One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  “Damn,” he said at one point during the night, rubbing his eyes. “I wish I weren’t so tired. Sleep seems such a waste right now.”

  “We’ve wasted so much time already,” I said, half-wailing and half-laughing. “I can’t believe we spent five months being only friends, when we could have been doing this at the same time.”

  He laughed, too, and wrapping his legs and arms around me, pulled me closer. “We’ll make up for it,” he said, his words slurring with sleep. “It might take us another thirty, forty, fifty years, but we’ll make up for those lost five months in the end.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered.

  I bent my head down to his chest and rested it there, breathing in the smell of his skin and listening to his heart beat. Lightly I ran my fingers over his collarbone, his shoulder, the angry white streak of the scar on his stomach, the smooth ridges of his ribs.

  “I love you,” I said, murmuring, my voice barely audible even to my own ears. “I’ve always loved you. And I’d bet the farm that I always will love you. But you know that, don’t you?” I asked, drawing back to look at him with some curiosity.

  His eyes were closed, his breathing deep and regular. He was smiling faintly in his sleep.

  Throughout this past year I have regretted much about that night. That I did not stay awake to watch and memorize Phillip’s face while he slept, or get up to barricade the door and lock him up inside the apartment with me, as I so longed to do. There have even been moments when I felt sorry that I was on the Pill at the time, although the shock of his death would have been far greater if I had been carrying his child.

  But the fact that he did not hear me say that I loved him was never something I regretted. For he knew that, of course, just as I always knew, deep down, that he loved me.

  All these memories are secrets I fiercely guard, even from my mother. I keep from her, too, how I woke to the gray light of very early morning, and Phillip’s head lodged snugly under my chin, my body wrapped around his. It seemed slightly incredible that we had managed to sleep like this, braided so tightly together that it was impossible to tell where I ended and he began.

  I was careful to keep my eyes turned away from the window at first, while I wished for snow. If I imagined it hard enough, surely it would have to come true: mountains blanketing the Newark airport, snow of such depth and weight that all the plows in New Jersey would be unable to clear it in time for the 11:35 A.M. flight to Sydney, Australia, where a flight to Kathmandu awaited Phillip. Seventy-foot-long airplanes wedged in tight or, better yet, buried, their outheld wings and dolphin noses transformed into ski slopes fit only for a child. Torrents of white coming down, blindingly hard, so that all the pilots in the area would roll over in bed, take one look at the blizzard raging outside their windows, and snuggle deeper into the covers, knowing already that their flights had been canceled.

  When I finally turned, a full ten seconds later, to see only the lightest layer of snow dusting (dancing on, already drifting away from) the windowsill, the disappointment choked my throat and came out in a sound that was horrifyingly close to a sob.

  I bit my lip, grateful that Phillip continued to lie still under my chin. Yet I was puzzled as well, wondering what had touched me on the hollow of my throat. It had been a tickle, just barely perceptible, like the tip of an ink brush leaving its mark on my skin.

  “You’re awake,” I said after a while. Phillip did not reply. “It’s no use pretending you’re not. Your eyelashes gave you away.”

  What I do tell my mother about is when I wake up yet again, to a light that is still gray, and the sight of Phillip standing naked beside the bed. He held his airplane ticket between his hands, ready to tear it in half.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded sharply.

  “I can’t go,” he said, lowering the ticket and turning to look at me. “I won’t go. Not after this.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I asked in disbelief; when I saw that he was not, my toes curled, seemingly of their own volition. I wanted to sing and dance, to cry and laugh. But I trembled, suddenly terrified, when the thought ran through my mind: this is what pure happiness feels like.

  “I don’t want to go anymore,” he said.

  “Sure you do. You love to travel. Besides, you have to go,” I told him. “You’ve got an expedition to lead.”

  I saw it as a pact that I was making with fate. If I let Phillip go now, if I gave him up for a handful of interminable weeks, then I would have earned him; he would be mine forever.

  “But—” he began.

  “Will you go, already?” I said in mock exasperation: four words that replayed themselves in my mind without cease for the better part of last year.

  He shifted back and forth on his feet, a quickly beating pulse visible above one collarbone. “I’ll cut the trip short,” he said at last. “Three weeks, and then I’ll be back. I swear it: cross my heart and—”

  “You can skip the vow,” I said, smiling up at him. I held out my arms, and after a pause he bent down and—with an almost bearlike, strangely touching clumsiness—clambered back into them.

  “I believe you,” I whispered.

  There is a small silence when I finish speaking.

  “A pretty bleak story, don’t you think?” I say, trying to prod my mother into speech.

  “No,” she replies slowly. “Sad, but not bleak. And it’s a relief to me, anyway. I was worried about you, because it seemed you were too deep in mourning for Phillip, after only five months of friendship. It seemed out of proportion. You were depressed for far too long.”

  “And now?” I ask, summoning a light tone. “Now you’re not worried about me, because you know I had a reason to be depressed?”

  Even with my head turned away from her, I can feel her nod. “Something like that,” she says.

  The light from the kitchen juts into the living room in a sharp angle, cutting a triangle of brightness on the floor. Moonlight comes in through the window, as does the dark smell of earth, the chirping of crickets, and the distant baying of a dog. Half-asleep, I lose track of time, and when I find myself jarred back awake by an urgent need to ask a question that I have wondered about for years, the crickets are silent, and the dog’s baying sounds even farther away.

  “Do you ever regret marrying Father?”

  My mother is quiet for so long that I, wondering if she has fallen asleep, turn around to look up at her. Her eyes, clear and bright, show no trace of fatigue; she returns my gaze calmly.

  “I regret everything,” she says. “I regret all the paths I didn’t take, and every step I did, and each of the hundreds of opportunities I passed up.” Suddenly she grins, her cheeks rounding into what could almost pass—in this half-light—for something resembling apples, and for a second I see her: the young woman with a keen curiosity about the far-flung corners of the world, as well as an insatiable appetite to experience them.

  “But you know what?” she asks. “If I had my life to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  I awake with a start to the raw light of morning. Dazed by the sunshine and confused by the unexpected vista of a window framed by brocade curtains, I blink, trying to orient myself. The last night I spent with Phillip is still vivid in my mind.

  Not until I hear a rustle and crackle, and the familiar whoosh of air that accompanies the turning of a newspaper page, do I remember where I am. The smell of toast is in the air, and soon I hear the rhythmic sound of munching.

  The couch is long but narrow, its cushions far too soft—a terrible place to sleep, as I know full well, having tried in vain to nap there as a teenager. But this morning I roll over, sinking ever more uncomfortably deep into the cushions, and easily slip back into sleep, lulled by the thought that my mother is there, within calling distance, just as she has been through all the past years.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THIS MORNING I woke to a premonition that I would see Phillip once again.<
br />
  I used to think that one day I would answer the door and he would be standing there, fully clothed, more or less nourished, and most of all talking. That Russia was wrong, that the news reports erred, and that the people at the lodge in Nepal that I called lied. That his death was a mistake, or even a joke—a colossal, awful thigh-slapper played upon me by my two closest friends. Then the hours of waiting slipped into days and nights and then into months, yet still I hoped, so that for almost a year every Seventh-Day Adventist who came knocking at my door with pamphlets was met by a woman whose face immediately darkened with disappointment.

  My premonition today, almost eighteen months after his death, is ridiculous, running strictly counter to reason and intuition, but then what else is a hunch if not that? Yesterday I had ridden on the certainty that I could guess at the life that lay ahead of me, and I had been proven decidedly wrong; surely my gut instinct could not fail me two days in a row. So I have remained vigilant today, sharply scrutinizing all the dark corners of the house, opening each of the cabinets in the kitchen until my mother, alarmed by all the banging, poked her head in to inquire what I sought.

  For of course I am not so foolish as to still hope that he will stroll through my door with his clothes on and his vocal cords intact and functioning. I am not even so greedy as to demand that he return to my apartment to keep me perpetual silent company from inside the fireplace. All I want is for this one premonition to bear fruit: all I want is to see his face once again.

  “I’m ready for Grandmothers present now,” I say. “And the letter, please.”

  It is only three but my mother is already hard at work making dinner, and has been so for the past two hours. I offered to help earlier but I was distracted, wheeling around at every sound, and she soon sent me away, muttering that she would not be able to afford it if I broke another glass.

  Interrupted in her sushi preparations now, she looks up, a little startled, but merely nods. Wiping her hands on her apron, she walks out to the hall closet. When she reemerges, she is carrying a brown package, dotted with Japanese stamps, maybe the size of a large dictionary.

  I take it out to the living room, noting with some relief that it is far too light to be a dictionary, even a small one.

  “You have to open the package first,” she says, explaining. “The letter’s inside.”

  She leans against the wall and watches as I snip the cord, rip the brown wrapping, open the box, and peel away the layers of bubble wrap and plastic and tissue.

  “You know what it is?”

  She nods slowly. “But I’m curious to see it again, after all these years.”

  My hands are shaking just slightly as I push aside the last folds of tissue, for by then I can guess what it is. Lacquered black on the outside and red within, it has a spidery pattern of pine trees along its walls, just as my mother had described. I open it, leaning forward to smell the inside; it conveys nothing other than the not unpleasant mustiness of a long-sealed box. But inside it, as if to make up for its lack of a tea scent, lies a sealed envelope.

  “Well? Does it still smell like burning leaves?” asks my mother, watching from her vantage point against the wall. “Will you keep your hair in it?”

  “No to both questions,” I tell her.

  “It’s a mystery where she got it,” muses my mother, and I nod: she does not need to tell me that she is referring to my great-grandmother Akiko, her namesake. “Those kinds of boxes are worth a lot.”

  “Even like this?” I say, holding up the top.

  She winces as she moves forward to examine the burn, and I know that she is thinking, as I am, of all that was lost in the fire.

  I pass her the envelope, then, and she turns it over in her hands, admiring the delicate flowers decorating its edge, but contrary to form she does not sit and open it, holding it back out to me instead.

  I look up at her inquiringly.

  “It’s in English,” she says, almost whispering.

  I take it back from her. Nothing if not tactful, my mother then murmurs a few words about rice, and a few seconds later I can hear her rattling away with the pots in the kitchen.

  My grandmother has written letters to me before, mostly terse cards congratulating me on birthdays, graduations, and other such milestones, but they have always been in Japanese. This is the first time I will be reading her words on my own, without the mediation of my mother.

  I tear open the envelope and unfold the letter without haste. The handwriting is sharp and angular, not dissimilar to my mother’s, though on a larger scale; it is also unusually clear, as one might expect from a person not at ease with the language.

  I think of my grandmother unpacking her fountain pen and pulling out this sheet of rice paper. Her movements are economical as she walks about her daughter-in-laws spacious guest bedroom, but they are slow as well, for the hour is late and she is tired and old. She lays down the pen and the paper on the desk, and she draws up one of the heavy chairs. Two suitcases, one shut and the other three-quarters packed, lie close beside her. As she sets down the date in the upper right-hand corner, she takes pleasure in the old, familiar sound of her fountain pen scratching against the paper.

  “Dear Yukiko-san,” she writes. “I am very sorry we will not have the opportunity to meet. I looked forward to long conversations with you. I was always sure we are friends. I hope your mother explained about Kaori. Take care. With regards, Yukiko.”

  I read the letter once, twice, and then again. In itself the letter is what I expected, no more, no less. Built though it is out of stilted phrases dredged from my grandmother’s distant memories of traveling abroad, or perhaps even cribbed from a lesson book, I cannot doubt its sincerity: the sentiments expressed in the disappointing clichés mirror too closely what I myself have been feeling about my unknown grandmother, this other Yukiko who lived out another time in another world.

  What surprises me about the letter, what draws me to read it again and again, is that the scratching of my grandmother’s pen is not my only accompaniment as I sound out its words. Unsought and unexpected, adding to the chorus of sounds, is my mother’s voice: her singsong lilt, her measured cadences, and the misplaced pauses when she stops for breath.

  While not a tall man, Ned Lewis is built like a block, possessing a bulk that suggests that in spite of the gray in his hair, he can well withstand the harsh winds he sometimes faces when he works in his garden. The vigor of his body stands in marked contrast to the lines of his face, which makes him look slightly older than his fifty-odd years. He moved to our town only recently, but still it is a well-known fact in our small neighborhood that his wife had been a long time dying.

  He is soft-spoken and given to few words, but dinner with him is still a far livelier affair than it usually is, his presence spurring my mother on to a new level of animation. He is an appreciative listener, smiling quietly, occasionally laughing, and often nodding, his gray eyes fixed upon her all the while. At the same time he makes sure to draw me out, asking me questions and listening with care to my answers. I am familiar to him from all those times I chatted with him when I visited home; he may also be predisposed to me because my mother told him how often I nudged her to go thank him for the vegetables. Still, even so, even considering that it could only be to his advantage to win me over to his side, I find myself touched by his gentle friendliness.

  Not for years, if ever, have I seen my mother so cheerful, but perhaps not surprisingly she sheds most of her glow upon Ned, with just a little of it falling on me. The years of reserve and silence that lie between my mother and me are still there, will possibly always be there. We may never kiss, and we will rarely hug. The warmth of a body rocking and folding me to itself, like the touch of long, cool fingers upon my head, is not something I will seek or expect from my mother.

  Once we shared an understanding so absolute it might have started in the womb. So many times have I asked myself why we grew apart that I have long since despaired of answering this
question on my own. So now (casting only one wistful glance back at the oracle that was to be my grandmother) I return, as I have so often before, to the far easier question of when we grew apart, and its answer: after my father left us.

  Her face flushed from the warmth of the kitchen, my mother stands, turns, and begins to wrestle with the windows. Ned moves quickly to help her, his broad back momentarily obscuring her from my view, and I watch him for a space, wondering whether I am wrong in guessing that someday I might be closer to my mother because of his bulky presence at her side.

  Not until it is after nine does dinner begin to draw to a close. The lamps have been turned on long ago; the light from the candles is now a necessity. Outside the night is cool, and the sky is dark and moonless.

  Breaking into a short pause, my mother tells me she will wrap the dessert, more than half of which remains, for Eric.

  “I have some bad news of my own,” I say then, baldly making the announcement I have put off so many times in this revelation-packed weekend. “Eric and I aren’t together anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” says my mother, a shadow passing over her face, momentarily dimming its brightness. “I liked him, you know.”

  I smile briefly at Ned, apologizing silently for casting this note of gloom over our first family dinner.

  “But I guess you weren’t ready for him,” continues my mother. “It was too soon after Phillip.”

  I had known she would be disappointed; I had thought she would be surprised.

  “You want to talk about it?” she asks.

  “Here?” I say. “Now?”

  “Why not?” she asks, countering my questions with one of her own.