If You Follow Me

by Malena Watrous

  “Don’t say good-bye.”

  “Don’t use any words to suggest separation. It’s bad luck.”

  I follow him through the hotel’s front doors, where he congratulates the receptionist, hands her his gift envelope and steps out of the way so that I can congratulate her too, and hand her mine.

  The wedding is beautiful, somber, largely incomprehensible to me. Noriko wears a white kimono, white face powder, a white Shinto headdress that looks like a boat made of paper. True to Hiro’s predictions, it is not a jolly affair. No music plays as she walks down the aisle and no one gushes over how lovely she looks, although she does. Her father cries, and to my surprise so do I, just a little, as she and the dentist pledge to spend the rest of their lives together.

  At the reception, Noriko changes into a meringue of a Western wedding gown. She and Taichi sit on wicker thrones on a small stage, holding court while the rest of us dine on a sticky pasta carbonara with little flecks of nori. Hiro is seated at the table right beneath the stage. I wish I were up there next to him, across from Keiko and Yuji Ishii. Instead I am at the Shika High School faculty table, next to my new supervisor, Takeuchi-sensei.

  Takeuchi-sensei is a woman in her late fifties, recently divorced, as several teachers have taken it upon themselves to inform me. She dyes her hair a stark, matte black, and seldom touches up her gray roots, so that it looks like a wig that’s sliding off. She has virtually no eyelashes and a voice with two volume settings: a whisper and a yell. When we teach, she stands at the back of the room, leaning against the wall with her eyes closed, keeping them closed even when she yells, “Shizuka!” Be quiet! The girls can’t stand her. Teachers from adjacent classrooms often pop their heads in to make sure that everything is okay. “Fine,” she whispers, closing her eyes again. “Everything’s fine.”

  In the past three months, Takeuchi-sensei has made exactly one contribution to lesson planning. One day, she brought a stack of index cards to class and asked all of the girls to come up with a personal motto. “Words to live by,” she explained in Japanese. “Like an advertisement for yourself.” For her own motto, she was torn between “Shop ’til you drop,” and “A penny saved is a penny earned.” When she asked me what my motto was, I plagiarized a Beckett quote I’d memorized in college. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” She made no comment, but later I discovered this index card—which I’d tossed into the recycling bin—displayed under her clear plastic desk cover, next to a picture of herself beside her teenaged daughter, in front of the Statue of Liberty.

  “Do you like a Japanese wedding?” Noriko asks me. She is making her rounds, handing gift boxes to each guest. I nod and smile and thank her for my favor, forgetting whether I’m supposed to do that or not. “You look beautiful. Are you having fun?” I ask, remembering too late that one is not supposed to seem too happy at a Japanese wedding, that it’s not meant to be a fun occasion. But she nods and says that she is having a good time. I’m also not sure whether it’s rude to get up and go talk to the guests at other tables, but I decide to take to heart what Hiro said to me earlier: no one expects me to get everything right. There are some advantages to being a temporary person here.

  “Hey,” I say, standing between Hiro and Keiko. “What are you guys talking about?” I have had a few glasses of champagne, just enough to make me bubbly.

  “Yuji and Hiro are talking about fun things to do in New York,” Keiko says. “I told you Yuji could find golf. He always finds golf on his vacation.”

  “It was not vacation,” Yuji says, smiling as he does whenever he speaks English.

  Recently, Keiko and Yuji invited Hiro and me over for dinner: Japanese pizza, with corn and dollops of potato salad, unexpectedly delicious. I didn’t know that Hiro had been invited too. We each went straight from work, in separate cars, but we got there at the same time and I watched him watch me climb out of my car window. He didn’t mention it, but I was still ashamed. At dinner, we all traded local gossip. Another petition to shut down the plant is circulating. Lone Wolf’s show is moving to prime time. One of the male teachers at the junior high got arrested for soliciting sex via cell phone from what he thought was a thirteen-year-old girl, but was actually an undercover cop. After we ran out of gossip, we played a simplified version of the game Taboo, where the goal is to get your partner to guess the word written on a card, without using that word directly. The first card I pulled had the word “gorgeous,” written on it.

  “Beautiful,” I started the game.

  “Cherry blossoms,” Hiro guessed.

  “Pretty,” I tried again.

  “You,” he said, blushing when we all laughed.

  “Fumiya,” Fumiya broke in, breaking the tension beautifully.

  Fumiya and Koji were partners, and Fumi turned out to be good at Taboo, as long as Koji gave him the same prompts and repeated those cards several times. “You” became the cue for him to say his own name. “Greeting” prompted him to say “Hello.” I noticed that Koji loved to prompt him, edging as close to conversation as his brother can get for now. We had a good time, all six of us. Keiko seemed relaxed around Yuji. I would’ve said that they had a happy marriage. But tonight at the wedding the air between them is tense.

  “You should give your wife a break,” I say impulsively. “She needs a vacation too.”

  “Hear, hear,” Keiko agrees, raising her own glass of champagne.

  “She is mother,” Yuji says. “You know our situation…maybe there is no vacation from this.”

  “It’s not our situation,” Keiko says. “It’s our son.” She looks at me as if for encouragement, and I want to cheer her on, but I also don’t want to overstep my bounds, or to make things worse for her. “I think you could take care of them,” she says, carefully cutting into her strawberry chiffon cake. “Just for one night…”

  “Where would you go?” he asks. He’s still smiling, but now it looks like the pasted on smile of a gymnast trying to execute a tricky landing.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe to onsen hotel.” There are hot spring hotels all up and down the coast, all-inclusive places where people go during the summer to relax, get pampered, have their every need anticipated.

  “Who would you go with?” he asks, looking at her a little sadly.

  “I don’t know,” she says again. “Maybe with Marina?”

  “I’d love to go,” I say. “I’ve never been to a Japanese onsen, and I’d be too nervous to go by myself. What if I did the wrong thing?”

  “It’s true, there are many rules at Japanese onsen,” Hiro says, with a glint in his eye.

  “What rules?” Yuji grumbles. “It’s just a bath.” But then he says, “Okay.”

  “What?” Keiko says, fork frozen in midair.

  “I can take care of the boys for one night, ne? It’s not that difficult.”

  “Thank you,” Keiko says. He doesn’t speak, but when she offers him the bite of her cake, he opens his mouth and lets her feed him, just like the newlyweds onstage.

  Afterward, in the parking lot, Hiro asks me whether I like the car. “It’s really nice,” I say.

  “It is really nice,” he agrees. “Probably nicer than a temporary person should have.”

  “What?” I say.

  “I’m not patronizing. I did not buy for you. It’s…loaner. On a test drive. Situation is, this car has only nine months left of shakken.” Shakken is the Japanese equivalent of insurance. “Your contract has nine more months. And the car you are driving is not safe. If you had an accident, you might not have time to climb out window. I think you had better buy this car. If you like it, I mean. I can negotiate a very good deal for you.”

  “I love it,” I say, accepting the keys. ‘Thank you so much, Miyoshi-sensei.”

  “Hiro,” he reminds me.

  Tonight, Hiro and I are taking turns soloing. We are at Big Echo, in a karaoke box that is truly just a box, a booth facing a screen that displays song lyrics and plays videos that are hopeles
sly out of sync with the words. On the drive back into town from Noriko’s wedding, I mentioned that I wasn’t really tired, and he suggested that we could maybe sing some karaoke. This is the first time we’ve done this since the night we kissed, all those months ago.

  Now he is singing The Beatles’ “Nowhere Man.” His eyes are closed, which means he knows the words by heart, and also that I can look at him without his knowledge. His skin is pale and smooth, except for the faint laugh lines fanning from the corners of his eyes. There’s a tiny nick in his earlobe—the trace of an old piercing? A remnant of a wilder youth? One of his sideburns is a few millimeters shorter than the other, and his upper lip is fuller than his lower lip. He is all charm points. His forehead and cheekbones are shining, damp from singing in this hot box of a room. The speed is off—this beat of the slow song is galloping forward—and it’s his doing. Between verses he keeps reaching for the dials of the control panel, accelerating the rhythm so that he can barely catch his breath. Onscreen, a frustrated dolphin repeatedly leaps out of its Marine World tank and belly flops.

  “That was great,” I say when he finishes and the room is once again silent.

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “Please do not give me a compliment I did not earn. Then I worry that you are not honest with me.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Your voice sounded good, but it was a little fast.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I wanted to finish this song quickly. I wanted it to end.”

  “Then why did you choose it?”

  “Sometimes I come here alone to sing,” he says. “I sang this song alone before, but I never paid attention to words. He’s a real nowhere man. Sitting in his nowhere land. Tonight I realized that this could be me. A nowhere man.”

  “You are not a nowhere man,” I say. “You’re here with me.”

  “Yeah,” he says again, placing the microphone in my hand. Our fingers touch briefly before he pulls away. I flip through the catalogue, wishing the songs were listed not just by title, but also cross-referenced by meaning or purpose. There are songs about love in so many mutations and guises, love offered and rejected, accepted and betrayed, remembered and missed and sparking, sparkling, new, but somehow none of them are quite right. I’m about to pick an ABBA song—“Supertrooper,” which as far as I can tell means absolutely nothing at all and is therefore totally safe—when I find it. The risky but almost perfect song to say what I haven’t been able to say without the cushion of a melody, the aid of a rhyme, the cheat-sheet of someone else’s phrasing.

  The words, “in the style of Patsy Cline,” flash on the screen, where for once the video almost makes sense as a backdrop for the music. A Japanese girl in a Country Western dress and cowboy boots square dances with a Clint Eastwood look-alike.

  I fall to pieces…

  Like Miyoshi-sensei, I sing with my eyes closed. I launch my whole heart into the song, trying to outpace my nerves, to remember what he told me once, that we only forget how to sing when we learn to be afraid.

  You want me to act like we’ve never kissed…

  Under the table, I feel his knee against mine. I shift slightly, just to make sure he knows that we’re touching, that he’s not mistaking my leg for the table.

  You walk by, and I fall to pieces.

  “It’s so sad,” he says when the song ends.

  His knee is still there.

  “All of the best songs are sad,” I say.

  “It’s true,” he agrees. “Why is this?”

  “I think it’s because they help us feel things that are hard to feel. It’s like you wrote in one of your letters, if you say to someone, ‘I’m lonely,’ you just sound needy, but if you sing it, you turn it into something beautiful, and you give them a way to share the experience. Then you become less lonely.”

  “You remembered what I wrote,” he says, sounding amazed.

  “Of course,” I say. “I love your writing.”

  “I also don’t want to be just your friend,” he says. “I also don’t want to pretend we never kissed.” I want to say, “What?” I want to ask him to repeat himself, to make sure I heard him correctly the first time. But instead I stay quiet. “Mari-chan,” he says, “how about your friend, the one you lived with before? May I ask what happened?”

  “She moved back to New York,” I say.

  “But before, I think you had some kind of…special friendship.”

  “She was my girlfriend.” Now he’s the one who doesn’t speak. It would be easy to offer a partial version of the truth, but I don’t want to lie to him about something this important, or anything. “I met her right after my dad killed himself,” I say. “I think she brought me back to life. I know that sounds dramatic, but that’s what it felt like. I was in shock. I was numb, and she made me feel things again. She made me do things I never would have done on my own, like come to Japan. If not for her, I have no idea where I would be right now, but I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Then I am glad you met her too,” he says. “You must be sad that she left.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I am sad. I loved her. I still love her, and I miss her, but our relationship didn’t work. It wasn’t right, especially after we moved here.”

  “Because you are both a woman?”

  “I don’t think that’s why,” I say slowly. “I think I can love a woman or a man. I really don’t have a type.”

  “You don’t have to pick,” he says. “You have so many options.”

  “I guess it might seem like that,” I say, “but love is rare.”

  “Sodesune,” he agrees.

  “What about you?” I ask, my heart migrating into my throat. “Is there anyone special in your life?”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “Oh,” I say. “Anyone I know?”

  “I am private person,” he says.

  “Of course,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “Last fall, when you kissed me, I felt sort of shocked. I was your supervisor, ne? To have workplace romance is very…frowned over?”

  “Frowned upon.”

  “Frowned upon,” he repeats.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again.

  “But now I am not your supervisor. For many reasons, I am happy about this.”

  “I made a lot of extra work for you.”

  “Yeah,” he says, leaning closer. “This is one reason.”

  Under the table, we clamp our legs together to steady their trembling. I lean in too, he shuts his eyes, and the distance between us collapses. Right before we kiss, I wonder what this means, what will happen next, whether I’m making a mistake. Will we have to keep this relationship a secret? Will it become a relationship? Will people disapprove?

  Then I stop thinking.

  I stop thinking and just give in.

  It is the lot of the dead to wander.

  These words come from a guidebook entry on O-Bon, the Japanese festival of the dead. Next to New Year, O-Bon is the most important holiday in Japan. At O-Bon people return to their furusato, their hometowns, to visit shrines and pay tribute to their departed family members, and to talk with them. Apparently, the dead are wandering all the time. That’s their lot. But only at O-Bon does the invisible barrier separating the dead from the living lift. We can’t see the spirits, but they can see us, and hear us, and hear our prayers. To celebrate O-Bon, all faculty and students get the week off. But everyone I know, including Hiro, is busy with familial obligations, so I spend most of my time swimming, and reading books my mother still sends in regular care packages.

  My mom is seeing someone now: the cabdriver who brought her home with all of the groceries she couldn’t carry back from Supermarket Singles’ Night. He helped her carry them inside, and then he said that she must be feeding a crowd, and when she admitted that she lived alone and had no idea what to do with all that food, he offered to fix her a meal. She’d bought salmon and potatoes, he could see them in the bag, and he said, “When I look at these ingredients, it makes me want to cook a
fish curry for you, the kind that cooks slowly, for a long time over a gentle flame, until the potatoes almost melt in your mouth.” And she asked if he meant it, and he said that he did, and within twenty minutes the curry was simmering softly on the stove, while he went out and finished his shift, and by the time he came back later that night it was exactly the way he’d described it.

  “Mom,” I said, when she told me the story, “was that safe?”

  “I guess not,” she said, “but it was wonderful. Scary, but wonderful.”

  I had told her that I wanted her to move on with her life. I know that I want her to be happy. She is a hot-blooded woman with love and affection to spare, who shouldn’t have to be alone. Still, it’s like Carolyn said. We are moving forward, further into the future, further away from my father, and in some ways this makes me miss him more. Sometimes I yearn for the raw time when his death was still so fresh that I could feel the displacement of the molecules in the air, not yet closed around the space he left behind.

  One especially hot morning in the middle of O-Bon, I wake up coated in sweat. The humidity is visible, a brown veil obscuring the horizon. Just like every other day, I walk to the beach wearing my yukata over my bathing suit.

  I’ve almost reached the water’s edge when I see them, thousands upon thousands of jellyfish, strewn across the wet sand, turning over in the surf, floating in the water near the shore. They are not clear, unlike other jellyfish I’ve seen. They are blue, bluer than the sea itself. Hiro warned me that they would come—no, that they would return—on this very day, but somehow this makes the sight even more stunning.

  I can’t go swimming today. I can’t float on my back, lose myself in the sea, allow the waves to push and pull me where they will. The jellyfish have returned, and they are getting in my way. My father was deeply cynical about anything spiritual. He believed that people find signs because they want to find them, see ghosts because they want to see them. He always said this dismissively, as if believers were a little dim-witted, to be pitied in their faith. But he also had a wicked sense of humor. “Is this your idea of a joke?” I ask, not expecting a reply. It may be the lot of the dead to wander, but what about the living? What’s our lot? I stare at the jellyfish, borne in and out by the current, tossed onto the sand and picked up, again and again.