Women On the Other Shore (14 page)

Squatting in front of a cardboard box, Ryoko opened the flaps and pulled out a crinkly bag of rice crackers, then lowered herself the rest of the way onto the floor beside it. She stuck her hand into the bag and began crunching on a cracker.

"Yeah, yeah, and all we've got here is the ocean. Seems kinda funny now, but when I was your age, I hated this place and couldn't wait to get out. Got me a summer job the first chance I had. A big, fancy inn, way better than here."

"Seriously? Where? Someplace else in Izu?" Nanako asked, leaning forward in her seat.

"Are you kidding? The last place I wanted to go was anywhere 106

close. I headed for the mountains. The mountains of Nagano. Ever heard of Togakushi? T h e first time was my tenth-grade summer, and they treated me so nice, the people there, I went back for winter break that same year, and again the next summer, and so on. I worked up there in the mountains all the way through high school."

Ryoko fell silent and sat studying the can of beer in her hand.

The glass doors facing the veranda and yard were open, and tiny insects clung to the other side of the screens. The brightness of the overhead light spilled out into the darkness, dimly illuminating the clotheslines and abandoned toy cars.
Chirrr chirrr chirrr.
An insect song unlike any Aoi had ever heard droned endlessly on.

"You know, something just hit me," Ryoko said, raising her eyes and looking from one girl to the other, her face completely straight.

"You two wouldn't happen to be runaways, would you?"

"No way."

"Hardly."

They both answered at the same time.

"Right. I didn't think so. Kids these days aren't that stupid," she said, rounding her back and laughing. "The summer of my senior year, I went to work at the same place as before, but then suddenly I couldn't stand the thought of going home. I mean, if I went home, the whole college thing was going to be staring me in the face, you know. This was the day when all of a sudden the school you went to mattered more than anything else, and the entrance exams got a whole lot more competitive practically overnight, yet at the same time the number one career choice for girls our age remained stay-at-home mom—which is to say, basically, things weren't so simple anymore. Mind you, this isn't all that long ago I'm talking about. It was practically just the other day, you know, just the other day."

"So did you run away or something?" Nanako said jokingly with a little laugh.

"You got it. I ran away," she replied without smiling. "I went to 107

Tokyo with a guy who worked at the same inn. A college student I wasn't in love with him or anything, I just couldn't bear the thought of going home."

Aoi studied the woman sitting on the floor with a beer in her hand. Looking from her dry, brown hair, to her makeup-free face, to her T-shirt with overstretched neck, she tried to imagine this woman as a teenager in high school. A vague picture of a chunky-looking schoolgirl in a sailor suit formed in her mind.

"I went with him thinking we were going to Tokyo, but where he lived turned out to be in the boonies, way out on the outskirts.

That's where his school was, too. His apartment was this dingy place with rice paddies all around. Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you're thinking. I slept with him. He was my first. I mean, what else was I gonna do?"

"This wasn't Mr. Mano by any chance?" Nanako broke in.

Ryoko's eyes doubled in size as she stared at Nanako for a moment, then she fell over backward laughing.

"Give me a break! I wasn't a complete babe in the woods." She lay there laughing and looking up at the ceiling a while longer before sitting up again. "Eventually the landlord of the dingy dump complained about him having a girl there all the time, so I decided to go home—especially since I was out of money anyway."

"What happened to the guy?"

"We wrote back and forth a couple of times, but basically that was the end of it. He didn't come to Togakushi the next year. Anyway, that's why it suddenly hit me a minute ago that you two might've run away from home, too. But I figure kids today are smarter than that."

Rising to her feet, she crushed the now empty beer can in her hands and put the bag of rice crackers on the table between the two girls.

"I've been meaning to mention," she said, changing the subject.

10S

have a whole box full of old cosmetics stuff I never use anymore.

Would you like it? I noticed you two've been trying things out on each other."

"No way! You have
makeup
?" Both girls reacted in disbelief.

Ryoko flashed t h e m a glare. "I'll go get what I have and you can take whatever you want. O h , it's time for that show you like about those teen rebels. W h y don't you go turn it on while I get the stuff?

I'll bring everything to t h e living room."

Her footsteps t h u m p e d away down the hall. Aoi and Nanako looked at each other and laughed. Out of the darkness in the yard came the incessant chorus of summer insects,
chirr chirr chirr.

The kind of personal harassment that made the rounds during their first year in h i g h school had stopped this year, but a new, even more troubling dynamic took its place, spreading beyond the single classroom to t h e entire class.

"Maybe this is what a caste system is like," Aoi had quipped to Nanako when she first noticed the change, not taking it very seriously.

Homerooms had b e e n reassigned at the beginning of the school year, which of course m e a n t all the social groupings changed as well.

The two close friends were now in separate classrooms. Aoi fell in once again with a collection of undemonstrative girls who didn't fit into any other group, while Nanako continued to flit about without attaching herself to any of t h e different crowds.

In the new order of things, girls from the more popular and attention-getting groups, which is to say those who'd taken the lead in the bullying the year before, in effect formed the top caste, and they considered it their rightful place in life to order those in the bottom caste to do their bidding, or to pick on them or ignore them at will—though they no longer got in any particular person's face the way they had t h e year before. Once someone became identified with 109

the lowest caste, it was almost impossible for her to rise above that status. Fortunately, the girls in Aoi's group never drew enough attention to themselves to receive bottom-caste treatment, and Nanako's avoidance of any specific affiliation essentially left her outside the caste system to do as she pleased.

As before, Aoi and Nanako hung out together after school, meeting up to go to the river, buying something to eat along the way, talking and laughing endlessly about the new caste system. It came from everything being so dull all the time, Nanako asserted. So totally ho-hum. Day in and day out, their world, their lives, their grades, everything always the same. And because of that, people got antsy and looked for ways to stir things up. Ranking everybody in an arbitrary caste system let them feel important. It was how they kept from going out of their minds.

Something Aoi had observed, too, was that the students at this school had no true choices presented to them, and all they could really do was mark time. For one thing, it wasn't a college prep institution. It continued to tout its founding mission of turning out good wives and wise mothers—even in this day when its students no longer dreamed of marriage as the be-all and end-all of feminine happiness. But the rising aspirations of the students hadn't led to a corresponding improvement in the school's academic ranking, and that seemed unlikely to change as long as its curriculum remained so utterly undemanding compared to other places. Aoi had barely made it through junior high at the bottom of her class, but here her test scores were always well above average. Even if she were to rise to the very top of her class, she knew she'd have a tough time getting into any four-year university.

Most students here graduated without knowing what they wanted to do, except that they didn't want to work, so they enrolled in voca-tional schools or the local community college, where they hung out with the same old friends, perfecting their bitching skills but 110

otherwise acquiring no useful knowledge before graduating from those schools as well and marrying local boys they'd met at campus mixers or around town. After living here barely more than a year, Aoi could already see the pattern plain as day. Her classmates all knew they would soon be treading the same predictable path the vast majority of prior graduates had traveled. With this fait accompli staring them in t h e face, an air of resignation settled heavily over the class early in t h e year. They had outgrown the childish bullying of the year before, but there was a kind of festering rage inside them that made t h e m want to stand atop the heap and lord it over someone. Aoi could feel t h e pent-up frustrations building all around her.

Sitting on the riverbank and tossing stones into the flow, Aoi and Nanako talked endlessly about the corrosive air that had settled over their classmates as if t h e frustrations and the pecking order and the limited horizons they faced had nothing to do with themselves.

Then about t h e time midterms were over, Aoi's worst fears from the year before c a m e true. All of a sudden, for no obvious reason, the entire junior class started giving Nanako the silent treatment, making f u n of her and pouring scorn on her behind her back. The slurs couldn't help but reach Aoi's ears as well: She was a people-pleaser and a phony. Her father was a drunk in rehab, her mother was a bar hostess who turned tricks on the side, and her little sister was a JD repeatedly hauled in for shoplifting. The family of four lived in a two-room apartment in a housing complex built by the prefecture, and all they got for dinner was the wild greens Nanako picked along t h e roadside on her way home. That sort of thing. The utter childishness and the poverty of imagination displayed in these attacks astounded Aoi, but she couldn't deny feeling a surge of relief that she'd never shown herself to be friendly with Nanako at school.

Although this was swiftly followed by pangs of guilt, she assuaged those pangs by reminding herself that she honestly knew nothing about Nanako's h o m e life. She stood smugly by while her classmates heaped abuse on her closest friend, but what else could she do really, when she lacked any knowledge to contradict what they were saying? She had no idea if Nanako had a sister, nor did she know anything about whether her father was in rehab or what her apartment was like, so how could she be expected to defend her?

Soon people were calling Nanako "DP," for dirt poor, but so far as Aoi could tell she remained completely unfazed by this or any of the other insults that came her way. On sunny days at the river and on rainy days under the bridge, in the evening over the straining phone cord and in the notes they surreptitiously passed back and forth, Nanako never seemed anything but her usual happy-go-lucky self. In fact, it was almost as if becoming the class pariah had set her free to rove around more than ever. At lunchtime, she disappeared somewhere off campus, and during other class breaks she would slip into the art room by herself and sit gazing out the window with her Walkman earbuds on.

When Aoi passed by and saw Nanako sitting like that, the words she had once spoken echoed in her head:
None of that stuff scares
me. None of that stuff matters to me.
By all appearances, she had meant every word of it, and this aroused in Aoi a deep admiration for how comfortable Nanako was with herself—though she felt an inexplicable burst of annoyance as well.

Perhaps it was this annoyance that prompted her to demand a few days before summer vacation, "When're you going to let me come to your house?"

"You don't want to come to my place," Nanako replied with a snort. "There's nothing there you could possibly want to see."

But Aoi insisted. "You've been to my house lots of times. Once you even just followed me home. Why shouldn't I get to go to your place, too?" she argued

Giving her a weary look, Nanako finally relented. "All right. Fine,"

she said.

Whether from embarrassment or trepidation or resignation or anger, this was t h e first time Aoi could remember ever seeing a shadow flit across her friend's customary smile.

Aoi recalled t h e events of a month ago as she trudged up the street skirting t h e b e a c h with grocery bags dangling from both hands. The sun had dipped about a third of the way behind a ridge to her right, and it cast an orange glow everywhere. Her beach sandals flip-flopped against t h e pavement as she hurried on, the cry of cicadas ringing t h r o u g h t h e air and the smell of barbecue waft-ing up from beach. She gazed out across the surf. It was after hours, so no one was swimming, but she could see the sails of several windsurfers b o u n c i n g on t h e water farther out.

"Hey, babe, which guesthouse you working at?" a young man shouted up at her f r o m t h e beach. Aoi glanced his way but pressed on without offering a response. "Wanna come watch our fireworks tonight?" the voice persisted behind her, but she kept right on going.

The day Aoi went to Nanako's house, refusing to take no for an answer, she had made a decision. No matter what her mother said, no matter even if she had to pay her way entirely by herself, she was going to go to college in Tokyo with Nanako, and she would do whatever it took to get there. They would study like crazy for the exams, starting as soon as they got back from summer vacation.

Nanako's grades were poor even at their underachieving school, so she'd have to work double or triple hard for them to have any chance of getting into the same university. But if they had to, they would pour all their summer earnings into exam prep courses together. If worst came to worst, they might have to settle for different schools, but one way or another they were going to get away from home and rent an apartment together in Tokyo.

As she reaffirmed to herself this resolve from the beginning of summer, she recalled t h e story Ryoko had told them. Ryoko had been their exact same age when she'd made her decision to leave home. She'd gone away all by herself, but Aoi and Nanako would have each other. They wouldn't have to depend on a guy like Ryoko did. Together they could make it work, just the two of them. She was sure of it. They had a whole year and a half to prepare.