If You Follow Me (15 page)

It was starting to get dark when I heard the beep-beep-beep from in front of our house. I opened the front door and saw Haruki's bulky frame bathed in the red glow of a miniature forklift's taillights. Its steel jaws were clamped around our refrigerator, holding it sus
pended in midair like the time machine in
New Horizons
. “What are you doing?” I asked, but the boy ignored me as usual. I tapped him on the shoulder and repeated my question in Japanese, but he still didn't answer, so I punched his arm, my knuckles sinking into his doughy flesh. “Are you crazy?” I asked, punching him again. “Go away!” But he just stood there while his grandfather lowered the refrigerator until it was level with our entryway. Mister Ogawa got out of the cab and he and Haruki proceeded to move the Amana back into our
genkan
, pushing and shoving until the refrigerator stood right where it had before, on the darker blue square of carpet. Haruki got on his knees and reached behind the machine to plug it in, Ogawa-san opened the door and the ceiling light flickered on. Inside, it was spotless and odorless. Not only had they fixed it, they'd cleaned it. There was no sign of the dead cat, not a single hair. That was the last time Ogawa-san brought our
gomi
back.

 

It's snowing out, and so cold that we eat dinner in the bedroom, sitting at the
kotatsu
, our thighs roasting under the electric coil while our upper bodies freeze.

“I can't even remember what warm feels like,” Carolyn says, hugging her bowl of soup. “I had to cook in mittens. I almost lost a finger when the knife slipped.”

“I'm so sick of the cold,” I agree. “It's all anyone talks about.”

“Sorry to bore you,” she says, setting her soup down. Lately she's so sensitive.

“You're not,” I say. “I keep having the same conversation with the vice-principal. It's cold. It
is
cold. Isn't it cold?”

“Well it is,” Carolyn says. “It's hard to talk about anything else.”

When I asked Miyoshi-sensei once why Japanese houses aren't insulated, he said that gas is very expensive here. I pointed out that
insulation—
like sweaters for the walls?
—is relatively cheap. He told me that Japan is an ancient country, that people had been living with the cold for so long that it had become a source of pride to endure it. But everyone here spends a fortune on electric blankets, carpets, and tables, none of which do the job; kerosene is messy, and to prevent headaches you have to leave the windows open, which defeats the whole point; and everyone talks constantly about how cold they are. Maybe that's the point, I think as Carolyn and I face each other in silence, our breath hovering in the air like empty cartoon talk bubbles. Maybe they'd rather be cold than warm, and have a guaranteed conversational standby.

I pick up my soup, take a sip, and accidentally bite down on a piece of hard carrot.

“You don't like it,” Carolyn says flatly.

“I do,” I say. “It's delicious, but my teeth are killing me.”

“You have to go to the dentist,” she says, reprising another conversation we've had many times. “Ignoring the problem won't make it go away.”

“I don't know where the dentist is.”

“Just ask Miyoshi-sensei.”

“Okay,” I say. “Can you pass me the soy sauce?”

“You never talk about him anymore.”

“I never see him anymore.” I didn't tell Carolyn what happened with Hiro. She was the one who wanted an open relationship, and I figured that if it didn't lead to anything, there was no reason for her to know. Besides, it was just a kiss. To change the subject, I tell her about Keiko, how she invited me to her art class, how I thought I was going to be drawing with the kids but instead I had to pose for them. “At first I was horrified,” I say, “but it turned out to be really fun.”

“Big surprise,” Carolyn says with a snort.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Admit it,” she says. “You weren't horrified. You loved being the center of attention, having those kids draw your picture. It's how I got you in my bed, remember?”

“Of course I remember,” I say, trying to take her teasing in good fun. “Anyways, Keiko's great. She's a little messy, not into rules, with this weird, dark sense of humor. We even snuck cigarettes together in her classroom, smoking out the window like teenagers.”

“Sounds like your perfect match.”

“I don't know about that,” I said, “but I do like her a lot. She invited me for dinner one evening this week.”

“Really?” Carolyn jabs at her rice. “Did you ask if I could come?”

“Um, no,” I say. “I mean, she doesn't know about us.”

“Of course she doesn't.”

“How about if we invite her over here next time?”

“So that I can cook for both of you once you're already best friends? Pretend to be your roommate? Sounds fun.”

“Come on,” I say, reaching for her foot under the table. She lets me massage it for a moment, closing her eyes. “I wouldn't expect you to bring me along the first time you went to a new friend's house for dinner.”

“Fine,” she says, pulling her foot back. “I'll remember that, if I ever make a friend of my own this year.”

“You will,” I say. “It just takes time.”

She gets up and clears the barely eaten food off the table. I follow her downstairs and watch her dump her grilled eggplant with sweet miso glaze into the trash. She tells me that she's going to get the kerosene from the car. Only now do I remember that I was supposed to stop at the gas station to refill the jug on my way home from work. She slams the door as she returns to the living room with the empty container.

“I'm so sorry,” I say. “I completely forgot.”

“Yeah,” she says. “You also forgot to tell me that you wrecked our car again.”

“It's not really our car,” I say, and the look on her face makes me wish I could suck the words back in. “I mean of course it's our car, but since you don't have a driver's license, and I paid for it…”

“I paid the key money for this place,” she says, “so I guess it's not really our home.”

“Yes it is,” I say. “Come on, Caro.”

“Is it?” she says. “Because it doesn't really feel like it.”

She goes upstairs and I sit on the front stoop, smoking in the snow, my ashes blending in with the falling flakes. Carolyn was right when she said that moving together to Japan, living together for the first time here, would put too much pressure on our relationship. I thought that by crossing the Pacific together, our lives would broaden, but instead, they shrank. Here we have only each other for comfort, for consolation, for conversation, for sex, for everything. And sometimes being lonely together is worse than being lonely alone. Still, I can't imagine being here without her, and I worry that when we go our separate ways, I will feel halved.

Upstairs, she is lying facing the wall, her back to me. The covers feel icy when I crawl under them, but I don't pull her to me. There is a large gap between us. She is wearing the red fleece sack that my mom sent me, with her arms tucked inside. She looks warm.

daijoubu:
(
ADJ
./
ADV
./
N
.)
safe; all right; okay

W
hen I wake up, the whole world has been transformed. The roofs are buried, each shingle capped with a white copy of itself. The road is a white river, while the river has been narrowed between stacked white banks. I listen to the soft fizz of the snowflakes pelting the river, the water rushing toward the ocean, the wind whistling through the branches of the trees, knocking clumps of snow to the ground. Mrs. Ogawa is outside as usual, wearing a high collared flannel nightgown under a down vest, emptying a kettle of steaming water into her koi pond. I imagine the carp frozen in place, tails beginning to flicker as the ice thaws. She catches me watching her and I raise my hand in a greeting. She holds up her own and we stand there for a moment like good neighbors.

Earlier this morning, I had just gotten out of the shower when Miyoshi-sensei called. Hearing his voice on the other end of the phone made my own tangle up in my throat. He said that he had a letter for me, that I should stop by the high school to pick it up on my way home from the elementary school. “It's not
gomi
letter,” he stressed. “It's something else.”
He could have faxed it to me at the elementary school
, I thought, but didn't point it out. I thought maybe he
was just looking for an excuse to see me in person. Maybe the letter was a pretext, or he was finally going to address in writing what he couldn't say in person. I wanted the day to be over with already, so I could see him and find out.

The highway has been plowed. The road is scraped clean, a narrow chute between banks pushed to either side of the rice fields, which are buried in snow, the glittering white peaks shifting like dunes as the wind blows. Every time I pass a driver coming from the opposite direction, we each glide to a stop and squeeze against the banks, bobbing our heads at each other.
You first
.
No, you
. It takes forty minutes to cover ten kilometers, and I'm late by the time I coast into the elementary school parking lot, where Koji is standing all alone, wearing his yellow hat.

When I jump out of my car window, he laughs. “What are you doing out here?” I ask, afraid that he's running away again. He tells me that first period was suspended so that the kids could play in the snow. When I say that I don't see anyone, he explains that they're all on the playing field. “Come on,” he says, as he takes my hand and pulls me past the staircase leading to the front doors, past the ducks and the rabbits in their hutch, around to the back of the school, where I'm relieved to find that the playground is in fact swarming with kids. In the swimming pool, an assembly line of children is building an assembly line of snowmen, screwing limp carrot noses—clearly the rabbits' leftovers—into round white faces. Other children grab sleds from a rapidly shrinking pile, throwing themselves down the snowy banks. Their bare legs look sunburned, they're so red from the cold. I don't understand why an exception to the rule can't be made on a day this snowy.

“Let's go, Marina,” Koji says, picking up a sled with his free hand. Kim is sitting by herself on the edge of the pool, eyeing us wistfully, and I suggest to the little boy that he ask her instead.

“She's too scared,” he says dismissively. “She won't do it.”

“Just ask her,” I insist.

“Kim-san,” he says dutifully, “Do you want to go with me?”

She hesitates for a moment, then shakes her head, an almost imperceptible no.

“I told you,” he said. “She's too scared. I need you.”

None of the other teachers are sledding. I don't know if I'm even allowed to be out here, or if there's something I should be doing inside. I glance up at the faculty room and see the vice-principal staring out the window, his breath fogging the glass. He seems to be waving at me, probably waiting for me to come inside for yet another conversation about the weather.
It is very snowy day!
There are no other teachers playing with the children. But then again, that's what I'm supposedly here for. He says so all the time.

“I
need
you,” Koji repeats with an earnestness that melts the ice of my heart.

“Okay,” I say to the little boy. “Let's go.”

Koji places the sled right at the cusp of the slope, jutting over the edge. He sits down, turns around, and pats the remaining couple of inches behind him. I straddle his body, cupping his frame with my knees, my arms wrapped around his shoulders, trying not to squeeze him too tightly, aware in a new way of how very small he is as he lifts his feet and we begin our rapid descent. The slope is steep and as the snow unzips beneath us I hold my breath until the ground levels out and we bounce and jolt to a halt. “
Mo ichi do
!” he cries out immediately. Lungs burning, I push myself to my feet and follow him back up the hill, slipping back half a step for every step forward. By the time we reach the top I'm winded, my core burning, my extremities freezing. This time I sit in front while he sits behind me, his arms wrapped around my waist, his cheek pressed to my back. At the bottom of the hill, the sled tilts to one side and tips us into the snow
and I lie there for a moment, just catching my breath and taking in the blank hugeness of the sky. The same shade of white as the falling snow, it looks like it's all coming down. Koji climbs on top of me and places his hands on my face. He leans close, his expression almost ardent as he gazes into my eyes.

“Mo ichi do
,” he repeats.

Exhausted, I tell him to go by himself, saying that I don't want to slow him down. “You don't slow me down,” he says. “You're very heavy. Together we go much faster!” I laugh and he says, “I need you,” and then again, “I need you!” So I follow him back up the hill and down again, up and down, again and again. After a while, the repetitive slow climb followed by the repetitive rapid descent makes me think of Sisyphus and his rock. Sure, pushing it up the mountain over and over must've been a drag, but maybe, on a good day, he derived some pleasure from watching it roll back down, feeling his own body give in to gravity's pull as he followed.

Koji is getting frustrated, impatient. The more times we sled down the hill, the faster he wants to go but the less fun he seems to be having. The other kids are laughing, throwing snowballs at each other, making snow angels and Hello Kitties, but he is weirdly single-minded, almost obsessive, a sledding machine. Every time I suggest that we call it quits, he begs me to go one more time, with an intensity that makes it hard to say no. Finally he plants the sled at the top of a swath that's been traveled many times before, the snow worn down to a slick chute of ice. He waits for me to climb aboard, then sits on my lap and hugs his knees. He's so skinny that I can feel the point of his tailbone, although he barely weighs more than a big cat. As we careen down the slope, he stands up abruptly, leaning forward like the masthead of a ship while I grab the back of his uniform jacket.

“Sit down!” I cry, just as the sled catches on a clump of grass or
submerged rock and catapults our bodies into the air. In the moment before we hit, it's not that time stands still, only that my mind empties and my senses take over. I hear the jangling of a school bell, I see children scatter, trying to get out of our way, I see the knobs at the top of Koji's spine, the bones like a strand of pearls, so small and close to the surface, his skin as thin as tissue. I clutch his body to mine and lean backward, and when we crash my body cushions his and his head slams into my mouth. Luckily, he is wearing his yellow hat. I am not so lucky. A spike of pain shoots through my mouth. I spit blood in the snow, cover the spot with my hand so he won't see it.

“Daijoubu
?” I say to the little boy. Are you okay? He is crying, crying quietly like a grown-up. When he doesn't answer I answer for him. “
Daijoubu. Daijoubu.
” You're okay. You're okay. I don't even realize that I keep repeating this until he tells me to stop, wiping his eyes with the back of his glove.

“It didn't work,” he says.

“What didn't work?” I ask, not sure that I understood him.

“We're here,” he says.

“We need to go inside,” I say, noticing a line of faces pressed to the inside of the faculty room window, all peering out at us. I wave and smile. I could've crushed him.

“Mo ichi do
,” Koji says, as he gets up and begins to drag the sled back up the hill.

“No,” I say, grabbing the sled and trying to take his hand. He wrenches free, so that I'm left holding just his glove, and then he runs away from me, into the school.

 

Inside the faculty room, his mother and the second-grade teacher are crouching before him, examining his hand. As I approach I can see that his fingertips are spotted with gray dots, as if he'd somehow
wedged pencil tips under his fingernails. Feeling queasy, I ask what happened—afraid he got hurt when we fell—and Keiko tells me that he has frostbite.

“He has frostbite?” I repeat. “How is that possible?”

“I already tell you. He runs away. He is outside all night.
Samui desu ne
?” It's cold, isn't it? Suddenly, the greeting is less banal.

“You were going too fast,” Kobayashi-sensei says, standing to his full height and looking down at me. “You were going too fast and then you—”

“Jampu
,” Koji cuts him off.

We jumped. I jumped. He jumped. Pronouns get dropped in Japanese. This is exactly how I described my father's suicide to the little boy. I remember what Keiko told me yesterday, after I said that children don't know how easily they can get hurt.
He knows. He wants to. It's how to get my attention
. But surely he didn't want to…I can't even finish the thought. No child seeks pain.

“Are you okay?” the teacher asks the little boy, and Koji nods.

“I told you,” Keiko says. “
Daijoubu
.” He's fine. “Miss Marina loves children.”

“Marina-sensei,” the vice-principal says. “Ishii-sensei said her students enjoyed drawing you so much. They experienced 3-D profile! How about returning to art class
mo ichi do
?” I look at Keiko, who smiles hopefully, and I'm so glad that she's not upset with me, and that Koji isn't hurt, that I say yes, sure, of course.

 

“It's so cold,” she says in the art room, rubbing her hands together briskly. She ignites the kerosene heater and then opens the window an inch to let out the toxic fumes. The wind blows flakes into the room, which melt and vanish in midair. I lie across the table as another group of children draws my portrait. I try to ignore the pain in my mouth,
to keep my expression pleasant, but I must not be doing a very convincing job because Keiko keeps pausing by the table, asking if I'm okay. Once again I see the scratch marks rising out of her shirt collar, darker and more obvious now as they're healing.

She tells me to go ahead and close my eyes again, but when I do I feel the thud of Koji's head. I can't drift off; the pain in my teeth is too omnipresent. In the break between periods, Keiko locks the classroom door and gets out her pack of cigarettes. It's snowing much harder now, the air a blur of snow being blown in every direction. In the swimming pool below, a tide is rising, burying the snowmen from both ends at once.

“I am so tired,” she says.

“Do you still want me to come over?” I ask, hoping she'll suggest that we reschedule. When I probe my teeth with my tongue, they all seem to shift, like a row of apartment buildings after an earthquake. They all sting too. I didn't know teeth could sting. All I want to do is go home, curl up in front of the heater and drink something stiff to numb the pain.

“Ah,” she says. “You are too busy?”

“I just thought, if you're tired…”

“I am always tired,” she says. “I don't remember not feeling tired. I don't even know a word for this condition.”

“Awake?” I suggest. “Alert?”

“But I am awake,” she says. “I must always be alert. This is the problem.”

As fifth-graders trickle in and settle into their seats, I hear one girl say to another, “I told you. Now we all have to draw her.” I excuse myself for a moment and go to the bathroom to rinse out my mouth. The art room shares a hallway with the kindergarten and everything in this bathroom is tiny. The stalls are so short that I can see right over them, at little toilets that look almost cute. Less cute
is my face. My skin is the color of Vaseline, my tongue scalloped with bite marks. When I spit into the sink, my saliva is threaded with blood. I push on my teeth and they wiggle. I imagine spitting them into my palm, liberated molars and bicuspids that I could shake and throw like dice, casting myself some new fate.

I swallow two aspirin and chew on a third, a trick I learned from my father, who liked to boast that he never once took a sick day from kindergarten through medical school. “There's nothing a doctor can tell me that I don't already know,” he'd say before staggering off to work with a 104-degree fever. He put off visits to the dentist as well, although his own teeth were porous and prone to decay, my unfortunate inheritance. When he did go, he refused Novocain, saying that he couldn't stand the numb feeling. “He hated to give up control,” my mom said. “He could never be weak.” That was his greatest weakness.

I splash water on my face and return to the art room, where I have to pose for two more classes before lunch. I keep my eyes closed but I can't fall asleep. I keep thinking about my father. I think about the note he left in the glove compartment of his car, a note so short that I memorized it without trying, without wanting to.
I am sorry for the pain that this will cause you, but I am in a black hole of despair and I can't find my way out. I forfeit the right to give you any advice
.
Please try not to be too sad and move on with your lives.
Try not to be too sad? Move on with your lives? I've been following this advice like a dare. Maybe Carolyn is right, I think. Maybe I have no feelings; only this pain in my mouth.