One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  “Listen,” my mother would whisper.

  The grasshoppers’ wingbeats whirred like tiny springs inside a watch. I would hold my breath and be absolutely quiet so I could hear them amid the chirping of the crickets and the buzzing of the cicadas. The arcs of the grasshoppers’ flight were like waves rising and falling, while the wind whistled through the pampas.

  Maybe in the year 2000, my mother and I will stroll in that pampas field and hear the grasshoppers again. I will be almost as old then as she is now, and she will be the age Grandmother Kurihara was. Maybe by then I won’t have to miss her or be angry at her for leaving me with a lie. Our time apart may seem like a long-ago, sad memory to reminisce about, the way old people often talk about the bombs and the famine during the war. “We’ll think of this time and laugh about it later,” Mother used to say when I was upset or sad as a young child. “No bad time lasts forever.” She would smile, comforting me, trying to believe it, I think now, herself. Maybe the two of us will be laughing in the year 2000. Anything is possible, I suppose; all kinds of things, good as well as bad, could happen in twenty-five years. But for now, I wish for the past, not the future. I would give anything to go back to my childhood, when I could stand in the field between my mother and grandmother, and all I had to do was listen.

  Chapter 3

  ON THE MOUNTAIN PATH

  The moment I walk up the rectory stairway into the Katos’ kitchen, I know that they have been arguing. Mrs. Kato jumps up from her chair and asks, “How about some tea?” Her voice sounds too chirpy, her smile looks too bright. Before I can answer, she is turning on the stove and measuring the tea into a small pot. Brushing her short, graying hair away from her square face, she smiles at me again.

  Pastor Kato puts down his bowl of rice and nods absent-mindedly toward me. He goes back to eating, dipping his chopsticks into the miso soup to scoop up bits of wakame seaweed. Kiyoshi won’t meet my eyes. The three pieces of toast on his plate are dry and cold. He is wearing blue jeans and the brown T-shirt he got at the Bible camp in Shikoku last summer, where he decided that he believed in God and wanted to go through confirmation. The front of the T-shirt has a picture of a big mountain with footprints all over it; on the back, the word Rejoice is written in rainbow colors above the New Testament passage—printed in white letters—about spreading the good news.

  While I reach out for the cup Mrs. Kato offers, Kiyoshi stands up abruptly, scraping the chair legs against the floor. The sound of his footsteps fade down the hallway toward his room. The door closes slowly but firmly.

  “How is school?” Pastor Kato asks me as I sit down in Kiyoshi’s chair. Pushing his reading glasses down to the tip of his nose, he peers at me across the table. He is tall and gangly. Dressed in a plain white shirt and baggy brown pants, he looks much older than my father. The round bald spot on the top of his head has been getting a little bigger every year.

  “School is already over for me,” I tell him. I don’t know why he forgets that our school always gets out earlier than the public schools. “Yesterday was the last day. I still have to turn in my essay for the time capsule contest, though. My teacher gave me some extra time.”

  “I’m sure your essay is worth waiting for.” Mrs. Kato chimes in.

  “I don’t know. This essay was hard to write. I finished it last night but I don’t like it.”

  “Always so hard on yourself,” Mrs. Kato says, frowning. That’s what she used to say to my mother. “Chie,” she would scold, her soft voice saying my mother’s name, which means “blessed with wisdom.” “Don’t criticize yourself so much. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “My mother didn’t write back, did she?” I know the answer from the expression on Mrs. Kato’s face.

  “No. Not yet,” she says, forcing a smile. “But I’m sure she will soon.”

  Mother has written only three times since she went away in January. Her first letter was full of apologies. She was sorry to have left me, to have kept me in the dark about her real plans until the last day; she wished she could see me or at least call me. “I miss you terribly,” she wrote, “but I know this was the only way I could live long enough to be with you in the end. Your father and I made each other very unhappy. I could not go on living in his house without feeling that I was being false to both myself and him, that I was living a big lie. He and I were always angry at each other; we could no longer feel kindness or love. Although your father and I were not married in a Christian wedding because he has never been a believer, I know that God does not intend any marriage to be like ours. Mrs. Kato and I talked and prayed together for nearly a year about what I should do; I consulted Pastor Kato, who also prayed with me. They both agreed with me in the end. My leaving was the only way—God will forgive me and keep you in His loving care. Of course, not being able to see you is the hardest thing for me. But, Megumi, you and I will live to be old women. Seven years is nothing. Let’s endure the hard times ahead. Even if I am not with you, I will be thinking of you day and night. Please try to forgive me for leaving, for lying to you about coming back in the spring.”

  In that letter, Mother was more honest than she had been in a long time—admitting her unhappiness and saying that the years ahead will be hard. Though I didn’t feel better, the letter made me want to forgive her. I wrote back and said that I understood, that I would try very hard to go on alone and be strong until we were able to see each other again. I meant that then, but I’m not so sure now. In the next two letters, my mother went right back to her pretending; she gave news about the early spring weather, Grandfather’s embroidery business, the neighbors—she made no reference to sadness or unhappiness, as though she were writing to me while on a vacation. It’s just like Mrs. Kato offering me tea in her cheerful voice when Pastor Kato and Kiyoshi must have been having one of their angry arguments about religion. Until last year they fought because Kiyoshi was not a believer; now that he is, they yell at each other just as much. Kiyoshi doesn’t think his father’s faith is strong enough, while Pastor Kato claims Kiyoshi’s beliefs are extreme, too unforgiving. If I were Mrs. Kato, I would be sick of the arguments by now. Still, that’s no reason to ignore them. Kiyoshi and I have been noticing this for a long time: Our mothers often pretend that our families are perfect and happy. Our mothers, who are Christians and profess to be truthful, should not care so much about keeping up appearances.

  I sip my tea slowly, listening for any noise that might come from Kiyoshi’s room. There is nothing. A few years ago, he used to slam his door and then play his rock music loudly enough to shake the hallway outside his room. Now he sulks in silence. Pastor Kato picks up the morning paper and continues to read, leaving Mrs. Kato to bring his dishes to the sink. He is a pastor, and he can cook; all the same, he does not pour his own tea or wash his own dishes when Mrs. Kato is around. Mrs. Kato rinses the dishes and sits back down to drink her tea. None of us says anything for a long time.

  “I’d better get going,” I say.

  “Wouldn’t you like something to eat?” Mrs. Kato asks.

  “No, thank you.” I bring my cup to the sink, leaving Kiyoshi’s uneaten toast on the table.

  “I’ll see you at church tomorrow,” Pastor Kato says, looking over his papers.

  “Yes. Thank you for the tea, Mrs. Kato.” There is no sound from Kiyoshi’s room. For a second, I consider going to knock on his door, but I don’t. It was rude of him to leave the table when I came in, including me in his angry silence as if I, too, were to blame. It isn’t my fault if his mother wants to speak to me in a cheerful voice. I didn’t ask her to pretend.

  I run down the stairs into the empty churchyard. There is no wind today. Under the maple tree, the three swings look like a row of minus signs floating in the air.

  * * *

  As I walk up the hill to my house, I wonder why Mother has not written. In my letter a week ago, I asked if I could call her on the telephone from the Katos’ house once a week. “Of course, Father has forbidden me to
speak with you,” I wrote. “But he said I couldn’t write to you either and you agreed to write to me at the Katos’ house. If I called you from there, it would be the same thing. I shouldn’t have to obey Father when his orders are so unreasonable. I don’t think it matters about being strictly honest. Even Pastor Kato knows the whole situation and does not mind your writing to me at his house.”

  I wish I hadn’t made such a stupid case. I should never have reminded Mother that we are already lying to Father in a way by writing to each other. Mother might have thought it over and decided that we should stop writing. This very moment, she could be trying to compose her last letter to me, her last letter for the next seven years. Maybe she hasn’t written yet because that final letter is so hard to write.

  I cannot imagine never hearing from her again. I would rather that she wrote twenty letters that made me angry, letters full of lies and pretending. When I was in grade school I used to get into fights with friends and say to them, “I’ll never speak to you again,” and they would say the same to me. But within two hours, we’d be talking again, even if it was only to call one another names or whine and complain about one another’s faults. It’s almost the same thing with my mother. No matter how angry I am with her, I can never say that I want to stop writing or speaking to her.

  Shivering, I turn up the collar of the purple spring jacket Mother sewed for me last year. The houses I pass have pots of pansies, spring mums, and yellow daisies in their windows and on the patios. There are no flowers at my house. Grandmother Shimizu has brought her bonsai trees from Tokyo: three pines with roots knotted and swollen out of the shallow soil like hardened hearts. She keeps them on a low table in her room. Once a month, she trims them, looking at the diagram in her book about how to keep them small, how to make them last. The bonsai remind me of the kind of person my mother did not want to become—shrunk and old, living with my father in bitterness. I have to admit, if I thought I were turning into such a person, I would have left, too. I would have done what my mother has done.

  * * *

  Father is in the kitchen, eating his breakfast of salted fish, rice, and miso soup. He is wearing a navy blue jogging suit in which he sometimes practices his golf swings in our yard. He came home from Hiroshima late last night and is still here, for a change. I wonder how long he will stay.

  Just like Pastor Kato, Father is reading the morning paper propped against his dishes. Unlike the pastor, though, he doesn’t have to wear reading glasses, and his black hair falls thick and shiny over his dark eyebrows. His eyes are sharp glints in his angular face. He is tall, but not in the gangly way Pastor Kato is. “You are lucky. Your parents are such a good-looking couple,” people used to tell me. “No matter which one you take after, you’ll be good-looking, too.” I never was happy to hear that. To me, it was obvious that my mother, with her oval face and large eyes, was by far the better-looking of the two.

  Grandmother Shimizu coughs and clears her throat but says nothing. She has had breakfast already. Every morning, she rises before six and eats a small bowl of rice, nothing else. Now she is hovering in the kitchen in her gray kimono, filling Father’s teacup every few minutes, straightening out the countertop.

  “Did you have a nice walk?” my father asks me over the newspaper.

  “Yes,” I reply, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “It’s a warm day. I walked down to the river.” I can’t believe how easy it is to lie to him, to not tell the whole truth. Lying to him doesn’t bother me anymore, and that’s the sad part. With everyone else, at least it troubles my conscience not to be completely honest.

  “So what will you do during spring vacation?” He puts down the paper momentarily and gives me a stiff smile, his “Now we will have a conversation” smile.

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. I try to keep my face blank, but my heart sinks at the thought of vacation. My friends are going out of town with their mothers, brothers, and sisters—mostly to visit their mothers’ families. What will I do alone?

  “Megumi should be studying,” Grandmother cuts in. “She should be thinking about transferring to a public school—if not this April, certainly next year.”

  I clench my fists; my fingernails dig into my palms.

  “It’s not even too late to transfer this year,” Grandmother continues. “The sooner she does it, the better. Her school gives her no real discipline. The public school children study twice as hard because they have to take tests. They are not guaranteed a place in a college the way she is at that school. But many of them will end up at national universities, while she can only go to a mediocre women’s college.”

  “Christian Academy College isn’t mediocre,” I say.

  “It certainly is,” she snaps back. “You are transferring to a public school soon and studying to go to a national university, just as your father did.”

  Father rustles his paper. “Mother,” he says, “I’m sure there is plenty of time to think about Megumi’s schooling. We don’t have to make decisions this morning.” He glances at me and nods slightly. You know your grandmother, he seems to be saying silently. Just let her talk.

  I glare back at him, wanting to stomp out of the room. How can he sit there and say nothing more in my defense? It’s his fault that I have to live with Grandmother. My mother would be here if he hadn’t made her so unhappy. Even if she had left, he wouldn’t have needed Grandmother to take care of me if he knew how, if he wasn’t planning to practically move to Hiroshima the moment Mother was gone. The least he can do when he is here is to tell his mother to shut up, to stop nagging me.

  Grandmother stretches her thin neck and smirks. She knows, and I know, too, that my father would never talk back to her. He might as well just move to Hiroshima and never come back, for all the help he is to me.

  “I don’t want to hear any more about my school being mediocre,” I say to Grandmother in the iciest voice as I can manage. “I’m not going anywhere else, and you can’t make me.”

  Grandmother Shimizu purses her lips and squints, tilting her head a little to the side. She looks like a crafty old woman, a witch from one of the fairy tales my mother used to read to me. “Why should your father pay a high tuition to send you to a private school he didn’t choose? It never was his idea.”

  “It wasn’t just my mother’s idea. I want to go there myself,” I protest. I want to sound calm and reasonable, but my voice gets shrill. Grandmother is a shrewd talker. She knows just how to make people feel afraid and confused so they doubt themselves and believe that she is right. She might convince my father to stop paying my tuition. She might force me to go to a public school where kids wear blue uniforms and take exams instead of art and writing classes.

  Father puts down the paper and sighs in an exaggerated manner. “I’ve been working very late every night. It’s Saturday. Can’t we all stop arguing and get along?” He tries to smile, first at me and then at Grandmother. “I’m sure we can talk about this another time.”

  His thin-lipped smile reminds me of the times he and Mother used to argue. Right after making her cry, he would go out and come home with some special gift for me—a toy, a necklace, a tin of cookies. He had that same smile on his face when he offered me those gifts, before I ran to my mother and he stormed out of the house again.

  “No, we can’t talk about it another time or ever again,” I yell at him now. “I refuse to go to any other school.” I turn around and stomp down the hallway. In the kitchen, Grandmother turns on the faucet. As I climb the stairs to my room, I imagine her squinting into the steamy dishwater as if she wanted to scrutinize each individual germ she was killing off.

  * * *

  Perched on a peach branch inside the pet carrier, the waxwing is making his cricket noises. He has eaten half the fruit I put in this morning. His hurt foot is grasping the branch almost as firmly as the other foot, though he is missing one nail. When I put in the branch three days ago, he immediately hopped onto it and stayed perched—before proceeding to strip
off all the buds and the blossoms. He shredded and spat out most of them but ate some. Now he is rubbing his beak against the bark like someone sharpening a knife.

  It’s time to bring him back to the doctor. I take down the cage from the hook above my desk; then I leave through the front door without saying good-bye to my grandmother and father.

  * * *

  “The bird looks very good,” Dr. Mizutani says, peering into the pet carrier. “We should let him go.”

  “Will he be all right?”

  The doctor opens the cage and pulls out the bird in one quick motion. Flipping him over, she examines his foot and nods. “His foot is almost healed,” she declares as she puts the bird back in the carrier. “If he were still curling his toes and dragging them behind, I would have asked you to keep him another week. We would have taped his foot around a little ball of tissue to hold his toes in the right position. That usually works. But he doesn’t need any more help. Did you see him fly?”

  I nod. “I let him fly around in my room after all. He landed on the windowsill and pecked at the wood.”

  “Your grandmother didn’t mind?”

  “She doesn’t have to know everything I do.”

  Dr. Mizutani smiles. “How did he fly?”

  “He was very fast. Sometimes he stopped in midair and changed directions or swooped down, like an airplane doing tricks.”

  “He’s ready to go, then. I’m glad we don’t have to keep him another week. Soon it’ll be time for him to migrate to Siberia.”

  “Siberia? That’s so far away.” Perched on one of the peach branches, the bird is preening his feathers. I cannot imagine how many millions of wingbeats it would take him to cross the ocean.