We pulled up at Japal and I threw what money I dug out. I think it was about five pounds, which meant that if I’d missed the plane, I would have to spend the night in the airport waiting room. And I knew I’d missed it. I didn’t know. Knowing was self-defense. I knew well enough not to look at my watch again. I stumbled through the lobby, past more Sumo on the TV set, searched frantically among the lines of computer type on the departure board, which were as meaningless as calligraphy and danced alarmingly. I saw a gray-uniformed steward of some kind, at some kind of roped-off barrier. He was wearing a Japal button, so I made for him.
“Where is flight two-eighty-seven to Los Angeles?” I shouted at him, and he said, “May I see your ticket?”
“I haven’t got a ticket!”
“Oh, well, you’re too late.”
“Where is it?” I screamed at him, so that he drew up coldly and said, “Gate four, but you’ve missed it.”
I stumbled to the automatic doors (automatic doors require so much damn effort; you have to wait for them) and through them. I found gate four and saw the plane. It was already in motion. I turned a lazy arc and sprinted to the end of the runway …
I lost myself, therefore I am. Is that an affirmation?
… to the end of the runway and lifted into the air and headed out toward that sea that is so recognizably Japanese though why I should recognize it I don’t know unless it is some war movie half remembered from my childhood; and is capless, surfless, and flat as a block of cloven wood with the little boats cutting across the grain, and meets the flat shore, and the land does not rise but continues inward flat and flat and flat and he was gone.
And he was gone, and he was gone. I went back through the doors that opened to admit me of their own accord and closed behind me of their own accord and he was gone. And sat down on the fake red leather sofa in front of the television set, where two giant masters of the art of Sumo, in full color, bred like bulls, grappled sweaty belly to sweaty belly, and he was gone.
26
IT IS LUNCHTIME NOW, black caviar on hard boiled eggs with asparagus. I can eat it. The topknotted hostess is bringing vodka, and I can drink. We are still over Siberia, and the rivers are still winding down the plains, earth-brown rivers and mud-purple soil, as twisted and serene as the weavings of my buddha-carp. I can sketch the pattern of these rivers, and I do.
I have finished, finally, Masuji Ibuse’s great Black Rain, a novel of the bomb, a narrative wrenched into significant form from fallout. Like Goya, he has made beauty out of the holocaust he deplores, so that to have been there seems to have been ennobled. But I do not know the import of this. On the inside cover is my sketch of the Koko Dera, bank and bamboo and one carp. It isn’t very good, but I can do it over.
What I cannot do, it seems to me, is go to California on my own and tell my daughter that I have reformed, deformed, her life. What I cannot do is wander through the territory called Southern Cal from church to parish house asking for the Methodist-ordained descendant of a famous drifter. Somebody could, and no doubt there are efficient ways of locating a very reverend, but for me, I know my pattern, and it cannot—can it?—include the chasing, after all, of a one-night stand. I cannot leave Oliver shaking in Frances’s crouch in Eastley Village, Cambs. I cannot go back to the place where I grew up to take the kneeling posture of an abject foreigner. I think I could more easily have put on a long dress and gone to shake Princess Margaret’s hand. I know what I am saying, but I do not know the import of it.
I remember myself when the atom bomb was dropped, I was having a Toni home permanent in the trailer port my dad had built. My mother had spread newspapers on the floor, and brought down the radio. I think she was crying off and on, while she rolled the little rods. You used to use little bits of pink plaster rod, about a hundred and fifty of them to my head, and a stinking ammonia stuff to make it curl. The radio kept piling up statistics all afternoon—equivalent to so many tons of this and that, how far it had been seen and heard and graphed—but I don’t suppose they could have been telling about people’s eyes melting and their skin dissolving. I filled all that in later. All the same, I’ve always assumed that nuclear holocaust smells like Toni fluid. It’s logical; it chemically alters the structure of the hair.
I don’t know if this is relevant. I know it was in the same week that Mrs. Fowler finished reading us Gone With the Wind in Language Arts. I remember thinking that I could have driven a team of horses through a blazing forest. I longed to be tested, and I thought that I would recognize a test. I should have been born in the South during the Civil War. I should have lived in England under the blitz. I should have been home in Watts when the squads went in, or in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped.
Every day children are sent to school, friends to hospital, husbands hit their wives; and of these wives an occasional one is so positioned that she tumbles down a flight of stairs. People miss a plane. Insignificant things happen and people are destroyed by them. Terrible things happen and they are met with requisite strength. I don’t know why this is so. People “rise to the occasion,” I am told. I know that I have examined my own self like fish scales under a microscope, and in the process the terrible thing has happened after all. Cumulatively, piecemeal, I have given myself away.
Of the three great options for fulfillment open to a woman, work and motherhood and ecstatic love, I have work left. The thing I have left is design, I haven’t given that away. And I am going to approach that, work, from a new perspective. I am going to do a series of designs based on the Japanese sea, and the waterfalls in the cliffs above the Nikko temple. I am going to get a telescope. On company funds. I am going to do a series of designs based on an aerial view of Siberia. There will be space, flight, and a flow of convoluted rivers.
I see it as rather lyrical, for me.
Acknowledgments
My warm thanks to the following people, who helped with the research for this book:
Valentine Ellis, Worshipful Company of Drapers, London
Peter Walters, Director, Sudbury Silk Mills, Suffolk
Robert Immerman, The American Embassy, Tokyo
J. Kenneth Emerson, Former Deputy Ambassador to Japan
Hideki Yagi and T. Inoue, Unitika Design Company, Osaka
Masakazu Takayanagi and Toshio Nakagawa, Osaka Dyeing Company, Osaka
M. Conrad Hyers, Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin
R. Bruce Moody, The Compleat Editor, New York, New York
John Grant, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Robert Piccard, the Wilderness Foundation, Brooksville, Florida
About the Author
Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children’s books, and eight novels, including Raw Silk, a National Book Award finalist; The Buzzards; Opening Nights; Cutting Stone; and Bridge of Sand. Her Writing Fiction is the most widely used creative writing text in America. Recent works include the plays Sweepstakes, Medea with Child, and Parts of Speech, which have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, Chicago, and various regional theatres; a collection of essays, Embalming Mom; and her memoir, Losing Tim. She is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita of the Florida State University.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1976, 1977 by Janet Burroway
Cover design by Neil Heacox
978-1-4804-6331-8
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Raw Silk (9781480463318) Page 31