Raw Silk (9781480463318) (39 page)

“Yes, madam, there is one.”

The clerk handed me one of the pink while-you-were-outs. “Please call back” was wittily checked, and the message read: “I won’t tell you what to do. But I will insist that it’s an option. You
could
come with me. You could
come
with me. You could come with
me.
Putai.”

I carried it up to my room and set it on the bureau top. I read it over about thirty times, which meant I got the message ninety. I got it finally. I could, couldn’t I? I
could.
I could if I hadn’t missed the train. I started making phone calls with the efficiency of panic. I found out there was a flight from Haneda to L.A. at two o’clock, but he wouldn’t be on that one because the ten o’clock train he took got in to Tokyo at 2:02. There was also a 5:43, Japal flight 287. He’d’ve taken the ten o’clock train for that, but the afternoon bullet express got to Tokyo at 5:15. You could get a demi-express from here at 1:27, which would pick up the express at Nagoya, but there was no point in that, because you could wait for the express itself at 2:14. I decided to catch the 1:27 all the same, if I could. It would be better to be in motion even if there was no point. Motion was the point. I would have to go now to catch it, and even so I might be too late, but I would “try.” I had no time to pack, but I zipped the little suitcase that already had my
kimono
and the Takayama store of junk, and took that; and when, at Kyoto station, I found I’d missed the demi-express, well, then, that was the point. That I’d left everything behind me that I’d brought. All I’d carry along with me was my treasure trove of Japan.

I paced back and forth on the platform from 1:30 to 2:14, striding and energetic as long as I was pacing east, but dogged and tired pacing back again, away from Tokyo. I did the same thing on the train, as if two hundred miles an hour wasn’t fast enough, and then at Nagoya sat in the front car, that much nearer my destination. I flipped the footrest over and over; I didn’t try to read. Then I realized that the front car wasn’t the cleverest place to sit; if I got off there I’d have to walk back to the middle of the station. So I lugged my souvenirs back again to the center of the train. I passed a couple of phone booths and remembered calling Tyler Peer when I was headed the other way. I thought it would be kind to call him now. But I wasn’t feeling kind. I’ve never been able to muster kindness up for Tyler Peer. I bought a
sake
and some beer. I sat looking out the window, moving faster than the train, still damp with last night’s love, or anticipation of the next. When we hit the outskirts of Tokyo I stood up and waited by the door, though there was twenty minutes or so to stand there, the outskirts of Tokyo beginning at the heart of Yokohama, bag in hand. It made me the first one out anyway. I dashed for the monorail.

But I missed the first turning, so I was closer to the taxi rank than the train, and I wasn’t sure, anyway, which was faster, and there was no queue, and there was a cab. So I tossed in my bag and took it.

“Haneda, Haneda, Haneda” was all the Japanese I had that day. But when my driver wandered along at the pace of his own mood, I dug out my phrasebook, and stuttered out that I had a plane to catch at 5:43. He looked at his watch, and shook his head, and shrugged, but he speeded up.

We hit the suburbs, and the racecourse with its miles of stables and trainers’ flats, a setup like old peasant quarters, horses below and men above, but in cheap corrugated tin, with front yards full of hay. When we got to the racecourse entrance we had to stop for a traffic light, and as if out of nowhere a cop showed up, and held us against our green light while a herd of thoroughbreds crossed the road. They pawed and snorted, prancing, handsome, led by besatined jockeys. I hid my face in my hands. I checked my watch. Five-thirty-two. The monorail passed over us, roaring for the airport, and one or two of the horses shied. We were held for three green lights and three red, and then we took a green. My driver shook his head to himself. I hated his yellow guts.

We pulled up at Japal and I threw what money I dug out. I think it was about five pounds, which meant that if I’d missed the plane, I would have to spend the night in the airport waiting room. And I knew I’d missed it. I didn’t know. Knowing was self-defense. I knew well enough not to look at my watch again. I stumbled through the lobby, past more Sumo on the TV set, searched frantically among the lines of computer type on the departure board, which were as meaningless as calligraphy and danced alarmingly. I saw a gray-uniformed steward of some kind, at some kind of roped-off barrier. He was wearing a Japal button, so I made for him.

“Where is flight two-eighty-seven to Los Angeles?” I shouted at him, and he said, “May I see your ticket?”

“I haven’t got a ticket!”

“Oh, well, you’re too late.”

“Where
is
it?” I screamed at him, so that he drew up coldly and said, “Gate four, but you’ve missed it.”

I stumbled to the automatic doors (automatic doors require so much damn effort; you have to
wait
for them) and through them. I found gate four and saw the plane. It was already in motion. I turned a lazy arc and sprinted to the end of the runway …

I lost myself, therefore I am. Is that an affirmation?

… to the end of the runway and lifted into the air and headed out toward that sea that is so recognizably Japanese though why I should recognize it I don’t know unless it is some war movie half remembered from my childhood; and is capless, surfless, and flat as a block of cloven wood with the little boats cutting across the grain, and meets the flat shore, and the land does not rise but continues inward flat and flat and flat and he was gone.

And he was gone, and he was gone. I went back through the doors that opened to admit me of their own accord and closed behind me of their own accord and he was gone. And sat down on the fake red leather sofa in front of the television set, where two giant masters of the art of Sumo, in full color, bred like bulls, grappled sweaty belly to sweaty belly, and he was gone.

I
T IS LUNCHTIME NOW,
black caviar on hard boiled eggs with asparagus. I can eat it. The topknotted hostess is bringing vodka, and I can drink. We are still over Siberia, and the rivers are still winding down the plains, earth-brown rivers and mud-purple soil, as twisted and serene as the weavings of my buddha-carp. I can sketch the pattern of these rivers, and I do.

I have finished, finally, Masuji Ibuse’s great
Black Rain,
a novel of the bomb, a narrative wrenched into significant form from fallout. Like Goya, he has made beauty out of the holocaust he deplores, so that to have been there seems to have been ennobled. But I do not know the import of this. On the inside cover is my sketch of the Koko Dera, bank and bamboo and one carp. It isn’t very good, but I can do it over.

What I cannot do, it seems to me, is go to California on my own and tell my daughter that I have reformed, deformed, her life. What I cannot do is wander through the territory called Southern Cal from church to parish house asking for the Methodist-ordained descendant of a famous drifter. Somebody could, and no doubt there are efficient ways of locating a very reverend, but for me, I know my pattern, and it cannot—can it?—include the chasing, after all, of a one-night stand. I cannot leave Oliver shaking in Frances’s crouch in Eastley Village, Cambs. I cannot go back to the place where I grew up to take the kneeling posture of an abject foreigner. I think I could more easily have put on a long dress and gone to shake Princess Margaret’s hand. I know what I am saying, but I do not know the import of it.

I remember myself when the atom bomb was dropped, I was having a Toni home permanent in the trailer port my dad had built. My mother had spread newspapers on the floor, and brought down the radio. I think she was crying off and on, while she rolled the little rods. You used to use little bits of pink plaster rod, about a hundred and fifty of them to my head, and a stinking ammonia stuff to make it curl. The radio kept piling up statistics all afternoon—equivalent to so many tons of this and that, how far it had been seen and heard and graphed—but I don’t suppose they could have been telling about people’s eyes melting and their skin dissolving. I filled all that in later. All the same, I’ve always assumed that nuclear holocaust smells like Toni fluid. It’s logical; it chemically alters the structure of the hair.

I don’t know if this is relevant. I know it was in the same week that Mrs. Fowler finished reading us
Gone With the Wind
in Language Arts. I remember thinking that I could have driven a team of horses through a blazing forest. I longed to be tested, and I thought that I would recognize a test. I should have been born in the South during the Civil War. I should have lived in England under the blitz. I should have been home in Watts when the squads went in, or in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped.

Every day children are sent to school, friends to hospital, husbands hit their wives; and of these wives an occasional one is so positioned that she tumbles down a flight of stairs. People miss a plane. Insignificant things happen and people are destroyed by them. Terrible things happen and they are met with requisite strength. I don’t know why this is so. People “rise to the occasion,” I am told. I know that I have examined my own self like fish scales under a microscope, and in the process the terrible thing has happened after all. Cumulatively, piecemeal, I have given myself away.

Of the three great options for fulfillment open to a woman, work and motherhood and ecstatic love, I have work left. The thing I have left is design, I haven’t given that away. And I am going to approach that, work, from a new perspective. I am going to do a series of designs based on the Japanese sea, and the waterfalls in the cliffs above the Nikko temple. I am going to get a telescope. On company funds. I am going to do a series of designs based on an aerial view of Siberia. There will be space, flight, and a flow of convoluted rivers.

I see it as rather lyrical, for me.

My warm thanks to the following people, who helped with the research for this book:

Valentine Ellis, Worshipful Company of Drapers, London

Peter Walters, Director, Sudbury Silk Mills, Suffolk

Robert Immerman, The American Embassy, Tokyo

J. Kenneth Emerson, Former Deputy Ambassador to Japan

Hideki Yagi and T. Inoue, Unitika Design Company, Osaka

Masakazu Takayanagi and Toshio Nakagawa, Osaka Dyeing Company, Osaka

M. Conrad Hyers, Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin

R. Bruce Moody, The Compleat Editor, New York, New York

John Grant, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Robert Piccard, the Wilderness Foundation, Brooksville, Florida

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children’s books, and eight novels, including
Raw Silk
, a National Book Award finalist;
The Buzzards
;
Opening Nights
;
Cutting Stone
; and
Bridge of Sand
. Her
Writing Fiction
is the most widely used creative writing text in America. Recent works include the plays
Sweepstakes
,
Medea with Child
, and
Parts of Speech
, which have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, Chicago, and various regional theatres; a collection of essays,
Embalming Mom
; and her memoir,
Losing Tim
. She is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita of the Florida State University.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1976, 1977 by Janet Burroway

Cover design by Neil Heacox

978-1-4804-6331-8

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

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