One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  Three salesmen hover around the woman, although she does not seem in any rush to buy: to them, too, the scent of the cucumbers is overwhelming, so much so they cannot smell that she is browsing. The cucumbers smell like summer, like cool green, like seeds. The smell is making me ravenous, not for salads but for ice water in tall glasses, long afternoons of lovemaking, Phillip lying beside me in the grass.

  I have been reading too much Proust, I tell myself sternly. Threatened by the onslaught of the past for the second time in the day, I force myself to concentrate on the woman’s bag. It is embroidered brocade, pretty in an old-lady kind of way, an unexpected possession—though not, of course, in the same league as its contents—for this woman of high fashion.

  “Kiki.” Eric is calling out to me. “Kiki?” he says again, his voice growing sharper with a touch of impatience.

  I shake my head, keeping my eyes fixed on the handle of the bag, which is brown and leather. The smell of the cucumbers is making me sway a little, but within the haze of memories and wishes that it brings, there is room for one moment of startling clarity.

  Never again in my life will there be anyone like Phillip. He was to me what Sekiguchi was to Yukiko, what Kenji was to my mother, and if there is anything I have learned from my mother’s bedtime stories, it is that the women in my family never let go. Never again will there be anyone like him, and I have nothing to show for my time with him but a naked ghost who lives in my apartment and is slowly wasting away.

  The outlines of the bag blur, and suddenly I am crying.

  The sobs come out in the great heaving gasps of a child, but before I can turn around to hide my face, Eric is there, pressing me to his chest, his arms around me and his shoulders shielding me from the world. He reacts faster than anyone else, but after a few long moments, I peek my head around his shoulder to find the whole store transformed as well. A chair, proffered by a security guard, has appeared out of nowhere. Our salesman is offering me a clean, well-pressed handkerchief (“He was carrying a handkerchief,” I would say triumphantly to the policemen, and their eyes would light up at such a clue, for how many people carry handkerchiefs in this day of disposable goods?); another black-suited man is waiting to hand me a glass of water. Even the small stylish lady, so stately in spite of her diminutive height and her cucumbers, has turned towards me with a low murmur of sympathy.

  Waving away the chair, the handkerchief, and the water, trying to smile at these people through my tears, I cling to Eric, my only sure refuge, for the past is a whirlpool and the thought of the future, which has long been lit up by the image of my grandmother, is all of a sudden dim. I have been like a stubborn child, who knows better than to believe in Santa Claus but still persists, anxiously awaiting my grandmother and her bagful of answers. In November, my mother and I will go to the airport to greet an old woman, healthy still but too tired to speak after her epic life and her husband’s death, who has come to America to die.

  It is some time before I can stop the tears. My nose is red and running, and my makeup, so carefully applied, is running down my cheeks and Eric’s (already coffee-stained) white shirt in striking streaks of black.

  After I make some ineffectual dabs at my face, we make our exit quickly from the store. It’s the sun, we explain as we pass by the concerned faces of our new friends; it’s cramps, a headache, fatigue, pain.

  Eric leads me without asking to our favorite noodle shop in the neighborhood. We walk the five blocks in silence, our four fingers once again interlocked. But as soon as we step into the restaurant, he begins to question me with rising exasperation and deepening voice: did I love Phillip; do I love him; and when would I be ready to move on. Yes, yes, and I don’t know but I’m trying, I say, repeatedly and consistently, yet none of my answers satisfy him, so he (a trial lawyer, after all) goes through the same round of questions again and then again, varying his phrasing slightly each time, hoping, perhaps, to trip me up or catch me in an inconsistency.

  Then he abruptly shifts tack.

  “You never slept with him, right?”

  “Who, Phillip?”

  He nods.

  I take a deep breath in, and let it out slowly “That’s right.”

  Our food arrives. We move our elbows and napkins to make way for the bowls, and sit quietly while the waiter tops off our water.

  “You know, Kiki,” he says, “we were shopping for an engagement ring.”

  “I know,” I say, looking down at my hands. “I acted terribly.”

  “I’ve been patient for a very long time.”

  “I know,” I say again. “You’ve been terrific.”

  “What we need to do now,” he says, his voice flat and robotic, and authoritative as only Eric’s can be, “is to spend some time apart.”

  My left elbow, a mere quarter-inch from the soy sauce container, jerks, only narrowly missing staining Eric’s shirt with yet another substance. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How long?” I say, a note of panic in those two words.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “We both need to rethink this relationship pretty seriously.”

  A long pause. We take our chopsticks out of their paper sheaths and break them apart, but neither of us begins eating.

  “Eric, I am really sorry,” I say, faltering. “I’ve been so unfair to you—”

  With his lips pressed tightly together, Eric cuts me off with a nod. He leaves me with a question, one so unanswerable it finds its way into my collection. “You’ve idealized him, you know,” he says. “How can I possibly compete with a ghost?”

  When we finally do start eating, the noodles are smooth, thin, and delicious, but they do not slide down my throat with ease, and I wonder (for my mind has clearly been addled by the sun), if I were to choke on this lunch and die, whether Eric could pick our Chinese cook out of the lineup of men with receding hairlines, black hair, and slanted dark eyes.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THREE YEARS AGO, when my mother returned to Japan, she saw to her astonishment a row of photographs of me lining a wall in my grandmother’s study, the only room in the house that had been wholly untouched by the fire. There were my baby pictures, from three days old to three years old; there were photographs of me taking my first shaky steps towards the outstretched hands of my mother, looking at picture books with my father, diligently hunching over to write my first words. There I was as a scrawny, gap-toothed child, mugging happily for the camera. I look less happy in the snapshots taken after my father left, and heavier, too, so much so that my resemblance to my grandmother all but disappears under the extra flesh. Not until I hit my late teens did I shed those pounds. Seen in a row, the photographs of my teen years seem like a lesson in perspective, a yo-yo in motion as viewed from below: getting bigger and bigger and then smaller and smaller.

  My grandmother has many grandsons, for with pleasing symmetry, her two daughters-in-law, both named Tomoko, were each blessed with three boys. My mother was astonished at the sight of all those pictures of me because she herself always felt slighted as the only daughter, the first child who turned out to be that most grievous disappointment, a girl. So she was baffled and, I think, not a little jealous that only my photographs, and not those of my cousins, were in evidence in Yukiko’s study.

  She was astonished again when I, told of this unlikely tribute to me, only nodded, for she does not understand the depth of the sympathy that exists between my grandmother and me. I have long taken comfort from this connection, only occasionally, in my very darkest moments, giving in to the fear that seized me when I sobbed for Phillip in the protection of Eric’s arms: that my grandmother will be too weary to tell me the tales that she told my mother, and that my mother passed on to me; that she will be too tired to listen to my story, the words that provide the text to the photographs lining her wall.

  If that does turn out to be the case, if my grandmother and I are in fact too late to enjoy the bond that links us together, acro
ss a chasm composed of two languages, two cultures, two generations, and two very different lives, I will have to struggle not to hold my mother accountable. When my grandfather died, I assumed that I would go to Japan for the funeral, but my mother told me that she was going alone. If she had explained that it was only because she was nervous about her long-delayed reunion with her own mother, I would have understood. But what she said was that the first reports of my grandmother’s health were bleak, and that the responsibilities of playing host to an unknown, American granddaughter, on top of the shock of losing a husband and the pressures of managing a very public funeral, would be too much for Yukiko to bear.

  Phillip used to say that I should just buy a cheap ticket and go by myself. He never could understand that when I do meet my grandmother, I will need my mother there, if only for the first five minutes. Still, what he said left a mark. If my grandmother is so exhausted that she will no longer wish to talk, I will have to live with the possibility that it is not only my mother’s fault that I never had the opportunity to become acquainted with the woman who shares my name.

  Really, though, these worries about my grandmother are groundless. “She could outlive us all,” my mother said upon returning from Japan, echoing the cheering prognosis of the family doctor, as well as his chilling caveat—“If she wants.” I give little weight to those last three words, for a period of depression is only to be expected. How else could my grandmother feel, in the aftermath of her husband’s death and the burning of her home? Once she gets to America, away from the city where she once lived with him, away from a life spent shuttling back and forth between the homes of her daughters-in-law, she will become the old Yukiko again, active and sharp.

  Still, in light of the likelihood of her initial fatigue, it would be better not to overtax her, at least at first. Questions about her refusal to consider my father as a likely husband for my mother are too heavy and too complicated by far—not a good beginning to the endless, delicious conversation that is due my grandmother and me.

  Far better to start with a softball. On the day of my grandmother’s arrival, I will make one of my pathetic fires in the fireplace, and my mother will make a pot of tea. We will first partake in inconsequential but truly pleasant pleasantries: small talk about the trip, my grandmother’s health, my unknown cousins and uncles and aunts. Only afterwards, when the tea has been drunk and the fire has lived out its short life, will I begin with the first of the questions I have been hoarding for a lifetime.

  Grandmother, I will say (leaning forward confidentially, close but not too close, my voice low, and my tone light to match the mood of that first encounter), Obaasama. How could I ever have doubted you?

  With his back turned towards me and his body shielded by shadows, Phillip sits with me as I wait for Eric to call. His knees are pressed against the wall of the fireplace and his head is tilted forward at an unnatural angle, so that his forehead touches the bricks as well. Even in the near darkness of the fireplace, the thinness of his body is apparent. The backbone is a long, sharp line of knobs, and the ribs are prominent, the shoulder blades like folded wings. The sight of his back is harder to take than that of his face, unnerving though his eyes are.

  Yesterday evening I called my mother. When I finally reached her last weekend, after the scare that I had when she was not at home on Saturday night, she was cool and dismissive, as always, of my fears. I, too, aim for reserve when I speak to her, and so while I mentioned that Eric and I went browsing for a ring, I said nothing about what had happened when we did so.

  Yet it may have been wiser to say something to her, because in the two days that have passed since our trip to Tiffany’s, Eric has returned my phone calls but once, and then in order to cancel for a picnic in the park this weekend; when I suggested that we reschedule, he said he wasn’t sure and all but hung up on me. The phone has not rung all day.

  Eric is most likely to phone after six, when he gets home from work, so even though I prefer to run in the cool of the evening on hot summer days, at three I put on shorts and a T-shirt, and carefully double-knot the laces on my sneakers. I bounce on my heels to test the strength of my left tendon, which had been injured in a bicycle accident years ago, and had never fully healed; the old ache is only a faint twinge.

  I do not want to leave the house. Smarting still from Eric’s rebuke, and worrying more with every minute about the silence of the phone, I wish to sink into the sofa and curl into a ball.

  As I pick up my keys, I just barely manage to stop myself from leaning over to check that the telephone ringer is on and the answering machine is working. Clearly nothing could have changed since half an hour ago, when I last checked.

  Phillip still has not moved. With a few moths hovering about his head, he huddles, Cinderella-like, bereft and alone among the soot of the fireplace. The closet door is still open, and without stopping to think, I reach inside, grab a shoe, and hurl it at him.

  “Goddamn you,” I hiss. “Do you know that you’re ruining my life?”

  The shoe, an old loafer, hurtles through the air with satisfying speed, but falls considerably wide of its mark. Still, Phillip is at least looking up at me now, and his back is straight. Although I glare at him for a few moments, there is, of course, no way that I can best him in a staring match, and I soon turn away.

  I manage not to look back at him as I head for the door.

  Old Mrs. Noffz keeps me company while I wait for the elevator. With interest she watches me do stretching exercises against the wall.

  “This heat is so dreadful,” she says.

  I do not answer for a while, and when I finally do, my voice is short and hard. “I guess so.”

  Perhaps discouraged, she stops talking, but she stands smiling amiably in her doorway, keeping me company until the elevator arrives. “Good-bye,” she says. “Have a nice afternoon.”

  I nod in response, staring straight ahead of me as the doors close.

  She, too, loved Phillip. “Such a well-spoken young man,” she often said, which always struck me as a singularly inappropriate description for Phillip, with his quiet ways and his lazy drawl.

  Then, after he left for Nepal, she kept asking, “Where’s your nice young friend?”

  One day I lost patience with the question. “He won’t be coming back,” I said, and although I did not realize it, I must have raised my voice, for the phrase bounced back to me from the hallway and the stairs, and I was breathing hard.

  She shrank back in the doorway, her face in half-darkness so that I could no longer read its expression. “I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly and briefly lucid.

  He used to chat with her for long periods, letting the elevator leave without him again and again. Once she even invited him inside her house, which she has never done for me. She gave him a cup of hot chocolate in an almost clean cup, and introduced him to her parrot, Mabel, whom I had previously suspected was a fiction.

  On her mantelpiece she had an old photograph of two young women, wearing matching wide-brimmed hats and with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders; when Phillip asked about it, she told him it was a picture of herself and her friend Mabel, whose name the parrot took. After that, he said, their conversation fell apart in spite of his best efforts, with her harping on the same meteorological points she always brought up.

  By contrast Mrs. Noffz has never liked Eric much, though she chats with him about the weather just as she does with anyone else she can waylay in the halls.

  The sun is no longer at its peak when I get outside, but the air seems saturated with the accumulated heat of the day. The humidity clings to my skin and makes me feel unclean. I turn left, away from Broadway. At the corner I run north towards West 106th Street, where the green statue man sits mounted on his green statue horse, and there I hop down the steps, two at a time. At the crosswalk I wait for a walk signal with a woman and her poodle.

  The trees look older now, more dignified than they did in April, when they were new to their
majesty. Now they are as resplendent as mature kings. New Jersey is a hazy mirage across the river. I wait for the cars to pass at 95th, and run past the well-tended gardens at 90th and 89th; a block farther down I climb out of the park and pant my way up the stairs towards the big, almost-white dome, which I circle, once. On the platform near the dome stands a frozen group of martial-arts students, perhaps twenty of them bent uniformly forward in a motionless position of menace. I jog by the two old black men who seem permanently ensconced on the bench at 86th, and who always direct some kind of comment at me; today it is “Nice legs, sweetheart.” I look away from them as I run past. I count the blocks and do math problems in my head to keep myself from getting bored—twenty blocks is a mile and I want to do five miles so when I get to 83rd I am a quarter through, eight more blocks and I will have finished a third of my run.

  My tendon is beginning to throb, though, and the pain intensifies until reluctantly, just before 79th Street, I slow to a halt. A few months ago, when the pain was so bad that I hobbled just like my mother, I went to see my old childhood doctor at home. He asked me questions and he felt my bones and looked at X rays, and then he shook his head at me. “If you keep running when your tendon is this bad, you’re not going to be able to walk in a few years, let alone run.” I slid off the examination table and smoothed my skirt down. “Thank you,” I said. “I mean it,” he told me. I could tell that he knew I was not taking him seriously “You keep this up and you’ll be as crippled as your mother,” he said. As I walked out of the room, he shook his head again. “You runners are such fanatics.”

  He was wrong, for by almost any standard I am too erratic to be termed a real runner. Still, I have been running for years, and I have managed to cultivate a considerable tolerance to pain. There is no doubt that I could keep running even now, but the doctor’s warning seems to have frightened me in spite of myself.