A Quiet Life (2 page)

I think the belligerent sensation, the
Hell, no! Hell, no!
that welled up in me, was not really a spontaneous reaction but one I had prepared all along. As a matter of fact, I had recently given vent to it on a number of occasions with those very words—words that Eeyore calls “rough” and reprimands me for using. Still, all too frequently, for some time now, my eyes have caught headlines decrying such sexual “outbursts”
by mentally handicapped people. The newspaper we subscribe to, in particular, seemed to be running a covert campaign against such people, and these accounts appeared so often, as in that day's morning edition, that I once suggested to Mother that we take a different paper. Yet Father had reacted with good grace to the paper's campaign denouncing the “outbursts,” as though he believed that they were actually taking place. And without even a word about the article, he had stammered that Eeyore should take up something for exercise—an attitude I found repulsive, annoyingly depressing at best.

Eeyore is definitely at a sexually mature age. I see many robust boys, in their twenties like Eeyore, while commuting to classes and on campus. I won't say this for all of them—in particular, I don't at all feel this way about my fellow volunteers—but now and then I detect in a boy's stare a radiation that seems to emanate from something sexual deep inside him. And all those sexy weekly magazine ads that hang everywhere in the commuter trains!

But if Father, from such general preconceptions, had worried about “outbursts ‘from Eeyore—in the same way the newspaper reporter worried about them—and had claimed that exercise a necessary measure (!?) to prevent them, then wouldn't there be something “banal” about Father that comes from his not seeing the facts clearly? I think I was reacting against this.

There was some talk at Eeyore's welfare facility, too, of several incidents that had almost been “outbursts.” But according to what I heard from some of the mothers who had come to pick up their children, these “outbursts” were moderate, even merciful, compared to the glares of robust, able-bodied youngsters. Still, who could have known, as I quietly listened to them from my seat at their side, that a voice rang in me so
loud as to almost make me cry,
Hell, no! Hell, no!
In any case, nothing had happened that should have involved the police.

When Eeyore first began commuting to the welfare workshop, I merely accompanied Mother when she took him there; and I recall there was practically nothing near the building at the time, just vacant lots. But since then, many wood-frame apartment houses with beautiful facades have mushroomed in the area, and it's often dangerous to cross the street with those structures blocking the view. So if there had been an assault, surely the new residents would have begun a movement against the welfare workshop.

One windy day early this spring, on my way back from the welfare workshop, where I had taken Eeyore, I turned at the corner of a fenced-in used-car lot to walk along a side street of the always wretchedly busy Koshu Boulevard. Since attendance for the day had been taken and the absence reports had already been submitted to the center office, I knew the boy I had seen wasn't one of Eeyore's workmates. But this seemingly mentally retarded boy had pulled down his pants to his knees to expose his pure white buttocks and was fondling his genitals while gazing at the grimy cars beyond the fence. “My, oh my!” exclaimed Mrs. A, one of the mothers who was walking back with me, a take-charge type of woman, quick in making decisions and taking action. “Ma-chan, you stay right here,” she said, “Mrs. M and I will go first!” Having brought me to a halt with these enigmatic words, she briskly headed toward the boy.

Three other women, who happened to be abreast of us on the other side of the street, also began to move to censure the boy's behavior. Reaching him first, though, Mrs. A made him pull up his pants, and helped him with the satchel he had left on the side of the road. She made sure which direction his
school was in, and wasted no time sending him off. The three women, left standing there with no opportunity to voice their complaints, reproached us over their shoulders as they resumed walking.

This is what Mrs. A, who had started toward the station, said when I caught up with her: “If those neighborhood housewives hadn't been there, and if we didn't have to worry about people mistaking the boy for one of ours, I'd have let him do it to his heart's content!”

It was then Mrs. M's turn to say, “My, oh my!” Like Mrs. A, she said this in consideration of a young girl's presence, but in my heart I concurred with Mrs. A. And this made me repeat to myself,
Hell, no! Hell, no!
for I had blushed and even become teary-eyed, which seemed somehow indecent, and I gritted my teeth in anger.

While it is not my intention here to fault the boy in any way, I have never seen Eeyore engaging in the act—at least not where the eyes of a family member might spot him. We also know that, unlike the boy, he has never done it elsewhere; and to be quite honest, I have a hunch he won't ever do it. I must confess, though, that my feelings regarding this matter are mixed, for the thought that he will never do it doesn't necessarily ease my mind, much less make me feel happy. …

Eeyore has a fundamentally serious streak in him, which makes him reject all sexual playfulness. Father prefers light-hearted banter about such things, though Mother says he was seriousness personified when he was a student, that his facetiousness is a second nature he acquired with great effort. Eeyore, however, is of the exacting, stoic sort. So I wonder if, when he hears “‘peck,” which is frequently uttered in our house, he consciously endures the word, however much he dislikes it.

“Peck” is Father's four-letter word, which lends itself to levity like silk off a spool. I know this usage isn't found in the
dictionary, but Father uses it like a wild card, so to speak. Still, if I were to stand in Father's defense, I would say that I understood his need to invent it, for if any impropriety involving sex were to arise, some situation he himself could not well cope with, it would be in his own best interest to treat it more like a scandalous joke than as an embarrassing predicament.

I recall something that happened to Eeyore when he was in the secondary division of a special-care school for the handicapped. One day, at home, he was, as usual, lying on the living room carpet, listening to FM radio and composing music. And then he turned on to his other side, and he did so in such an
awkward
manner, thrusting his hips back, as it were, with obvious embarrassment. Father saw this and said to him, his voice louder—at least as I heard it—than necessary', “Eeyore, your peck's grown. Now go to the bathroom!”

So off he went, wobbling like a woman you might see in a hospital with something abnormal about her underbelly. I thought of his grown “peck” hurting as it brushed against his underwear, and I wished to help him in any way I could. But at such times Eeyore became extremely defensive—to the point that he would have pushed my hand away had I tried to do anything. Mother said she was helpless as far as the grown “peck” was concerned.

There were also times when we would come face to face with Eeyore's “peck.” Eeyore has always worn diapers when going to bed. As he grew, the vinyl covers they had in the neighborhood stores became too small for him, so whenever we happened to go downtown, Mother and Father looked for something larger in the department stores. An instructor at the special school said he wanted all bed-wetting problems solved, and suggested that we get Eeyore up at night, between eleven and twelve, and take him to the bathroom. Mother usually did this, sometimes Father, but I took care of everything when Father
was away traveling and Mother was too tired to get up. In those days I was up anyway, preparing for my high school entrance exams.

When you turned on the light, Eeyore would immediately awaken, but he wouldn't spontaneously initiate any movement. Seeing him lying there, his form heaving under the blanket, you would think he was a bear in hibernation. You would start by stripping off the blanket, and find him sprawled out every which way. Then you began taking off his pajama pants. While still lying there, totally inert, he would du his bit, making subtle movements to help you with the task.

If his diaper was still dry, you would use it again after taking him to the toilet, so you would carefully remove its adhesive tape to keep its folds and creases the same. You could tell immediately by its sodden warmth if it was already wet, but when you made it in the nick of time, you would be as happy as a hunter who had bagged some game.

Yet it was precisely in this situation that there was a problem. As soon as you removed the adhesive tape, Eeyore's “peck” would spring up with a force that would all but send the diaper flying. But after the diaper was removed and everything below his waist was exposed, there would be little left to do, for Eeyore would raise his upper body, get out of bed, and stand up by himself. No matter how often I did this, though, I could never get used to the smell of his breath, which reeks like some beast, or the foams produced when alloying metals. It's totally different from the sweet smell of his breath during the day: different, too, from the odor of his mouth when he has his attacks. …

Thanks to the conscientious instructor, Eeyore's diaper-wetting was cured virtually overnight—a half year after the instructor made his bold suggestion—when Eeyore spent, a night at the special school dormitory for a dry run to prepare
the children for camping trips and the like. Since then, I don't think anyone in the family has seen his “peck” rise as it did before, with the virility of the serpents on Medusa's pate. Come to think of it, it's been years since I've seen him double up into that awkward posture with his elongated “peck.” But because Eeyore is of a serious mettle, and since he's the kind of person who doesn't allow himself to conceal such things from the eyes of his family, I wonder if this means that his “peck” has ceased to grow.

When I told Mother what I thought, she replied, in a lowered tone of voice, “Perhaps that period has passed. A short youth, wasn't it?” Father was then in the living room, but had been listening in on our kitchen conversation, and said, “All in all, it's nothing bad. We don't need to be anxious anymore. That's the long and short of it.” I resented this.

“We don't know if that's good or bad for Eeyore!” I protested in my heart. If his youth is gone, surely he won't do anything like what that boy was doing on the street. But again, I don't really know very much about such things. As far as my feelings go, something makes me want to say that I'd rather not be spared the anxiety. But more than this, I think to myself,
Hell, no! Hell, no!

Despite the mental preparation I had made for all the things that might occur, the first week after my parents departed from Narita presented me with a host of wholly unanticipated events that set my mind awhirl. Because I was able to sleep only four or five hours at night, I would lie on my bed a couple of times a day between my chores and doze off, and sometimes I got so absentminded that I made two entries in the “Diary as Home” I had promised Mother I would keep. There was a lot to write about, though.

Every little thing I had to attend to did, in a way, help forget my loneliness and anxiety. Nonetheless, I was vaguely perturbed by a nagging awareness of two matters, perhaps two persons. Something categorically carnal about them hung suspended in the middle of my body, right above my stomach. I refer to the two men who, at the height of my exasperation, I called “fanatics.” Father seemed taken aback by this way of referring to them but was silent, while Mother cautioned me not to speak this way in front of others.

The men started coming to our gate, at least once a week beginning late last year, to bring us presents of a sort. We knew nothing about them, but it was because of their odd behavior that I began calling them fanatics. One of the men brought a bouquet of small flowers, not the kind you find at a florist's, but one that was bunched together in a peculiar fashion. The bouquet was like a cheerless classmate with downcast eyes who one day. when you're not on guard, usurps your inner thoughts. The other man brought water in a half-pint sake bottle stoppered with a cork. This one just went away after leaving the bottle on the brick wall by the gate, but once I confronted him face to face when I went out to receive the delivery of a year-end gift. He was a hefty, muscular person, like a monk who practices rigid religious austerities, and under his broad brow were the light-brown dots of eyes set too far apart.

The bouquet man rang the bell on our gate and offered the flowers to whoever answered. He was a diminutive person with the bearing of a bank teller or a schoolteacher, and always attached to his flowers was a letter in a small envelope. I never read any of them, but because the envelopes bore the letterhead of his workplace, got the impression he was comparatively normal. Father and Mother made little if any mention of him, but come to think of it, I remember there was a big
commotion in the house many years back, possibly because of this man. It happened in the small hours of the morning, but oblivious to everything in those days, I had slept through most of it, and only very vaguely remember sensing that there had been some kind of trouble. Now I wanted to know what it was, so I asked Eeyore if he remembered what had happened. “Ah! We really had trouble! A police car came, but I didn't hear any siren!” His reply came in the usual belated fashion, yet he seemed to have a clear memory of the incident. “What kind of trouble was it?” I asked. Eeyore then lowered his eyes and said, with touching sincerity, “I'm in trouble! I'm in trouble!” From the way he tried to skirt my question, I assumed Father had told him to be quiet about it.

The appearance of such visitors was the high point, but there were also letters and phone calls that I felt were of the same nature, and as far as I krrow they increased after the telecast of a lecture called “The Prayers of a Faithless Man,” which Father had given at a women's university. As someone who has had to directly put up with numerous nuisances, I can argue that there was no need for Father to go and tell everyone he was a “faithless man.” And though I don't think he meant to offend anyone, for him to talk of
prayers
after admitting he professed no faith was, in my opinion, a breach of common courtesy. In this sense, he did make a social blunder, for which I think he well deserved some minor castigation. “But why do
we
have to go through this!” I protested to Mother once, and I think Father heard about it later. Anyway, that's when I first called the two visitors “fanatics.”