Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  How is it that over a span of eight years—not long enough a period to account for a layer of rock in the canyon, perhaps, but enough to formulate and submit a question, or even two—I never once asked Henry about his work? While he'd always been humble or at least quiet about the value of his work, especially in comparison to my mother's paintings, which he held in awe, that was hardly an excuse.

  Sitting in the lodge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I leaned against my lover and missed my stepfather. The ranger had just asked if there were any questions, and while the audience stirred, I turned around, thinking that I would whisper to Max how I'd once been related to a geologist. I looked at him, the angular planes of his face thrown into relief by the light shining from the lamp on the table beside him, and knew then that he was going to leave me.

  I had been wrong about Henry, believing him to be immune to the worries of our world by virtue of his six-foot-five frame. It was silly of me, really. He loved my mother so much that he wanted nothing more than to shoulder as many of her worries as he possibly could. What I had with Max was altogether different from what my mother had had, and had wasted, with Henry.

  The next day I would wake up (at four, so we could beat the heat for the long climb back up the canyon) in Max's arms, and I would wonder what had been wrong with me to harbor such doubts about my long-term love. And in fact it would be another month—a month during which I'd learn that my next year would be filled with tests and treatments and retching and mornings in which I'd wake to find locks of my hair scattered on the pillow—before he left. Throughout those thirty days Max was a steady arm around my shoulders, so much so that I didn't allow myself to think that life would ever be anything but the two of us side by side.

  But that evening in the valley of a canyon billions of years older than the human race, thinking back to the only father I can remember, I knew.

  “I THOUGHT ABOUT YOUR MOTHER a lot,” says Claudia abruptly, her words coming slow and heavy, large rocks up a steep incline, “in the days before I began sleeping with Vikrum.”

  With that, she stops talking. We are walking toward Harvard Square, and we go another three blocks, which means, at her pace, considerably more than a few minutes, in silence. I am just about to prompt her ever so carefully when she begins to speak again.

  “Did you know that you don't have to teach babies how to walk?” she asks. “What's really incredible about it is not only that they can figure out how to stand and put one foot in front of another on their own, but that they want to figure out how to stand and put one foot in front of another on their own. They're born with the desire to learn to walk. They'll keep struggling by themselves, grunting away, until they succeed. And think about what it takes to succeed: balance, strength, the coordination of a large variety of muscles, knowing where you want to go and also that you want to go.

  “Talking happens the same way. Just by listening, they'll pick up a language. Without even trying. And you know what kind of effort that takes for any regular adult, and how many years; you've studied a foreign language. Don't you think that's incredible? To think that just like that”—she snaps her fingers—“babies learn how to move the tongue and the lips, how to produce certain sounds and pitches and inflections, how to conjugate and pluralize and use irregular verbs and the subjunctive and the pluperfect, whatever the hell that is, and God knows what else. It must be the most amazing thing to watch.”

  This brief lecture on babies, arriving as it does apropos of exactly nothing, leaves me without much to say. I turn my head to the left and then to the right, looking for the inspiration to this commentary, but I can spy nothing to make me erase my belief that this commentary is a complete non sequitur.

  “There,” she says, pointing with her chin to a spot directly in front of us: the source of this outburst had been in my line of vision all along. Held in the arms of a curly-haired man, the baby is positioned so that we can just make out the upper half of its face.

  “Right,” I say. We trudge on.

  Maternal, adjective. Of, relating to, belonging to, or characteristic of a mother: motherly. In the most recent version of the dictionary of my mind, this definition is accompanied by a picture of my stepsister, age thirty-four. But in the older versions of this lexicon, Claudia also figured in this definition; her picture was found beside it even when she was only nine, a child who could easily have been the object rather than the subject of the verb to mother.

  Where does she—a teacher of small children, sure, but as childless as I am, and not even an aunt—collect all this information about babies? More importantly, why does she persist in doing so; why does she torture herself, collecting and brooding over information (like a miser, like a frustrated hen with borrowed eggs) that she cannot use?

  And, finally, what does this all have to do with Vikrum and my mother, and do I really even want to find out?

  PARTLY BECAUSE OF (and not, as one might be tempted to conclude, in spite of) her pronounced maternal qualities, Claudia has always enjoyed a solid and remarkably easy popularity with men. Remarkable to me, anyway, at least when we were fourteen. You're too interesting, she explained to me as she looped her hair into a high ponytail, saucy but also serviceable, before going out on yet another date. You're smart and you have a personality and, most of all, you're pretty in such a completely unusual way that these stupid high-school boys are intimidated.

  Resigned to another Saturday night spent reading or playing Scrabble with Henry, I just smiled, letting Claudia think that that explanation had achieved its intended goal of making me feel better. Which it maybe would have, if it had not been for my sister, Kei, also cursed or, in her case, clearly blessed with completely unusual looks, who four years earlier had captured the imagination of what seemed like every single boy in her high school. Every day at least one of them, and sometimes three or four, called to ask her out. If no one was calling for me, whether or not my looks were unusual had nothing to do with it.

  Claudia's success with boys was less spectacular than Kei's, but it was arguably more solid. Whereas Kei went out with a succession of boys, many of whom did not seem to like her in the end, Claudia's stuck by her. It was partly because of the kind of boys Claudia chose to go out with (she was nonplussed by Kei's taste for the pot-smoking, black-leather-clad type and, at least back then, particularly mystified by her interest in other girls' boyfriends), but it was mostly because of the ones she attracted and how she made them feel.

  Yes, the boys liked Claudia in high school because she was a nice girl, brainy but unpretentious, and always kind and sweet. Yet they also liked her because she was a nice girl etc. who had a healthy appetite for sex and who saw nothing wrong with indulging said appetite as much as possible. At the age of fifteen, three years before I even kissed a boy, she lost her virginity with a minimum of fuss, and then, having lost it, she practiced the moves that had accounted for its loss as many times as the opportunity presented itself.

  Her popularity was such that the opportunity presented itself often.

  “Before Vikrum, I'd never made the first move with a man,” Claudia says, breaking a medium-long silence. “Let alone asked anyone out.”

  Again with the non sequitur. This time, though, I am too startled at the way our thoughts as well as our feet have kept pace that I can't be bothered to search for the inspiration to her comment. Besides, this comment might just be the preamble to the next chapter of her romance with Vikrum. “Never?”

  She shakes her head. “Pathetic, isn't it? So unfeminist of me.”

  “You only didn't because you never had to,” I say, “because they always beat you to the punch.” I pause and then add, “So to speak.”

  Claudia smiles. “Maybe. Still, I should have gotten a punch in there somewhere, don't you think? You have, haven't you?”

  “We're not talking about me,” I say, scolding. “Don't change the subject. Why do you think you never got a punch in?”

  “I think that maybe I've alw
ays liked men too much. I've always liked the idea of men . . . but none of them in particular, if you know what I mean.” With that, she stops walking and begins to rummage in her bag. “It's starting to rain. I brought two umbrellas—you should take this one.”

  “There was Doug, though,” I say. It's a mist rather than a real rain, so refreshing and light I want to dance in it, yet I take the umbrella from her without protest. She opens hers, and once again we fall into step. “You were with him for a number of years—you must have liked him in particular.”

  “There was Doug,” Claudia repeats. “That's true.”

  “But?”

  “Was it so obvious there was a but there? Never mind, don't answer that. I actually loved Doug in particular. But I didn't make the first move with him. But I wouldn't have cared, honestly, if nothing had ever happened between us—if we'd only stayed friends.” She glances at me and says, gently, “But you're supposed to open the umbrella.”

  “But it's barely raining.” Still, I pull it out from under my elbow and open it.

  Tilting her own umbrella back, Claudia smiles at me. “I'm a nag, I know. It's just that we still have ten minutes more to go, and if you're soaked, it'll detract from our shopping experience.”

  She must have packed an extra umbrella for me this morning. How could I not at least listen? If only I could dance my way through her story: a swoop to the left and a twirl to the right, and then before I knew it I would be on the other side.

  “So,” I say, leaden as my feet are now, one step forward at a time. “So was it different with Vikrum? Did you actually want him enough to make the first move?”

  CLAUDIA HATED MY MOTHER, of course. I say of course even though she used to beg me for stories about the girl who gave up a chance to become a princess, and the woman who remained devoted to a ruined, melancholy aunt.

  My mother tried hard to be kind to Henry's only child. When Claudia came to stay for the weekend, she slept not on ashes or even the rickety fold-out in the den, but in the best twin bed in the house, set up in a room that was reserved just for her. She was never asked to help clean up after supper, or put out the garbage, or even make her own bed, as was expected from Kei and me. Furthermore, my mother was always civil and even friendly to Claudia, taking a real interest in how her classes and flute lessons and soccer practice were going, exclaiming with real pride over her good grades, and buying her so many knickknacks and special outfits that sometimes Kei and I ended up feeling like the unwanted stepchildren.

  Still, Claudia hated her. When her father moved out and her mother buried herself in her numbers, who else was there for her to hate? At times, it was true, she hated her mother; once or twice, maybe, her father.

  But her stepmother she hated all the time, and no one was the worse for it, other than my mother and me.

  “DOUG CALLED THIS the boyfriend chair,” Claudia says, fondly tapping one of the arms of a large, upright wooden chair tucked away in the corner of the shop. “He'd sit here, glowering away, his arms folded and his face red, while I shopped.” Leaning close to me, she adds, sotto voce, “The skimpy clothes and lingerie in here really embarrassed him. You should have seen how red he got when these skinny young things would be trying them on in front of the mirror.”

  She's shown me pictures. A big man, tall with a fair amount of flesh on him. Square head, square jaw, square shoulders; nice-looking in an unassuming way. In all the photographs that she has of him, and there are a great number, he looks as if he's not quite comfortable. I would have chalked it up to the clothes that he had on, except that Claudia has photographs of him in a considerable variety of outfits, from T-shirts to tuxedos and swim trunks to down coats, and it seems unlikely that he's uncomfortable in all of them. So maybe it's having a camera on him that does it.

  Based on the pictures and the little she's told me about him, I can imagine him sitting in this tiny shop with its low ceilings as we look around. He'd be a quiet, reassuringly pleasant presence, a large man trying politely to make himself small. Maybe a little easy to forget about, patient and uncomplaining in spite of his red face.

  When it came to shopping with Claudia, his patience wasn't actually tried all that much. Although her familiarity with this particular store might suggest otherwise—and although, perhaps, Doug might even beg to differ—she doesn't really like to shop. She didn't when we were younger, and while she has literally dragged me, pulling me by the arm, into this store filled with vividly colored, beautifully textured clothes that she loves as much as I do, I can tell from the way she's acting that that has not changed. While she pretends now to be interested in the scarves, holding them up to herself and checking the tags, she's not fooling anyone (least of all the women who work here, who studiously ignore her)—it's for my benefit that we're here.

  Big-boned and perhaps inevitably self-conscious about it, Claudia has always thought of herself as plain. A teenager no longer, she's not really bothered by this, but out of years of habit she slouches still, carrying her body as if it were an unwieldy parcel that she had been asked to carry by a stranger, and a stranger of dubious provenance at that.

  And since we were little, she has admired my lanky frame as well as my dark skin and black hair.

  Does she know how much I covet the health and solidity of her body now; could she possibly fathom the depths of my envy?

  “One time,” she continues, still lost in memories as we move toward the rack of dresses, “the boyfriend chair was taken up by some other woman's boyfriend and that open space over there was taken up by some boxes, so he had to stand. There was a sale and it was crowded, and he ended up being squeezed up against all these lacy clothes, and all these women had to reach around him and over him to get at what they wanted. And he's so big, and self-conscious about being big on top of that; naturally he felt horribly awkward.”

  “How could you have subjected him to that?” I say, marveling. “Claudia Marianne Klein, you shock me. To think that I thought I knew you.”

  “Wait, it gets worse. We were only here a few minutes that day. But I couldn't resist: before we left, I yelled across the store to him that I had to spend another hour here, just so I could watch him squirm.” Extending her arms out in a luxurious stretch, she sighs with satisfaction. “Those were good times.”

  “Well, not for him, maybe.”

  “No, he thought it was funny too. That whole big-lug-of-a-guy was something of an act. He knew he was a little like that, and so he exaggerated it and laughed at himself for it.”

  Not so easy to forget about after all. Clearly my understanding of human character leaves much to be desired. “And yet you gave him up.”

  “And yet I gave him up,” she says, the tone of her voice perhaps determinedly light.

  No, Claudia doesn't know—she shouldn't know, and I will do my best to see that she never will—how much I envy her life.

  In this respect, too, little has changed since we were young.

  Chapter Sixteen

  New Jersey, 1974–82

  A FAMILY; A ROAD TRIP; AN ACCIDENT WITHIN A STONE'S throw of the Canadian border. This, too, was a story Rei fed to Claudia. At times she thought she should bring herself to circulate the narrative more widely; the details of the trip alone made it worth telling. Nowhere else in the entire history of the Watanabes was there an image that gave such a wholesome, quintessentially American face to her family.

  It was the car, not unexpectedly, that served as the cornerstone to this idealized image. As if it were not enough that they were on the first leg of a cross-country road trip, on their way to see no less a cliché than Niagara Falls, the car they were riding in was a station wagon, and a Ford at that. Bicycles and luggage were piled in the back and, in what Rei would later characterize as the figurative as well as literal crowning touch, a few suitcases rested on the roof of the car, where they made alarming creaking sounds when the wind blew. Seiji drove while his wife, three months pregnant and dreamily absorbed by it, sat beside him
, strapped in by her seat belt. Their two daughters squabbled with varying degrees of seriousness in the backseat.

  It was the picture-perfect image of American domestic bliss. Never mind that Seiji hated American cars and had complained almost without cease through Massachusetts and New York about the heap of junk that this one was. Never mind that he dreaded driving and did so only now because Hana was tired after having spent the day before behind the wheel. Never mind, even, that they had returned from their two-year sojourn in Japan just this spring; that Seiji was complaining, Hana was dreaming, and the daughters were squabbling in Japanese; that they viewed themselves as foreigners, as year-round tourists in this country of uninterrupted vistas and pleasantly wide highways; and that they were worried that Seiji's bank, as well as assorted visa complications, might force them to leave this country in another ten months. Their Ford station wagon, with their luggage wobbling above it, conferred upon them the stamp of Americanness, as surely as if their ancestors had arrived on the banks of Plymouth—as if their forefathers had crawled, like the first amphibians, up onto those shores in another great moment in the annals of evolutionary progress—fresh off the Mayflower.

  Rei was five; Kei was newly nine, and uppity about it. Their bickering could not last forever, though, and a temporary cease-fire was at hand (Kei lost in the pages of the Japanese translation of Anne of Green Gables, and Rei singing to herself) when one of the suitcases slid off the roof of the car and landed with a thump on the ground. With that thump, Kei lost her place in the novel, Rei stopped singing, and Hana woke from her reverie. Seiji steered the car over onto the shoulder and stepped on the brake. They all looked back and there, on the side of the highway, they saw the suitcase.

  It was a sturdy, well-made piece of plastic and nylon—one of the wheelless suitcases that Hana had lugged with her from Japan, it had managed to survive the fall without bursting open. An attractive shade of light purple, it lay on its side on the road, glinting faintly in the sun.