Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  She was right, of course; there's no arguing with Claudia, so I pocketed both the plums and went home. It was a ruse, I was sure of it. Claudia wanted me to eat more. She was worried that I was too thin.

  Then, a few weeks later, I was on my way to meet her when I saw her on the street, crouching next to a storm drain. As I came closer, I saw her reach into her jacket pocket, take out one of the tiny pears that she loved, and roll it into the drain.

  “What are you doing?”

  She jumped, or at least as much as one can while crouching.

  “Sorry,” I said, lowering my voice. “I didn't mean to scare you.”

  Shielding her eyes with her hand, she looked up at me; the sunshine was strong that day. I crouched down next to her, so she wouldn't have to squint.

  “I saw you throw that pear in there,” I said, whispering.

  She looked away. “I dropped one in there,” she said sheepishly. Her voice was lowered too. “By accident. I tripped.”

  Why were we whispering? Out of respect for the pears, or was it because the way we were positioned, our heads close together as we crouched and peered into the drain, suggested secrecy? Whatever the reason, neither of us seemed to be able to stop.

  “But I saw you,” I said. “You threw that one in.”

  “I threw the second one in,” she corrected me. “The first one, I dropped.”

  “Oh.”

  Together we looked down into the drain. Faintly visible through the bars were two round shapes resting side by side. It was too dark to see their colors well, which was a shame, as they were beautiful pears, dusky red and yellow, Cezanne fruit. Once when I brought a couple of them home, my mother painted them for me; I have the picture still.

  “You threw the second so the first wouldn't feel lonely?”

  She nodded.

  “But now you don't have dessert,” I said, “and you love those pears. Couldn't you have rolled a pretty pebble into the drain instead, called it a day?”

  “It's not the same,” she said, flushing a little. “There needs to be two of a kind. Think how alone it would feel otherwise. Like it was abandoned.”

  “You're probably right,” I said.

  We looked into the drain for a few moments longer. Then we stood up, stretched, and walked arm in arm to her house.

  NO, CLAUDIA CAN'T have changed much, at least not fundamentally. Even if she does turn out to be that dark-haired woman who just made a grand entrance—that one, there, sporting too much makeup, the low-cut shirt, and what is almost certainly a fake pair of breasts.

  Chapter Three

  Claudia

  Boston, 1999

  WE STILL LOOK ALIKE. IT MAKES NO SENSE, GIVEN OUR different blood and our lack of any kind of genetic family tie, let alone the fact that we have not seen each other for more than seventeen years, but there it is, and I feel guilty remembering that I had sometimes wondered over our long sojourn apart whether there was a statute of limitations on stepsisterhood. She wears her hair unfashionably long and loose, as I do; she is dressed in an ankle-length dress, black with a striking design of small red stars, which could be a distant cousin of the blue one that I am wearing. Her head is bent studiously, even devoutly, over a tattered copy of a fat novel—could it be War and Peace?—but as I watch through the window, she crosses and recrosses her legs, and then bends down to scratch an ankle, and then picks up her coffee cup and puts it down without drinking. Rei never could sit still while waiting.

  I tap lightly on the glass. She turns so quickly she knocks over the small vase of flowers at her elbow, daisies and water spilling over her left arm and her book. She glances down at the table, looks over at me, throws her head back, and bursts out laughing. Although the glass is too thick for me to hear her, I know the glad bark of her laugh so well I can play the soundtrack to this silent movie in my head. She drops a napkin over the mess, shakes the drops off her arm and her book, and in one careless motion sweeps the flowers back into the vase. She jumps to her feet (her unusually long feet, her bare feet—her shoes are discarded, kicked under the table) and, picking up the ends of her skirt, she leaps the three paces over to where I am standing, skinny legs whirring in a blur of motion and hair pouring out in a black stream behind her; with smiles on their faces, a number of café customers look up to watch the madcap Asian woman fly by.

  Arriving at the other side of the glass from me, she is suddenly motionless, brought up short, perhaps, as I am, by the fact that we are thirty-four years old, an age we once did not believe we would ever reach. Rei has changed little, her face still narrow and dark, her eyes bright, and her features sharp. Her hair is slightly unkempt; it almost certainly still falls over her face to cover her eyes. She is almost unbearably thin, the dress hanging on her like a sack.

  Smilingly she examines me from tousled head to too-large feet, and for a second I study my reflection in the glass, an image superimposed over her: dark blond hair, gray eyes, a face that's weathered, a nose that's hopelessly snub, and a body, ungainly and too tall, that has seen better days. Does Rei notice how messy my hair is, and how flushed my cheeks? Can she tell how recently I have been loved; does she suspect that that is why I was almost late for this, our first encounter, so eagerly anticipated, in what has been far too many years?

  My hands are resting, palms flat, against the glass. With care she places her thin brown hands against where mine are, lining up our fingers so they match, and for a moment I think I feel the warmth of her palms through the thick pane.

  When I woke up this morning, I was so heavy with questions that I thought they would tumble out of me, six hours too early. Did you accomplish your ambitions; are you a dancer and a singer and a world-traveler, and do you have five cats that you take with you wherever you go? Did you meet the man of your dreams; was there a prince waiting for you, just as there was for your mother? Do you like to wear hats; are all of your earrings long, and do they come in bright colors? Do you remember how, after a trip to Jamaica with Hana and Henry, we decided we had to have dreadlocks—how we, per the instructions of a kind hippie we met there, didn't wash our hair for as long as we could stand it? I caved in first, done in by the unfortunate smell of the project, while you, motivated by the possibility of being the only dreadlocked Asian-American in New Jersey, went for almost a month longer, practically the whole summer.

  Then, in a darker vein: why did you write so few letters; how could you have let so many years pass by without a visit? Do you know how much I have missed you?

  I press my hands harder against the glass, wishing I could grip on to hers. As girls we used to walk hand in hand, arms swinging in tandem. Her fingers used to be longer and thinner than mine; still far thinner, now they are shorter by a hair. Are her hands clammy like mine with excitement? (Do you still make fun of yourself for worrying about clammy hands—do you still say with mock solemnity, wiping your hands against the sides of your pants and making yet another song out of the rhyme, “Don't forget: Asians aren't supposed to sweat”?). Although I want to look down to see if there is anything on her palm to mark where her recent illness began, I force myself to keep my eyes on her face.

  The questions had seemed uncontainable this morning. But as I face her now, with our hands pressed together through the window, there is only one phrase in my head.

  Rei grins. Her lips still stretch cartoonishly wide when she does so, an expression altogether different from her smile. She leans into the glass, one inky strand of hair falling over her left eye, and mouths the very words that I have been thinking.

  It's like looking in a mirror.

  Chapter Four

  New Jersey, 1974–82

  “THE ONE AND ONLY TIME MY MOTHER MET THE PRINCE of Japan,” Rei would say, drawling, holding on to the line and savoring it, like the pro that she was, “she had paint on her face.” A dramatic slash of blue-green—cobalt, to use the name on the tube—that started at the tip of her nose, cut across her left cheek, and managed to wend its way almost
to the corner of her eye.

  The year was 1954; the setting, a train bound from Nagoya to Tokyo. The heroine, a girl whose paint-splattered face was the least of it. There was also a dab of yellow on her ear, a streak of black that ran from her sleeve to her forearm, and orange splattered on her shoe, and it would be no mean feat to catalog all the colors that could be found on her hands and beneath her fingernails. Hana herself was well aware of the colors that adorned her: her shoe and her forearm were impossible to miss; she had been admiring the interplay of shades on her fingers, and she had seen her face and her ear reflected in the window when the train passed through a tunnel. No wonder a few of the other passengers had been staring as she walked down the aisle, searching for a seat; that the conductor had been smiling as he punched her ticket now seemed perfectly understandable.

  Still, what could she do? She had wet her fingers with her tongue and tried to rub the cobalt—such a satisfying color, so cool and serene—off her face, but she could not remember with accuracy where the slash started on her nose, and no other tunnels seemed to be forthcoming; she could see only through the window now, to rice paddies that were themselves a beautiful color, emerald green, perhaps, or Windsor, vivid and deep. So, with a shrug, she left the cobalt to glow dramatically—but also with serenity and coolness—on her nose and cheek.

  An artist, but one only in the making. Hana was twenty-one, and she looked younger that day, dressed as she was in what she considered to be a nightmare of a school uniform and what a pedophile would see as a wet dream: a white sailor's suit blouse with a square collar and a scarf that knotted in front; a knee-length, maroon pleated skirt; and bobby socks and canvas shoes, the whiteness of which was sullied only by the aforementioned orange splatter. Hana loved her school, which was tiny and select, attended by girls only; her teachers were smart but easygoing, and they encouraged her in her artwork. But the uniform they made their students wear! While Hana's fit her poorly—its sleeves were too long, the skirt too short—the reasons she hated it all had to do with its girlishness. As her mother never tired of reminding her, she always slouched when she wore it.

  It was early September, and hot outside, but Hana munched on warm chestnuts, spitting out the bits of shell into their bag (an unladylike habit that her mother despaired of ever curing her of) to pass the time until she reached Tokyo. Once or twice she dozed off, and when she did so she dreamed, as usual, of colors, vivid swirls of reds and oranges that she would later try with only limited success to replicate on canvas. Unlike her friends, girls who also wore sailor's suits but hated it less, Hana never dreamed about boys.

  The whistle blew, the conductor called out Tokyo station, and with a screech and a shudder the train came to a halt. Waking up with a start, Hana shook herself, trying to remember where she was. She rubbed her eyes, stood, and bent down to pull at the bottom of her skirt, wishing it were long enough to cover her knees. She gathered up her bags, which were light since she and her aunt Sachiko were traveling together just for the weekend, and then she walked down the aisle and out the door. The hazy Tokyo sunshine made her feel as if she were still dreaming.

  THE DAY THEY FIRST MET, Rei told Claudia the story of her mother and the prince. The two girls met in New Jersey, in Hana's house, on a sunny day in May of 1974; both of them were nine.

  Over the next eight years Claudia would drink in all of Rei's stories, yarns and nonyarns alike, tales of children found in peaches and bamboo shoots, chickens who wander through modern Tokyo, and cranes who pluck out their own feathers to weave a kimono. She would listen, enthralled, to descriptions of a far-off land where everyone is born with hair in shades of black, dinner is eaten while sitting on the floor, and figs and clementines are served daily to the dead.

  The stories that Rei most liked to tell were those involving journeys—rides taken on the backs of turtles, in rice bowls with a chopstick used for steering, in trains that shoot off steam, in airplanes and boats across strange seas. But the tales Claudia most liked to hear, the ones that left her spellbound and breathless even after the hundredth retelling, were about Hana, the girl who came so close to living out a fairy tale.

  IN 1954 THERE WERE still many in Japan (Hana's mother notably fervent among them) who worshiped the Emperor. Nine years had passed since he had come on the radio and revealed—through his high-pitched, almost falsetto voice as much as through his admission that America had won the war—that he was all too human. Still, many continued to believe that he and his kin were the direct descendants of Amaterasu, the sun god. And why not? His family had ruled Japan for two thousand years. They had triumphed over political turmoil, pretenders to the throne, and wars of both the civil and international variety; in spite of revolutions and barren wives and a long bout of obscurity during the Shogun era, they had managed to stay in power and to produce more or less viable candidates for the throne for generations upon generations.

  Hana herself had been trained since childhood to bow to a large picture of the Emperor every day in her classroom at school. So what if she was young and therefore perhaps inevitably skeptical about the system of values of her parents and teachers—a system that taught her that a squeaky-voiced man who led her country into a doomed and terrible war was kin to a god? So what if the aftereffects of the war could be felt all around them still—just look at Aunt Sachiko!—so what if the prime minister was the real ruler of Japan now, the Emperor but a figurehead? When Hana walked out onto the train platform and overheard the conductor telling another passenger that the Emperor's oldest son was to pass through this very station, she felt a very small twinge of curiosity.

  MOST ALTHOUGH BY NO MEANS ALL of the stories that Rei told Claudia had their source in Rei's mother. Hana herself was singularly unthrilled by this business of the Emperor's son. She had told her daughters that story just once, and only because they had heard about it from an old friend of hers, a woman who had also worn a sailor-suited uniform (but who had kept it free of paint) and who had shared her dreams about boys with Hana as they walked, whispering and giggling, to class.

  Hana did not understand her daughters' wide-eyed interest in the prince. “Why do you care about him?” she asked, with real curiosity (or, at least, more than a very small twinge of it). “He didn't do anything. He was just lucky with his parents.”

  Hana had not wanted to tell her daughters about the chance encounter between her younger self and the prince in the Tokyo train station because (as Rei explained to Claudia) she had been worried that it would disappoint them. She even apologized to them before she began her account: “It's not really a story.” Which, of course, it wasn't, at least in the sense that it did not stand on its own, only making sense as one tile of the almost-fairy-tale mosaic that was Hana's life.

  THE PLATFORM HAD BEEN freshly swept and scrubbed. It was the fact that the station had been emptied of people, though, that reminded Hana of the disdain she felt for the hidebound institution that was Japan's royal family and made any curiosity she felt in the prince (a young man, just her age, who was, she recalled her friends saying, more than a little good-looking and was interested enough in fish to study them scientifically; what would he be able to teach her about the fish that swam about in her mother's pond?) vanish.

  As if he belonged to another, higher form of life, as if he were too valuable to breathe the air that the rest of Japan took in, the prince led a sheltered life. His principal home, a grand palace surrounded by acres of gardens, occupied multiple precious blocks right in the center of the city. Its privacy was so closely protected that even Tokyo's dense and elaborate subway system, one of the great wonders of the modern world, was forced to bend, quite literally, to its will: because the subway was not allowed to go underneath the Emperor's palace, a few of its lines had to contort themselves in ways that were ridiculously inefficient. Hana was all for efficiency; she believed strongly in taking the quickest route between two points. The thought that the subway, which was streamlined and gratifyingly fast, which respon
sibly transported who knew how many millions of people every day, had been compromised for the sake of one little family's residence always riled her up.

  Hana herself lived with her parents and her younger sister and brother in a tiny, run-down house with a Japanese garden that was her mother's pride and joy. Along with a stone pagoda and maple as well as pine trees, the garden had a pond inhabited by large, slow-moving carp, or koi, which came in breathtaking colors, red and gold and dappled white, and which would live for more than a hundred years (or, as her grandmother had once told her, forever, but surely that wasn't true; that was one thing she would like to ask the prince) if only the neighborhood cats gave them the chance.

  Why were her friends suddenly so interested in boys; why would she ever want to meet someone like the prince? What would she have to say to him, and he to her—although she did, of course, have other questions to ask about fish, and thoughts of her own about them; she had been trying to capture their sheen on canvas for a long time—what did young men such as the prince have to offer her that the infinite possibilities of her paints did not?

  Thinking these thoughts, Hana walked swiftly through the station and then ran up the stairs to platform #2, where she would catch a connecting train to Nakano. She had a few minutes before the train arrived, and it was not as though she had anything particular to do on the platform; while she believed in efficiency, she didn't necessarily practice it herself, preferring to sit and daydream rather than, say, start on her school reading. Still, she ran up the stairs; Hana ran everywhere. (In the years to come, she would not change in this regard, just as she would continue to be indifferent to the presence of paint streaks on her face. When her daughters, who got tired of running to keep up with her, asked her with exasperation why she had to speed through the parking lot and race down the grocery aisles, she would say, pursing her lips to contemplate the question—and without slowing her pace by even a beat to do so—“I guess I hate to walk.”) It was a long flight of stairs so she was a little out of breath, her face lightly flushed from the September heat, as she approached the platform.