One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  I have not seen much of Father since our argument. By the time I came home after talking to Toru on Sunday night, Father had already gone back to Hiroshima. He came home only once, late Wednesday night, when I happened to be downstairs making a cup of tea. In his usual stiff voice, he asked me how I was. “Fine,” I said, picking up my cup to bring it back to my room. He made some small talk about the trains being crowded, about all the rain we have had even though it isn’t the rainy season yet. I couldn’t tell whether he was talking to me, to my grandmother, or to both of us. “I broke my umbrella,” he said. “I should go and buy a new one.” Then he disappeared into his study and I didn’t see him again; he went back to Hiroshima the next night after work. He never mentioned our argument: He didn’t ask me if I really meant to spend my summer with my mother; he didn’t say whether or not I could live in his house afterward.

  I used to get angry with my mother for pretending that nothing bad ever happened in our family. But at least my mother didn’t just clam up; on the contrary, she talked a lot. Whenever my father, grandmother, or I said or did something inconsiderate, Mother found kinder, however mistaken, interpretations and reasons for our actions. That’s how she tried to make us sound or look better than we were. She never pretended that we hadn’t said what we said, that certain conversations had never taken place. I had plenty of opportunities to contradict her instead of silently resenting her for being falsely cheerful. With my father and grandmother, there is no talk, no chance for me to say anything. All I can do is to sit there, worried about what they are really thinking.

  Maybe my father and grandmother are doing what Keiko and I used to do in grade school, when one of us was very angry. We would pretend that the other person didn’t exist. Once, she walked the ten blocks from our school to our houses, staring at me without any expression as if I had become invisible. I kept asking, but she wouldn’t tell me why she was angry. She showed no sign of hearing me. My voice might as well have been the scarcely noticeable stirring of hot air, not even a breeze. Finally, I broke down, cried, and begged her forgiveness though I had no idea what I had done to offend her. If my father and grandmother are trying to do the same thing—biding their time till I am so lonely for conversation that I’d agree to say and do anything—they might as well stay silent for the rest of their lives. I am too old now to fall for that trick.

  It’s almost time to go. I put my empty juice glass on the table and stretch my arms over my head. I’m still stretching, feeling sleepy, when the door of my grandmother’s room slides open and she comes walking down the hallway in her mud-brown kimono. She flicks on the kitchen light and grabs my glass while I am sitting dazed in the sudden brightness. At the sink, she begins to rinse the glass.

  “I was going to do that,” I protest. She doesn’t have to pretend that I am irresponsible about the dishes.

  Without a word, she washes the glass in steaming hot water and soap, scrubbing hard as if the orange juice—or maybe I—had contaminated it.

  “I am going to visit my mother,” I announce while she is drying the glass with a dish towel.

  No answer, of course.

  “Dr. Mizutani is driving me there in her truck. I told her I would meet her at the clinic.”

  I am just getting up when Grandmother says, “Wait.”

  I sit back down, irritated. Why does she have to choose this moment to say something when she has had the whole week? It’s nearly five o’clock. I told Dr. Mizutani that I would be there at quarter after.

  My grandmother doesn’t speak. She pulls open the refrigerator door and stands scowling at the contents. After a while, she pulls out the two eggs I boiled last night for the birds—once a week, I feed all the baby birds mashed-up boiled eggs mixed with yogurt to give them a protein boost. My grandmother peels the eggs at the sink, letting the shell fall into an empty bowl in jagged pieces like paint chipped off a wall. In another bowl, she mashes up the eggs, the potato masher coming down hard and steady in her hand. By the time she puts a dollop of mayonnaise into the bowl and looks for the salt, I know that she is making my lunch. Don’t bother, I can tell her. I don’t want lunch. But I keep my mouth shut. Her face has an irritated and put-upon look—her bottom lip sticking out, the corners of her mouth wrinkled. It isn’t the icy, silent glare she has shot at me all week. In the bowl, the eggsalad is a pale golden color, not very different from what I offer the birds. I remember the herb tea and the broth she made for me at her house in Tokyo, when I was sick. I can almost hear my mother saying, “Grandmother Shimizu is a good person at heart. She is from another time. Being strict is her way of showing love.” There must be a better way of showing love and kindness. What I want is an apology, not a sandwich. But I know an apology is never coming. I can accept the food she offers—or I can throw it in the sink, make a scene, and leave the house feeling angry and self-righteous.

  My grandmother finishes making the sandwich and wraps it in wax paper; she puts it inside a paper bag with an apple and a can of soda. She brings the bag to the table and puts it down with a thunk.

  She doesn’t say, Have a good trip; Give my regards to your mother; or It’s nice of Dr. Mizutani to bring you there. She hasn’t made any food for Dr. Mizutani. But Grandmother Shimizu cannot be who she is and still do any of those things. To say or do something so normal and polite, she would first have to be turned into someone else, by one of the genies or good witches in my mother’s fairy tales. Even when my mother was trying to be cheerful, she had to admit that Grandmother didn’t know how to show love or concern. As I put my hand on the bag lunch, I let myself imagine throwing the bag against the wall—the apple would bruise, the soda can might explode. In a way, it would be satisfying to stay angry. But that’s what I’ve been criticizing Grandmother about—how she prefers to complain and stay mad. I can’t do the same when she is trying to make a kind gesture.

  “Thank you,” I say, trying to keep the begrudging tone out of my voice. “I’ll be back in the evening. It won’t be very late.”

  No words come out of her mouth as she stands between the sink and the table, with a frown on her face.

  I get up to leave. “Please don’t worry,” I offer before turning away.

  * * *

  While the doctor is getting ready, I go out to the backyard with a flashlight to change the water inside the birdcage and fill the food dishes. All the birds are asleep—the sparrows perched side by side on a high branch, the grosbeak alone on a middle branch, and the brown-eared bulbul ruffled up on the piece of wood that sticks out above the door. Each bird has been flying well, eating on his own, getting ready to leave. Dr. Mizutani and I are watching the weather forecast and waiting for the first stretch of mild days without rain or strong winds. It could be any day next week.

  Stepping outside the cage, I drop a few pieces of cut-up meat and berries into the crow’s dish. He must be asleep in one of the maples, his black wings folded up against the new green leaves. He has been flying around with the other crows in the neighborhood, sometimes chasing them away from his dish. Every week we give him a little less food. By the end of next week, Dr. Mizutani says, we will stop altogether. She puts out a lot of food in the yard for all the birds in our neighborhood—seeds, fruits, corn, suet. If the crow wants to eat here he can, without having his own special dish. He is looking better these days, much less ragged. In a month, his tailfeathers will grow out completely and even we won’t be able to tell him apart from the other crows.

  When I come inside, Dr. Mizutani is putting food in a cooler—bread and cheese, apricots, cherries, cans of juice. I take out my lunch and put it in, too.

  “I’ll trade my sandwich for an apricot,” I joke. “My grandmother made me a sandwich, after not talking to me all week.”

  The doctor raises her eyebrows. “Your grandmother should have been a Trappist monk.”

  I laugh, thinking of the monks up on a hill in a suburb near my school. My mother used to buy tins of the butter cookies they baked. They a
re the monks who never speak. When I was in grade school, I used to get them confused with vampires, probably because of their black robes. I believed that the monks who baked the cookies slept in coffins and turned into bats at night. I didn’t realize then that not speaking would be much harder in a way than sleeping in a coffin or even turning into a bat.

  “Grab that Thermos, all right?” the doctor asks me.

  We load the car in the gray light before sunrise. There is a faint band of orange across the water and along the eastern sky. The trees are coming into focus. As we pull out of the driveway, I remember the first all-day field trips I went on from school, back in first and second grades. My mother would get up before dawn to pack a special lunch for me and to walk me to the schoolyard, where the bus was waiting. We were always the last ones there. While I boarded the bus, she stood with the other mothers, all of them trying to look happy with tight, scared smiles on their faces. The way they waved to us when the bus started moving, no one would have thought we were only going to be away for ten or twelve hours at the most. Back then, being apart for the whole day was a big event. Now, after four months of separation, I am coming to see her, and she doesn’t even know it. She has no idea.

  * * *

  Somewhere north of Osaka, as we drive on the highway past the small suburban factories and offices, the sun comes up. I have been telling Dr. Mizutani about how I tried to provoke my grandmother into talking last night.

  “Your grandmother sounds a little like my mother-in-law,” she says.

  I glance away from the gray factory buildings toward her. It’s so hard to picture her with a husband or a mother-in-law. Sitting behind the wheel in her denim jacket, white linen blouse, and jeans, she looks like someone who has always been young and carefree—not at all like an unhappy wife or daughter-in-law. In spite of the early hour, she doesn’t look tired, sleepy, or grumpy in the slightest. Her eyes look wide awake and happy; beaded peacock feathers dangle from her ears, catching the morning light. I’ve come to think of her as the prettiest woman I have ever seen, except maybe for my mother and Mrs. Uchida.

  “My former mother-in-law,” she corrects herself.

  “What was her name?” I ask. “Was she very mean, like my grandmother?”

  With a shrug she answers, “Her name was Etsuko Hamanaka. She was mean, all right, in a silent, sullen way. When she wanted to, she could also turn vicious and loud. My husband, Masao, and I lived with her. He had had his own apartment, but we went to live with his parents after our wedding because his father was ill. Masao was an only child.” She stops speaking and concentrates on the road, stepping on the gas to pass a slow car.

  “Is that why you left?” I ask. “Because your mother-in-law was mean?”

  “In a way, but it was more than that. I don’t think my husband and I understood each other very well in the first place.” I say nothing, and she goes on. “When we moved into his parents’ house, I assumed that my husband was going to take care of his father or help his mother with housework. I was a graduate student in ornithology, working on my master’s thesis. I stayed in our tiny room studying all day, trying to stay out of everyone’s way.

  “After a month, my mother-in-law started complaining to my husband about how I never did anything around the house. She said I was a cold-hearted and spoiled girl. The thing is, she had never asked me to do anything. My husband didn’t help much, either. He was a professor at the university where I was a student. He drove to work in the morning and came home for supper. About all he did was clear the dishes and clean our room now and then.

  “Seeing that, I thought that Etsuko had everything under control. I assumed that she had asked us to live with her because she just wanted moral support and maybe someone to drive her husband to the hospital in case of an emergency. I had no idea that I was expected to help more than my husband because I was a woman.” She shakes her head. “That sounds naive, but I didn’t know. My father always did some work around the house—not as much as my mother, but quite a lot. My parents never expected me to help with chores if I was busy studying. I suppose I should have known better all the same. My mother had often talked about her friends having problems with their mothers-in-law, who lorded over them and made them miserable. These mothers-in-law claimed they had sacrificed so much for their husbands and sons, now it was their turn to have someone slaving for them. Though I had heard these stories, I never thought something like that would happen to me. I was young and stupid.”

  “No,” I say. “My grandmother was mean to my mother in the same way, always criticizing her about housework and bragging about how hard she used to work. I never thought my mother should put up with that. Grandmother doesn’t have a right to be mean just because she’s had a hard life. That isn’t my mother’s fault, even if it was true.”

  “My husband wouldn’t have agreed with you,” Dr. Mizutani says. “He never stuck up for me, not once, while his mother made my life miserable. After I put my thesis aside and started helping her, things only got worse. All day she would find fault with me, hinting that my mother had not raised me right. She would send me to the store with a grocery list, only she would forget to write down one or two things. When I came home she would scold me for not having thought of the things she’d forgotten to write down. ‘If you had been paying attention,’ she would scream, ‘you would have known what I really needed.’ A couple of times, I bought some extra things that weren’t on the list, just in case. It was no good—Etsuko scolded me for wasting her money. ‘I never wanted my son to marry a rich, spoiled girl,’ she said, ‘a girl who never learned anything but study, study, study.’”

  Dr. Mizutani screws up her face and speaks in a nasal tone, mimicking her mother-in-law. I imagine her as my Grandmother Shimizu’s identical twin. I can see exactly how this old woman must have screamed in the kitchen and written out incomplete lists so she could complain about how she never got what she needed. But I can’t fit Kumiko Mizutani into the picture.

  “I don’t understand,” I blurt out. “I can’t think of you putting up with someone so mean, going to the store and worrying about what she was going to say. That isn’t how I think about you.”

  “You can’t imagine me being so wishy-washy?” she asks.

  “Well, I didn’t say that,” I protest, my face feeling warm because that is exactly what I meant.

  Dr. Mizutani turns to me momentarily. Her eyes look darker and larger, and her lips are slightly parted in concentration. “Believe me, Megumi. Sometimes people can break our will. They can make us feel so low that we don’t even know how to defend ourselves.” She turns back to the road and falls silent.

  Outside, the small factories near Osaka have given way to the black-slated farmhouses and rice paddies.

  “I was lucky to catch myself in time,” she continues. “After two months, one day I came home from shopping and was about to unlatch the front gate of their house and go in. But I couldn’t. My hands couldn’t be lifted; my feet felt frozen into place. I couldn’t make myself go into that house, to face that woman. ‘Now or never,’ I kept repeating to myself. I must have stood there for five, ten minutes, saying that. Finally I held my basket upside down, dumping all the food on the ground. Then I ran to the train station. When I got there, I realized I didn’t have enough money to get home. I was in northern Honshu, hours by train from Ashiya. I called my mother collect from a pay phone and all I could say was, ‘Help me. I need to come home. Come and get me.’

  “I must have sounded terrible. Neither of my parents knows how to drive, but they called one of their friends who had a car. I took the train to Nagoya, which was as far as my money would go, checked into a hotel, and waited for them. I never went back. My parents hired a lawyer to get me a divorce and to arrange for my things to be sent back to Ashiya. I already told you that. I never saw my husband again, or his mother.”

  She shudders, narrowing her eyes a little as if remembering her marriage has stunned her with pain. I’m glad y
ou got away, I want to tell her. You are the most remarkable person I have ever met. But I feel too shy to say such a thing.

  “I didn’t finish my master’s thesis,” she adds. “Instead I enrolled in a veterinary school so I would have an occupation—and nobody would say that I was just a rich-man’s daughter.” She smiles dryly. “People still say that anyway, but I have an occupation, and I know it. Besides, I didn’t want to continue at school because my husband was an ornithology professor there. I had originally gone to study botany, but during my first month, I met Masao and became an ornithology student, and later married him. I know that sounds stupid. All through college I was determined never to fall in love or be married. The only women I knew who were important—who were professors or doctors or politicians—were single. I wanted to be a famous scientist. But I fell in love with Masao because of a bird.”

  I wait for her to go on.

  “One day at school, I saw a sign asking for volunteers to help Professor Hamanaka band some warblers that were coming through the mountains. I didn’t know him, but I went because it sounded like fun. I stood in a clearing in the mountains with six or seven people, holding a tiny willow warbler I had taken out of the mist net. The professor smiled and asked me if I knew how to tell birds’ ages. I shook my head no. He leaned over and blew very lightly on the bird’s head—as if he was going to whistle, only no sound came out. Instead his breath parted the feathers and the down on the bird’s head. He guided my hand so we were holding the bird in the light. The bird’s skull looked almost clear in that light, like soft, clear plastic. ‘You are holding a one-year-old bird,’ he told me, ‘last year’s baby.’ It takes a long time for the birds’ bones to ossify. As they get older, their skulls get more white spots, and that’s how you can estimate their age. I fell in love with Masao for showing me that. It’s stupid, I know.”