by Sachi Parker
I didn’t see Yuki at the hotel after that. I discovered later that Mom had arranged her flight back to Japan. She and I were going to head back to the United States in a day or so. Everything was back to normal—but it wasn’t. That night, the guilt kicked in big time. What had I done? How could I have told such a story? What would happen to Yuki now?
I couldn’t sleep. I was racked with remorse. I had to tell Mom the truth. I went to her room and woke her up, at about three in the morning. In retrospect, I probably should have waited for a more civilized hour, but I had to come clean now. I had to be absolved.
“That wasn’t the truth, Mom!” I recanted. “Yuki didn’t take the tickets. I just made that up so I could have something to eat. I don’t know what happened to the tickets. They just disappeared!”
There was silence for a moment.
“So, you were lying?” she said finally.
“Yes!”
“So, you’re a liar.”
This wasn’t going the way I wanted. “Yes…” I continued, losing a degree of my confessional zeal.
“So, how do I know you’re not lying now?”
“Because…I’m not.”
Mom stared at me. She was probably giving me the Look, but it was too dark in the room to feel its coruscating effect. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
She walked me back to my room. All the way, I insisted that Yuki and I were both innocent, nobody had stolen anything, the tickets had just disappeared. That was the absolute truth!
Mom pushed me back into my bedroom, and shut the door. I heard it lock.
• • •
WE flew to New York the next day and stayed at another fancy hotel, where I was again locked in my bedroom and denied food. “You can come out when you decide to tell me the truth.”
I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I’d been punished for telling the truth, and then when I finally lied, I was set free—until I told the truth again and was tossed back into my cell. Should I just lie again?
No, I couldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
Out of desperation, I took to checking my suitcase, over and over again, scouring every corner of it, praying for the lost ticket somehow to materialize. It couldn’t be in there, of course, because I’d never put it in there in the first place. I had plenty of time on my hands, though, and who knew? Maybe there would be a miracle! It was as if I were expecting the fox gods to do me an extra favor and exert their magical influence across the ocean.
A few days later, we moved on to Los Angeles. I was eagerly looking forward to the flight, just so I could get some peanuts to eat.
Back in Encino, I was given the run of the house, but my relationship with Mom had gone from cold to ice-bound. She wouldn’t speak to me. I was a thief and a liar, and I was heading for a huge demotion in the next life.
What really scared me was that soon I would be going back to Tokyo to confront my dad. Let’s face it: if Mom could react with such unreasonable fury, Dad might spontaneously combust.
It was while I was starting to pack up for the flight when I looked into the corner of my empty suitcase, and—
There it was! The plane ticket!
I picked it out of the corner of the suitcase and stared at it in amazement. How…?
I didn’t know how. I still don’t. I’d searched that suitcase from top to bottom, maybe hundreds of times, and there was no way it could have been there. But there it was.
I was stunned. My heart was pounding. I had to show Mom right away. I rushed down the hall to her room, but then, when I confronted her closed door, I stopped dead, terrified. How would she react? Would she hug me to her and apologize for doubting me? Or would she still freeze me out?
I knocked gently. “Mom? Mom?”
There was no answer. I tried the doorknob. Locked. I knocked again. “Mom?”
After a long silence, I heard the lock on the door click open. I waited for the door to open. It didn’t.
I don’t know how long I stood outside her door—afraid to walk in, afraid of my mother—but I had to go in. I had to tell her.
She was sitting in her king-size bed surrounded by magazines. Self-help magazines, women’s magazines, entertainment magazines. She was reading one now.
I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for her to look up at me. She didn’t. She gave no recognition of my presence whatsoever.
“Mom,” I said with a weak hopefulness, “I found the ticket.”
She didn’t respond. She kept reading.
I went on. “It was in my suitcase. I don’t know how many times I looked in there, a million, and it wasn’t there. But then I just looked, and there it was.”
This again seemed to make no impression on her.
I held the ticket up. It was my last gambit. “See?”
Finally Mom looked up, stared at the ticket, and regarded me with a cool indifference.
“Leave,” she said.
I stared at her in disbelief, hoping I’d misheard her, hoping she would say something else.
“Leave the room.”
So I left. I don’t remember leaving, I don’t remember where I went afterward—I probably fled back to my room—but I remember feeling that something seismic and terrible and irrevocable had taken place between my mother and me. We had had our first break.
I called Yuki soon after to give her the news about the ticket turning up. Her response was a rather scornful “No kidding.”
It was apparently too late to clear her name, because the story was already out in her Tokyo neighborhood. It seems my dear “stepmother” Miki had quickly spread the rumor that Yuki’s mother had masterminded the theft from afar, instructing her daughter to steal the tickets and cash them in, so she could send the money back home to her. It was pretty close to the story I’d told Mom. Miki must have heard it from Dad.
Both Yuki and her mother suffered a good deal of ostracism and social persecution because of this story, so I couldn’t blame Yuki for being angry at me. In fact, she had no reason ever to forgive me for what I had done, except that she had been there in that hotel suite. She knew what had happened.
Even today, Yuki and I still wonder about those tickets. Where did they go? Did one of the matrons take them? Or are they still sitting somewhere in that office in Charters Towers, collecting dust?
More mysteriously, how did that other ticket get into my suitcase? I could have just overlooked it, but that seems close to impossible. Was it even the same ticket? Did someone plant it there? Who? Why?
• • •
A few days later I returned to Japan, where I feared even harsher retribution from my father.
But no, he was not troubled at all. In fact he took it very much in stride. “So you lost the ticket.” He shrugged. “Things get lost.”
I was shocked. “Really? But all that money…”
He waved it off. “Pah—money! As long as you got home safe, that’s the main thing.”
I was bewildered by his sangfroid—also relieved—but still, I wanted to make sure he understood my side of the story. “It wasn’t my fault, Daddy. I gave them my ticket at the beginning of the year, and then when they opened up the box, it was gone!”
He nodded. “Look, Sachi, it’s not important. Even if the ticket weren’t gone…even if you did cash it in…”
“But I didn’t!”
“It doesn’t matter. I know you must have had a good reason for doing what you did. Look, you finally found the ticket, right? So it’s over.”
I could see he didn’t believe my story. “But—”
“Don’t worry about it, Sachi. When you get to be eighteen, I know you’ll tell me the truth.”
I don’t know what being eighteen had to do with it, but six years later, when I turned eighteen, I sought my father out and told him again, in pretty definitive terms, that I’d been totally innocent in this affair, and so had Yuki, and that the tickets had just disappeared. That was the pure, unvarni
shed truth.
Dad nodded knowingly. I thought I saw a trace of pride in his smile, as though he were thinking, She’s sticking to her story, even after all these years. Cool.
Chapter 5
From Here to Zagreb
I returned to Charters Towers the next year, as did Yuki. The Strange Affair of the Lost Tickets slowly faded from memory, and our friendship resumed its usual comradely competitiveness.
I was thirteen now, in full-rigged adolescence, and naturally inclining toward romantic dreams and schoolgirl crushes—and since I was surrounded mostly by fellow schoolgirls, my first big crushes involved females. (I wasn’t going to get all dreamy-eyed over the flatulent Mr. Gerard.) I wasn’t unique in this regard: all the younger girls at the school had big crushes on the older girls. This had nothing to do with sex. It was all very innocent and pure of spirit. Yet the power of the emotions, the from-the-heart intensity, was so overwhelming and all-consuming that some girls would hyperventilate, get hysterical, go into catatonic trances of longing.
My great crush was Sarah, a prefect with bright red hair and freckles, who was maybe two years older than I. She was so sweet and so friendly. I was crazy about her. I don’t know if she realized the depth of my infatuation, or if she even suspected my interest. She probably had her own crush on somebody older. That’s how it worked: the love kept spiraling forward in a great, continuous daisy chain of unrequited desire. The hallways were thick and humid with yearning.
I was unaware of anyone else’s passions, being totally absorbed in my own little drama. Sarah would pass me in the hall, and my heart would leap. Sometimes she’d smile at me, and I’d lose my breath. If she happened to touch me, if even just her clothing brushed against me…electricity! A week’s worth of daydreams!
Eventually the obsession faded, and I moved on to the next infatuation. I had lots of crushes at Charter Towers. About the only girl I didn’t have a crush on was Yuki. We knew each other too well.
The following year, I switched schools—and found myself in Switzerland. Aiglon College was located high in the Swiss Alps, not far from Montreux and Lake Geneva. It was a spectacular location, a magnificent series of chalets set in a picture-postcard Alpine valley cradled by tall, snowy peaks.
Also spectacular, for me, was that Aiglon was a coed school. This was one of the reasons I petitioned Dad to leave Charters Towers. The all-girl ambience was starting to feel unhealthy to me. I remember telling him quite seriously, “I want boys.”
And I got them: an international smorgasbord of boys in blazers. I soon discovered that while I liked girls, I loved guys. They were so cute, and funny, and full of energy.
And they loved me. Perhaps because I had such an open innocence, they were always flocking around me, flirting in a sweet way. I adored the attention, but I was still shy and deferential in my Japanese way, so not much happened. Except in my head.
I really had a great time at Aiglon. It was sunnier than Bexhill, nowhere near as cold and dank and dispiriting. The food was wonderful, and there was all that Swiss chocolate. And the mountains, and the forests. And the boys.
My grades were still terrible, true; I was an abysmal student. Then again, my father had already convinced me I was an idiot, and I had demonstrated no capacity for learning at any level, so I didn’t care. I was supposed to be stupid.
So instead of going to class, I would sneak off to the Alps. I’d go skiing, or rock climbing, or skipping through fields of wildflowers, doing my best Heidi impersonation. In the spring, I’d slip out of the dorm at night and climb up the forest path to a glacier lake, and I’d skinny-dip in the moonlight. It was crazy and irresponsible, I know, but it was quite wonderful.
The great love of my Aiglon College days was Gabriel Connolly. I’ll never forget him: a short, dark-haired British kid, sort of a Dudley Moore type, who had a mad crush on me. He thought I was gorgeous, and I thought he was funny, so it was a great match. Gabriel was from Liverpool, and he was probably on scholarship, because he had a slightly unrefined, street-smart air about him, so different from the other privileged kids at the school. A tough, manly Dudley Moore.
One night, I was in my dorm room on the fifth floor, lying awake in bed fantasizing about marrying Gabriel Connolly and having the perfect life. My roommate, Katie Sokoloff, was sleeping peacefully. Katie was from Greenwich, Connecticut, from wealthy, entitled stock; ironically, she was very good friends back home with the man who would become my husband some twenty years later. Right now, though, she was just the girl snoring in the other bed.
Suddenly I heard a light tapping on my window. I knew who it was right away—my Romeo, my dashing cavalier! He had climbed up the side of the building in the dark, using a rope. I couldn’t let him in, not with Katie right there, so I climbed out. We went down the rope together—five stories, mind you—with Gabriel carrying me in his strong arms. It was the quintessence of romance.
Together we went into the woods and climbed up to my favorite glacier lake. All shyness gone, we took off our clothes and went swimming in the nude. The water was ice-cold and thrilling. When we came rushing out of the frigid lake, Gabriel wrapped me in a blanket. Then we kissed: my first real kiss, with tongues and everything. The cold had made the blood rush to the surface of my skin, and I was suddenly boiling hot. The rush of sensations was overwhelming: the cold, the heat, the full moon, Gabriel’s lips, Gabriel’s hands, the sweetness, the tenderness…I thought I would pass out.
That’s as far as we went: a little petting, a little swooning. This was plenty far for me. We came back down the mountain, hand in hand, and climbed back up the rope, and he delivered me safely to my bed. Another kiss or two, and he was gone. While Katie slept on.
No, I’ll never forget Gabriel Connolly.
• • •
THE first moments of 1971 found me at the New Year’s Eve party at the Kanaya Hotel, high on a mountaintop in the Japan Alps. I was fourteen years old, and Dad was dancing with me. I now loved dancing with him, because he made me feel so grown-up and special. There was a disco ball overhead, scattering dreamy patches of light everywhere.
As we circled the dance floor, Dad pointed out an elegant European woman sitting at a table.
“That woman is quite beautiful. Don’t you think?”
He turned me around on the dance floor so that I could see. Yes, she was beautiful.
“She reminds me of Eleanor Parker,” he said. “The actress?”
I shrugged blankly.
“She was in The Sound of Music. She played the Baroness.”
“Oh.” Of course I remembered her. Everybody hated the Baroness.
“I was good friends with her,” Dad said.
I looked at him in surprise. Who? The woman at the table?
“Eleanor Parker,” he elaborated. “She was very special.”
At the same time he was telling me about Eleanor Parker, his hand slid down from my waist and patted my fanny—and stayed there.
That struck me as very odd.
“She was a real woman—lovely, sophisticated, a classic beauty,” he said, still holding on to my bottom. “You should watch some of her movies. You’ll see what I mean.”
I was getting some very confusing signals. Why was Dad grabbing my butt this way, as if I were his girlfriend? And why was he going on and on about Eleanor Parker? I sensed that he was conveying a message to me: that this actress was his idea of a truly desirable woman, and he was telling me—he wanted me to know—that I didn’t come close to measuring up to her. I needed to be sexier and more beautiful if I wanted his approval.
Yet, why would I need that kind of approval? I wasn’t his lover. I was his daughter, wasn’t I?
• • •
IT was the end of my second year at Aiglon. I was fifteen years old and waiting to go home. I wasn’t sure who was coming to pick me up, Mom or Dad. There hadn’t been any communication or instructions—I wasn’t even sure where they were—but I knew someone was coming. So I packed up my suitc
ase and waited.
The rest of the students were already leaving. Some had their parents pick them up; others took the bus to Lausanne and grabbed the train, heading off to various parts of Europe. The school was emptying out.
Still no sign of my parents. People were starting to get a sense of my plight. “When are you leaving?” they’d ask.
“I don’t know,” I’d say bravely. “But pretty soon. It won’t be long now.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!”
Of course, as soon as someone asks you if you’re okay, you start to realize that maybe you’re not okay. What happens if nobody shows up? And the college and the dorm rooms are all shut down? Where will I sleep?
At the same time, I was sort of enjoying the drama of the situation. I was like young Ebenezer Scrooge, left behind at the Christmas break. Nobody wanted me home. Nobody cared! At the same time, it was the perfect opportunity to be swept away in a wild European adventure. I was exhilarated by the prospects.
It was the next day now, however, and the last students were trickling out. Even the staff was leaving. I began to sense that I was in real danger of being abandoned there. Who was going to take care of me? I was starting to panic. As the last few students waved goodbye, I waved back cheerfully. I didn’t want to share my agitation. I didn’t want to make trouble.
Finally, my schoolmate Jane Wise, the last soul on the premises, was going off to catch the train at Lausanne. She saw me sitting by the front steps. “Are you okay?”
I thought about giving her a reassuring nod and sending her untroubled on her way, but I couldn’t keep my upper lip stiff any longer. “I don’t know,” I answered plaintively. “I don’t think anyone’s coming to pick me up!”