by Laura Furman
Back in Tokyo on Sunday, we went straight to Sumiko’s apartment and flopped onto her futon, too tired to take off our coats. We hadn’t touched all weekend, had hardly spoken, and now we lay inches apart, staring up at the ceiling. “Your parents aren’t so bad,” I said, unable to lift my head, which was still full of polite Japanese conversation, spinning around and around. I’d played Go with her father, had allowed her mother to teach me calligraphy in a studio full of morning light at the back of the house. Before we left for the station, her mother had given me a scroll with an example of her own writing, surprisingly thick and muscular, full of sharp angles and mad splatter. I’d felt like she was declaring something about herself, something that secretly linked us together. “I think they liked me,” I said, wanting to believe it, testing the sound of it.
Sumiko turned to look at me. “In Japan, politeness is a wall. The more polite, the higher the wall.”
“And how high was their wall?”
“It was electrified, with barbed wire on top.”
I thought of Sumiko’s mother serving me at dinner before anyone else, thought of Sumiko’s father refilling my glass with beer over and over, though etiquette required the reverse, that I pour for him. I had tried once, but he had grabbed the bottle from me. “At least they weren’t rude,” I said.
“In the kitchen, my mother turned to me and said, ‘Don’t give me blue-eyed grandchildren.’ ”
Everything inside me got very quiet; I could feel the blood moving through my heart. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“You don’t think that they know that we—”
“I don’t care what they know, and anyway, they’re not idiots.”
And then I felt the delayed sting of her mother’s comment. “My eyes are brown, not blue,” I said, remembering Sumiko’s mother handing me the brush, guiding my hand over the paper, showing me how to write the long dripping letters that looked like rain on the window. I had thought she liked me, maybe she even had, but the more important thing was that I had liked her: her gentleness, which was akin to melancholy, her ability to instruct without saying a word. “I don’t think anyone in my entire family has blue eyes.”
Sumiko sat up. “You don’t want to marry me. You would never even consider marrying me.”
“What are you talking about?” We had never used the word together, and it seemed startling, naked.
“You won’t marry me,” she said.
“I would marry you,” I said, phrasing it as a hypothetical.
“No, you wouldn’t.”
So frightened it almost seemed to be happening in a dream, I asked her to marry me. She burst into tears and asked why I hadn’t proposed sooner.
“Because I didn’t know you’d say yes,” I lied.
“I’m not saying yes.” She put her head down on my lap, hiding her wet face with her hands. “Poor sweet boy, I feel sorry for you.”
• • •
Sumiko went to her first job interview dressed in a blue suit and cream blouse and carrying a leather portfolio tucked under her arm, like all the other soon-to-be-graduated job seekers I saw on the subway. Afterward, she came back and lay on the tatami with her eyes shut while I kissed her face and neck and shoulders. “Why don’t you write something?” I suggested. “Writing always makes you feel better.”
“There’s no point,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“Write something gory, about aliens who hollow people out and lay eggs inside their skulls.”
“It would only make me sad.”
“I’ll do dinner and the dishes, and you can work till we go to bed.”
“That me is gone. I have to be the other me now, the one who pretends to like children.”
The job interviews became routine. Sumiko would iron the cream-colored blouse and the blue suit, then spend a long time in front of the mirror, painting her face into a heavy mask. Back at home, she would wash it all off and change into jeans and we would go out for ramen, then watch TV till late at night, as if waiting for some undefined miracle to happen, something that would put a stop to graduation forever. Sitting in the blue glow of her little TV, I wanted to close my eyes against the world, like the beautiful statues of Jizō in the monastery, and imagine us back at the beginning, when she had laid her head on my chest, reading me a story.
And then one night, she shook me awake in that dead space before morning, saying that there was something we had to do. I got dressed in the dark, feeling lucid but not really awake, as if I were just a guest inside her dream. She gave me a big black garbage bag to carry, then grabbed a bottle of shōchū from the kitchen counter and opened the front door. I followed her out onto the open-air veranda, dragging the bag, which was surprisingly heavy.
The street was motionless, like an artifact contained in a museum case. The only thing alive was the thrumming of the cicadas, a metallic sound like the whirring of an engine deep inside the world. I followed her around back to the courtyard, a square of concrete on which sat a row of garbage cans, frosted by the light of a single streetlamp.
“Dump the stuff in there,” she said, pointing to a big metal tub used for burning leaves.
I carried the bag over and undid the twist tie. Inside were her notebooks, their covers decorated with hearts and Hello Kitties. “Hey, wait a second,” I said.
“We’re celebrating.” She reached into the pocket of her sweatpants and pulled out a very official-looking piece of correspondence. “I got a job. I’m now a kindergarten teacher.” She opened the bottle of shōchū, took a swig, and handed it to me.
“You can’t burn your work,” I said.
“Kafka did.”
“He asked Brod to do it, knowing full well that he wouldn’t. And Kafka was dying, not graduating.”
She lit a Golden Bat. “You know what, you’re not my husband, so you don’t tell me what to do.”
“You’re going to regret this.”
“What do you know about me, anyway?”
Maybe she was right. Was this a test? Did she want me to stop her? I watched her use two hands to dump the notebooks into the metal tub, scooping them out of the trash bag in heaps, as if they were fallen leaves. Her cigarette bobbed between her lips as she worked. When she was done, she lifted the bottle of shōchū from the ground and took another swallow.
“Writing was just a stupid fantasy, anyway,” she said.
“I love your stories.”
“But you don’t love me.”
“I wish you’d stop saying that.”
I watched Sumiko pour shōchū onto the notebooks in the tub and then use her lighter to set the acceptance letter ablaze. For a second, it was like a little handkerchief of fire between her fingers. She held it aloft as if waving good-bye to someone leaving on an invisible cruise ship, and then dropped it into the tub to light the rest.
There were some loose pages that caught and curled first. The flames burnt green and then orange. I could see Sumiko’s handwriting twisting, turning brown. Bits and pieces of paper flew off into the darkness. The cardboard covers burnt, curving like smiles. I passed the bottle back and forth with Sumiko, feeling the heat from the fire on my face and hands.
In that moment, I knew that I would pack in the morning and go back to my place, and that I would quit grad school and get on an airplane and fly back to America. I knew that my parents would meet me at the airport, looking boozy and frail. I knew that I would go with them for the very first time since the funeral to visit my sister’s grave in the big cemetery next to the highway, where the headstones were lined up like millions of chessmen. I knew that I would have to do something to start my life.
Till then, I was just watching.
About a year later, living in New York, I got a letter from Sumiko. It was our first communication since I’d left Japan, and my chest tightened as I opened the envelope and saw the handwriting I knew from her notebooks, that swift native speaker’s hand that I could ne
ver imitate:
Dear Poor Sweet Boy,
The cherry blossoms are falling, and for some reason I think of you.
The school where I teach looks exactly like the one I went to as a child: the concrete building, the playground with the metal climbing set and swings. On the first day, I got there very early, and as I walked the empty hall I had the feeling that I had gone back in time to become a kindergartener again—worse, that I had somehow fallen asleep in the middle of class and dreamed that I was an adult. Though the dream had seemed to take twenty-two years, it was really only a few minutes long, and in a second I was going to wake up in my little-girl body, and my mother would be waiting outside at the end of the day to take me home. I got so confused that I had to sit in my chair at the front of the empty classroom and put my head between my knees and breathe, wondering when I would wake up and be my real self again in the real world, not the dream world.
But I’ve grown used to teaching since then, and I find that I now take a great deal of comfort in the daily routine. There is a working agreement here that makes life reassuring: I pretend to be a teacher and the children pretend to be my students. Parents and teachers agree to forget that children are in fact lunatics, and that what we call growing up is just learning to hide it better so nobody will lock us away.
Oh, did I mention that I’m engaged to be married? He works at the same insurance company as my father, which is convenient. The only problem is that he has a good heart, so we have some trouble communicating—just like I had with you. But I’m trying to learn how good people talk, so I can fake it.
I don’t miss you at all.
My first thought was to tell her that she should leave her fiancé and come join me in New York. In America we would switch roles: she would be the space alien and I would be the human guide, the one whose job it was to explain the world. But I knew she would never listen to me.
I sat with the letter in my hand, remembering the sound of her voice as she read me a story for the first time. We were naked, her head resting on my chest. The story was about children whose parents are nothing but holograms, beams of light, and the words were so full of sadness that I knew then and there that I could love her if she let me—if I let myself.
The story was long, and it wasn’t till I realized that I could hear every word of it that I grabbed a notebook and a pen and began to write. My fingers ached as they chased her voice, the voice that had made me feel free and alive and frightened all at once, whether we were hiding in the shadows outside the train station or soaking in her deep tub, the water so hot I couldn’t breathe. I was going to save her story from the fire, save it and send it back to her as a wedding gift, save all the stories in all the notebooks. But when I came to the end, what I had written was about the night my sister and I sat on the roof of my parents’ house in Leonia, right before she went into the hospital for the last time: Daisy and me, staring at the stars, those tiny points of light, and feeling as if we were falling upward into the sky.
Louise Erdrich
Nero
HE WAS THE SECOND, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents. With a grocery store that included a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse, they could feed as many dogs as they liked. Nero, a mixture of fierce breeds in a line known locally as guard dogs, was valued for his strength, his formidable jaws, and his resonant bark. At night, he was turned loose to guard the cash register in the front of the shop, where he paced the waxed linoleum, a ghostly white. Other unbanked valuables were kept in a safe in my grandfather’s bedroom. He slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side of him and a loaded gun on the other. This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.
I was taken to stay with my grandparents because my mother was about to have a baby. The plan was for me to stay there until the baby was established at home—a period of only two or three weeks. While there, I must have lived at a more intense pitch. Or perhaps the novelty of everything that happened caused each day to imprint itself deeply on my mind. I believe I could still draw the stippled print on my grandmother’s homemade shifts, or even reproduce the maps of blood that appeared and disappeared on my grandfather’s bleached, starched, ankle-length aprons. I was seven years old, wore boy’s clothes, and was often mistaken for a boy, a sickly one. “Don’t you feed him?” the customers would say, laughing. My grandmother stopped giving me jobs out front. Every day, I climbed the trestle fence to watch Uncle Jurgen, a skinny, awkward figure in steel-toed boots, bring pigs, sheep, even steers and heifers to a stilled submission. My grandfather, a real wrestler, had taken prizes in Germany. But Jurgen had his own ways. He grappled with each animal without exerting, it seemed, much effort. When the animal had tired itself out and stopped kicking, he’d use a razor-sharp knife to cut its throat with a technique so precise that the blood could be collected for black sausage.
Now the scalding tub for pigs is rusted, thistles have grown through the wire chicken cages, and somewhere in the field behind the closed shop the bones of Nero whitely petrify.
“Throw down the guts if he rushes at you,” my grandmother said, handing me a bent pie tin heaped with offal. Nobody argued with her, ever. Sometimes Nero buried his dishes in the fenced backyard after emptying them, or, if acutely bored, tossed them high in the air with his great muzzle. He caught these objects and chewed them to lethal shreds of metal, which littered the ground, along with his dung, and had to be picked up by one of the old men who worked odd jobs in exchange for schnapps. As instructed, I threw down the guts and backed away. Nero snapped down his food and stared at me. His eyes were nobly set in his broad brow. I stepped behind the screen door, but Nero held my gaze.
As I looked into his eyes, which were the same brownish gold as mine, I had my first sensation of self-awareness. I realized that my human body, my human life, was arbitrary. I could have been a dog. An exhilarating sadness gripped me, and then I felt the first intimations of sympathy for another form of creation, for Nero, who had to eat guts from an old pie tin. In the kitchen, there was a ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a fat baker. It was always filled with gingersnaps that had gone stale in the shop. The jar was kept on top of the refrigerator, but was easily reached if I stood on the table. I took two cookies to the back door, opened it a crack, and tossed one of them toward Nero. He caught it with a jump. He caught the second one, too. After that, it became my custom to take a few gingersnaps to the door and toss them to Nero, in the spirit of secretly aiding a fellow prisoner. For I had a confused sensation that we were both captive—in different bodies, true, but with only one dark way out.
Every animal had its use. Most, of course, were there to be slaughtered or, in the case of chickens and guinea hens, to lay eggs and then be slaughtered. The smaller dogs were there to keep my grandparents’ feet warm and to accompany them on deliveries. They were given a few pats and scratches, but Nero, as a guard dog, wasn’t treated with human affection. Therefore he never begged, wagged his tail, smiled with his tongue lolling, or pricked up his ears with excitement at certain words. He knew no human words except the one I taught him: gingersnap. The only sign of his understanding was a keener look in his eyes, a stiller stillness, a slight crouch for the midair catch. But it is probably impossible for our two species, interdependent since the dim beginning of our ascendancy on this earth, not to communicate. Staring at each other, we were exchanging some signal. After being fed or catching his daily gingersnaps, Nero trotted away to lie underneath a rogue pine that had grown up close to the door. When his food was digested, he usually returned to his primary daytime task—attempting to break out of the backyard.
It was well known that Nero was not just looking for freedom. He was infatuated with a mean snub-nosed cocker spaniel named Mitts. She lived on the other side of the fairgrounds with Priscilla Gamrod, the shop’s bookkeeper. Her father owned a bar and was known to fling men twice his size out the door by their collar and belt. Priscilla was twenty-five, but she still
lived with him. Her mother had died, leaving the two of them bound by a grief that eased with time but was replaced by Mr. Gamrod’s jealous dependence. This had got so bad that he insisted on fighting any man who tried to court her. He’d beaten them all, and Priscilla had put up with it because she hadn’t found a man she liked yet anyway. She doted on Mitts and took her everywhere, brushed and beribboned. Once a year, she bred Mitts to Lord Keith, a papered stud who lived on a farm near Long Prairie. She sold the purebred pups only to people who met her standards, and cried when the last one left the house. Nobody knew if Mitts preferred Lord Keith to Nero, because she bit every dog and person within her reach. Priscilla, with her bandaged fingers, often had to cope with Nero’s longing, but she never called the city dogcatcher.
Every time Nero broke loose, Jurgen built the fence higher. He used a combination of materials—old pickets, long staves, chicken wire, and spare rebar. He had it up to seven feet now, but the haphazard nature of its construction made the outcome almost certain; there were always bits of wood or metal jutting out on which Nero could gain purchase. For a couple of days now, he had been practicing his ascent. Over and over, he rushed at the fence, each time gaining a few inches of height. From one side of the yard to the other, using subtle variations in each approach, Nero strove. He kept at this for an entire afternoon and could be heard before dawn the next day, throwing himself upward.