Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (7 page)

HER FIRST MARRIAGE HADN’T WORKED OUT.
They’d married out of college, but then he couldn’t find a job, and she got pregnant and he still couldn’t find work, so they decided she would have an abortion. It wasn’t such a big deal. People had abortions all the time; the local clinic took same-day appointments. Afterward you visited a shrine and bought a
jizo,
a small cement figurine representing a soul that had not yet found its way to Earth. The statues stayed in the shrine, lined up like dolls in a department store. The priests blessed them every morning.

Less than a year later, he’d come home from a temp job at a waste disposal plant and dropped the envelope from the travel agent on the table. He was going back to Okinawa, he said. He had family there. She felt many things, among them relief, as if some great disaster had been averted.

THAT NIGHT, YUMIKO WOKE AT 3 A.M.
and couldn’t get back to sleep. She went to the kitchen. First she chopped vegetables: cabbage,
nira,
green onion, garlic, ginger. She salted the cabbage and set it aside. Getting the dough right took time, and she added the water drop by drop—make it too wet, and the insides fell out. Her mother had told her once that the dough should feel like an earlobe. She poked and rolled and kneaded with her fingertips, palms, the backs of her hands. Sometimes she imagined it
was
an ear she was creating, part of an incomplete sculpture. She pressed the water from the cabbage and laid out small circles of dough upon which she arranged vegetables and morsels of pork with the fastidiousness of a surgeon. Then she folded the skin upon itself, crimped the edges together six times, and dropped the resulting crescent into a pan of hot sesame oil. The scream of the dumpling hitting the oil sometimes woke Lou, but tonight he slept on.

She’d come to the kitchen the night before, and the night before that. Three nights in a row was a first.

It was the season, perhaps. Last year the Obon holidays had been a week of parties, drinking with friends, karaoke and fried treats in the park. The final day, they’d attended a short ceremony at the shrine with her family, honored her dead grandparents by lighting incense, and, as an afterthought, said a prayer for the soul of Yumiko’s unborn baby. Afterward she and Lou had met up with friends and danced at a nightclub until the sun came up.

This year, their friends were traveling, or had babies of their own. Her parents had moved back to her mother’s
hometown in Nagano. Lou had come home from work on edge that night, and they had argued again about how to spend the coming week. If they weren’t going to visit her parents, she wanted to do at least a couple of the traditional things she’d grown up doing: joining the crowds along the river, visiting the temple. It was a Japanese holiday, after all. She went along every year to Thanksgiving dinner at the International Center and pretended to like green bean casserole, didn’t she?

But Lou had other ideas.

“Can’t we go camping or something? Get some peace and quiet and skip the dead-celebrating thing? We don’t need to be thinking about the dead this year. Or at least, I don’t need to. You seemed to enjoy it fine last year at the shrine.”

“Lou. It was never alive.”

“What?”

“It’s not dead. It was never alive.”

He said nothing.

“It’s just waiting for the right time. You know that’s what we believe.”

“I just don’t see why you have to rub it in my face every year that someone else got you pregnant and it was just an...
inconvenience
.”

“A year or two isn’t long,” she said. “We should be more patient. It isn’t easy.”

“You made a baby for him easily enough.”

She walked out and wandered the streets for over an hour, fuming. Yet she could see his point, and that was what hurt the most. The doctor could find no explanation
for their difficulty. She wanted more than anything to be a mother, to bear his child, and no matter what the doctor said to the contrary, she still wondered if her abortion had hurt their chances.

When she returned, his eyes were red. He apologized so sincerely that she gave in and told him they could stay home for the holiday. They went to bed after that, and though it appeared things had been resolved, a gap separated their futon, and they fell asleep before either moved to close the space.

HEAVY POUNDING WOKE YUMIKO
the next morning. The door, she realized groggily. She glanced at the clock as she threw on her robe: 8 a.m.

“Mornin’.” A chubby man stood in the hall, humming under his breath. He looked inside as if waiting for the man of the house to appear. When he did not, the man shrugged and said, “Here for the toilet,” and stepped over the shoes heaped in the entranceway.

Yumiko backed away, rubbing her eyes. “Um—”

“New toilet’s going in,” he said. “Might be a few days.”

“New toilet? I don’t believe we...”

He stood in his boots, in her kitchen, and looked around.

“Gyoza, yum!” He stalked over to the stove. “Do you mind?” he asked, his hand inches above the plate.

“Oh! Yes, yes, please—eat up.”

In the bedroom, Lou was half-awake.

“Let’s go out of the house today,” she said.

THEY WENT TO THE BEACH.
It was uncomfortably warm already, and Lou’s hair puffed up in the humidity. They arrived early enough to get a prime spot, but Lou, as always, led her to a rocky corner near the breakwater. He was the kind of man that, given first choice of desserts, would choose the most undesirable one, just so he wouldn’t have to share it. He avoided crowds if at all possible. Once, when they’d first met, she’d asked him why he’d settled in such an overpopulated, and foreign, country. “To escape my family,” he’d joked, and when she pressed him seriously, he’d finally responded that he enjoyed the challenge. As she bobbed among the waves, studying him in his corner, she reflected that her husband seemed to enjoy a certain
lack
of challenge, as well.

They’d met in one of her introductory ceramics classes. He was thirty-one; she twenty-seven. He was her worst student. It wasn’t that he didn’t listen; on the contrary, he hung on her every word. But his first project, a pinch pot, fell apart in the kiln, which she hadn’t seen happen in years. And the next one, the slab pot, simply wouldn’t stay together. Even though he used the exact amount of slurry she prescribed, the final wall wouldn’t attach.

One night he stayed after class so she could fix his slab pot. “I’ve never seen anyone so bad at clay,” she teased. “Most people have at least some instinct for it. Humans have been doing this for thousands of years.” She tried to show him how to roll a thin coil and lightly press and weld it to the side slabs at the correct angle. He laughed and said, in stumbling Japanese, “I’m much better at eating. Do you want to have dinner?”

They talked all night. Her English had been better than his Japanese, and still was, thanks to the two years after college she’d spent in Chicago, studying sculpture. When it turned out that neither of them actually lived in Tokyo, but an hour east and only four train stops apart, they called it fate. A year later, they got married and moved closer to the seaside, dingy as it was. They wanted their children to grow up smelling the ocean.

The beach did get crowded eventually; the crowd grew to such a size that even their sad patch of sand was not spared, and they drove home. On the ride back, Yumiko found herself hoping that the plumber would still be there, pounding and humming.

WHEN THEY RETURNED,
tools littered the kitchen floor so thoroughly there was no way to reach the refrigerator without kicking something. A puddle sat defiantly in the bathroom doorway, and as they stood in silence, a bead of water fell into it with a
plop
!

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Lou said. He kicked a cigarette butt from the entranceway and began picking his way to the bathroom door.

The only thing more annoying to Lou than smokers were the
bosozoku,
“noise gangs” of teens who removed the mufflers from their motorbikes and raced up and down side streets, shattering the silence at odd hours of the night. Once, last month, when a group had gathered in the parking lot next door, Lou had jumped out of bed and
climbed onto the roof with a carton of eggs. After some confusion and yelling, the roar of engines faded. Smiling in the dark, she thought to herself, a Japanese man would never have done that.

“He took out the toilet!” he called.

“Yeah,” Yumiko said slowly, “he mentioned putting a new one in.”

“You knew about this?”

She shrugged. “Only since the morning. It will take a little longer, but won’t it be nice to have a normal, you know... king’s chair?”

“Throne. It would be nicer to not have my house torn apart.”

“Miura-san thinks he was doing something nice for you.”

“I don’t need a special potty because I’m a
gaijin.”

“It will be nice for me too, recently most places don’t use—”

“And he’ll expect me to be so grateful,” Lou went on, and bowed deeply, throwing his arms out to his sides. “Yes, I’m so indebted to you, I can’t use my kitchen, my apartment’s flooded, and everything reeks.”

“We could go to my parents’ home. They really— what?” He was staring at the metal ladder that led to the roof, looking suddenly enlightened.

Slowly, he said, “No. We’re definitely staying here.”

“You have an idea.”

“We’ll move onto the roof.” He rubbed his hands together. “That’s it. It’s perfect! We’ll bring the futons up,
some books, your art stuff, whatever we want. It never rains in August, and it’s warm enough to sleep outside. The perfect vacation.”

“You are kidding,” she said, but he was already inside, throwing open the sliding doors that hid the futon. She looked doubtfully at the ladder, then back into the apartment. On the bulletin board she could see the calendar, its gilded edges poking out beneath the pile of menus. Lou, so obviously pleased, lumbered toward her with an armload of pillows. She reflected on the portability of their lives and the things in it, how even the marital bed was easily hidden away behind doors that slid soundlessly, like ghosts.

SHE WOKE UP STARING INTO
the pink-dappled sky. Lou slept facing away from her, his body curled around a pillow. For once, he did not snore.

The air was calm, heavy on her face yet soothingly cool, like a washcloth. She did not move, and breathed only shallowly. She imagined she was floating in a bubble that might pop at any moment.

And then a voice: “Kirei, da ne?”

Beautiful, isn’t it?

So he was awake after all. It had taken her a moment to identify Lou’s voice—as if it could have been anyone else, up there. But he spoke Japanese with her so rarely these days that other possibilities had entered her mind first. Her ex-husband, for one.

“
Un
,” she acknowledged.

A moment later, he rolled over. “What shall we do today? The beach? An art museum?”

She watched the clouds. The way he put the past behind him amazed her, this capacity for acting like nothing had been, or could ever be, wrong.

“Or maybe... hey, how do you say ‘rooftop nudist colony’ in Japanese?”

She sat up and ran her fingers through the tangled hair that fell halfway down her back. He was in a good mood, at least. “The beach again sounds nice. And we could shower there. My hair is gross.”

“I had this dream,” he said, reaching up and fingering a lock of her hair. “You had your hair in braids. Have you ever done it that way?”

“When I was in high school, maybe.”

He sat up and began to divide her hair into sections. “Did I ever tell you how glad I am you don’t dye your hair?”

“All the time.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “Do you just wind it around like this?” He swizzled two pieces together.

“Here.” She took the pieces and smoothed them between her hands. “You make three sections.
Ichi, ni, san. Mitsu ami, dan-dan
.” Her fingers moved nimbly as she recited the rhyme. “The boy chases the girl, captures her beneath him, the third comes between, like this, and from then on they are—” she paused, then left off the last line of the grade-school chant, which played on in her head: “a happy family woven together.”

“
Jaan
!” she said instead, holding the finished braid out to him like an offering. He took it.

“Amazing how girls can do that to their own hair,” he said. “Like it’s an instinct or something.” He took her hand. “It’s our own little world up here. Do you like it?”

She
did
like it. “It’s like we’re flying on a magic carpet. Or explorers on the frontier.”

“My pioneer woman,” he said, and lay down, pulling her with him. The sky was brightening; a mile away at the town park the trees on Shiroyama stood silhouetted against it, like sentries keeping a polite distance.

THE SEASIDE WAS NOT AS CROWDED AS USUAL;
many people had left town for the holiday. This put Lou in a carefree, happy mood, and when they returned home, hungry and sun-baked, the kitchenful of tools did not dent his good spirits.

They agreed immediately on a restaurant, a ramen place known all over the prefecture for its pork broth, and took a booth in back. Lou filled her in on the beer ladies. Kimiko, a woman of sixty who had climbed Mt. Fuji every year since she was in college, was back after a two-week illness. She’d been bedridden, she told them, and her husband, for the first time in his life, had had to prepare their meals.

“The guy didn’t know where to find the toaster,” Lou told her. “So he cooked the bread right on the stove burner!”

“Even
I
can make toast,” Yumiko said.

“Makes me think maybe I should learn how to cook a few things. We could take a class together.”

She loved this enthusiasm. Here was the Lou she’d taught in her pottery class, ready to try anything. “Why not?” she said.

After dinner they walked along the river. On Friday, the boardwalk would be packed with people dancing, drinking, and lighting lanterns; booths squeezed in along the riverside would sell everything from fried squid on a stick to giant pet crickets. But now they were alone on the dark walkway. Even the river seemed motionless, and the only sound they heard was the clacking of the one-car train that brought tourists to and from the seaside. Though it was too late for the beach, the train still ran, shuttling nothing but air.