If You Follow Me (16 page)

 

Lunch today is curry rice. Usually this is my favorite school lunch, but today I can't manage to chew the mush. When two boys come to clear our trays, Kobayashi-sensei gestures at my untouched bowl and asks if I'm okay, sounding genuinely concerned.

“Usually you have big appetite,” he says. “Like me.”

“I'm fine,” I say. “I'm just saving room.”

“Saving room?”

“I'm going to Keiko's house for dinner this evening.”

“Honto-ni
?” He turns to face her. Really?

“Dinner?” she repeats. “Maybe not dinner but…tea and fruits okay?”

“Of course. Anything is fine,” I say, feeling embarrassed. I try to remember how she phrased her invitation to come over. Didn't she mention a meal?

“I am very bad cook,” she says. “My husband always say so.”

“Daijoubu
,” I say. “That's fine. I'm just looking forward to hanging out.”

“Hanging out?” she echoes uncertainly.

The vice-principal emerges from behind his desk and stands before us. He's wearing a bolero tie, but it looks proportionate on him. “Ishii-sensei,” he says, “Did I just hear that you invited Miss Marina over for dinner to thank her for posing for you? How nice.” Keiko glances at Kobayashi-sensei before nodding. “What are you making?” he presses. “Japanese food? Something from
oosa
, to remind her of New York?”

“You really don't need to make dinner for me,” I say under my breath.

“Do you like steak?” she asks.

“Suteki
,” the vice-principal says, laughing and clapping his hands. For once, I get the Japanese joke.
Suteki
is the word for steak, also slang for great.

Keiko tells me that she has to pick up her older son from junior high, take Kim-san back home and stop at the grocery store before I come over. She draws a map showing the way to her house and tells me to meet her there at five.

 

Even though he called me this morning and told me to stop by, Miyoshi-sensei looks surprised to see me. But not as surprised as I am to see Joe Pope, sitting in my desk chair in the high school faculty room, engrossed in conversation with Ritsuko Ueno. They don't even notice as I walk past them. I finger the tasseled ends of the scarf my mom knit for me. It's made of bright yellow wool, the same Day-Glo shade as the elementary school uniform caps, and so long that I can wrap it around my neck a dozen times, until it puff s out like an inner tube, and still the ends dangle to the ground. As Miyoshi-sensei gets up to greet me, I feel as stiff and immobilized as the yam truck driver in his neck brace.

“Ohisashiburidesune
,” he says. It's been a long time.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I ran into Joe at Mister Donuts this morning,” Miyoshi-sensei says, burying his hands in his pockets. “Our students have been studying so hard. I thought they could use some break. It was kind of…spur of the moment.” I nod, hoping that I don't look hurt. I suspected that he shipped me off to the elementary school so that he wouldn't have to deal with me, but this confirms it. If Carolyn knows that Joe is in town, she hasn't said a word. Last I heard, he was living at a
gaijin
residence in Osaka, the city where most Japanese television shows are filmed. Miyoshi-sensei asks if I'd like a cup of tea and I nod, trailing after him to the social corner.

He hands me my tea, as well as a piece of paper, folded into a tight little square. Apparently the letter wasn't just a pretext to see me. He sits on one end of the couch and I sit on the other as I read it, as conscious of the wide space between us as I once was of our hips touching.

 

“It wasn't a hit-and-run,” I say, the words on the page sliding beneath my eyes.

“Daijoubu
,” he says, but it's obviously not okay and he obviously doesn't believe me.

At the culture shock panel in Tokyo, we were told that it is never, under any circumstances, acceptable to cry at work here. Apparently it rips the
wa
, the social fabric, beyond repair. I can never seem to cry at the right times: when it's expected of me, when it would actually put people at ease. But now it's like a cork has been popped, a lid unscrewed, and the tears are pouring out too fast for me to get the lid back on. I am giant Alice. I could flood a room. He looks around as if for an escape hatch, a way away from this crazy foreigner, this fresh mess I've put us in.

“I'd never do that.” I manage to squeeze the words out between sobs. “I would never flee the scene of a crime.”

“You don't like to follow rules,” he says quietly. “You've admitted so often.”

“The truck looked okay. I asked the driver if he needed to go to the hospital, and he said no. I offered to pay for the yams. I really did!”

“Daijoubu
,” he says.

“Just tell me where Uyesugi-san lives, so that I can pay him back,” I say.

“Daijoubu
,” he says one more time. “The debt is paid.”

“No!” The word comes out louder and more passionately than
I intended. “I don't want you to pay for them. You already hate me.”

“I do not hate you,” he says.

“Then why won't you talk to me?”

“I am your supervisor,” he says, but as he meets my eyes for a moment, I get a flash of the man I used to know, not my supervisor, but my friend. He bites his lip, and again I remember the feeling of his mouth pressing back against mine.
Nothing happened
, he said when I tried to talk to him about it. But then why did he send me away? Why did he jerk his hand back when he gave me this letter and our fingers brushed? Why is it so hard for him to look at me? I can tell that this attraction annoys him, that he wants it to go away, that it isn't “convenient” for him. Well, it isn't convenient for me either. But just because it isn't convenient, that doesn't make it untrue.

I get out my wallet, pull out all of the bills without counting them and hold them out to him. He glances around again, refusing to take my money. The Japanese teachers are all going about their business, ignoring the B-movie screening in the corner. Only Joe is openly staring, leaning back in his—my—desk chair, smirking. It's this that makes me stop crying. In the rock-paper-scissors of emotion, anger still beats sorrow.

mo ichi do:
(
EXP
.)
once more; again; repeat after me

T
rying to follow Keiko's smudged charcoal map is like trying to locate myself on a landscape painting. Without labeling anything, she rendered the landmarks in three-dimensional detail. But the snow has blotted out the real landscape, the road has not been plowed again, and I can hardly see the edge of the cliff s as I drive. I concentrate on the fuzzy tire tracks in front of me, holding my breath as the car glides around the curves.

On her map, a picture of a UFO matches the one on the sign leading to the UFO museum in Hakui. Carolyn and I visited this museum last summer, shortly after we got here. It's a small building near the beach, the walls covered with drawings of almond-eyed aliens, the tables painted to look like flying saucers. According to the brochure, the first local extraterrestrial sighting was just a brilliant flash of light, witnessed by different people all across the Noto peninsula. Then a mother reported watching a shimmering vessel materialize over the waves where her children were swimming, beaming them up before blinking out. Although she was arrested for negligence, her children's bodies were never found, and every year crowds visit the site on the day of the alleged alien abduction,
driving onto the beach and parking their cars facing the sea. Watching this spectacle last summer, Carolyn and I agreed that it looked like the people hoped not just to see a UFO, but to be carried away themselves, beamed up into the sky.

Halfway to the UFO museum, what looks like a real fox on Keiko's sketch is actually the stone fox guarding the entrance to a Shinto shrine. In front of the shrine stands a tree ornamented with skinny strips of paper that flutter in the wind. These are letters to the dead. According to Miyoshi-sensei, when rain or snow melts the ink and the paper turns to pulp, the messages seep into the ground and reach their intended recipients. A lot of dead people are getting mail today.

Keiko's house is the next building after this shrine, surrounded by a high fence. I pull a rope hanging from a bell, and several minutes later she appears at the gate to open it, drying her hands on her jeans before reaching out to shake mine.

“Shake okay?” she says.

“Usually you only shake hands when you meet someone,” I say.

“No,” she says. “Is my shake too hard? Too soft? Too quick or slow?”

“It's great,” I say. “You shake very well.”

“Next month, maybe my family will visit your home,” she tells me.

“San Francisco?” I ask.

“New York,” she says, looking confused. This is the answer on my self-introduction quiz. She tells me that her husband has to go to New York to learn more about different treatments for cancer. Her delivery is so matter-of-fact that I'm not sure what to say. Sensing my apprehension, she laughs. “Husband is a doctor,” she says. “He works for nuclear power station. They send him to New York to learn more about radiation treatment.” While I'm relieved that her husband isn't sick, I find her explanation equally disturbing.

I follow her up the path to an A-frame house that looks like a small ski lodge with a thatched roof, the bottom half made of stone,
the top half of dark wood. They are rich, I realize. Inside the entryway, a lamp with a paper shade hangs from the ceiling, illuminating brick red walls covered in framed woodblock prints of a weeping willow, a snow-capped Mount Fuji, a breaking wave. I haven't seen such deliberately Japanese décor outside of the United States. Keiko offers me a pair of plaid slippers, still joined by a price tag.

“It's for you,” she says. “To use every time you come here.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I hope you'll come over to our house soon too.” I stress the word
our.
I've decided to tell Keiko the truth, to be open with her, so that we can have a real friendship. But before I go on, she holds up a palm and says, “What's that sound?”

“Running water?” I guess.

“Fumiya!” she cries out. “
Mo ichi do
?”

In the kitchen, two boys are standing at the sink, both dressed in school uniforms with their backs to us. The air is thick with steam and the sink is overflowing. The taller boy has his arms plunged up to the elbows in the water, which he keeps scooping onto his own plaid slippers. “
Yamero!
” says the smaller boy. Stop it! Keiko rushes to turn the faucet off, drawing a sharp intake of breath as she pulls a dripping, shrink-wrapped package of steak out of the sink. The meat is gray. She slams the package on the counter and rakes her hands through her short hair, obviously trying to calm down. Although the water is no longer flowing, the taller boy continues to mimic the sound it made rushing, striking the steel basin, splashing on the linoleum. I don't know how he's doing it, but it sounds remarkably close to the real thing. As the real water churns down the drain and gargles in the pipes, he begins imitating that sound to perfection too.

Keiko seizes him by the shoulders and turns him to face her. She unbuttons his jacket and he recoils from her touch, whimpering and giggling at the same time.

“Daijoubu
,” she says.

“It's okay,” he repeats, somehow mimicking not only her words, but also her strained solicitude. After wrestling the boy out of his wet jacket, she turns him to face me. He is wearing a V-necked undershirt, his arms are long and noodle thin, and he wiggles his fingers as if practicing piano scales in the air.

“Go aisatsu shinasai
,” Keiko prompts him. “Say ‘hello' to Marina-sensei.”

“Hello,” I say.

The boy giggles and does a manic little dance on the tips of his toes. Then he burrows his chin into his chest and hoots like an owl.

“His name is Fumiya,” Keiko says.

“Hi Fumiya,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

“Hifumiyanicetomeetyou,” he says in a falsetto parody.

“Good job!” Keiko says. “Fumiya speaks English very well, don't you think?”

“Very well,” I agree.

“His junior high English teacher says that maybe, with practice, he could be fluid.”

She pulls him close and tries to kiss his cheek, but he shrinks from her touch. When she releases him, he puckers and kisses the air, touching his lips as he blows little bubbles of spit, then resumes imitating the gargling sound of draining water.

“Yamero
,” Koji says again. Stop it!

Fumiya's face both does and doesn't look like Koji's. He has a stronger chin and a longer, sharper nose that ends in a cleft. But like his little brother he is so pale that I can see the veins at his temples, and his eyes are equally wide-set, of that same lovely shade of gray. Amazing, then, just how different these eyes can be. Whereas Koji's gray gaze is generous, curious and inviting, his brother's eyes look hard and shellacked. It's impossible to find a way in. He pinches the tip of his tongue between his teeth and hisses at me.

Keiko places her hands on Fumiya's shoulders and pushes him into a chair at the kitchen table. She tells Koji to sit down too, and when he begins to lower himself into a chair at the opposite end from his brother, she says, “No, sit next to Fumiya.” The little boy stands up, dragging his body like a sandbag. He sinks into the chair with a deep sigh that Fumiya copies. Keiko tells me to have a seat, pulling out the chair across from the two little boys. In the middle of the table is a plate of sliced apple pears, every slice peeled halfway, the peel lifted from the apple and cut to look like rabbit ears.

“Marina-sensei,” Keiko says, “How about starting with animals?”

“Starting with animals?”

“I made some cards,” she says. She holds up a stack and flips through drawings of a cow, a dog, a cat, a horse, and a bird. “For warm-up, you could begin by teaching animal names and noises.” She slides the cards across the table to me. “Or something else. You are English teacher. Please teach Fumiya and Koji.”

“Please teach Fumiya,” Fumiya says. “FumiyaFumiyaFumiya.”

Repeating his own name seems to excite him, and he sways like a rocking horse until his head almost knocks against the tabletop, but Keiko slides her palm between his head and the wood and for a moment he stops rocking, resting it like an egg in a nest.

My stomach twists in a knot as the real reason why I am here dawns on me. It is only because I speak English. Keiko didn't want a new friend. The kitchen is silent save the sound of a wall clock, a ticktock that Fumiya imitates a hair too late. If she had asked me to tutor her kids, I would have said yes. But I can't help but feel that she sensed my loneliness and took advantage of it, that she wasn't direct with me on purpose, and what I thought I liked so much about her was her directness.

“Stop it!” Koji says again. I look over, then away, but too late. I see Fumiya's legs spread, fly open, hand on his penis, rubbing so
hard it looks more like stain-removal than pleasure. “
Yamero
,” Fumiya repeats, eyelids fluttering. It's hard to see a twelve-year-old face contorted with lust, but the look on Koji's face is worse: shame in miniature. Koji grabs his brother by the wrist and yanks his hand away from his crotch. Fumiya makes a fist and lashes out, clipping Koji in the chin. The little boy starts to cry, bringing his hands to his eyes. “Wah, wah!” Fumiya imitates, “Wah, wah!” When Koji gulps for air, Fumiya pauses too, waiting to join back in like a dutiful choir member.

“Cow,” I say in one of the brief pauses between Koji's sobs. “Moo!”

“Cow,” Keiko repeats, trying to wrap her arms around both of her sons, both of whom shrink from her touch.

“Cow,” I try again. “Moo!”

“Cowmoo,” Fumiya says. “Moocowmoo.”

Koji's crying is tapering off now that he's no longer being imitated, and as I pick the next card off the pile, Keiko sneaks away so that I can teach her boys animal sounds.

“Cat,” I say. “Meow!”

“Meowmeowow…” Fumiya sounds like a real cat in heat. “Owmeowowmeow.”

Koji won't even look at the cards I'm holding up. “You like animals,” I say to encourage him.

“Not those animals,” he whispers.

“Really?” I say, “You don't like cats?” He shakes his head. “How about birds?”

“I hate birds,” he says.

“You do?” I ask. “Why?”

“Because they repeat,” he says, picking up an apple slice. “I only like rabbits.”

 

At six o'clock on the dot, Keiko places a plate in front of me. A thick slab of meat floats in a puddle of bloody juice, next to a potato that looks as hard as a rock.

“Aren't you eating?” I ask as she collapses beside me, looking exhausted.

“I must wait for Yuji,” she says. “He comes home at seven.”

“You cooked all of this just for me?” I try to sound appreciative rather than horrified.

“It's good meat,” she says. “Fresh frozen.”

“It looks wonderful,” I lie.

“Go ahead,” she says. “
Itadakimasu.
”

“Itadakimasu
,” Fumiya repeats. He reaches across the table, but Keiko grabs his hand right before he swipes the steak off my plate. I wish I could slip it to him, but his mother pushes him back into his seat and the three of them watch as I saw off a tiny bite, swallowing it whole with difficulty.

“Are you okay?” Keiko asks. “It's no good,
ne
?” I tell her that it's great, but she looks skeptical, and I finally admit that I have a toothache.

“Toothache,” Fumiya repeats. “Toothtoothtoothache.”

“Why don't you fix it?” she asks me.

“I don't have a dentist.”

She tells me that her husband's brother is a dentist, that he has an office in Jade Plaza. She asks if I'd like her to make an appointment for me, and when I say yes, she makes a quick phone call. It's amazing how fast this all happens, after weeks of putting it off. She gets off the phone and lets me know that the dentist will expect me the next morning at seven, that he's going to come in to see me early so that I can get to school on time. I thank her profusely, but Fumiya is rubbing his crotch again. She grabs his hand and clutches it while he writhes in his seat.

“Recently Fumiya discovers his body,” she says. “I think it's normal for twelve-year-old boy. But girls complain. They feel uneasy. So his teachers put him in a room alone. Then he is bored, so he touches his body more. It's big problem.”

“Is he in a special class?” I ask.

“Special class?” she repeats. “He does not need special class. Shika Junior High has no special class.”

“Oh,” I say. “Sorry. Of course.”

“Fumiya has talent in many subjects. Especially English. He has gift for repeating. It's useful skill to learn a new language,
ne
?”

“It can be,” I say, although it's painfully obvious that this boy has no idea what he's repeating, that every new sound is a tunnel down which he falls, further from everyone else in the room.

“Marina-sensei,” Keiko says, “could you come back again,
mo ichi do
?”

“Sure,” I say, setting down my fork.

“How about every Thursday from six to eight?”

“Every Thursday?” I echo.

“Every Thursday,” Fumiya chimes in. “Every Thursday! Every Thursday!”

“The thing is,” I stall, “I don't have my calendar with me. And I'm not sure what I'm doing every Thursday…”

“Ah,” she says.

“But I could come once in a while.”

“Fine,” she says, but the light behind her face has flipped off. She's not even a daytime lamp. She is dark. She takes my plate and scrapes the food into the trash, while I sit at the table, feeling dismissed, but not sure if I should get up and leave.

 

When Carolyn returns home from the faculty party that she had to attend tonight, I am lying on our bedroom floor, curled up in front of the chugging kerosene heater, sucking on an aspirin and clutching my jaw.