One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  “The men aren’t the reason she wants to go back. She wants to go back because she’s tired of being taken care of. She’s proud, you know—she always has been.”

  I nod, albeit reluctantly, admitting to myself as well as to my mother how glorious it would be for Yukiko to run her own life once again.

  “But even more importantly,” says my mother, “your grandmother loved being a geisha because of her friends. Because of—well, because of the company of women. In particular, Kaori. Remember how I told you about taking a walk with my mother, and seeing a man who must have been Jun? And how Kaori stood in front of him like—”

  “—a traffic cop,” I say, nodding, handing her own image back to her.

  “I always thought that when my mother cried after that encounter, it was because she was missing Jun,” she says. “But it was Kaori she wanted to go back to—it was Kaori she was missing all along.”

  An image descends upon me, then, with the speed of a camera shutter, a movement that lasts no more than a split second but which leaves a frozen image: a row of girls, lying together in shared futons, whispering and giggling in the dark. It is a memory that has been handled with such care that only its edges, slightly yellowed and curling upwards, give away that it has twice suffered the passage from one generation to the next, a journey of nine thousand miles and sixty years.

  “Your grandmother was very happy throughout her marriage,” my mother says gently, “but at times she was very lonely, too.”

  Struggling to make another leap in logic, I cannot attend to her words. “Do you think,” I whisper, “that Yukiko and Kaori were lovers?”

  She does not flinch. “There are lots of ways a woman can love a woman,” she says at last. “But it’s possible.”

  Unexpectedly, perhaps, it is not her admission, tendered with the downbeat of an afterthought, that lingers in my ear. “There are lots of ways a woman can love a woman,” I repeat slowly (savoring the phrase), wondering whether there are as many as one hundred and one of them.

  “She told me her only regret is that now you won’t be able to show her around New York,” continues my mother, breaking into my thoughts.

  Her voice makes an odd dip at the end of these words, and I glance sharply at her, but she is meditatively peering into her cup of hot water. I look away, rubbing my forehead. My mother is, after all, inured to disappointment only because she has had a lifetime of it; I should not resent her for being the picture of calm wisdom.

  “But we’ll go see her in Kyoto, maybe even over Christmas,” she says. “I know it’s not quite the same as her visiting us here, since she will be busy, but Kyoto is a beautiful city, and it’s high time we got you to Japan.”

  I can feel her eyes on me but I keep my own fixed upon my own teacup, the smear of a kiss my lipstick left on it, and the ring of tea staining it beneath its rim.

  “She wrote you a letter,” she adds, “and sent you a present. Do you want to see them now?”

  “Maybe later,” I say lightly. Then I stand, mumbling an excuse about work; I push my chair in and run up to my room.

  Say that there once lived a Cinderella who had a friend among the soot and ashes, another person to confide in and hold after each day of backbreaking labor, throughout each of the long cold nights. Say, too, that only Cinderella was blessed with a beautiful face and charm and most of all luck, and that when her prince came, she went gladly, but she never forgot her friend, and the warmth they had shared in the dull glow of the dying embers.

  Obaasama, I say to myself (self-indulgently—or is that self-mockingly?—knowing these questions will not be an easy habit to break), my seventy-four-year-old grandmother. How could I grudge you this final warmth?

  But in spite of myself I do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I SPEND THE afternoon crying on the bed I slept in for most of my life. I take a nostalgically perverse pleasure in kicking the bedpost as I used to during my old tantrums: my feet were bare, as now, when I did so, but even so the wood is worn from where I kicked against it so many times.

  I do not go downstairs until my mother calls me down for supper.

  We eat lightly, saving up for the big dinner tomorrow. My mother could not have helped but overhear the sound of my sobbing, nor can she now be unaware of my red-rimmed eyes, for my artfulness with eyeliner is to scant avail after a crying jag of such length. But she allows me to eat in peace, and she fills the silence around my sullenness with chatter about the house, the neighborhood, the town, and even—after my restriction to monosyllables passes the half-hour point—about the world.

  It is not until we are carrying the dishes into the kitchen that she brings the conversation back to where it started, five and a half hours ago. “You forgot to ask me about the good news,” she says.

  “The good news?” I ask, today being my day to repeat everything that she says. Stacking the dishes into the dishwasher now, I find it necessary to concentrate: my hands seem even less efficient than usual, their grasp on the dishes less secure.

  “Don’t you remember? I asked you if you wanted the good news or the bad news first.”

  “Oh yes,” I say dully, preparing myself for reservations at another popular Japanese restaurant, or more likely plans to go ahead after all with yet another house renovation, for the last had been shelved because of my grandmother’s anticipated arrival. Or if I am really lucky, the good luck will be that one of my Aunt Tomokos has decided to pay us a visit—in another four years, maybe, by which time I will have severed all ties with my faithless Japanese relatives. “Shoot,” I tell my mother. “I’m listening.”

  “This is real news,” she says, “big news. Or at least it’s big news for me.”

  Had I been that obvious in my indifference? “Okay,” I say, suppressing a sigh as I wipe my hands and turn away from the sink and the dishwasher to face my mother. The dirty dishes and pots and pans are still piled high.

  She is sitting on the stool we keep in the kitchen. I watch her feet, which are dangling a good three inches off the floor, swing back and forth, bumping against the legs of the stool as they do so. If I were to sit on that same chair, I could not swing my feet.

  Then I look up at her face. Something is wrong with her skin and her eyes.

  “Mom, you’re glowing,” I say in bafflement. “Like a—well, like a firecracker.”

  She begins to smile, but then her forehead wrinkles. “Do firecrackers glow?”

  “No,” I say. The catching of my throat lasts only for a second. “No, they don’t.”

  “The news is”-—she draws out her words, stalling, or is that building up suspense?—“I’ve invited Ned over for dinner tomorrow; I hope that’s okay.”

  She has spoken those last words so quickly that I cannot be sure I understood. “Ned?” I say (my tendency to repeat her now a confirmed tic). “You’ve invited Ned over for dinner? Who’s Ned?”

  “Ned Lewis,” she explains patiently, as to a very small child. “Ned Lewis, our neighbor.”

  “Ne—” I say, starting to repeat her yet again, but stopping myself in time.

  “Ned Lewis, who left me the beets and the carrots and the tomatoes on the doorstep. The man I dated last year, for about three weeks?”

  I had seen vegetables as a theme running side by side with thwarted passion in the story of my life.

  “You do remember him, don’t you?” my mother says, laughing at me, teasing just a little, perhaps recalling, as I am, how severely I questioned her about why she let him go.

  She had made the overtures necessary for them to begin dating again, showing up at his house one afternoon with a basket filled with neat rolls of sushi and a proposal for a stroll down the street. He did not require much convincing, it seems, or even that much of an explanation for their long separation, although my mother did tender him one of her own will. That he accepted her back with a minimum of fuss, and that she shines with gratitude when she talks about how he did so, are facts that I treas
ure, for I cannot help thinking that they bode well for their future happiness.

  They have been back together, as it turns out, for more than a month, and when she tells me this I know that I have found the reason for all those nights I sat by the phone, worrying as I dialed her number over and over again. On the verge of reproaching her for not telling me earlier, I manage to clamp down on my tongue: it is not as if I am a stranger to the crime of keeping secrets.

  She and Ned simply picked up where they left off. They have been attending movies and concerts, going out on bicycle rides and picnics. He has resumed bringing her vegetables; she has been cooking for him again. Lately he has taken up spending nights over here, a confession she makes without blushing.

  “It makes up a little,” she says at last, concluding, “for the fact that your grandmother’s not coming.”

  I look up, then, startled. Is it something in that phrase, which is, after all, a kind of search yet again for a silver lining? Or is it the tone of her voice, at once melancholy and resigned? Whatever the reason, her words bring it home to me that my grandmother is also her mother.

  If I am feeling unfairly cheated of my chance to know the woman whose name, face, and long body I inherited, the woman who reserved a whole wall of her study for photographs of me—if I am reeling with what is almost a child’s sense of disappointment and rejection at my grandmother’s decision to spend the last years of her life with someone other than me, what my mother must be feeling is infinitely worse. I think then of that first Akiko, who clung to her tall daughter and cried as she said good-bye, and how Yukiko worked through her apprenticeship waiting in vain for her arrival.

  I look across the kitchen at my mother, who looks so small sitting high off the ground. This is the woman who despite my resistance held me spellbound with her tales.

  “Thank you for telling me all those stories about Grandmother,” I say, reaching across the space that separates us to touch her on the arm. “At least I’ll always have that.”

  Reared in a culture in which family members bow rather than hug, my mother is perhaps not surprisingly a woman of reserve, shy even around her daughter. Caught off-balance by the contact, she pulls away from me slightly: a gesture that I, after two beats, mirror.

  Yet her physical retreat may not be a rejection of me, even an unconscious one, for there is more than a hint of wistfulness in her next words. “I can listen to stories, too, you know,” she says.

  “And answer questions?” I interject suddenly, for within this afternoon, the hoard of questions I have been saving for my grandmother has become an almost unbearable weight.

  She looks at me strangely: my question was undoubtedly too abrupt. “I can try to answer questions, anyway,” she says. “Why, is there something on your mind?”

  “Maybe later,” I say, echoing myself now, and I wave in the direction of the pile of dirty dishes. I turn on the water and the pots clatter against one another when I pick them up, but even so I can still hear my mother sigh as she stands up behind me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE PROBLEM WITH being descended from insomniacs is that it is difficult to find a corner of peace and quiet in the house, even in the earliest hours of the morning, Or so I think when I see my mother hobbling down the stairs, a vision of ghostliness in one of her long white nightgowns, at a little after three.

  She yawns, and passes a hand wearily over her eyes. “Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asks.

  I shrug. “Why aren’t you?”

  “Want some water?”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head.

  She disappears into the kitchen. Lying down on the sofa, one ear pressed into a cushion, I listen to her move about the kitchen. Presently she emerges, two glasses in her hands.

  “I said I don’t want water,” I say, still in sulky mode.

  She sits down at the other end of the couch, her hip brushing against my feet, and reaches over to place one glass on the coffee table in front of me. “Just in case,” she says mildly.

  A pause during which I try to rouse myself out of my petulant mood, but I cannot come up with anything particularly pleasant to say. “I’m glad about you and Ned,” I tell her at last.

  “I was lucky,” she says. “I was almost too late, you know—I almost lost him.” She taps a fingernail lightly against her glass. “I wasted so much time waiting for your father.”

  Her confession, unusual as it is, does not seem amiss in this place and time. The room is quiet and cool, the hour an odd one; the very darkness closing in around us seems to invite revelations.

  “Maybe you did,” I say. “But I know how you felt.”

  “You still miss Phillip, don’t you,” she says softly.

  “Less and less,” I say. “But yeah, I do.”

  “It’s been more than a year and a half since he died. You and Phillip—” She breaks off, clears her throat, and drinks some water. Then she asks me a question that Eric, too, has asked more than once. “You and Phillip—you two were never lovers, right?”

  I hesitate only briefly, thinking, as I begin to speak, about the convergence of circumstances that makes me want to do so: the strangeness of the hour, most obviously, and the way she found me in spite of it; that both of us are only semiconscious, a mere stone’s throw from the borders of sleep; the fact that I am half turned away from her, so that I do not have to see her watch me as I talk. Not least, perhaps, my shame at how I indulged my self-pity all throughout the day.

  “The night before he left, we had a fight,” I say, reaching for the glass in front of me. “It was silly, really—I was upset because I went to his apartment, and it turned out that he was giving up his lease…. I was feeling cross, I guess, because I was worried that he’d never come back. Then he kissed me on the street, and it frightened me, he was so intense—I drew back and he left without saying good-bye.”

  “And?”

  I shake my head slowly, and take a polite sip from the water. “He came back to my apartment later that night. Some time after midnight, even though his flight was for the next morning,” I say. “And then—then we spent the night together.”

  These words (choppy, desultory, stammered) make for a bald and even bleak statement, one that singularly fails to do justice to the light and life of that wintry night, and the sheer wonder of him coming back for me, after the botched good-bye we had had in the street, when the snow was just beginning to fall.

  But then again, the details of that night are nothing that my mother needs to hear. So I do not tell her how when I heard the knock, I did not bother to look through the peephole before opening the door. After the way I reacted to our kiss, I had no right to even hope he would show up. Still, I had been pacing restlessly for the past hour, turning sharply at every imagined creak and every phantom footstep outside my door.

  As soon as I saw his face (his mouth set in a stern line, his eyes grave, with only a wrinkle between his brows to betray he was not at ease), I threw myself at him. He reeled when the full force of my weight hit him and stepped half a pace back, but caught me squarely.

  We moved to the bedroom (kissing, biting, licking, bits of my clothing falling along the way) before the snowflakes covering his shoulders had time to melt under my arms.

  After five months during which we saw each other almost every day, after hours and hours of conversation in which I was utterly absorbed, watching and listening as he talked, I knew all the tricks of his speech, the erratic rhythm of his pauses, the angle he tilted his head when he laughed, his impatience with his own constant struggle with the inadequacy of language. Still, a year of observing him, an entire twelve months of wondering what he would be like in bed, would not have prepared me for how he actually was.

  He was passionate, even overwhelmingly so, just as I had imagined, but a far cry from the smoothly experienced lover that his innumerable successes with women had led me to expect. There was a rawness to our lovemaking, an edge in his need for me, that I would never ha
ve predicted. I had figured him for a bit of a tease, in control, amused, and just a little distant, working me into a fever pitch with delays that I would scarce be able to handle. Yet the reserve that characterized his interactions with the outside world and even, at times, with me, had vanished. Quickly recovering from the force of my attack, he returned my kisses with a ferocity that startled me, and eventually proved contagious. Removing the last articles of clothing from each other, we thrashed about with the awkwardness of overeager teens.

  The shyness came later, after that first time, when we lay spent and exhausted, tangled still in each other’s bodies. Shaking, shivering, grinning like a fool, I turned to kiss him with gratitude, only to find his face hidden beneath the crook of his elbow.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” he replied huskily.

  “You hiding?” I asked, slowly bringing my face closer, zeroing in on his one visible eye until my nose crashed into his arm.

  He shrugged, or what passed for a shrug in the position that he was in.

  “’Cause if you are,” I volunteered helpfully, “it ain’t working.”

  He remained silent, although he did uncoil a little, enough so that I could see both his eyes. It took me a few moments to place the expression on his face. It was an expression I had seen in the library when I had looked up, weary and dusty, from my own musty books, and gazed with idle curiosity upon the faces of those sitting around me. It was a look I had seen on my mother in her pre-med days, when she spent the evenings poring over chemistry equations. Phillip was studying my face and my body, to learn and remember them.

  We stayed up far into the night, as deliriously giddy as children, but we dozed on and off as well. With my back turned towards him and his top arm wrapped around my breasts, I pushed against him in my sleep, clashing against the resistance of his hardness until the sound of my own groans eventually awakened me. All told, we made love perhaps three or four times. My inability to pin down an exact number frustrates me no end, but so often did we drift in and out of sleep during that night that I cannot discount the possibility that I may have dreamed one of those times.