If You Follow Me (33 page)

“She moved back to New York,” I say.

“But before, I think you had some kind of…special friendship.”

“She was my girlfriend.” Now he's the one who doesn't speak. It would be easy to offer a partial version of the truth, but I don't want to lie to him about something this important, or anything. “I met
her right after my dad killed himself,” I say. “I think she brought me back to life. I know that sounds dramatic, but that's what it felt like. I was in shock. I was numb, and she made me feel things again. She made me do things I never would have done on my own, like come to Japan. If not for her, I have no idea where I would be right now, but I wouldn't be here.”

“Then I am glad you met her too,” he says. “You must be sad that she left.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I am sad. I loved her. I still love her, and I miss her, but our relationship didn't work. It wasn't right, especially after we moved here.”

“Because you are both a woman?”

“I don't think that's why,” I say slowly. “I think I can love a woman or a man. I really don't have a type.”

“You don't have to pick,” he says. “You have so many options.”

“I guess it might seem like that,” I say, “but love is rare.”

“Sodesune
,” he agrees.

“What about you?” I ask, my heart migrating into my throat. “Is there anyone special in your life?”

“Maybe,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. “Anyone I know?”

“I am private person,” he says.

“Of course,” I say. “I'm sorry.”

“Last fall, when you kissed me, I felt sort of shocked. I was your supervisor,
ne
? To have workplace romance is very…frowned over?”

“Frowned upon.”

“Frowned upon,” he repeats.

“I'm sorry,” I say again.

“But now I am not your supervisor. For many reasons, I am happy about this.”

“I made a lot of extra work for you.”

“Yeah,” he says, leaning closer. “This is one reason.”

Under the table, we clamp our legs together to steady their trembling. I lean in too, he shuts his eyes, and the distance between us collapses. Right before we kiss, I wonder what this means, what will happen next, whether I'm making a mistake. Will we have to keep this relationship a secret? Will it become a relationship? Will people disapprove?

Then I stop thinking.

I stop thinking and just give in.

 

It is the lot of the dead to wander.

These words come from a guidebook entry on O-Bon, the Japanese festival of the dead. Next to New Year, O-Bon is the most important holiday in Japan. At O-Bon people return to their
furusato
, their hometowns, to visit shrines and pay tribute to their departed family members, and to talk with them. Apparently, the dead are wandering all the time. That's their lot. But only at O-Bon does the invisible barrier separating the dead from the living lift. We can't see the spirits, but they can see us, and hear us, and hear our prayers. To celebrate O-Bon, all faculty and students get the week off. But everyone I know, including Hiro, is busy with familial obligations, so I spend most of my time swimming, and reading books my mother still sends in regular care packages.

My mom is seeing someone now: the cabdriver who brought her home with all of the groceries she couldn't carry back from Supermarket Singles' Night. He helped her carry them inside, and then he said that she must be feeding a crowd, and when she admitted that she lived alone and had no idea what to do with all that food, he offered to fix her a meal. She'd bought salmon and potatoes,
he could see them in the bag, and he said, “When I look at these ingredients, it makes me want to cook a fish curry for you, the kind that cooks slowly, for a long time over a gentle flame, until the potatoes almost melt in your mouth.” And she asked if he meant it, and he said that he did, and within twenty minutes the curry was simmering softly on the stove, while he went out and finished his shift, and by the time he came back later that night it was exactly the way he'd described it.

“Mom,” I said, when she told me the story, “was that safe?”

“I guess not,” she said, “but it was wonderful. Scary, but wonderful.”

I had told her that I wanted her to move on with her life. I know that I want her to be happy. She is a hot-blooded woman with love and affection to spare, who shouldn't have to be alone. Still, it's like Carolyn said. We are moving forward, further into the future, further away from my father, and in some ways this makes me miss him more. Sometimes I yearn for the raw time when his death was still so fresh that I could feel the displacement of the molecules in the air, not yet closed around the space he left behind.

 

One especially hot morning in the middle of O-Bon, I wake up coated in sweat. The humidity is visible, a brown veil obscuring the horizon. Just like every other day, I walk to the beach wearing my
yukata
over my bathing suit.

I've almost reached the water's edge when I see them, thousands upon thousands of jellyfish, strewn across the wet sand, turning over in the surf, floating in the water near the shore. They are not clear, unlike other jellyfish I've seen. They are blue, bluer than the sea itself. Hiro warned me that they would come—no, that they would
return
—on this very day, but somehow this makes the sight even more stunning.

I can't go swimming today. I can't float on my back, lose myself in the sea, allow the waves to push and pull me where they will. The jellyfish have returned, and they are getting in my way. My father was deeply cynical about anything spiritual. He believed that people find signs because they want to find them, see ghosts because they want to see them. He always said this dismissively, as if believers were a little dim-witted, to be pitied in their faith. But he also had a wicked sense of humor. “Is this your idea of a joke?” I ask, not expecting a reply. It may be the lot of the dead to wander, but what about the living? What's our lot? I stare at the jellyfish, borne in and out by the current, tossed onto the sand and picked up, again and again.

I tie the sash around my
yukata
and walk back home, rummaging through the storage area and finding the box with my mom's handwriting on the label. Then I return to the sea and walk straight into the water, up to my knees in the lapping waves, not caring if my
yukata
gets wet or if a jellyfish brushes against me as I turn the baggie upside down. The ashes fall like mist, melting in the humidity, clinging to my fingers, dispersing across the water, and salting the blue forms. The jellyfish have no mouths that I can see, no faces at all. They are halfway between liquid and solid, earth and sea, above and below.

As I scatter the ashes in the waves, I don't say good-bye. Even if the barrier separating the dead from the living has lifted and he can hear me, I don't want to say a word that suggests separation or worse—closure. It's bad luck. Besides, this grief isn't over. It has barely begun. I squat and hold the baggie in the sea, watching it expand and fill with water like a little lung, watching the water clean the last dust from its clear plastic sides until it is empty. I wade into the water still wearing my
yukata
, float on my back and look up at the big gray sky, waiting to be stung. But all I can feel is the wet cotton billowing around me, holding me up when it should be pulling me down, maybe even protecting me.

I
would like to thank my writing teachers, beginning with my mother; Bob Bumstead; the incomparable Timea Szell; and Michael Cunningham. At Iowa, it was an honor to learn from Marilynne Robinson and Frank Conroy. Thanks to the wonderful John l'Heureux, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, Eavan Boland, and Mary Popek, for countless forms of support. A huge debt of gratitude to the Truman Capote fellowship and the James Michener/Copernicus award. Thank you to Meghan Quinn for more than I can list, and to Hiroshi Nishita and Chikako Ishida, who shared so much about Japan.

Thank you to readers and friends Sarah Braunstein, Robin Ekiss, Matthew Irbarne, Kaui Hart-Hemmings, Chelsey Johnson, Thisbe Nissen, Cathy Park-Hong, Eric Puchner, Curtis Sittenfeld, Nick Syrett, and Shannon Welch. A very big thanks for the special help from Sara Michas-Martin, Katharine Noel, Glori Simmons, Stephanie Reents, and Ghita Schwarz. And to Jeff O'Keefe, for the title.

Thank you to my amazing agent, Lisa Bankoff, and to the editor of my dreams, Jeanette Perez, who helped me to envision and create a better book.

Thanks to my family for your love, guidance, and enthusiasm: Merrill and Willis Watrous, Barbara and Ellen Watrous, Mary Ann and George Kalb, Deborah Johnson, Ward Schumaker, and Vivienne Flesher. And a big thanks to the littlest member, Max Watrous-Schumaker, already a creative force and inspiration.

And finally to Matt Schumaker, my best reader, my best friend, my love.

About the author

A Conversation with Malena Watrous

About the book

Malena Watrous: Alien Encounters of the Closest Kind

Read on

Author's Picks: Favorite Books Set in Japan (plus one movie)

A Conversation with Malena Watrous

Let's start simple—where are you from?

I was born in San Francisco, and my family moved to Eugene, Oregon, when I was in eighth grade. I went to college at Barnard, in New York, and to the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. I returned to San Francisco six years ago.

When did you start writing?

In elementary school, my friend and I coauthored a fifty-page “novel” about her father's childhood exodus on foot from Ethiopia to Kenya. It involved a lot of wild animal encounters, illustrated in color. I also tried to write about my great-grandmother's childhood. She emigrated from Norway to Minnesota. When her father slipped under a horse's hooves and died, she ended up an indentured servant. I was drawn to tragic stories of orphans.

Do you remember the first book you fell in love with and why it affected you so strongly?

It was definitely
Jane Eyre
. Another tragic orphan story. Jane has such a strong and honest voice. She's lonely and passionate, self-aware and bookish, prickly but sympathetic. And I like the brooding Rochester too, stuck with his crazy wife in the attic. He sees and loves Jane for who she is, and vice versa. This was the first love story that got under my skin, and it still does.

Who are some of your writing influences?

I get inspired by what I'm reading all the time, but I try not to stick to any particular influence, for fear of being imitative.

When you're writing, do you have an audience in mind? Are you writing for someone in particular?

Not exactly, although sometimes when I am having trouble figuring out how to tell a story, or if my voice feels muffled, I will imagine my friend Nick reading it. We've known each other since college, and not only is he a total laugh slut—he laughs so easily, it's wonderful—we also have overlapping taste in fiction. If I can write something that he would want to read, then I'm happy.

How much does your background, whether it be the city you grew up in, your family, your experiences, make its way into your writing?

I'm like a magpie. I collect bits and pieces from my present and past and tuck them into fiction. When I'm writing steadily, I feel like my powers of perception are heightened. That said, the stories are invented. Real life—mine, at least—doesn't have much plot.

You teach creative writing to students of all ages. Are there any lessons you think are essential for up-and-coming authors?

The best piece of writing advice I ever got was to try and write the book that you want to read, the one you wish was on your bookshelf. It sounds simple but it's hard. I also think that there is always room for fiction writers to break new ground by trying to describe the present—always changing—moment. My favorite authors, from Edith Wharton to Flannery O'Connor, all wrote from their particular place and time. You get to define the moment you're living in, and it's always changing so there's always new ground to cover.

After spending some time in Japan, did the language difference, or Japanese in general, affect your writing at all?

Definitely. I love the playfulness of Japanese, in particular
katakana
, the special alphabet used to colonize foreign words, and the ways that Japanese English borrows and misuses certain terms like, “Let's…” Let's English! Let's donut! More generally, as I wrote this novel, I both enjoyed and was frustrated by the limitations the characters faced in communicating. This is something I also experienced when I lived in Japan. How do you communicate deeply, sincerely, with humor or passion, when you have a limited number of overlapping words?

Do you feel there are differences in the way the Japanese regard novelists versus Americans?

I was surprised that the Japanese novels that I read in translation didn't seem as popular there. Not that many people that I spoke with had heard of Haruki Murakami, for instance. I was surprised by how many adults read manga, a lot of which is really graphic. Businessmen in suits would seem utterly unabashed to be reading pornographic comic books on the subway.