Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  The prince was dressed in a dark-blue business suit, well-cut and elegant, and he was the first thing Hana saw when she arrived at the platform. She was in fact so close to him, and her ascent to the top of the stairs had been so swift, that he started a little and pulled back. There was a murmur of concern from behind him, and Hana saw that he had a retinue—a group of four men, two young and two middle-aged, who stood perhaps two meters behind him. It was when she also saw that, despite their concern, these men made no move to bridge the gap between them and the prince that Hana began to feel sorry for Prince Akihito.

  Two meters was, after all, a good distance. (Years later, when she told this story to her American-born daughters, she would interrupt herself at this point, anticipating their question. “It's about six feet,” she would say, used to not being understood by them; it was when she could not keep up with them, when she could not even figure out what they were talking about, that she minded.) She herself—a commoner, someone who took and even liked the subway—was probably breaching some rule by standing so close to him. She and Akihito were no more than a meter and a half apart, close enough that she could see that even though he was very short, perhaps even as small as she was, he was every bit as attractive as her girlfriends promised. Who would have thought that his skin would be so smooth and pale; who would have guessed that he'd be beautiful, with that noble nose and the delicate features more like a girl's than a man's?

  And, as she thought a moment later, they were close enough too that he could see the paint on her face.

  Hana covered her nose with her hand, but it was too late; in a moment a grin transformed the face of the young man in front of her, and then just as suddenly it was gone. Sorry for him no longer, Hana felt her own face grow warm.

  How dare he laugh at her; who does this boy think he is?

  A god, perhaps, or an emperor's son.

  Hana bowed deeply. Then she lowered her hand from her face, lifted her head high and, walking rather than running for once, swept past him.

  IN THE SUMMER and in most of the spring and fall, Rei and Claudia usually sat outside, cross-legged on the lawn, for their storytelling hour. In the winter and on rainy days, they found private spaces inside the house: under the bed; in Hana's closet, beneath her silk shirts, textured pants, and skirts in myriad hues; behind the sofa in the seldom-used formal living room.

  Giving in to Claudia's pleas, Rei told and retold the stories about Hana with only a little reluctance, but it was hard for her not to think sometimes that Claudia's reverence for this almost-mythic figure was peculiar. Still (she told herself), she should not be surprised. Her mother, whose name meant flower in Japanese and who often seemed as fragile as one, was, after all, Claudia's stepmother—a spiteful, witchy figure in the Western counterpart to the myths Rei grew up on about tongueless sparrows and beautiful women who turn into cranes. Maybe, Rei thought, it was because Claudia took those stories as well as Rei's to heart that she regarded the adult incarnation of the almost-princess with more than a touch of suspicion.

  NO WORDS WERE EXCHANGED in the encounter between Hana and the prince, and they did not touch—a nonstory indeed, although it did not quite end there. That night, Hana, lying on a futon not far from Sachiko's at the inn, found herself in the unusual position of being unable to sleep. She thrashed about, scratching at nonexistent itches, kicking the covers off and then pulling them back over her, wishing that she could stop thinking about the prince and how for one fraction of a second he had stood there and looked at her, grinning widely at the paint on her nose.

  A couple of months later, Hana learned from her mother (who was almost tearful in her pride; Hana had never seen her like this, not when she came home with top grades, nor when she won the local award for best young artist) that she was being considered as a possible bride for the crown prince. There were many other candidates, but only from families far better than theirs; her mother speculated (with only a small furrow, the most delicate wrinkle, on her forehead betraying the doubt that she felt about her own words) that it was because Hana was so accomplished that she had been singled out.

  Hana was not used to having her mother fawn over her; she found it a pleasant albeit slightly odd experience. She also knew how cranky her mother could be when crossed. Still, she did not shrink from saying that she was not interested in marrying the prince, and no matter how her mother pleaded and argued and yelled, she never wavered from that stance.

  Because of her mother, everyone soon knew that Hana had been mentioned as a possible bride for the prince. But her encounter with Akihito on a Tokyo train platform during a hazy September afternoon Hana kept to herself: not her friends, not even her favorite aunt, Sachiko-san, and certainly not her mother ever found out about it. She would also keep to herself her suspicion that she had been traced through her school uniform, with its collar and skirt in distinctive maroon rather than in the standard navy, until years later, when her two daughters begged her for the story of the prince who wanted to marry her.

  When Hana finished telling them her story, there was a short pause, and then Kei and Rei, acting as one, raised their voices.

  “But you thought he was beautiful. You wanted to talk to him about fish; you couldn't sleep afterward,” they said, bewildered. “You liked him.”

  “I liked him,” said Hana, coloring a little. “I just didn't want to marry him.”

  “Why not?” they clamored, yet press though they did, she refused to give an answer.

  WHILE THERE WERE OTHER stories Claudia enjoyed more, the one about the prince intrigued her the most. In later years, she would wonder whether she asked her stepsister to recount that story so often because she was trying to understand, even then (at an age when she lacked the necessary skills even to formulate the question) what kind of woman would decide to break up another woman's home.

  But if the tale of the prince held the answer to this question—if it contained even a morsel of a clue about who Hana was—Claudia couldn't find it. In terms of resolving the ever-baffling mystery of what made Hana tick, all that that narrative seemed to yield was the unsatisfying (because already known) nugget that she was a person who did what she wanted to do, regardless of the opinions of others.

  That this story further seemed to suggest that Hana did what she wanted to do even when it ran against the grain of her own desires was too confusing to take into account, and so was dropped from Claudia's musings on her stepmother.

  But long before Claudia came to question her own fascination with the narrative of Hana and the prince, she and Rei would analyze the story together. Their understanding of it would change as they grew older, so that their initial wonder at a life that seemed at once strange and wholly familiar (the boy with a retinue; the girl with colors on her brain; the father, worshiped as a god, who almost destroyed a country; and the fleeting encounter that led to the possibility of marriage) turned into amazement at the befuddled, lurching path that fate could take—the coincidences and excruciating near misses that brought Rei and her sister into being. Then, in high school, during their first enthusiastic embrace of feminism, the stepsisters would feel outrage at the way in which this girl's picture had been studied, her medical records pored over, so that her fitness as a prince's wife, the mother of future human gods, could be appraised.

  Later still, after their own initiation into the push and pull of sexual attraction, they would marvel at how a passing whim, an idle moment of lust, could shape and mold the very contours of a life.

  Chapter Five

  Rei

  Boston, 1999

  IT'S LIKE LOOKING IN A MIRROR. THE PHRASE IS OUR PRIVATE joke, of course. How could we look alike, after all? We never did and never will, despite how we used to wear the exact same outfits, despite the way in which we used to pretend we could pass for each other, despite the fact that even after all these years apart—who would have guessed it, other than the two of us?—we still dress alike.

  Claudia's in trouble. It'
s what I first think, even before I come to a standstill in front of her, even before I start to take in what about her has changed, and what has not. Still, it's been seventeen years, so almost certainly, or probably or at least maybe, my judgment is off.

  Seventeen years. A lifetime, albeit an incomplete one.

  She's changed more than I thought, enough that I wouldn't have known her if we had passed on the street, although my fears of not recognizing her today were clearly groundless. She's considerably taller now, and stockier too, yet her hair hasn't changed at all. The braces worked: the gap in Claudia's front teeth is gone, and I'm almost sorry to see it. Her smile, flanked by those two soft dimples, is the same old gentle sunshine, but it is, perhaps, a little more wistful than it used to be—those lines around her mouth, and a hint of sadness lingering in her eyes—and underneath it she looks worn out. Tense, as if she's not sleeping well. Maybe it's just that her patients are wearing her down—or is that her students? Probably not clients, although I would bet sums of money too vast for the likes of me to hang on to that the woman standing in front of me works with people.

  She wears no ring, which must mean that she has not yet started on the brood of children that she used to want so badly, and it's a surprise to me that that fact doesn't surprise me.

  There is just the barest whisper of her father about her, one that only someone who is longing for it could pick up. Like Henry, she moves slowly, as if unsure of how to manage the unwieldy length of her limbs. Still, muted though that whisper is, it's enough to bring him back to me for a spate: one summer day coming in from outside. Dirt stains on the knees of his pants, a leaf stuck in his hair, loot from the garden in his hand, and him muttering, almost to himself, “People don't give onions enough credit. They're a beautiful vegetable.” I wanted to laugh, but at the same time I looked again at the onion, covered with specks of dark earth; beneath the dirt, the bulb was translucent, with rich green stalks that shot away from it like a rocket's flare.

  The night he came to take me out to dinner one last time. He in shock still, at a loss as to what had happened. Me struggling not to cry into my soup, and he politely pretending not to notice, even as he engaged in the same struggle with only marginally more success.

  No, there is little of Henry in Claudia. She looks more than ever like Rosie now. Blonder, much taller, and dressed in far brighter colors, but her mother nevertheless. The same build, the same softly sloping face, and although Rosie's are hazel while Claudia's are gray, the same watchful eyes peering out from under sharply angled brows. I won't tell Claudia how much she resembles her mother now, even though she doubtlessly knows it. She always wanted to take after her dad.

  As I did too, with, go figure, even less success.

  It's an odd thing, when you come right down to it. While stepsisterhood seems to be an enduring condition, it turns out that stepdaughter and stepfather are more impermanent states. As soon as Hana left Henry, he became a-man-my-mother-was-once-married-to. Not even the-man-my-mother-etc., a designation that would have conferred upon him a certain dignity, not to mention a distinct status. Never mind that for eight years he used to make me scrambled eggs in the morning, drive me to school (his fingers on the wheel so bony, so unbelievably long), go over my homework with me at nights. Never mind, even, that once or twice I slipped up and called him “Dad” just as Claudia did; never mind that he didn't blink when I did, just answered in his normal courteous fashion.

  He was nice to me in part because he missed Claudia, I think; seeing her on weekends and the occasional Wednesday didn't come close to cutting it. And because—even though she and I looked nothing alike, since, after all, how could we—I reminded him of her. But even if she and I hadn't been the same age, even if I'd been a boy, Henry would have been nice to me, simply because it was the right thing to do.

  That's another way, come to think of it, also not immediately perceptible, in which he and Claudia resemble each other—their desire to figure out what is right and then do it. I've always wondered, given this desire, how much he struggled to make the decision to leave his wife and children.

  I point with my chin toward the right, gesturing toward the door. Claudia nods, and we take our hands off the glass. I turn and begin to walk toward the entrance, but she doesn't; out of the corner of my eye I see that she's using the end of her scarf to wipe her prints carefully off the glass.

  I stifle a laugh. You see? It's the same old Claudia.

  IT'S AN AWFUL LOT TO ASK, of course. Even if she weren't in trouble, it would be. The nerve of me, showing up at her doorstep after so many years, and hoping that once again she will take me in. Will it help if I tell her how when Hana and I moved to Paris, a scant two months after we moved out of the house we'd lived in with Henry, I wanted desperately to write her but felt too afraid? Too much had happened between our parents, and too little said by her and me about it. Will Claudia accept my apologies for the fact that it wasn't until two years after that, when I moved to California for college, that I called her; will she forgive me for the way that I made vague plans to come visit but never followed up?

  Perhaps what I need to do is go back even further in time. Perhaps what I should explain is how much my relationship with my mother changed when I was fourteen, and my sister left home. Yes, maybe what Claudia needs to know is how Kei took me aside the day she flew out to Ann Arbor. Take care of her, she'd said, nodding at Hana. I'm leaving her in your hands. I nodded back, blithely unaware of what I was committing myself to, and woke up within the next few weeks to a world of new worries. I watched Hana, noticing for the first time how guarded she was with herself, reserving the few words she spoke for the lightest of conversational topics—the weather, food, and the like. I saw how when she was alone, her face looked pinched, and her eyes forlorn.

  But telling Claudia about what turned out to be a misbegotten desire to protect my mother is unnecessary, and probably not all that helpful besides.

  There is, in fact, probably very little that I can say to make these past seventeen years right. So why, then, don't I feel anxious or even guilty; why this sense of untrammeled joy?

  There's an unexpected crush of people at the doorway. Caught behind the small crowd, forced to wait her turn to step forward, Claudia smiles ruefully at me. I want to jump up and down, but I remind myself that we are in Boston, a city of demurely dressed, demurely behaved people, and hold myself to rocking back and forth on my heels.

  At last she's at the door. She pushes it open with both hands, then walks through it. My arms are out; have been for some time now. Claudia's body is warm and so soft I feel as if I'm being enveloped. She holds me very tightly, and for a long time.

  “I'm sorry,” I say, into her shoulder.

  She shakes her head quickly. “It's okay,” she says. And so it is, at least for now. In spite of my best intentions, I find that I'm jumping up and down after all.

  How strange, that here I am showing up at her doorstep, and I feel as if I have finally come back to my own.

  Chapter Six

  Rosie

  New Jersey, 1974–82

  SHE NEVER MEANT TO LOVE HER. OF THAT MUCH ROSIE was sure. She already had a daughter of her own. Not to mention mathematics, her lectures, and a full load of teaching. Why, she had a veritable posse of graduate students, shy but eager youngsters with dark rings under their eyes who needed her, for Pete's sake—students who took her girth for motherliness, her diminutive stature for approachability, and the premature gray in her hair for wisdom and ended up taking more of her time than her own (admittedly very grown-up, almost surprisingly undemanding) child.

  What was Rei to her, after all? Not a daughter, not even a stepdaughter (that clunky term invoking the drop of bitterness in the honeymoon of a new marriage, just as stepmother calls forth a self-dramatizing nightmare of a lonely childhood spent in soot), not a niece or godchild or daughter of a friend. The English language, with its uncountable myriad of words, doesn't include a term to represent wha
t Rei was to her, and Rosie took that as proof positive that the two of them shouldn't even have known each other, let alone be close. Theirs was a relationship that defied logic. Hell, if they went by the English language, theirs was a relationship that did not even exist.

  Rei was the stepdaughter of her ex-husband, a relationship so convoluted that when Rosie thought about her, she felt obliged to resort to a descriptive title connected by hyphens, as if the child were Native American rather than Japanese: Rei the-child-of-the-woman-who-slept-on-what-used-to-be-my-side-of-the-bed Watanabe.

  She was the olive-skinned girl who helped her mother dress in white on a picture-perfect Saturday in June one year, a day during which Rosie wished for the first time in her life that she drank. She was the black-haired, slant-eyed, alien upstart who received the fatherly attention for which her own daughter seemed to be slowly but surely starving. In short (a phrase that Rosie savored delivering in her lectures, giving a dramatic pause to invite the laugh), Rei was the enemy.

  ROSIE HAD GONE into her marriage believing firmly that having children was the whole point of it. She loved Henry, of course. Yet even though one might consider that a reason for marriage in itself, for her that was only the story behind the scenes: although it was because she was so in love with him that their having and raising children together became an imperative, the imperative was still the children.

  How incredible was it that together they could produce tangible proof of their love—breathing, teething, laughing and peeing and crying proofs that they could throw up in the air and dandle on their laps?