by Kyoko Mori
Sitting alone in my aunt’s kitchen at night during my visit, I thought about my mother. When my family lived in that house, my mother stayed up late after the rest of us had gone to bed—my brother and me upstairs, our grandfather in the downstairs room. Even back then, my father was seldom home. He had a lover in another town, and he often went to stay with her, leaving my mother to take care of his father. Although he used his business trips as excuses, my mother knew the truth. Sitting in the same kitchen thirty years later, I wondered if she had sat up late because she was angry. Did she think about her husband and the other woman and cry? Or was she trying to relax, to enjoy her solitude in the few quiet hours she had to herself to read or work on embroidery—to do something she liked? All day, she was busy taking care of my brother and me. As soon as my grandfather came home from his paint company, there were constant demands from him: he wanted tea, clean clothes, supper, more tea. If he spilled a drop of water on the table, he did not wipe it himself but called her to clean it up. “Takako, Takako,” I remember his voice, nagging and scolding.
I was sorry that she’d had no place but the dark, cold kitchen to sit in. I hoped that she had been happy to have some time to herself after everyone else went to sleep. Surely, I thought, she could not have been sad or angry every time she was alone. But it was hard to feel cheerful or hopeful in that kitchen. My cousin had left the flowers she had been arranging: flowering branches of plums mixed with some annuals, anchored by a cluster of needles at the bottom of a shallow vase. The flowers were the only decoration in the house. Kazumi bought a large bucket of mixed annuals every week, arranged them in several vases scattered around the house, and then replaced them the next week. Though they were beautiful, the flowers didn’t cheer me up—I wished Kazumi would make something that would last, a painting or a quilt we could look at ten years later and say, “Remember when you did that?”
Kazumi was thirty-six, about the age my mother had been when she lived in the house. Kazumi and my mother were very much alike. Just like Kazumi, my mother had shoulder-length hair; she arranged flowers for no special occasion, resigned herself when she didn’t get what she wanted, and went on smiling and taking care of other people until she couldn’t bear her unhappiness. Kazumi and my mother both tried to live up to the age-old ideal of a nice Japanese woman. The friends I grew up with, I was sure, were doing the same thing—carrying on our mothers’ legacy of patience and beauty and consideration. I wondered if most of them were happy or lonely or both. I imagined my friends staying up late, trying to enjoy their moments of solitude and yet feeling lonely. Sitting in front of the tower of flowers my cousin had made, I thought of all the women driven to be alone late at night, craving solitude and yet lonely for a different life; night after night, they practiced flower arrangement or embroidery—disciplines of beauty against so much sadness.
My mother had many reasons to sit alone in the kitchen feeling miserable. My parents’ marriage didn’t get any better after we moved out of my grandfather’s house into our own apartment or even after my parents had bought a house of their own. When I was in fourth grade, my father’s first lover, Okiyo-san, started calling our house late at night, looking for my father. When my mother said that he was not home, Okiyo-san told her that my father was cheating on them both with a new lover. Soon, the new lover—Michiko—found out about Okiyo-san and took to calling our house when my father wasn’t with her. As my mother sat alone in her kitchen, she could not even look forward to being left in peace: one of the women would call to weep and complain about my father’s unfaithfulness.
I remember the phone ringing late at night and my mother being upset afterward, but I hadn’t known the exact details until after my father’s death, when my Aunt Akiko told me. Until then, I had assumed that my father had had an affair only with Michiko, and that all the late-night calls had been from her.
“Oh, no,” Akiko said, “Okiyo-san was his lover long before Michiko. She was the woman who lived in Mizushima.”
We were sitting in a coffee shop in Osaka, near the family cemetery where we had visited my mother’s grave. Watching the men and women drinking their coffee, cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling, I remembered something I had almost forgotten.
“She lived in Mizushima?” I asked Akiko. “Is that the woman who used to send us peaches?”
Akiko nodded.
“I remember those peaches,” I told Akiko. “I had no idea that they were from my father’s lover.”
“Your father was seeing Okiyo-san long before you two were born,” Akiko told my brother and me. “She lived in Mizushima and owned a bar your father went to when he was in town on business. That’s how he met her. Pretty soon, he was telling all his friends from work to visit the bar when they were in Mizushima. ‘She’s a special friend of mine,’ he told them, making no secret of their affair. After your mother was gone, he would have married Okiyo-san if she hadn’t already been married. She had a husband, though he was seldom in town because he was a sailor. Okiyo-san wanted to divorce him and marry your father, but your father couldn’t risk his reputation by marrying a divorced woman. He married Michiko even though she had only been his lover for two or three years instead of fifteen or sixteen.” Akiko sighed and shook her head. “So I guess for a while before your mother’s death, your father had two lovers. Your mother said that both of them called the house and got upset if he was gone—your mother was laughing and crying at the same time when she told me. ‘Now I’ve got two women looking for him,’ she said.”
Okiyo-san’s peaches arrived at our house every August, in a big wooden box wrapped in brown paper. My mother told my brother and me to be careful. “Make sure you wash and peel those peaches,” she nagged us. “My sister Etsuko died from dysentery. The last thing she ate before she got sick was an unwashed and unpeeled peach. I don’t want you kids getting sick.”
I always wondered why my mother was so cautious about those peaches. No one died from dysentery anymore. My mother didn’t insist on washing or peeling other fruits—she often saw my brother and me taking big bites out of unpeeled apples and pears and said nothing.
After what my aunt told me, I finally understood. To my mother, peaches were contaminated—reminders, not of her sister’s death, but of her own humiliation and my father’s betrayal. I wished my mother had taken the whole box of peaches and smashed them against our doorstep. She could have refused to buy or eat peaches forever and forbidden Jumpei and me to touch them. Instead, my mother carefully sliced and cored each fruit, removing the fuzzy pink skin with her paring knife. She put the wet yellow slices on a pretty plate, swallowed them with her tears.
Like most Japanese women, my mother was in charge of our house but was expected to act like a servant when there was company. From time to time, my father brought his work friends to our house after the bars closed so they could continue their drinking and talking in our living room.
As expected, my mother served the liquor and snacks and then retreated into the kitchen, letting the men talk and drink undisturbed. She reappeared only to refill their glasses and dishes, not to join in the conversations. Nobody spoke to her or asked her how she was. It must have been humiliating for her to sit in the kitchen listening to their loud laughter. Everyone knew about my father and his lover. Many of the men must have visited Okiyo-san’s bar with my father and seen the two of them together. When my mother went in to refill their glasses, she was having to do exactly what her husband’s lover did.
On those nights, my brother and I were already asleep. The few times my father was very drunk, he woke me up and insisted that I play the piano for the guests. I would play two or three pieces and go back to bed—saying good night to my mother, who was alone in the kitchen preparing snacks for the guests. Though I don’t remember seeing her serve the food and the drinks, I know one thing about my mother: the more cheapened she felt, the calmer and more poised she would have behaved, tilting the beer bottle and the glass at just the right angle
to make a perfect crown of foam. It would never have occurred to her to drop the glass on purpose on someone’s lap or to spit into my father’s drink in secret.
My mother was a sweet, gentle person, her friends and family always tell me. They remember her, as I do, as a beautiful and sad woman. I loved her poise, her gracefulness. But I want to be different. I don’t want grace or beauty if it means turning all my disappointments into something spare and elegant, an artful silence. I don’t want to live my life in quiet dignity.
I decided to be divorced because I began to sit alone in the kitchen late at night, as sad and silent as my mother had been. Yet there was a big difference. Chuck had never caused me to be unhappy: he would never lie to me, hurt me, or belittle me. Unlike my parents, we spent a lot of time together and were happy when we were together. We talked and laughed a lot—about politics, work, religion, books, other people. I could not imagine a life in which I didn’t talk to him every day.
But something was wrong. If Chuck didn’t make me unhappy, then our marriage did. What each of us wanted to do with the house applied to our lives as well. Chuck wanted to pare down his life and open up more space, while I wanted clutter and comfort. Because he was from Green Bay, Chuck already had a few old friends from childhood. He hadn’t made new friends at work, but he didn’t mind. When he was younger, he said, he enjoyed spending time with a big group of friends, but now he appreciated being alone with me. He was ready to settle down a little more. We should move to a large house out in the country, he said—we would build a house in a big lot and never be bothered by neighbors. We would have a lot of space where we could be alone.
The idea of living in the country frightened me. I liked living in town, within a few blocks of grocery stores and coffee shops. After ten years in Green Bay, I finally had close friends from work and from the various volunteer or arts-and-crafts groups in town. For the first time in my life, I belonged to a community of like-minded people, and that was important: I had grown up feeling lonely because my Japanese friends and I had so little in common; I had spent my twenties and early thirties with friends I could not keep because people were always moving on. Now that I was finally settled into a community, moving to a house in the country with just my husband sounded like a return to loneliness. I wasn’t ready for that—I would never be.
A house in the country, I was certain, would feel like a trap. No matter how nice Chuck was or what a good relationship we had, I would end up feeling as lonely and miserable as my mother had. If I had to choose between living alone but having many friends and living with a husband but having no friends, I would have to choose the first.
From time to time Chuck and I talked about our differences, but our talk always petered out, just like our plans for house renovation. We didn’t have ugly fights and we didn’t get angry at each other, but we could not resolve anything. Our house matched our marriage: nothing was really wrong and yet we seemed stuck in something that wasn’t quite right, doomed never to move on.
No matter what we decided, one of us would have to make a sacrifice if we were to stay together. Either we lived in town and socialized more or we lived in the country and spent more time alone. I didn’t want to give up anything I wanted, but when Chuck finally told me that he would be willing to make a compromise and just move to a bigger place in town, I was suddenly scared. All our lives together, we would have to remember how he had given up something for me. A future based on his sacrifice was like a bottomless pit I could fall into, never to come up. I didn’t feel any better knowing that Chuck wouldn’t blame me or resent me; he wasn’t that kind of person. We might both be happy in a new house in town, and he would never remind me of what he had given up for me, but it would still be wrong. What was wrong with us, in the end, was not our disagreement about where to live. We could never move forward together because I was incapable of making or accepting sacrifices. If marriage meant sacrifice, mutual or one-sided, I wanted to be alone.
I went to live in a small studio I had been renting for a few years as a work space. Chuck had wanted us to have a big house in the country where I could have a quiet and comfortable writing room. As I unpacked my boxes in my studio, I felt sad that he had imagined a nice room for me in his vision of our house together, but I knew that I could never have lived in that house even if I had a private room. Because I had been using the place as a work space, the studio already had some of my things. Moving in, I had the same sense of comfort I experience when I go to a store and buy clothes that look just like the ones I already have—everything seems right, meant for me, and I can’t imagine anything different.
It could be that some of us reenact the same space over and over in different apartments. My small kitchen is just like all the kitchens I have lived in since I left my parents’ house—the same plates and utensils arranged in pretty much the same way. The exposed bricks and warped window frames give my studio the temporary and makeshift look of the house I had just left. My books and yarn clutter the three tiny rooms. But the big windows overlook the only truly busy street in town, with its several coffee shops and two bookstores. Living in my studio is a lot like sitting in my first car in the Diary Queen parking lot: I am alone in the midst of traffic, and somehow that gives me comfort—to be alone and yet to be part of something larger.
My studio is upstairs from a photography studio where people get their high school graduation or wedding pictures taken. Most of them arrive casually dressed, with several dresses or suits packed into their gym bags. Walking in or out of my studio, I often see these people outside—standing in front of the brick façade of the building and brushing their hair or reapplying their lipstick between shots.
Watching people trying to look their best, I am reminded of the beauty salon my mother and I used to visit when I was a child. The salon, like my studio, was a small place in an old building overlooking traffic. Its large windows had a view of a busy street lined with shops, and across that street, a train station. My mother and I went there once a month to get our hair trimmed.
Arriving at nine or ten in the morning, we walked up to the receptionist, who sat at a large metal-top desk at the entrance to the room. She would hand us pink gowns to put over our clothes before seating us in two of the chairs in front of the wall-to-wall mirror. The salon was one big room with large windows in the back. Along the opposite wall from the mirror, a few women sat in identical pink gowns under the round dryers shaped like space-age helmets. Reading magazines and sipping fruit drinks, the women looked as though they were traveling to Mars or the moon.
The hair-dressers, who were all young women dressed in white gowns, complimented me on my long hair. They fussed over my mother and told her how young she looked. She was so beautiful, they said, that a little lipstick and the simple shoulder-length haircut were enough to set off her looks. My mother and I smiled and made mildly disparaging comments about ourselves, so no one would think we were vain. I knew everyone received a compliment—being flattered was part of getting a haircut. But there was no need to be on our guard. My mother was beautiful. When someone praised her beauty and she denied it with a smile, I could see that the exchange gave both of them a good, friendly feeling. Sometimes the other women who were getting haircuts joined in the conversation, and all of them chatted and laughed as they talked about shopping or TV or their children.
For my mother, the beauty salon was the opposite of the kitchen. It was one of the few places where she was pampered and complimented, where she didn’t have to take care of other people. Instead of being alone, she was with other women. Though she didn’t know these women by name, they were regular customers at the same salon, so they didn’t have to treat one another with the polite silence of strangers. Dressed in identical pink gowns, they sat together like reunited school friends or cousins, talking about nothing important but feeling cheerful and friendly.
My mother was happier in rooms that weren’t her own. The public places that we visited together seemed more
intimate and comfortable than the cold houses in which we lived. Every month she and I went shopping downtown or visited the art galleries in Kyoto to see exhibits. We stood in room after room full of paintings or bolts of fabric or dresses, admiring what we saw and talking to each other. If we got tired, we found tearooms where we could rest and drink tea or coffee in pretty cups. We felt so comfortable in these rooms—though they were public places, I felt they existed just for us. My mother showed me that it was all right to be made happy by the small, seemingly trivial things like clothes and haircuts and compliments as well as by works of art. She made me feel that the whole city was my home.
For her, a woman’s place was the city itself, not her house. I know that my life can be—and already is—different from hers. Maybe someday I will have a house again and a big garden that will remind me of a park. The summer after Dean and Katie were divorced, I visited their old house and saw the roses and salvias Katie had planted. They were leafing out and blooming again in her raised beds, and they seemed like the saddest things I could see. For many summers, my lavender and delphinium, too, will keep on flowering without me. It’s as if the lives we’ve chosen not to live had gone on without us, a small pantomime in the corner of a garden. Doing the right thing doesn’t mean that we have no regrets. Still, I love the temporary home I have made in an almost public place, staking out a little private space in the midst of traffic. It’s a good place to be.