“She’s in,” I would tell him. “And her health’s okay. Why don’t you go over and say hello?”
But he was too shy, or maybe he just moved slowly. Instead of knocking or calling, he took to wooing my mother with vegetables, a motif found side by side with thwarted passion in the story of my life. The gifts were made anonymously, at the crack of dawn, so that for most of last year, whenever my mother opened the door to pick up the newspapers in the morning, she never knew what she would see: a Valentine of blooming radishes; half a dozen new potatoes nestled in a basket; three ears of sweet corn, loosely tied together with string, lying like a bouquet at her feet. He also brought her cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes, onions and, yes, cucumbers and eggplants, too, the sincerity of his ardor conferring dignity upon even these most ridiculous of all vegetables.
“He has such a crush on you, Ma,” I said, coming in windswept from my bike ride, early last fall.
“Who does?” she asked, looking up from a steaming wok.
“Mr. Lewis,” I said. “You know, our neighbor.”
“Oh,” she said, and did she blush a little, or was that the heat from the stove? “Oh, him.”
“Why don’t you go over and say hello?” I said to her, using the same line I had tried on him. “Throw him a bone,” I added, wheedling. “Say thank you for the vegetables.”
She was quiet for a while, pensive over the vegetables—his vegetables—that were cooking in the wok. “It’s not as if he ever left a card or even a note, you know,” she said, her voice trailing off. “But you think I should?”
“Definitely,” I said. “It’d be rude not to. Shocking, in fact.”
Considering that this conversation took place after almost three months of free high-quality produce, I probably would have been justified in taking her by her brittle-boned shoulders and shaking her into reason, as I wanted to (“You two are over fifty, you know—it’s not like you can afford to waste time, acting like moony teens….”). With this kind of drawn-out prelude to dating, it seemed clear that theirs was destined to be the slowest-moving courtship of all time. But as it turned out, the romance was over almost as soon as it began, as quickly and suddenly as it flared into life.
Hidden in the shadows and wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, my mother sat on the porch swing and lay in wait for Mr. Lewis for two mornings. When he finally showed, a head of crisp lettuce straddled by his hand like a bowling ball, she sat forward and called out to him, rising and offering her apologies when she saw how he started and flushed.
She invited him in for breakfast, and after that, for the next twenty-two days, there was no stopping them. They went to movies and bookstores together, and cafes and bars. In the evenings, after she cooked dinner for him, his own vegetables served up with ginger and a twist of soy sauce, she sang for him, Japanese folk songs and snatches of opera, too. They argued politics, played gin rummy, and read the papers side by side.
Best of all, going out with Ned Lewis brought out at least glimmers of another side to my mother: that sense of adventure that had seemingly been lost for good with the slow disintegration of her marriage. Hobbled by arthritis though she is, she and Mr. Lewis took not only long walks but, incredibly, short bicycle rides together as well, she balanced on the seat behind him, her arms wrapped around his back, and her hair streaming out behind her like a flag. At her instigation, they drove fifteen miles out to the nearest lake, rented a sailboat that neither of them knew how to operate, and had a picnic on the water, the dock a mere twenty feet away.
It was Mr. Lewis who filled me in on the details of those twenty-two days. While my mother did mention to me that she and Mr. Lewis had been to the movies, when I called just a few days later and asked how he was doing, she responded with just a hint of tartness. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
So that weekend I took the train out to New Jersey, and pedaled off on my bike almost as soon as I got home. Mr. Lewis was sitting on his porch drinking coffee when I rode up his driveway.
“So what happened?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.
He looked over at me and ruefully smiled. When I pressed him, though, he gave me a capsule summary of all the things that they had done.
“So what happened?” I asked again, once he had finished. “It sounds as if it was going so well. What went wrong?”
But no matter how much I begged, he refused to say, telling me only that I should really be talking to my mother. Finally, just as I was giving up, he took pity on me, and spoke.
“Actually, I’m not really sure what went wrong,” he said.
Ned Lewis is a reticent man, chary with his facial expressions as well as with his words. Yet when he spoke then, his face contorted just for an instant, and I wondered if I was wrong in guessing that the gesture connoted not just bafflement, but a fair share of pain, too.
After riding the short distance back home in record time, I dropped the bike onto the grass and ran inside. A few minutes of dead time, during which I poked my head into different rooms, looking for my mother, took away some of my momentum, but when I found her reading in the study, I managed to resummon enough anger to storm inside the room.
“Are you going to tell me what went wrong between you and Mr. Lewis?”
She looked up from her book.
“It was going so well” I said, and then, when she did not answer, “Well, wasn’t it?”
Her eyes darted restlessly around the room, as if searching for an escape hatch. “Do we have to talk about this?” she said, almost pleading.
I continued, undaunted. “You liked him, right? You could have loved him. You could have had a life with him.”
“Look,” she said. Her voice sounded scratchy, as if she were coming down with a cold. “I’m fifty-four years old. I was with your father for fifteen years. And I met him when I was eight.”
Taken aback, I paused, for elliptical and number-heavy as those statements were, they constituted far more of an explanation than I had expected. “But what about Mr. Lewis?” I said, rallying. “He’s obviously crazy about you. Doesn’t that count for anything? You should go talk to him again.”
She shook her head, and stretched her arms out in front of her. “What’s the point?” she said at last. She was looking down at her hands, which are so swollen at this point that she probably could not take off her wedding ring if she wanted to, and of course she does not.
“What do you mean, what’s the point? And why can’t you tell me what happened?” I said more quietly, already losing steam, pitying her in spite of myself.
I posed all these questions for no other reason than that they gave me the opportunity to berate my mother with some righteousness: I knew she was not going to respond to them. Besides, I already knew the answers, for it is not for nothing that I know my mother as well as I know myself.
Rigid in her ways, addicted to her solitude, and devoted beyond reason to the image of her lost husband, she panicked in the course of her sudden romance with Ned Lewis, and froze. She must have known, deep down, that no one on earth could possibly live up to the image she cherished of Kenji, the way he once was: young, smart, exhilarated by his own prospects, cocky to the point of arrogance but kind to her as no one else had ever been before, the same boy who had raced across train tracks to amuse the lonely little girl that she had been. She never speaks of my father, and no pictures of him adorn the house, yet even now, their marriage is legally undissolved.
I still make sure to see Mr. Lewis whenever I am in town. But our conversations are brief these days, for all we ever talk about is school and life in the big city, and the state of his vegetable garden.
She loved my father and she dreamed of medicine, but my mother’s only successful love affair was with the piano. When she played, she could let herself go, and although she favored Chopin and Bach rather than the more turbulent Beethoven, although, too, the music was always beautiful, the piano provided an outlet for passions rarely expressed in public. Often her f
ace flushed as she played; she bit her bottom lip, and it seemed as if she banged out the chords with more vigor than was necessary. After my father left, she played a lot more than she ever had before.
She was forty-one when her body showed the first signs of arthritis. Through the following five years, I heard a new mistake every time she played. Her hands fumbled and missed notes in the middle of the simplest of pieces, and I could hear her patiently counting in Japanese as she practiced measures with stiff fingers that had once glided across the keys. Sometimes as she sat at the piano, the sound of playing stopped entirely, and I could hear her strained breathing. One day she closed the lid to the piano, and never played Chopin again.
Arthritis is a disease that affects the joints of the body. They become inflamed, swollen, and twisted, and the pain is the burning kind. The cause of the disease is unknown, and as of yet there is no cure. The symptoms are different for every patient. For my mother, whose arthritis is of the rheumatoid variety, it began with the feet. First both big toes started to hurt, and then with a symmetry almost harmonious, the ache spread outwards to the rest. She thought her feet needed exercise, but after a long walk, the pain was worse. A month later her fingers were also hurting. A month after that, she went to the doctor. “I’m very sorry,” he said when he gave her the diagnosis. At the time she did not see the need for his pity.
Throughout the years she has taken large quantities of different medications. The results have varied. Most had no effect, a few exacerbated the pain, and some eased it, but not one could stop it altogether. For some time she was injected with gold, and as at least some of that substance probably courses through her veins still, her body might after all be worth something, an unplumbed gold mine.
One drug caused her hair to fall out. We were living in a tiny set of rented rooms at the time, and every night I had to wait for her to get out of the bathtub before I could brush my teeth. If I came in before she had finished cleaning up, the tub would be carpeted in black. In the mornings her pillow was likewise covered, so that sometimes I had to look twice to see whether it was her or only her hair that still lay in bed. When she walked, the strands drifted down after her like strangely colored snow. Once as I looked out my bedroom window, I saw her fleeing from her hair. She had just parked the car in the empty street, and though her feet must have hurt her, she was running towards the apartment building. Periodically she looked back as she ran, gazing with fear at the pieces of herself she left behind.
She did not become completely bald because she was able to determine relatively early that the medication that made her lose hair did nothing to ease her pain. For about half a year she wore a wig, an ugly black thing that spent its nights draped over a faceless plastic head, and then her hair began to grow again. Where it had once been black and thick and straight as my own, it grew back thin and fluffy, and a shade lighter than it had been. Worst of all, it had lost most of its former luster. I suspected her of lying when she said she preferred her new hair because it was more Western, but perhaps my own vanity was clouding my judgment.
Leaving long scars on her body to mark where they have dug into her skin, the doctors have been taking her apart and replacing her bit by bit. The joints in her left shoulder, her right hip, and both her knees are metal now; she is half flesh and half steel, a forerunner of an age in which the human body will become godlike through the magic of machinery. But whereas those future generations will run faster than a train and perhaps even fly with a mere flap of superhuman arms, all of the steel inside my mother does not enable her to walk without pain. Doglike, she carries heavy objects with her teeth.
I go to the hospital to take her home after each of her operations. When I went in to see her after her hip replacement, she was lying down, and did not hear me come in. Her whole body jerked with an instinctive movement of shame as soon as she saw me, her torso twitching forward, one hand pulling her nightgown over stick-thin legs, while the other reached up to hide her chest and throat. She quickly recovered herself and made as if she were only smoothing down the covers, but for her sake as well as my own, I looked away from her body and her eyes, puffy and darkened with fatigue; I did not allow myself to stare at her like that, an exposed human being after all.
When the arthritis first struck my mother, I thought it was a judgment, divine retribution for the way she had rejected her mother, perhaps, or for her failure to keep her husband from drink. But after a couple of years passed, I grew to understand that she alone was to blame for her affliction. Just as my own misery had once ballooned inside me and made me fat, so, too, did the bitterness of her frustrated love poison and maim her body. It was the weight of unshed tears that clogged and swelled her joints, and it was the heat of her own rage that made them burn with pain. Her body is forever racked with the screams she stifled when my father beat her.
In spite of the bins that overflow with the latest publications, my mother has no contact with the present world. To her the newspapers are nothing but a catalogue of remote disasters; since she refuses to vote, the political events she follows so ardently have as much relevance and reality as a fairy tale. I do not want to be like her any more than I want to be like my father. I do not want to lead an existence made up only of the cold comforts of an exquisite home and the printed word; I do not want to spend my life clinging stubbornly to wispy memories of a happiness that may never have been.
I do not want to be like my mother, and I cannot be like my grandmother, who married the man she loved the best. Phillip is once again watching me from his favorite corner in the fireplace, but when Eric calls, if Eric calls, I will make him so happy he will never want to leave.
I met my uncle Tadashi eight years ago, when he was in America on business: a small man whose face was all over laugh wrinkles, and who did magic tricks for me until I forgot that we did not speak the same language. It was he who called us, a little more than three years ago, at the start of what I had thought was going to be a nostalgically idyllic time—my last summer at home, to be celebrated by doing nothing but reading novels on the porch. But what my uncle Tadashi called to say was that Sekiguchi had died in a fire, and that the funeral was in five days. My mother booked a flight, packed, and flew out within twenty-eight hours, and while I stayed home, living on tuna fish and marshmallows and reading to all hours of the night, she went back to visit the country and family she had not seen for twenty-nine years.
Driving through Tokyo in a cab, her luggage loaded with impromptu presents for her nieces and nephews, my mother, always sensitive to beauty and the lack of it, shuddered. The pollution could kill a baby, the traffic moved at the stately pace of glaciers, and the buildings were clustered so tightly together that the windows were a largely empty gesture. Still, not much had actually changed since she had left Tokyo all those years before. My mother’s reaction was in fact due to the way she remembered the city. In the course of her long hiatus, her image of Tokyo had misted over with nostalgia. In her memory she had reverted to the city of her childhood, where the houses were low and made of wood darkened by age, and the streets bustled with people and ricksha instead of cars—a city that had succumbed almost without struggle to the bombs and resulting fires of the war.
After this massive destruction, Tokyo had rebuilt itself almost overnight, it seemed, regenerating itself with what materials could be scavenged: scraps of plywood, plaster, and tin. Not surprisingly, this slapdash rebuilding came with a price, which was found not only in the shoddiness of the new buildings, but also, and perhaps more irreparably, in the overall layout of the city. Postwar Tokyo had been planned without foresight, and it showed. Streets meandered like bad conversation, trailing off into a question mark and then silence, so that even native Tokyoites could not find their way, and there were no strategically placed squares of green, no trees to shade its avenues, and no major parks except for the largely private one adjoining the Emperor’s estate.
Frozen in traffic with her face pressed against the window,
her neck twisting as she gazed up at the latest earthquake-proof skyscraper, my mother thought that what astonished her was that no one seemed to notice, let alone grieve, that one city had been buried as another one had grown. Then, as the traffic thawed a drop’s worth, she chided herself for her quick scorn, for twenty-nine years ago, she, too, had not noticed, numbed by constant exposure and distracted by the more consuming demands of her everyday life.
But she noticed now, and grieved.
The funeral was a protracted affair, taking place over three days and involving hundreds of people, for Sekiguchi’s life had touched many. But only my grandmother, my mother, and her two brothers participated in the last rites.
My grandfather’s body was brought out to them in a pan maybe the length of an adult’s arm: before discreetly withdrawing, the polite young attendant warned them not to touch it, for it was still burning hot from the oven. The ashes were pale gray and slightly shiny, the bones a dirty white. My mother was handed long chopsticks, longer than Chinese ones, longer, even, than the cooking chopsticks she used to stir vegetables in the wok. She used them to fish out a bone from the ashes; though the length of a shin, it felt surprisingly light, almost hollow. Yet the chopsticks were unwieldy and she was clumsy because of her arthritis, and so her grasp on the bone was not quite firm. She dropped it and it fell back into the pan, scattering the ashes in a small cloud of dust. My mother let out a small American “Oh,” but Tadashi, irrepressible as ever, chuckled, and even Isamu gently smiled.
My mother picked a daintier bone the second time. It was probably a finger, and as she dropped it ceremoniously into the urn, this time without mishap, she thought not of her father’s scarred, thick hands, but of her mother’s long fingers, and their cool touch on her head.
One Hundred and One Ways Page 21