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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393320480 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 06/17/2000 |
| Pages: | 332 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Kerri Sakamoto is a Toronto-born writer of fiction as well as film and visual arts criticism.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
I happened to be dusting the front window-ledge when I saw her running across the grassy strip of the electrical field. I stepped out onto the porch and called to her. I could tell she heard me because she slowed down a bit, hesitated before turning. I waved.
"Sachi!" I shouted. "What is it?"
She barely paused to check for cars before crossing the concession road in front of my yard; not that many passed since the new highway to the airport had been built. Shyly she edged up my porch steps to where I stood. She was out of breath, her eyes filled with an adult's burden. "I don't know," she said, panting. "Maybe it's nothing."
The sweat glistened on her, sweet, odourless water, and it struck me as odd, her sweating so much--a girl and a nihonjin at that; we nihonjin, we Japanese, hardly perspire at all, and the late spring air was cool that day. I sat down to signal calm and patted the lawn chair beside me. She sat but kept jiggling one knee. Finally she stood up again. "Yano came and took--," she began.
"Mr. Yano," I broke in, though everyone called him Yano, even myself.
"He took Tam out of class this morning. Kimi too."
"Tamio," I corrected her, as if I could tell her what to call the boy, her special friend. As if I could tell her anything. "A doctor's appointment, maybe?"
She shook her head as a child does, flinging her hair all about. Though at thirteen going on fourteen, she no longer was a child, I reminded myself.
"Yano looked crazy," she went on. "Like I've never seen him. His hands were like this." She clenched her fists and gritted her brace-clad teeth: a fierce little animal. "He hadn't taken a bath, not for a long time," she said, pinching her flat nose and grimacing. "Worse than usual. Everybody noticed."
She almost pushed me away when I patted her brow with a paper towel, then smiled meekly as I smoothed out her thick black hair. I felt the tangled nest of it at the back of her neck but stopped myself from getting a comb. I gave her a glass of juice and a cookie and made her sit still until she cooled off. I gazed across the field at the Yanos' green-roofed bungalow, identical to the others in its row except for the overgrown lawn and the curtainless front window.
Suddenly Sachi was at the bottom of my steps again, peering up at me. Like a child with no mother to clean her up: crumbs scabbing her chin, and her skin dirty in the light. She made me think of a scraggly urchin we'd passed on the road leaving the internment camp after the war, Papa and me, long ago. I was unhappy that day as I recall, because we were not going to the sea, I would not see Japan; we were staying in Canada. Leaving the mountains, going deeper in to a place that Papa could barely pronounce. "On-ta-ri-o." Standing in the back of that crowded, rattling truck, I gazed down at the urchin, her lost eyes. Left behind. I was glad at least not to be left behind.
"I have to see if Tam's back," Sachi was saying, her knee jiggling again. I dabbed around my chin until she did the same, backing onto my lawn. "How's your mother? Tell her to come by," I said, and immediately felt foolish.
I warned her to watch the road, but already she'd scampered across it, back to the field. "Let me know what happens," I shouted, remembering why I'd called her over in the first place. She waved her thin arm at me without turning, afraid I'd make her come back. I felt a tinge of loneliness as she crossed to the other side, to those bungalows in a row that kept one another company. Not like our house, built by a veterinarian decades before, sitting at the edge of the field, up from the creek, all on its own.
Nothing that unusual, I told myself, a father taking his children out of school for the afternoon. Not at all. He might have needed them to lick some stamps, give out flyers for one of his redress meetings that no one came to. Maybe a last-minute treat, an outing. Yano was capable of that much.
I watched Sachi wait at the Yanos' door for a moment or two, all she could stand, then run home to the grey-roofed bungalow a few houses down. I could not help thinking of the games she liked to play, with me and with herself, and how convincing she could be. But I told myself her worry was not to be taken lightly. Sachi was a perceptive child, gifted, really. She reminded me of myself in a way: a finely tuned receptacle for others' impulses and confidences. I often caught myself telling her thoughts better kept to myself, at least until she was older. It was the knowing way she had about her, the way she carried an understanding in that wispy girl's body. She wasn't muscular like most nihonjin, with hard, dense flesh. Even I with my restful life, old enough to be her mother, had flesh more taut than she.
When I went back inside, the smell seemed worse than usual. After all these years, I'd never grown used to it. It was Papa, his body whittled away upstairs, the smell of the sheets, the pillow, no matter I'd just changed them. There was his moan calling for one thing or another, coming steadily down the stairs like a creeping vine; quickly I passed by, plumping up a cushion on the chesterfield before sailing through the kitchen and out the back door.
In the garden, my flowers were coming up nicely, in spite of the frost we'd just had, not unusual for mid-May, I suppose. My tulips and daffodils in the far corner, my peonies and irises coming up on both sides. I caught the scent of my narcissus, potent, I thought, for such a delicate-looking bloom, its pale colour. It went straight to my head when I put my nose to it, like a drug. Stum had mown the grass short and even, as I'd asked, and swept the walk of clippings. I spied a hardy spiked weed sprouting in one corner of the garden, and was about to get up when I felt a sensation rise inside me that would not go away.
It was Yano, the thought of him, wild, crazy man in the middle of my placid afternoon, riling me. He was forever ranting about something, raking back his hair with his dirty fingernails; his hair that was too long, like a teenager's, his clothes too tight at the armpits and crotch, so they showed his bulge. Standing at the foot of my steps, where Sachi had stood, his dog peeing in my flowers. Over and over he'd ask me about the camps. He'd say the government owed us money and an apology. Badger me with where this, when that, and how long. "How long were you there, Saito-san?" For the tenth time.
"I told you," I would scold back, not keeping the impatience from my voice.
"Each time you say different," he would say. "Four years, five, which is it? When was it you left? Forty-six, forty-seven?"
When I didn't answer, he'd come up with more to taunt me with. "Why didn't you leave sooner? Right when the war ended? Why did you wait, Saito-san?" I could have asked him why too, why didn't he stay in Japan? Why did he come back? But I did not. Really, it mattered little now. Thirty years gone by, and still it was fresh in his mind.
Whenever he came to me with his petitions, his flyers for meetings, he'd stand so close and I'd have to breathe through my mouth because he smelled. Even out here, in the open air. It wasn't like Papa, a slow, seeping odour coming down the stairs, settling on you; it was alive and pungent, insistent, a man's odour probing you all over. How I wanted to shake it off, shake both him and Papa off me, but I couldn't.
Instead, I reached under my skirt and unhooked my stockings. I was careful with them because they were expensive. These days it was nothing but pantyhose in the stores. I left the stockings in beige pools on the stoop and stepped onto the cool, cool grass. I even forgot to yank out the weed.
It was the first time in a long while that I'd given myself over to such an impulse, gallivanting in my garden, barefoot. Beyond the fence of the yard, the bushes and grass seemed thick as a jungle leading down to the creek.
Later that evening, after dinner, I noticed one of my stockings hanging out of Stum's pocket. "What are you doing with that?" I demanded, and took it from him. He smirked a little. "Where's the other?" He pulled the second from his pocket as well. "They were there," he said in his drawling way, pointing to the stoop where I'd left them. His fingers were gentle and slow giving it back.
I knew it wasn't the first time he'd touched a woman's things. Years ago, I caught him with his nose inside my underwear drawer. Since then, as far as I knew, he'd held only day-old chicks, just so in his palms, squeezed and scrutinized so he could tell their sex. One after another, eight hundred in an hour, so he said, separated out to do their business, the males from the females. He'd never brought a girl home.
"You snagged them," I said, examining the stockings. This kind, thick yet fine at the toes and heels, was not to be found in the stores any more. I'd bought two dozen of them when we lived in the city, before we'd moved here, and taken out a new pair every two years over the past twenty.
"Go check on Papa," I ordered. "See if he wants dessert." Stum could be an obedient little brother at times. He and his lopsided cheeks and his tiny eyes, and his legs that met from their tops to the knees, so you'd hear the vim vim of his trousers as he walked. He'd be turning thirty-three this year but he was still my baby brother, my ototo-chan.
At my window I noticed that the Yanos' car was still not there. At the Nakamura house, farther down, the drapes were now drawn and their car was parked in the driveway. I thought of Sachi inside, waiting under its grey roof. I took one last look before finally closing the drapes for the night.
I stepped out onto the porch in the morning and picked up the newspaper. I treasured this hour in the fresh early air, Stum gone and the routine not yet started up with Papa--feeding him, cleaning him. When, without a glance at the world's dreary front-page news, I could, at my leisure, turn to my word jumble and my crossword at the back of the want ads, near the funnies. I was not far into it when I looked up to find Sachi racing through the field towards me. She was screaming something but I couldn't make out the words. I folded up my newspaper and set it aside, trying to resist the chaos she was bringing. I could not help seeing then that the Yanos' car was not back, and the light from last night still burned in the living-room. Sachi flew up my steps, two at a time. She grabbed my arms, screaming in my face: "Tam! Where's Tam!" Her hair swarmed round her unwashed face; her breath was rotten.
I pushed her away. "Shush, shush, now," I said, but she only screeched louder.
"Where is he? We have to find him!" She was hysterical. "He could be down there!" She pointed to the back of the house, her hand shaking, her whole body shaking; down at the creek, she meant. I drew back. I could hardly stand her clawing me like this; where was Keiko, her own mother? She should have known better, she should have sensed what was rising in me, but she was coming closer, about to grab at me again, and I slapped her, not hard, but enough. As if I'd been waiting for an excuse for some time. In all her confusion, she sensed that too. The air carried the sound, the smack of it. The sleeve of her top slipped down her shoulder, exposing the brown nut of a newly sprouted breast, her hair hiding her eyes. She wasn't the untouched child I'd sat with here yesterday; I had no wish to soothe her, to comfort her. Tam would be back in no time, with the others. No time at all. She just couldn't stand the fact of them gone somewhere together, a family, without her. I almost said so, but didn't; I bit my lip.
"You don't care about him," she said coolly. "Maybe he's dead and won't you be glad," she seethed. She ran along the side of the house and down towards the creek, then turned back. "But he's not! He's not! You'll see!" she cried.
"Sachi," I called out. "Come back here, now!" I shouted, but the words seemed to drop to my lap, little fish leaping from a tank. She'd got me riled up in spite of myself. Hurriedly, I slipped into my shoes, calling up to Papa, though he couldn't have heard. I headed down to the creek after her.
I ran, my feet tangling in the uncut grass, until I reached the trees that thickened by the creek and fanned the water, and the bushes hung in bunches over the edge. I thought I caught a snatch of black hair through leaves, a shadow sliding over the dirt path that followed the creek. I stopped; aside from my own heaving breath, there was only the held-in whisper of the woods I knew so well. My feet were hot and swelling inside my shoes, my stockings snagged. I touched a hand to my face to find it curiously damp; I was grateful no one could see. Mosquitoes circled close even as I swatted them, drawn in by the sweetness of my body, my blood. I took a last look through the bushes at the creek, the murky water quite still except for circles of current tracing the surface from its underside and pinpricks of insects that touched down here and there. I called out. At last I spied her lying by a weeping willow that leaned off the bank, her thin stomach wriggling to catch some breath. She looked pale and sickly: a strange little island there. Her eyes were black holes, shot out by the sun. But her face strained up, her back arched up too, up to the burning bright sky. Then she cupped one hand over that nut of a breast.
"He's not here" came out of her small, cold lips. "Go back. You can't stay," she hissed. "Not this time," and her eyes stayed with me, as if to ward me off, as if telling me she'd found me out. Then she curled up, wrapping her raggedy arms across her chest, pulling up her thin legs so they stuck out at her sides. She made me think of those straddling insects you often saw here this time of year, with their jutting wings, getting ready to mate in mid-air. Abruptly, she jumped up onto the bank and danced across the creek on stones; faced me from the other side with the sun blazing behind. Now her face wasn't pale any more; it was tanned, too tanned in this light, her eyes gone gun-metal. She was that urchin again, belonging to no one.
"He's not gone," she called across, all the hiss let out. "But you don't care. You don't give a shit about any of them."
For a moment I didn't reply. She was hysterical, she made no sense at all. I could have said something, something to calm, something to hurt back. She was a girl, after all, and I was a grown woman. "I'll say a namu amida butsu for Tamio that he's all right" was all the answer I gave, ignoring the strange and angry look she cast me. I dabbed my forehead with a crusty tissue I'd finally found tucked up my sleeve. "You'll be late for class," I said stupidly, as if she cared about school, and headed back to the house.
When I climbed my front steps, I saw I'd left the door wide open. Anyone could have walked right in, taken whatever there was to take. I made a mental note to go and dust off Buddha's figure dark in the altar in the dining-room; to say a prayer, needless as it seemed. It would be the first time in a long, long while. I would do it for Sachi's sake, in spite of how she'd spoken to me. Papa was calling for me; I could hear him even through the screen, that low intermittent groan that must have started long before my return. I left my mud-chunked shoes on the porch. Chotto matte--in a minute, in a minute, I thought, sliding my feet into cool slippers. The groaning went on. Everything had the dull sheen of the indoors you see after coming in from bright sunlight. I made my way to the kitchen and drank a cool glass of tap water before heading upstairs.
I hesitated the slightest bit at his door before stepping in; it happened every once in a while. His eyes shifted to me as I stood just inside the doorway.
"Nani?" I finally said, coming up to the bed. What, what? Knowing what he wanted, making him wait a moment more. He closed his eyes and I moved in, all shameful efficiency: I yanked back the sheet from his shrunken body; I hitched down his pyjama bottoms without flinching at the sight or the smell, unpinned, wiped, and changed him. He gave a thread-fine shudder at my final movement: tucking the cooled sheet back over him. His mystery, power, gone.
Downstairs, at my window, a lawn of silvery fine dust had already appeared on the ledge I'd wiped just yesterday. There was still no sign of Yano's Pontiac. I reminded myself to drain the soybeans I'd been soaking overnight for dinner, and to slice and salt the cucumber for sunomono.
The beans had bloated up to the surface, along with the moulting husks, tiny corpses. I poured them into a sieve, all clustered against one another like a hive. I shivered at the sight. It was turning into the kind of day, I felt, when nothing looked quite the same. I dropped the beans into the sink, and went back to the front window.
There she was, my Sachi, crossing the field as I'd seen her on a hundred other days when she'd been skipping school to run off with Tam. Already wise to life, wiser about its possibilities than I'd ever been. I could never fool her, never keep her with my silly folding cranes or my heaven-earth-and-man flower arrangements, my pretend readings of tea leaves. I could never be angry with her for long. No wonder her mother didn't know what to do with her.
She was halfway across the field when she turned as if she knew I was looking out, though with the sun casting a glare over the window she couldn't possibly see me. Her hair was a dark blot, nothing blacker on that field. I came out onto my porch. She raised her hand to her mouth and I saw there was a cigarette clipped between her fingers. She looked foolish and mean, her one shoulder bare where her top slipped down a summer top, too thin, too skimpy when it was only the middle of May. I fought the feeling welling in me as I saw her tiny hip jut through the cotton of her skirt; I detested that stance with everything in me. She puffed furiously in quick spurts, a little engine revving. All of a sudden she froze, spotting something where the glinting electrical towers marched like giants past the houses and into the distance. Then she ran. She stopped short at the base of a tower, the north one, closest to Mackenzie Hill. So small against the giant, yet I could read everything there in her posture, her turned hip, the way she held her head. Again she glanced back, daring me, knowing I wouldn't step down from my porch to stop her. She swung herself up the first rung. She was climbing, a slow struggle because the rungs were diagonal and widely spaced even for her gangly legs. Her skirt hitched up to expose the gleaming white of her underpants, white as the clouds.
I put my hand to my mouth. I was about to utter something. An awkward sound? Her name? "Get down here this instant," like the concerned mother I could never be? I held my hand there as she struggled higher and higher, higher than I'd seen her climb with Tam, up into the cut of the sun. Then she stopped and leaned her skinny neck and shoulders towards the creek where it curved down behind Mackenzie Hill, holding on with one arm wrapped around a steel beam. I knew she was looking for Tam, and hoping he'd be looking for her. I felt wet at one corner of my lip--my mouth was still open--and I knew the word just as my lips pushed against one another: "Baka!" I cried. Papa's word. Stupid! Get down! I'd taken another step when shouts from the far side of the field drowned me out. It was him, Tom, Nakamura-san, her father, on his day off, striding across the field, stopping himself from running. "Hey, hey!" he yelled, the way he always did, without using her name, as if she were anyone to him.
He arrived at the base of the tower, and once she saw him there she gave in instantly. As if all she'd wanted, all along, was for him to come for her. I knew it, for hadn't I felt that impulse, used that child's ruse, myself? She tugged at her skirt and began climbing down, almost daintily now. But just when she was about to reach him, she balked. She screamed and pointed past my house towards the creek. I heard Tam's name cried out, and her legs bounced, poised to climb again. Then he grabbed her. I'd come down my lawn by then, crossed the road, and as I hurried onto the field I saw that man's brute fist grabbing Sachi's skirt, pulling her as she screamed and screamed, her eyes darting and blinking all at once, like the light inside a siren. Once he got her, he slung her over his shoulder as if she were one of his two-by-fours to be nailed down in his unfinished basement, only she wasn't a piece of board, she flopped and kicked. He nodded at me as I ran up, some sort of polite gesture. His face was heated, red, his eyes only half rising from the ground as he kept his balance. "Sorry, Miss Saito," he called, and as he swung towards their house, Sachi glared at me through the web of her hair. She raised a finger in a rude gesture I'd seen other schoolchildren use with one another. "He's back there!" she screamed. "Go look! Go! For me!" And she strained over her father's shoulder, tethered there, almost diving into the field, except for the strong carpenter's hand that clamped her back.
In a few moments they'd disappeared into their house, and I was left standing alone as usual, the ridiculous one. The girl's cries rang in my ears and I half turned to head for the creek, but I stopped and marched myself back to the house. I bristled at Tom calling me Miss Saito, like some old thing, some old schoolmarm, when he could hardly be much younger. Even Yano called me Saito-san. I shook my head thinking of what Tom would have to contend with once he got her home. Hands grabbing at door handles left and right, holding on with all her might; legs kicking and banging, fighting him in his arms with each step he took down the hall to her room.
It was half-past eleven. Already the sun was overhead. They were somewhere: Yano and Chisako, driving with Tam and Kimi in back, a family. Down a pretty country road, green, with tips of spring colour sprouting in the ditches, somewhere together, for once. A little holiday on a whim, a day or two taken off work, the light in the living-room forgotten, who knows what else. I might have even urged Yano to do just that, had I thought of it.
More chores, and at last I sat down to read my paper, folded as I'd left it. I opened the paper and there it was. I remained calm, numb to it, I suppose. I ran my hand over the picture of Chisako, smudging it with my fingertips, which were suddenly damp. Awful picture. It was her, but before. Beside her, a hakujin, a white man, behind big horn-rimmed glasses so you couldn't really see him. Couldn't see his deep-set eyes, or his wavy hair that was dark but not quite black, or how tall he was. Her Mr. Spears. Woman, man shot in lovers' lane, it said. In the chest, both of them, him once, her twice. Husband, twin son and daughter missing. It blurred as I tried to read on. Found by boy and his dog Wednesday evening. Inked in thick and black, their names for strangers to see: Mrs. Chisako Yano, Mr. Donaldson Spears. Tamio and Kimiko, Mr. Masashi Yano. Masashi. Who called him Masashi?
The field was silent. Children should have been out by now, on their way home for lunch, calling to one another, baby birds weeping to be fed. Something was wrong. Come out, come out, I wanted to call. Across the way, the rows of houses were straighter than ever, drapes drawn except for one. Closed eyes. Cold shoulders. Where were the children? No jeers, not even a hey, chink lady. Deserted. Nothing.
I ran into the field. Seized, I wanted to be seized. Like that girl, like my Sachi was, instantly and firmly. I ran until my heart was pounding, but still I felt shallow and light. Shot twice. In the chest. I touched myself there; the beat was slowing. I held out my hand but it was steady.
I found myself at the feet of the giant, where Sachi had stood, among the weeds. Cool and dry. I leaned and the cold metal shocked me at my hip. I held the rail and squeezed. Yards away, smoke spiralled up. I could not mistake the acrid smell from the grass, how something that is moist with life held in it smells when it burns. Suddenly children swarmed the south end of the field. In the distance, the middle-school bell rang. I ran to the spot of smoke and ground my heel over Sachi's stub of cigarette and the smouldering blades. The children were calling out to one another, rushing in as I backed away; quickly I returned to my porch.
I stepped inside the screen door in time to hear Papa's faint wail. Sa, sa, sa. A lulling sound that brought me back to my life. I was not Chisako. No matter how many times I had wished it. Nor was I that girl pining for her special friend. I took a last look at the sky through the screen, and the flood of schoolchildren, like gulls come in from the lake when it starts to rain. The sky was blue as ever, with white puffy dashes. As I tried to keep Papa's call at bay, I kept seeing those dashes in blue, a ghost's hoary eyebrows raised at me. Whose, I could not say.
I went into the kitchen to prepare lunch. I noticed that the clock on the stove already said 12:16. No wonder Papa was wailing for his lunch. The school bell must have gone off late.
"Chotto matte," I called up to Papa. Just a minute. I heard my own voice, cheery almost, forgetful. Steady. There with my tray at the doorway. Then Chisako came to me again, the thought of her, and I had to set it down. Chisako. Dead. I'd have to say it to myself aloud, to make myself understand.
Some time later, I sat down to rest on the chesterfield for a moment or two; I did not go to my window. I noticed the newsprint that stained my fingertips, the pitch that had not come off through all the chores of washing and wiping and dusting I'd got on with. I marvelled at that, the consolation of my quiet life, the getting on: my calm. My grief, oddly removed from myself.
For I had long ago understood that you had to live in the midst of things to be affected, in the swift of the storm, you might say. And once you did, only then could you be for ever changed. You couldn't simply sit and watch, imagining from time to time how such-and-such would feel, would be, what happened to others and not to you.
I hadn't spoken to Chisako in a long while, or so it seemed. It felt as though months had passed, and yet it could only have been days, perhaps not even a week. I had not said what I would have wanted to be my last words to her.