoubu.” You’re okay. You’re okay. I don’t even realize that I keep repeating this until he tells me to stop, wiping his eyes with the back of his glove.
“It didn’t work,” he says.
“What didn’t work?” I ask, not sure that I understood him.
“We’re here,” he says.
“We need to go inside,” I say, noticing a line of faces pressed to the inside of the faculty room window, all peering out at us. I wave and smile. I could’ve crushed him.
“Mo ichi do,” Koji says, as he gets up and begins to drag the sled back up the hill.
“No,” I say, grabbing the sled and trying to take his hand. He wrenches free, so that I’m left holding just his glove, and then he runs away from me, into the school.
Inside the faculty room, his mother and the second-grade teacher are crouching before him, examining his hand. As I approach I can see that his fingertips are spotted with gray dots, as if he’d somehow wedged pencil tips under his fingernails. Feeling queasy, I ask what happened—afraid he got hurt when we fell—and Keiko tells me that he has frostbite.
“He has frostbite?” I repeat. “How is that possible?”
“I already tell you. He runs away. He is outside all night. Samui desu ne?” It’s cold, isn’t it? Suddenly, the greeting is less banal.
“You were going too fast,” Kobayashi-sensei says, standing to his full height and looking down at me. “You were going too fast and then you—”
“Jampu,” Koji cuts him off.
We jumped. I jumped. He jumped. Pronouns get dropped in Japanese. This is exactly how I described my father’s suicide to the little boy. I remember what Keiko told me yesterday, after I said that children don’t know how easily they can get hurt. He knows. He wants to. It’s how to get my attention. But surely he didn’t want to…I can’t even finish the thought. No child seeks pain.
“Are you okay?” the teacher asks the little boy, and Koji nods.
“I told you,” Keiko says. “Daijoubu.” He’s fine. “Miss Marina loves children.”
“Marina-sensei,” the vice-principal says. “Ishii-sensei said her students enjoyed drawing you so much. They experienced 3-D profile! How about returning to art class mo ichi do?” I look at Keiko, who smiles hopefully, and I’m so glad that she’s not upset with me, and that Koji isn’t hurt, that I say yes, sure, of course.
“It’s so cold,” she says in th
e art room, rubbing her hands together briskly. She ignites the kerosene heater and then opens the window an inch to let out the toxic fumes. The wind blows flakes into the room, which melt and vanish in midair. I lie across the table as another group of children draws my portrait. I try to ignore the pain in my mouth, to keep my expression pleasant, but I must not be doing a very convincing job because Keiko keeps pausing by the table, asking if I’m okay. Once again I see the scratch marks rising out of her shirt collar, darker and more obvious now as they’re healing.
She tells me to go ahead and close my eyes again, but when I do I feel the thud of Koji’s head. I can’t drift off; the pain in my teeth is too omnipresent. In the break between periods, Keiko locks the classroom door and gets out her pack of cigarettes. It’s snowing much harder now, the air a blur of snow being blown in every direction. In the swimming pool below, a tide is rising, burying the snowmen from both ends at once.
“I am so tired,” she says.
“Do you still want me to come over?” I ask, hoping she’ll suggest that we reschedule. When I probe my teeth with my tongue, they all seem to shift, like a row of apartment buildings after an earthquake. They all sting too. I didn’t know teeth could sting. All I want to do is go home, curl up in front of the heater and drink something stiff to numb the pain.
“Ah,” she says. “You are too busy?”
“I just thought, if you’re tired…”
“I am always tired,” she says. “I don’t remember not feeling tired. I don’t even know a word for this condition.”
“Awake?” I suggest. “Alert?”
“But I am awake,” she says. “I must always be alert. This is the problem.”
As fifth-graders trickle in and settle into their seats, I hear one girl say to another, “I told you. Now we all have to draw her.” I excuse myself for a moment and go to the bathroom to rinse out my mouth. The art room shares a hallway with the kindergarten and everything in this bathroom is tiny. The stalls are so short that I can see right over them, at little toilets that look almost cute. Less cute is my face. My skin is the color of Vaseline, my tongue scalloped with bite marks. When I spit into the sink, my saliva is threaded with blood. I push on my teeth and they wiggle. I imagine spitting them into my palm, liberated molars and bicuspids that I could shake and throw like dice, casting myself some new fate.
I swallow two aspirin and chew on a third, a trick I learned from my father, who liked to boast that he never once took a sick day from kindergarten through medical school. “There’s nothing a doctor can tell me that I don’t already know,” he’d say before staggering off to work with a 104-degree fever. He put off visits to the dentist as well, although his own teeth were porous and prone to decay, my unfortunate inheritance. When he did go, he refused Novocain, saying that he couldn’t stand the numb feeling. “He hated to give up control,” my mom said. “He could never be weak.” That was his greatest weakness.
I splash water on my face and return to the art room, where I have to pose for two more classes before lunch. I keep my eyes closed but I can’t fall asleep. I keep thinking about my father. I think about the note he left in the glove compartment of his car, a note so short that I memorized it without trying, without wanting to. I am sorry for the pain that this will cause you, but I am in a black hole of despair and I can’t find my way out. I forfeit the right to give you any advice. Please try not to be too sad and move on with your lives. Try not to be too sad? Move on with your lives? I’ve been following this advice like a dare. Maybe Carolyn is right, I think. Maybe I have no feelings; only this pain in my mouth.
Lunch today is curry rice. Usually this is my favorite school lunch, but today I can’t manage to chew the mush. When two boys come to clear our trays, Kobayashi-sensei gestures at my untouched bowl and asks if I’m okay, sounding genuinely concerned.
“Usually you have big appetite,” he says. “Like me.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’m just saving room.”
“Saving room?”
“I’m going to Keiko’s house for dinner this evening.”
“Honto-ni?” He turns to face her. Really?
“Dinner?” she repeats. “Maybe not dinner but…tea and fruits okay?”
“Of course. Anything is fine,” I say, feeling embarrassed. I try to remember how she phrased her invitation to come over. Didn’t she mention a meal?
“I am very bad cook,” she says. “My husband always say so.”
“Daijoubu,” I say. “That’s fine. I’m just looking forward to hanging out.”
“Hanging out?” she echoes uncertainly.
The vice-principal emerges from behind his desk and stands before us. He’s wearing a bolero tie, but it looks proportionate on him. “Ishii-sensei,” he says, “Did I just hear that you invited Miss Marina over for dinner to thank her for posing for you? How nice.” Keiko glances at Kobayashi-sensei before nodding. “What are you making?” he presses. “Japanese food? Something from oosa, to remind her of New York?”
“You really don’t need to make dinner for me,” I say under my breath.
“Do you like steak?” she asks.
“Suteki,” the vice-principal says, laughing and clapping his hands. For once, I get the Japanese joke. Suteki is the word for steak, also slang for great.
Keiko tells me that she has to pick up her older son from junior high, take Kim-san back home and stop at the grocery store before I come over. She draws a map showing the way to her house and tells me to meet her there at five.
Even though he called me this morning and told me to stop by, Miyoshi-sensei looks surprised to see me. But not as surprised as I am to see Joe Pope, sitting in my desk chair in the high school faculty room, engrossed in conversation with Ritsuko Ueno. They don’t even notice as I walk past them. I finger the tasseled ends of the scarf my mom knit for me. It’s made of bright yellow wool, the same Day-Glo shade as the elementary school uniform caps, and so long that I can wrap it around my neck a dozen times, until it puff s out like an inner tube, and still the ends dangle to the ground. As Miyoshi-sensei gets up to greet me, I feel as stiff and immobilized as the yam truck driver in his neck brace.
“Ohisashiburidesune,” he says. It’s been a long time.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I ran into Joe at Mister Donuts this morning,” Miyoshi-sensei says, burying his hands in his pockets. “Our students have been studying so hard. I thought they could use some break. It was kind of…spur of the moment.” I nod, hoping that I don’t look hurt. I suspected that he shipped me off to the elementary school so that he wouldn’t have to deal with me, but this confirms it. If Carolyn knows that Joe is in town, she hasn’t said a word. Last I heard, he was living at a gaijin residence in Osaka, the city where most Japanese television shows are filmed. Miyoshi-sensei asks if I’d like a cup of tea and I nod, trailing after him to the social corner.
He hands me my tea, as well as a piece of paper, folded into a tight little square. Apparently the letter wasn’t just a pretext to see me. He sits on one end of the couch and I sit on the other as I read it, as conscious of the wide space between us as I once was of our hips touching.
Dear Miss Marina,
How are you? I’m so busy thank you and you? I hope you could enjoy playing with elementary school students every day. Maybe you feel like after a long vacation. So relaxed. Maybe too relaxed?
Reason for this letter is: some car “accident” you had with Mister Uyesugi. He is Shika’s Yam Truck driver, you know? Of course you know. You crashed Yam Truck. You did not tell Uyesugi-san your name, but he knows. He knows you are Marina-sensei and he knows I am your supervisor. Everyone knows this. It’s unfortunate for you in this case, and also for me as well.
Maybe you did not know that accident must be reported in Japan. I tell Uyesugi-san that this is the case. You do not know better, I say to him. So let me explain now. To collect an insurance, you need crime scene police report. Even if you do not want to collect an insuranc
e (for example, in such case where cost of fixing car is greater than cost of car) you should file accident report. Accident entails two people. Yam Truck driver needs compensation for so many ruined yams. If you do not file police report, if you flee the scene of the crime, then it’s not called accident. In this case, it’s called hit-and-run. You know what I mean?
Maybe you think it’s joke or it’s “no big deal” because it’s only yams? Maybe you didn’t know one roasted yam costs 500 yen. It’s kind of a splurge food for us. Uyesugi-san counted more than two hundred ruined yams on road. It’s not insignificant damages.
Mari-chan I really don’t want to breathe on your neck. So if such a situation occurs once more (I hope not!) let me be clear. If you stay on scene, it’s not crime. It’s only accident. If you flee, it’s hit-and-run. Lucky for you, Uyesugi-san decided not to file a charge. So, this time you can walk. I mean this in two senses. You will not become prosecuted. Also, maybe you had better walk from now on.
Ganbatte, Marina-san. Please do your best. Maybe even better.
Yours truly,
Hiroshi Miyoshi
“It wasn’t a hit-and-run,” I say, the words on the page sliding beneath my eyes.
“Daijoubu,” he says, but it’s obviously not okay and he obviously doesn’t believe me.
At the culture shock panel in Tokyo, we were told that it is never, under any circumstances, acceptable to cry at work here. Apparently it rips the wa, the social fabric, beyond repair. I can never seem to cry at the right times: when it’s expected of me, when it would actually put people at ease. But now it’s like a cork has been popped, a lid unscrewed, and the tears are pouring out too fast for me to get the lid back on. I am giant Alice. I could flood a room. He looks around as if for an escape hatch, a way away from this crazy foreigner, this fresh mess I’ve put us in.
If You Follow Me Page 16