Other girls liked to talk about boys and romance.
When our classmates got into animated discussions about who they liked or which celebrity they wanted for a boyfriend, we would hang back a little and look on with polite smiles. They’d carry on about what present they gave some boy or what he gave them, whether they should tell a boy they liked him or how a boy had declared his love, and other silly stuff. We couldn’t come right out and say “Borrrring!” or anything so uncool. We would cock our heads slightly and say “Hey, that’s great!” and listen oh-so-sweetly. Later on, when she and I were alone, we’d have a good laugh and feel relieved. We weren’t being critical of our friends. Our laughter meant, You and I are on top of things, isn’t this cool? We felt a conspiratorial kind of satisfaction. We two always made a special combination.
In junior and senior high, especially since we went to a girls’ school, people’s expectations and desires concerning the opposite sex were extreme. Pick up any novel or newspaper, or turn on the TV, and everybody and his brother is in love, or at least that’s how it seems. But I always figured there must be a surprising lot of people out there who never loved anybody. It’s just that when everyone around you is excited about their little romances, it takes courage to come out and admit, You know, I’ve never actually been in love. I know, because I was like that.
When we got to school that morning, the classroom was livelier than usual. They must be carrying on about the usual stuff, I thought—somebody had made a declaration of love, or kissed somebody, or gone beyond kissing—so I paid no attention and just took my seat. But so many people were dying to tell about it that without my trying to find out, the information came to me.
“The art teacher’s getting married.”
So that’s all it was.
Well, well, congratulations.
In contrast to my outer expression, inside I was thinking spitefully, Ew, who’d want to marry that guy?
“Omigod!” Somebody gave an exaggerated scream.
Another voice said, “You’re kidding, right? I had a teeny crush on him myself!”
“Who’s he marrying? It isn’t one of us, is it?”
Young, unattached male teachers in a girls’ school get treated like pop stars. Scarcity value makes them prime targets of pseudo-love. The gossip went on.
“I heard it’s someone he’s been seeing since college.”
“Argh! Who knew there was somebody like that in his life! Argh!”
“Oh no, Saki’s crying!”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I spun around, but so many people were clustered around her that I couldn’t see.
“Saki, honey, I’m devastated too!”
“Don’t cry. I know what—let’s go find out for sure. We’ll ask him in person.”
A handkerchief covering her face, Saki was escorted out of the classroom by several classmates offering her their arms for support.
My total inability to share her sadness left me in shock.
To me, the art teacher was a tall man with delicate features, and that was it. I always thought the only reason she joined the art club was that she liked to draw. She alone had always been so special, giving no outward sign of any interest in casual romance or deep passion or feminine desire. I’d always liked that purity of hers, admired and respected her for it.
My agitation didn’t let up even after class began.
Saki, crying. Saki, grieved at heart.
Then why wasn’t I wounded and in tears?
Fleecy Clouds. Ever since she told me about the shop, I tried to keep an eye out for it on the way home, watching out the bus window, but nine times out of ten my mind would wander and I’d miss it. When the bus pulled up at the next stop I’d think, Rats, I did it again.
But today I didn’t miss it. That’s because I got on the bus alone and kept careful watch the whole time. The display window looked like a picture in a wooden frame, and in the back, lit by a spotlight, was a layered dress in soft bright colors. If you wore that dress to an art museum you’d fit right into an Impressionist painting, that’s how soft the colors were.
I got off the bus at the next stop and half ran back down the sidewalk through the rain.
I hate rainy days. I’m no good at carrying an umbrella. The umbrella cuts off my view of the sky. The sight of the damp, depressing sky makes me feel like a damp, depressing human being.
I raised my umbrella high in the air and looked up at the fancy sign of the boutique she admires so much. Then I screwed up my courage and went in. Why, I don’t know.
The saleslady started to welcome me, and stopped with a puzzled look.
Picking up the unspoken implication of her smile—What’s a high school kid like you doing here?—I said huffily, “May I try on the dress in the window?”
I took off my school uniform and put my arms through the sleeves.
That other day, she’d said that soon she and I would be adults who looked good in clothes like this. But all I saw reflected in the mirror was my gawky, freaky, high school self. I looked less like someone you might accompany to the art museum than someone who might put on a one-woman comedy show. That’s how pathetic my reflection looked, how different I was from the kind of person she aspired to be.
I liked Saki so much, but she lived on a higher plane than I did. Thinking it over, I couldn’t stop the tears when I realized how foolish I’d been to suppose I’d never been in love.
There in the Fleecy Clouds dressing room it came to me—for the longest time, I’d felt unrequited love for my own gawky reflection in the mirror.
The Zodiac Tree
by Thersa Matsuura
Izumi stretched out her arm, held up an index finger and began drawing slow circles in the air. At her feet hundreds of electric-blue dragonflies flitted in clumsy circles above a water-filled rice field.
“Do you think she can catch one before it gets dark? I got to be home before it gets dark.” Hideki was her eight-year-old brother Taka’s new best friend.
“Shh,” Taka said. “I had to be home an hour ago.”
A single dragonfly rose, hesitated, and neared her finger. It was just about to light when Izumi caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Something hit her hard on the side of the head. She fell to her knees.
“Ow!”
There was an explosion of laughter. Muck filled her ear, coated the entire right side of her face and neck, and oozed down the inside of her T-shirt. She raked the mess to the ground, standing to get a better look at what it was: a sopping wet mud clod, a handful of rice shoots growing from its top.
“Cut it out!” Taka yelled.
More laughter.
Izumi cursed, using the side of her hand to scrape the gunk from her face and fling it to the ground. Her eye stung so badly she couldn’t open it. Grit coated her tongue.
“She talks like a boy too.” It was Mai.
Mai was the tallest girl in her eighth-grade class, the most beautiful too. She was thin with a long delicate stem of a neck. Stunning in both her looks and her cruelty. Just last week she’d emptied an entire bottle of calligraphy ink into Izumi’s book bag.
Mai straddled her bike, her friends on either side. Another girl squatted down by the rice field holding one long sleeve of her yukata against her ribs. Her other hand was muddied and hovered over another tuft of rice.
“Izumi’s a boy’s name,” the girl with the pinched fox-face taunted.
“It is not,” Izumi’s brother said. Hideki tugged on Taka’s shirttail as if signaling that this wasn’t a fight they wanted to get mixed up in.
“Listen, it’s going to be dark soon,” Izumi said, leading the boys to their bicycles. She rested one hand on her own bike’s seat while holding the heel of her other hand up to her streaming eye. “You two go home.”
“But—” Hideki rattled an empty plastic cage at her.
“We’ll catch some tomorrow,” she said. “I promise.”
Taka stuck out his bottom lip and shook h
is head.
“You know mom’s going to be upset,” Izumi told her little brother. “I’ll be fine.”
The two boys hopped on their bikes and sped off, hugging the side of the road farthest from the bullies.
“That’s it, run away!” The squatting girl’s arm was buried almost to the elbow as she loosened another mud clod.
All four girls wore summer yukata—flower and goldfish prints in pastel pinks, blues, and yellows—bright-colored obi wrapped neatly around their waists and tied in large springy bows at their backs. Their long hair was pulled up and secured with silk flower pins and combs that dangled strings of fake pearls.
“Look at them go,” Fox-face Girl said, leaning on her handlebars, one sandaled foot hiked up on a raised pedal.
The pebbly mud turned sour in Izumi’s mouth. She spit twice on the ground.
“There she goes again. She thinks she’s a boy,” Mai said. “I bet she wants to be a boy.”
The two girls flanking Mai laughed and rang their bicycle bells in agreement. Squatting Girl shook the throttled handful of rice shoots above her head, slinging drops of mud all over her baby blue outfit.
“I do not,” Izumi said. It was just the way she was. It had always been easier hanging out with boys. Even before the terrible thing happened, before her mother yanked them out of school and moved them in with her grandparents, out here in the middle of nowhere.
“Hey look, she’s crying!” It was the girl on Mai’s left, the one with the fall-away chin and the high, perpetually shiny forehead.
“I’m not crying,” Izumi dabbed at her stinging eye with the tail of her T-shirt.
“She’s a boy and a crybaby,” Mai declared.
“Come on, let’s get her!” Squatting Girl scrambled to her feet, readying the dripping ball of gunk for a throw. “One, two—”
Izumi didn’t wait; she jumped onto her bike and tore off down the dirt road toward the town. Right behind her she could hear the furious pedaling, bell ringing, and crazed shouting of the four girls. Izumi turned down the main street and immediately skidded to a halt. There were people everywhere.
The summer festival had started, and it looked as if the entire town had turned up, everyone dressed in rainbow-colored yukata and jinbei. Already Izumi heard the drums and flutes of Obon music in the distance. It almost seemed as if the festival-goers were hypnotized by the jangle of music, as if they were being led out of their homes, down the street, and to the town’s only temple.
One by one the four girls’ bikes squeaked to a stop immediately behind Izumi. They whispered sharply amongst themselves, probably debating whether or not to continue the fight with so many witnesses present.
“I need to wash this off,” Squatting Girl whined, dropping her weapon at her feet and holding up her mud-plastered arm with a horrified look on her face.
“Hey, I think I see Hiro and Tatsumi over there,” Fox-face Girl said, noticing a group of boys from the school’s soccer team.
“My house,” Mai said, and then addressing Izumi directly, “We’re going to be back, so you’d better hope we don’t see you again.”
Laughter and bell ringing continued as all four turned to leave. After a couple of steps Squatting Girl looked back over her shoulder, stuck out her tongue, and used her finger to pull down the skin under one eye, leaving a gray fingerprint on her cheek.
Izumi considered going home. She imagined her mother back from work, pulling on her apron to help her grandmother with the evening meal. Taka would no doubt be stepping all over the heels of her slippers exaggerating the incident at the rice fields. He worried about Izumi too much. But despite his alarm, her mother wouldn’t listen.
Izumi learned six months ago that her mother’s own grief had paralyzed her. She almost never left the house anymore except for work, and she tried to keep everyone close at all times, Grandma, Grandpa, and especially Taka and Izumi.
Sometimes when she couldn’t sleep at night Izumi toyed with the idea she’d lost both parents instead of one. The last place on earth she wanted to be right now was home.
There was only one choice left: the zodiac tree.
Izumi wove her bicycle through the crowd while above her the sky changed to a bruised blue-purple. Strings of red paper lanterns flickered and swung in the muggy summer breeze. Their golden glow led the mesmerized throng up the thirty-five stone steps where they would pay respects to the temple itself before descending again.
Izumi steered around a circle of people—everyone dancing with hands cupped and fans raised, spinning and clapping in unison—and made her way between the busy food stalls. The mingled smells of grilling soy-sauce-dipped corn on the cob and steamed meat buns made her wish she’d left home with at least a five hundred yen coin in her pocket. At the foot of the steps she moved away from the gathering and over to the quieter, practically unlit side of the temple.
Of all the trees that surrounded the two-hundred-year-old building, the evergreen oak stood the grandest. Its humongous trunk and scraggle of a thousand limbs was a net of protection. She placed both hands on the rough bark and asked the tree if it would be okay if she climbed. Even in the early evening the countless cicadas continued their midsummer screeching, and she took the fact that not a single one of them stopped and flew away when she invaded their territory as a sign that she was welcome here.
Izumi worked her way up the zodiac tree until she reached her usual branch. It was wide and comfortable, and from it she had a perfect view of the temple yard below, all lit up with paper lanterns. It’s where she spent almost every day after school observing the monks swishing about performing late-afternoon chores in their dark layered robes. She knew their routine by heart.
There were twelve monks, and she could identify them all by their gait or their profile or the shape of their bald heads. She knew who pushed wet towels up and down the wooden floors that surrounded the structure, who plucked small pieces of trash and errant weeds from the temple grounds, and who wielded a long stick to carefully remove spiders and their webs from the rafters.
Occasionally visitors made the trek up the steps to cast offerings into the slatted wooden box, afterward clasping their hands together and praying for health or money, marriage or good grades. She liked to guess their stories. What was it they wanted so badly?
Every day at five-thirty sharp a boy appeared and swept all the steps from top to bottom. She tried to imagine his story as well, but couldn’t. He was tall, probably a high school student. And his black hair reached his shoulders, so she didn’t think he was a monk or a monk in training. She couldn’t figure him out. All she knew is that when he shouldered his broom and disappeared around the corner it was time for her to head home.
Izumi heard a familiar squeal and looked down. No more than fifteen meters away stood Mai and her cronies. A line of four boys fidgeted across from the hysterically laughing, overly animated girls. Only Mai was calm. She was spooning shaved ice into her mouth and concentrating on the cutest boy at the end.
The sight prompted a wave of anger in Izumi. The dried muddy patch on her head and neck prickled and itched. She began picking at the flaking dirt, stripping it from her hair wishing she could get even, but knowing it was impossible.
It was at that moment she remembered the animals.
Izumi stood up carefully on the fat branch and looked around. She examined the turns and twists in the wood, she gently poked a finger into several knotholes she knew sometimes held the presents. But there was nothing.
That’s okay. I’ll try again tomorrow.
She stretched out one leg and dug deep into her jeans pocket, pulling out a small black bag. She tugged the drawstrings open and plucked out a random good luck charm. A dragon. Ah, she loved the dragon. It was the size of her little finger—all of the animals were—and it was carved from some fragrant wood. She inhaled the creature. Japanese cedar, she guessed. The details were astounding, she could make out the dragon’s eyes and scales, its claws, and even its long
flowing whiskers.
She remembered the day she’d found this one. She’d had a huge fight with her mother and left the house in tears. She’d curled up in the oak for half the day thinking, whispering her problems to the bristling leaves. She’d discovered the dragon when she returned the next day. It was nestled in the crook of a low branch.
Then came the others. They always appeared after a particularly bad day, as though the tree were trying to comfort her, to give her something to smile about, to be her friend. She had collected eleven animals in all. There was a dog, a rabbit, a mouse, but it took until the snake before she realized they were the animals from the zodiac. She replaced the dragon in its pouch and stuffed it back into her pocket. Only one more left to make twelve, she thought.
Below her the bullies and their boyfriends had spread out a mat on the ground and continued their flirting sitting down. They weren’t the only ones. Quite a few couples and families were lounging around the temple grounds on mats and large plastic picnic sheets. It almost looked as if they were waiting for something to happen.
Suddenly the tree shook, and the resting cicadas screeched and took flight. Someone was climbing her tree. Izumi’s heart thumped high in her chest. Who could it be?
Her answer came immediately with a huff, when two hands grasped the thick limb across from her. A foot—a black-and-white Converse high-top, actually—hooked over the branch and with a grunt there appeared a boy, pushing himself up. He was tall with mussed-up hair, wearing the jinbei shirt and shorts that boys typically wore to summer festivals.
“Hi,” he said, smiling and finding his balance.
The boy looked familiar, but it was hard to tell in the dim glow coming from the festival below.
“Hi,” Izumi answered.
The boy brought his other leg over the branch, so that they were facing each other now. Izumi’s perch was a little bit higher, but because he was taller than she they were nearly face-to-face, their bare knees almost touching.
“You’re way up here,” he said, glancing down and then up before looking her straight in the eyes.
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