“Mo ichi do,” I mutter.
“Nani?” the vice-principal says. This morning, he barely greeted me. I hope Miyoshi-sensei didn’t tell him about my suspicions that he’s been keeping me here for free English lessons. Ooka-sensei is a kind man, and Shika is a small town.
“It’s snowing again,” I say.
“And again and again,” he speaks up from behind his freshly polished desk. “This is snow country, Miss Marina. What did you expect?”
In the last period of the day, Koji and Kim are among the students who file into the art room to draw my portrait. Koji sinks onto a stool at the back of the room, while Kim hurries to claim the stool next to his. Her long hair is loose today, falling around her shoulders like it did at the bath last night. She swivels to look at Koji but he ignores her. He teeters on the back legs of his stool, staring out the window where snow is falling densely now, in such thick flakes, that the air looks as white as the sheets of paper that Keiko places in front of each child. They’ve been sketching for about fifteen minutes when Keiko squats beside Koji.
“You’re supposed to draw Miss Marina,” she says.
“I don’t like to draw,” he replies. “You know that.”
“Okay,” she says. “How about making another collage?”
“I already made one,” he says. “I don’t like copying. I’m not like Kim.”
“Kim’s not copying you,” Keiko says. “She’s drawing her own picture.”
“I know,” Koji says. “She’s copying herself.”
I prop onto my elbow so that I can see. At first I think he’s right, that Kim is drawing the exact same picture, but then I notice something new about this drawing. The girl has two long braids and a school uniform, and she is only standing beside one rabbit: the one with the fangs. This is not a picture of me but a self-portrait, a plea for the kawaisou, a request for help, I think.
As the bell rings, I linger on top of the table, hoping for a chance to talk to Keiko, when a burst of static erupts from the loudspeaker, followed by the vice-principal’s voice. “Because of the storm, everyone is excused early. Please return home promptly and safely!” The announcement is barely finished before Keiko dashes out of the room, leaving me behind.
I slide off the table and rush after her, reaching the top of the stairs just as she reaches the bottom. By the time I get to the bottom, she is pushing through the door to the playground, still wearing her uniform slippers. I’m about to follow her outside when what I see through the window stops me. Kobayashi-sensei is stacking sleds in a pile when she approaches him from behind and touches his back. Their forms are softened by the falling snow. All she does is place her hand between his shoulders. All he does is not move away from her touch. He seems to lean back against her palm, as if that were all it took to keep his huge body propped upright. Maybe this is why she wanted me to come over for a few hours each week, not just to tutor her sons, but to give her some time alone. Or not alone. With him. I wish she had confided in me. She might have, eventually, if I’d given her the chance. If we had actually become friends. I’m backing away when I hear Kobayashi-sensei call out, “Dame!” Stop! He’s looking up at the building, his expression terrified. I push through the door, stumble into the snow.
Kobayashi-sensei and Keiko are both holding their hands up, flakes falling through their splayed fingers. I walk across the yard, plunging to my knees in the slush, which is now freezing over, covered with an eggshell crust of ice. When I turn to look up at the school, I see the two children sitting on the ledge of the window, bare legs dangling outside. It’s only the second floor of the building, but they are so small that the distance seems enormous.
“Why are you here?” Koji yells.
“Why are you here?” Kim repeats after him.
“This is my home,” he says.
“This is my home,” she says.
“Go away!” he says. “I want to be alone!”
“But I want to be with you,” she says.
“She can speak,” Kobayashi-sensei says to Keiko.
“Yappari,” Keiko replies. Naturally. She cups her hands around her mouth and calls, “Koji! Go back inside! I’m going to come upstairs now. Mama is coming!”
As he shakes his head, one of his slippers falls off, sailing through the air before landing on the soft mound of snow, which rises higher than the lip of the swimming pool.
“Mukoo e ikitai!” he says. I want to go…
“No!” I yell, but too late. The boy doesn’t jump so much as drop from the ledge, holding his arms close to his body as he falls through the air with Kim, as always, just a second behind, her hair lifting above her in a black streak. As they land in the pool, first one child and then the other, the white mass seems to swallow them whole. The slush beneath the snow acts like water, yielding too easily, closing over their heads, as if they were never there at all. Keiko staggers toward the pool with me right behind her, but Kobayashi-sensei is faster than us both, diving into the slush and disappearing too. “Mukoo e ikitai,” the boy said before jumping. I want to go…Abroad. Far away. To the other side. This is the word his teacher used to describe where Kim and I come from. It’s also the word I used to describe where my dad ended up. Jampu shimashita. He jumped. I jumped. There are no pronouns in Japanese. The boy wanted to get out.
I don’t know how much time passes before Kobayashi-sensei finally resurfaces. Twenty seconds? Five? An eternity and a blink. But when he does, he is holding one child in each arm. They are wet and shivering and gasping for air, but alive. Alive. Keiko takes Koji in her arms. The little boy wraps his legs around his mom’s waist and she wraps her sweater around his body, pressing her forehead to his.
“I’m still here,” he cries.
“You’re still here,” she cries. She uses her thumb to wipe the snow out of his eyes, his nostrils, his ears, as if he were a newborn just entering into this world, still bearing the traces of the last. Kobayashi-sensei holds Kim like a baby too, on her back in his arms, rocking from side to side.
“Daijoubu?” he says.
“Daijoubu,” she replies, and the two teachers huddle closer together, each holding a child, oblivious to me as I slip away.
New snow covers every surface in the hutch. At first, looking through the wire mesh without seeing either animal, I assume that someone must have thought to get them out before this storm hit. Then I spot a vibrating mound. I let myself into the cage, and reach under the snow to scoop up the gray rabbit. His body feels almost too hot yet he shivers as I brush off his back, his head and paws. I tuck him into my shirt, under my jacket, close to my heart. I’m glad when he kicks me, relieved that he has a little fight left in him. He’s going to need it. His heart is pumping fast, an electric current that spurs me on. I climb into my car and turn on the heater, saying, “Gambatte, usagi-chan.”
Fight, little rabbit. Do your best for me.
At the dentist’s office, the hygienist shows me into the private room where I close the door before unbuttoning my jacket, reaching into my shirt and setting the rabbit down on the reclining seat. The animal scratches at the paper lining and I keep a hand on his back to keep him from jumping off. He trembles violently and tries to kick me again.
“Nani?” the dentist says. “What’s this?”
“His front teeth won’t stop growing,” I say. “He can’t eat.”
“Is it yours?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “He belongs to the elementary school. Koji’s school.”
“I am not animal dentist,” he says, reaching for the doorknob. “I can’t do.”
“Koji loves this rabbit very much,” I say in my slowest, clearest English. “He needs help, or he’s going to die.”
“Wakaranai…,” he stammers.
“You don’t have to understand,” I say. “I can pay you. I’ll give you free English lessons. I’ll do whatever you want. Just please help.”
“Wakaranai…,” he says again, but he is filling a needle with clear li
quid. “You have to hold him,” he says. “Hold him tight.” And so I press the rabbit to my chest, gripping both sides of his jaw to steady it as the dentist slides the needle into his mouth. His mouth softens, opens at last, and he relaxes in my arms.
PART III
Rabu-Rabu
SPRING
First day of spring—
I keep thinking about the end of autumn.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
kieru: (V.) to disappear; to vanish; to go out; to be extinguished
As usual, the senior technical boys are practically naked when we enter their classroom this afternoon. Often at the start of the period we find a few boys still changing out of their red nuclear power plant jumpsuits and into their school uniforms. But today all thirty are wearing nothing but saggy boxers or dingy briefs. It’s a rainy April day and their skin is puckered with gooseflesh, nipples hard and pursed. They sit at their desks in a parody of model pupils, smirking. “Please get ready for English class,” Miyoshi-sensei says, his voice shaky. He spins around to write the target sentence on the board, but he can’t hide the blush staining the backs of his ears or steady the tremble in his handwriting.
The factory foreman gets around: by car, on foot, in an airplane.
Once his back is turned, the boys resume doing whatever they were doing before we arrived: texting each other on their cell phones, playing video games, leafing through catalogues of sports cars, hairstyle magazines, and pornographic comic books. The comic book splayed in front of a kid named Nakajima shows a naked woman dangling from a meat hook, her legs spread and cuff ed, about to be penetrated by an advancing subway car. “Mazui,” I say, that’s disgusting! I grab the book and clap it shut, but the boy just opens it again, calmly flipping the page.
Nakajima is the senior technical class ringleader. While the other boys’ bodies are awkward works-in-progress, still puff y with baby fat or gawky, stretched out but not yet filled in, he alone looks finished, hard. He has no excess flesh, but oddly he’s the reigning high school sumo champion of Ishikawa. He looks like the figure on the gold trophy he won in last year’s competition—the lone trophy in the lobby display case—his skin tinted an orangey shade of brown from tanning lotion. Nakajima is also the reigning class ganguro, or “blackface,” with a perm the size of a football helmet and a gold medallion that nestles between his pecs, spelling out his “blackface” name in zirconium-studded pyrite: MCNakaG. His bolder classmates like to copy him, especially his habit of lingering in his underwear to delay class. I’m sure today’s prank was his idea.
“Please put on your uniforms,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “There’s a woman here, ne?”
“We can’t,” says a bulky kid named Sumio, one of Nakajima’s minions, who has Band-Aids covering his crusty nipple piercings.
“Why can’t you?” Miyoshi-sensei asks.
“Kieta,” says Nakajima without looking up from his comic book. They vanished.
Lots of things have been “vanishing,” ever since Miyoshi-sensei and I started team-teaching the senior technical boys in late February.
The boys aren’t supposed to be coming to the high school anymore. After taking their prefectural exams, they were scheduled to spend the last two months before graduation putting their technical training to use at Shika’s nuclear power station. Then the prefectural exams were scored and the scores averaged for each class. In English, Shika’s technical class averaged 4 percent, an all-time low for Ishikawa, according to the front-page headlines of the local paper. In her article, the reporter happened to mention that the senior technical boys were the only students at Shika High School never to have studied English with the native speaker. They alone had no idea how fun and useful English could be.
Those were the same words the principal used when he summoned Miyoshi-sensei and me into his office. Parents had been calling, and he had to placate them. So up until graduation, the boys would be returning from the plant every day after lunch, for a special English class with the two of us. We could teach them whatever we wanted, but our lessons had to be fun and useful. Miyoshi-sensei looked pale as he translated these terms in the hallway. “I thought I was through with them,” he said. “I have no fun or useful ideas. What will I do?” His dread was palpable, but I was almost glad for it. I still sensed a distance between us. He was perfectly polite, but that was the problem. This was the first time we’d spoken candidly in months. I told him not to worry, that I could bring in all of the fun worksheets and games I’d made for our other classes. “These boys are like wild animals,” he scoff ed. “Would you expect a tiger to fill in some worksheet? A gorilla to perform your skit?” I laughed and he groaned. “I wish they were tigers,” he said. “Tigers can jump through hoops. Gorillas can sign, ne? These boys are like fish. Cold and slippery. Impossible to hook.”
Before our first class, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the boys had sexually harassed their last female teacher, something the newspaper article failed to mention. I imagined them leering at me, making innuendos, maybe even groping me as I maneuvered between their desks. But the boys barely looked up when I entered their classroom. They didn’t stand or return my greeting. Not one of them filled out my self-introduction worksheet. They acted like I was invisible, ignoring Miyoshi-sensei too.
We’re still invisible. This doesn’t seem to bother Miyoshi. He simply ignores the fact that they are ignoring him, reading from the textbook for no one’s benefit but his own. I can’t stand it. An almost existential case of futility overtakes me every time we recite a dialogue from English for Busy People (“busy people” being a euphemism for laborers), our voices drowned out by their digital din. I keep thinking about those movies where an intrepid teacher transforms the difficult kids from apathetic thugs into model citizens, using spoken word poetry or ballroom dance or math. Of course I know that this is a Hollywood fantasy, but those movies always claim to be based on a true story. Maybe if I could find the thing that interests these boys, something they like doing and are good at, I could break through the wall and reach them. But every time I suggest that we try something different, from bringing in rap music to baking chocolate chip cookies in the school kitchen, Miyoshi-sensei shuts me down. “These students are eighteen years,” he reminds me. “Almost men. Probably we should stick to the textbook. Discourage any kind of…risky behavior.” Those words, “risky behavior,” are the same words he used in reference to the night we kissed. I always let the subject drop.
“Are they ready?” Miyoshi-sensei asks me, still facing the board. For some reason, the one thing that gets under his skin is when we find the boys undressed.
“No,” I say. “They’re still naked.”
I walk up and down the aisles, peering into the backs of their desks to see if any uniforms might be wadded up inside. Inside Nakajijma’s desk I see something square and silvery, something that looks a lot like my Marina bank.
The boys actually paid attention the day I brought in this bento box, filled with photocopied “Marina dollars,” my grinning face collaged over George Washington’s. I gave out freebies while Miyoshi-sensei reluctantly translated my explanation for how they could earn more: by saying hello, making eye contact, asking or answering questions. Basic politeness. “What can we buy with these Marina dollars?” one boy wanted to know. It was the first question any of them had ever asked me, and I peeled off several bills, telling him there would be an auction before graduation. “What will you auction off?” another boy said. “Cool things,” I replied vaguely. “Like what?” he pressed, earning more Marina money instead of an answer. The truth was, I hadn’t thought this far ahead, and it didn’t take them long to figure out that I had nothing to offer them, nothing fun or useful, because they stopped asking questions, stopped answering mine, even stopped accepting the Marina dollars I doled out as obviously empty bribes. I stopped bringing it to class. I hadn’t even realized that it was missing until now.
As I reach into Nakajima’s desk, my arm brushes his hot torso.<
br />
“Look what I found in Nakajima’s desk,” I say to Miyoshi-sensei.
“His uniform?” he asks hopefully.
“No,” I say. “My Marina bank.”
He turns around and scrutinizes the object in my hands, tilting his head to one side.
“This is the most common bento box,” he says, “available at 100-Yen stores everywhere. How can you be certain it is yours?”
“Because mine is missing,” I say, frustrated by his reluctance to take my side.
“Nakajima will graduate soon,” he says. “Probably he would not risk expulsion, stealing something he has no real use for. He has no real use for Marina money, ne?”
Instead of answering, I pry open the lid and turn the box upside down. If this were a movie, Marina dollars would flutter in an incriminating pile at our feet. Instead it spills a half-eaten rice ball, a banana, and a sparkly lavender cell phone. Without a word, Miyoshi-sensei crouches to retrieve these things, returning them to the box and the box to Nakajima.
“Did your uniform really disappear?” he asks the boy in Japanese.
“Obviously,” Nakajima snaps at him.
“Then why don’t you put your plant uniform back on?” he suggests.
“No way,” the boy says. “It’s soaking wet.”
“Please,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “There is a woman here. Hazukashii desu.”
“If Miss Marina is so shy,” Nakajima says, “then why does she always stare at us?” Miyoshi-sensei glances at me and bites his lip. If I refuse to look away when the boys are changing, it’s only because I don’t want them to think that they can intimidate me as easily as they intimidated their last female teacher. I wait for him to come to my defense. “She’s always staring at us,” the boy continues. “It’s perverted. Make her turn around. Then we’ll do her stupid English lesson.” His friends laugh and Miyoshi-sensei clears his throat.
“Miss Marina…,” he hesitates. “Maybe…do you think…could you please turn to look at the board?”
If You Follow Me Page 20