One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  Dr. Mizutani thinks that over for a while. “If he does love you,” she says finally, “he isn’t likely to disown you and risk losing you forever, is he? If the only way you will live with him is to see your mother—to live with her for the summer—then he will have to accept that in the end.”

  “I’m not sure,” I say, completely confused. I don’t know how we got from talking about the big trouble I am in to my making demands on my father. But the doctor looks so calm and reasonable. Anything she says, I think, is worth considering.

  “Besides,” she says, “think about how he would look, disowning you and forcing you to grow up in poverty.”

  “My father doesn’t care much about appearances,” I have to point out. “As soon as Mother was gone, he went to live with his girlfriend in Hiroshima. That’s why he’s never home. Everyone he works with must know about her. He’s not embarrassed by that.” I look down, ashamed even though my father’s affair isn’t my fault.

  But the doctor just shrugs. “A man is never criticized or shamed for having mistresses. That’s why your father doesn’t care. If anything, he wants everyone to know that he has a girlfriend. Now that your mother is gone, he doesn’t want to look like a poor deserted man; having a girlfriend helps him save face. If he disowned you, it would be different. He would come across as an irresponsible man who lets his own daughter live in poverty while he makes a good living and stays with his mistress. He wouldn’t want to look like that.”

  She may be right. My father does care about appearances enough not to marry his girlfriend. He might not want to embarrass Grandmother Shimizu by seeming irresponsible any more than by having a big divorce trial.

  “I think you would be safe to make your demands,” the doctor continues. “He is not going to disown you. You can insist on seeing your mother, on going to your school. You have every right. He can’t forbid you. He will never go to court to try and keep your mother from seeing you. Going to court means publicity, bringing shame on the family. He’ll never do it. I know about these things, Megumi. The man I was married to gave me a divorce in order not to embarrass his family. At first he and his family thought our divorce would make them look bad. They wanted me to pretend that we were still married and I had come back to Ashiya to take care of my parents. I insisted I wouldn’t live with a lie like that. I didn’t want to be connected to his family at all. He had to agree in the end because going to court would bring him and his family more embarrassment than getting quietly divorced, so he settled with my family’s lawyer in a private mediation. Your father, too, will do whatever he can to avoid lawsuits.”

  “But what if he decides to disown me or go to court anyway? What can I do then?”

  “You won’t have to face that alone, Megumi,” she says, “because I’ll do what I can to help you.” She leans forward and looks into my eyes. “If your father wants to go to court, I’ll get my family’s lawyer to help you. If he disowns you, then you can come and live with my family, go to Christian Girls’ Academy, and spend summers with your mother. I won’t let you be poor. I know how lucky I was to have money, how much shame I was spared because of that. No one will insult me to my face because my father is a rich man. I can’t just stand by and watch you and your mother suffer or be humiliated.”

  The way she tries to smile, I know she means every word. She will indeed take me in if I have nowhere else to go. She will look out for me and make sure that I won’t live in shame or poverty, just as she didn’t have to. Suddenly, I am so relieved that I want to cry again. I am not falling off a cliff after all. Dr. Mizutani is telling me that she is my friend—and my mother’s friend, too. “I don’t know how to thank you,” I say. My voice sounds choked up.

  “Don’t worry, Megumi,” Dr. Mizutani says, smiling. “I’ll always be there to help you, but you won’t even need my help. Your father won’t disown you or stop paying your tuition. If he is anything like most other people, he cares a lot about his reputation. He won’t do anything that will cause him to lose face or look stupid. His concern about appearances is your best advantage.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “It’s worth calling his bluff. If that doesn’t work, we’ll come up with another plan. Trust me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No need to thank me.” She shrugs. “It would be no imposition, even if you were to need a place to stay. My father and I helped some of my cousins—my mother’s nieces—go to college because they had no money and we did. I didn’t know them that well. Helping you would be a pleasure, not an obligation. I enjoy your company, Megumi. The minute you showed me that waxwing, I knew I’d enjoy getting to know you.”

  That bird is in Siberia, pecking at the early spring berries, building a nest. By now the week he spent in my room eating cut-up grapes and chirping on the windowsill must seem like another lifetime to him.

  * * *

  My father and grandmother have locked the door even though it’s only five o’clock. I pull the key chain out of my pocket and open the door; I want to laugh at their stupidity. How can they lock me out when I’m fifteen and I have had my own key for more than three years?

  I enter the house and go straight to the kitchen, where my father is drinking tea and, as usual, my grandmother is hovering over him. Both of them glare at me in silence. My father is in the brown suit he usually wears while traveling. I remember what Dr. Mizutani said about everyone caring about appearances. Maybe she’s right. My father does not want to scold me in his usual relaxing-at-home outfit of an old kimono and long underwear.

  “I’m sorry I lied,” I admit right away. “I should have told you that I was getting letters from Mother and talking to Toru on Sunday nights. I was doing nothing wrong. I had no reason to hide anything from you or to be ashamed of myself.”

  The two of them glance at each other. She sticks her chin out toward him and then nods.

  “You and I will talk in my study,” Father announces to me as he slowly rises from his chair.

  I follow him down the hall while my grandmother stays behind, pretending to clean the kitchen. In his study, Father sits down in his large leather chair. There is no other place to sit, so I stand near the door. Around us the walls are lined with his books, all of them about money and banking and insurance.

  “You have disappointed me, Megumi,” he declares in his extra-deep voice. “Your grandmother has told me everything.”

  “No, she hasn’t,” I snap back. “She can’t tell you everything because there is a lot she doesn’t know.”

  Completely ignoring my point, Father says, “I have specifically told you not to visit or write to your mother. You have disobeyed me. You made me look like a fool by involving the Katos and your veterinarian friend. As if that weren’t enough, you lied to Grandmother and went driving around with a boy at night.”

  “The boy was Toru Uchida. You remember him. I wasn’t sneaking around with some strange boy.”

  “You know nothing about men,” my father raises his voice. “This boy is twenty or twenty-one. You have no idea what boys think about, sitting in a dark car with a young girl. You were lucky nothing happened.”

  If I weren’t so mad, I would laugh. Most of the time that Toru was sitting in the dark car with me, he was thinking about another girl. My father has no right to assume the worst about Toru and make him sound like a bad person.

  “Toru would never hurt me,” I declare.

  “You don’t know.”

  “Yes, I do. He cares about me more than you do.” I picture Toru taking the dead butterflies out of the glass case, holding them delicately by their wingtips and burying them, one by one. If my father owned something that hurt me, the way Toru’s butterfly collection had, he wouldn’t give it up—he wouldn’t bury it or throw it out and say, “I just didn’t want to see you cry.” More likely he would keep explaining in his dry and reasonable voice about how wrong I am to be hurt, how right he is to do what he wants to. “Toru would never hurt me,” I repeat,
“because he is a kind person. He cares about me more than you do. That’s the truth.”

  My father says nothing for a long time. He narrows his eyes, as if concentrating on some important thought. He drums his fingers on the arm of the chair and sighs, still saying nothing. Finally he mutters, “I work hard for you.” His voice is low and weak; he swallows hard. I have never heard him sound so pitiful before.

  Maybe I should feel sorry for Father. He can’t help not caring for me the way Toru does. Father has never cared about anyone enough to give something up for them. Even when I was very young—before Father had a girlfriend—my mother was often unhappy because he worked late every night and then went out with his work friends on weekends. He never gave up an hour of work or a day on the golf course to make Mother happy. Now he must know that Grandmother is unhappy because he had asked her to give up her house and live with us, only to abandon us himself. He will never give up his girlfriend, or even any of the time he spends with her, for Grandmother’s sake or mine. He is different from everyone else in that way. Not only my mother and Toru, but all of my friends—Mieko, Noriko, Dr. Mizutani—would give up things for me if they had to, and I would do the same for them. Maybe he can’t help being different. That is a reason to feel sorry for him, just as I would feel sorry for someone who couldn’t appreciate beautiful colors or music because they were color-blind or tone deaf.

  “I work hard for you,” he repeats. “I send you to an expensive school, a school I don’t approve of, only because you want to go there.”

  As I stare at him, my anger comes back. He doesn’t have to remind me of all the things he pays for.

  “When your mother left, I thought about taking you out of that school,” he continues, his voice getting louder with every word. “Your grandmother thought I should. But I didn’t. Do you know why?” He stops, waiting for me to answer.

  “No, I don’t know why.” My voice sounds stiff and wary. I can’t help feeling suspicious. My father never asks questions because he wants to know the answer. He is only trying to trick me.

  “Because I felt sorry for you,” he says. “I thought you would feel bad enough with your mother leaving the way she did. I didn’t want you to have to change schools, another thing you had to adjust to. To be honest I didn’t think you would be able to handle so many changes, psychologically. That’s why I kept you at your school. I didn’t want you to fall apart.”

  He is saying that I should be grateful. He is reminding me that he did think about me after all. But the way he says it, the way he keeps squinting at me, doesn’t inspire gratitude at all. His eyes have a small gleam of satisfaction. He sticks out his chin a little, as if to taunt me. What he said is rude and unfair. He didn’t have to make me sound like a pitiful character, a girl about to fall apart. None of my friends would talk about me in that way, to my face or behind my back.

  “I don’t care how hard you work to send me to school,” I say. “You are my father. You are supposed to send me to school, it isn’t a special favor you are doing for me. It doesn’t give you an excuse to act the way you do. You are the most selfish person I know. I’m ashamed to be your daughter.”

  My father stares at me, his eyes bulging out. I’m not sure if he is too angry to speak or just surprised.

  “You gave me no choice except to lie to you about Mother’s letters. You had no right to forbid me to hear from her.”

  “Your mother left you,” he says in a quiet voice. “If she truly loved you, she would have stayed, no matter how unhappy she thought she was. You are better off without her. We are both better off.”

  He sighs as if he truly believed that. And maybe he does, but that makes no difference.

  “How can you say that, when you were the one making her unhappy? You have no right to say that she should have put up with the unhappiness you were giving her.”

  “But she made me unhappy, too.”

  Maybe that is true. “I don’t care,” I insist. “If my mother had made you leave and I had wanted to see you, she would have allowed me to. No matter how she felt about you herself, she would have let me hear from you because she loves me.”

  My father is silent for a long time. I think he must be trying to come up with an argument to prove me wrong. But when he finally speaks, he asks me something completely different. “If I had left and you were living with her, would you have asked to see me?”

  I look down at him slouching in his chair. For the first time I notice where his hair is looking brittle and almost gray along his temples. His face looks pale and pasty; there are circles under his eyes. Even those people who used to say that he was good-looking, if they saw him now, they wouldn’t think that anymore. Just like my mother he is unhappy, if not for the same reasons. I should feel sorry for him. But I don’t. I can’t help telling him the truth. “I don’t know,” I reply, “probably not.”

  For a second, he slouches even more, looking as if I had punched him. But then he straightens out. His back goes rigid and his face hardens, thin and determined. In his sternest voice, he says, “I forbid you to receive any letters from your mother. Because you lied about them, you can no longer see the Uchida boy, the Katos, or the veterinarian.”

  “You can’t forbid me,” I retort. “I don’t have to do what you say just because it’s your house. You don’t even live here. You live upstairs from a bar with a girlfriend who wears orange lipstick.”

  “Don’t you ever talk to me in that way,” he threatens. Hard, thin lines ridge his neck—he is gritting his teeth, but I’m not afraid of him anymore. Dr. Mizutani is right. He can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do, when I am in the right and he is in the wrong.

  “I’ll talk any way I want to,” I reply as calmly as possible. “When school is over, I am going to stay with Mother and Grandfather Kurihara. If you don’t want me to come back here after that, I’m going to live with Dr. Mizutani. She already told me I could live with her and go to Christian Girls’ Academy. She knows the whole story. I don’t care if you disown me. I have a place to go to.”

  Before my father can say anything, I walk out of the study, slamming the door behind me for good measure. Down the hallway, the kitchen is absolutely quiet. My grandmother must have been trying to hear the conversation; she would have had no chance, especially with her bad hearing. Grabbing my shoes from the foyer, I go out the door.

  * * *

  The sun is just setting behind the mountains to the west, but the sky is still a dark blue instead of black. In the east, the three-quarter moon looks pale and thin, like the lemon slices Keiko and I used to put in our tea. Her mother could slice the lemon so each piece was a whole circle, paper-thin. Keiko and I were clumsy, or maybe we were distracted by the fear of cutting our fingers; we could never get the knife to go down straight. Our slices looked like that moon—crooked, imperfect circles.

  From the end of our block, I look back at the Yamasakis’ house. The light is on in Keiko’s room. She must be getting ready for the Bible study meeting, making up her face so it looks as though she had no makeup on, choosing a dress or a blouse that will show off her figure yet look modest. It will be a long time before I can forgive her for telling on me—and Kiyoshi, too, for giving away my secret to her, for thinking of her as someone he should trust.

  I don’t want to spend any more time thinking about them. I walk down the hill toward Toru’s bar. It’s only a little after six, so I will be early. Maybe I can go into the bar and call Dr. Mizutani from there and tell her that everything will be all right.

  Toru will be happy and surprised to hear of my new summer plans. The first time we talked, he told me how he got his way with his father and grandfather. They threatened to disown him if he didn’t go to college, but backed down as soon as he moved out of the house on his own. Our first talk was only early last month, but it seems like a long time ago. Back then, I had thought he was more resourceful than I, or luckier in being older, being a boy. I know different now. Being a girl or being
younger wasn’t the problem—what matters is having someone to count on: Toru had an older friend, I have Dr. Mizutani. Calling a bluff is like being a circus acrobat, I suppose. Though we don’t expect to fall off the wire, we can’t climb up there unless there’s someone holding a net underneath just in case—someone we can trust. Laughing to myself at the thought of Toru and me on a circus wire, I stop walking and look down the hill.

  The lights are coming on fast in the city. They glitter white, orange, red. I think about my mother in the countryside, in a drafty house next to a pampas field, which is pitch-dark after sunset. Moving from the living room to the kitchen and back again, she would collect the cups and plates the guests had left—trying to balance as many as possible on her strong hands but being careful. She must be so tired, and sad, too, remembering her mother’s death. I try to send her all my love. Wait for me, I think to her. It won’t be long now.

  Chapter 10

  THE PINK ROSE

  At four-thirty in the morning, the sky is dark outside my windows. Even my grandmother is still asleep. I walk quietly down the stairs and the hallway to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of orange juice, and sit down at the table. Without the light on, I can feel my grandmother’s silent anger floating around in the dark.

  In the week since she found out about my lies, she has said about twenty words to me: Dinner is ready; Lock the door; I am going to bed; The telephone is for you. Every night we ate in silence except for the clicking of our chopsticks, the occasional scraping of a spoon or a fork against the plates. Last night, as I was bringing my dishes into the sink after supper, I stacked my glass on top of the dirty plates in a clumsy way. I dumped the potato skin, which she thinks we should eat because of the vitamins, into the sink instead of scraping my plate carefully over the garbage can. Grandmother didn’t scold me. She glared in such a cold way that I knew never to try that trick again. I can’t irritate her out of her angry silence and make her talk to me.