Women On the Other Shore (21 page)

All of a sudden an image rose up in her mind. On a country road stretching straight into the distance, several classmates hurry by, turn to wave, then race on ahead with their skirts flouncing about their knees. It felt to her like something she had seen long, long ago, in the distant past.

"I'm tired, too," Nanako said quietly.

Aoi turned to look out over the city again. Night had fallen.

Thousands of lights large and small dotted the deep, indigo darkness enfolding the city. As she stared at the nighttime sky spreading before her, she recalled the bright lights that had dazzled her eyes in downtown Yokohama. The relentless flicker of neon rose up against a darkness without bound. Now, as yesterday, she felt as though she were gazing not out across a resplendent city, but down into a pit so wide and vast its edges could not be seen.

"You know what, Aokins?" Nanako said, slurring her words like someone trying desperately to stay awake.

"What?" Aoi asked back, thinking she probably sounded much the same.

"It seems like we're always going but we never get anywhere."

It was exactly what Aoi had been thinking without being able to put it into words.

"Yeah," Aoi nodded. "I wish we could go somewhere much farther away."

"Somewhere much farther away," Nanako repeated in a flat mono-tone. Then grabbing the fence with both hands and leaning her face 160

against it, she said, "Maybe we should just hold hands and jump, on the count of three."

Then maybe we'd finally make it someplace,
thought Aoi before the full implication of Nanako's words could sink in. Someplace where they wouldn't feel so tired. Someplace where they wouldn't have to find another hotel for the night, or worry about how they were going to get the cash they needed. Someplace where everything would go the way they wanted.

With a childlike innocence, Aoi still felt like she could do anything at all when she was with Nanako.

If.
..it's... sake ...it's... Ozeki.
The words lit up in sequence on the massive neon sign. Aoi stared at the words until they blurred and she could no longer make out what they said. After a while she realized that the persistent ringing in her ears had finally gone away.

^ ^ 161

"Settle down, Akari! That's enough!"

The force of her own voice startled Sayoko. Not long ago, one stern look and Akari would have burst into tears, but now she remained unfazed no matter how sharp her mother was with her.

Not only that, she raised her voice right back, determined to have her way.

"But I wanna play! I wanna play!"

"If I stop to play with you, I can't make your dinner."

"I'm not hungry."

It still made Sayoko proud each time she realized her daughter was carrying on an actual conversation with her. But the moment she heard the pot boiling over on the stove, the conversation became a source of exasperation instead.

"What am I going to do with you?" she exclaimed, racing for the kitchen and switching off the burner. She tried to go back to shaping the meatballs she was halfway through when interrupted, but Akari came squealing and giggling up behind her, pulling on her leg and straining upwards.

"Up! Up!" she pleaded.

"Don't you remember, sweetie? You said you wanted meatballs."

"I don't want meatballs!"

"This'll only take a minute, so please go watch TV until I'm done, okay?"

"I don't wanna watch TV!"

The child reached over the edge of the counter dangerously close 162

to the cutting board, which had a large kitchen knife resting on it.

Sayoko quickly pushed the board out of reach, but in the process knocked the bowl of ground meat sitting next to it onto the floor.

Akari let out a shriek. Sayoko looked down at the meatball mixture splattered across the linoleum, feeling thoroughly fed up with making meals and washing dishes and everything else.

"For goodness sake, Akari, I'm just about out of patience with you!"

She grabbed her daughter by the arms and was half carrying, half dragging her from the kitchen when Shuji walked in.

"Don't you think you should take it a little easy?"

He dropped his briefcase and a magazine onto the table and looked at his wife as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

"You don't understand, dear. She was grabbing for things. She could have hurt herself. I had to get her out of the kitchen."

Akari threw her head back and burst into tears, holding her arms out toward her father. Instead of picking her up to comfort her, he merely loosened his tie and switched on the TV.

"Mommy seems to be pretty cross," he said.

Back in the kitchen, Sayoko squatted on the floor to scrape up the mess. Quickly taking stock, she decided simply to give the meatballs she had ready to Akari and Shuji and make do for herself with rice, miso soup, and pickles. Sigh.

"I didn't get home till nearly seven either, I'll have you know," she said. "Akari wanted meatballs, she insisted she wouldn't eat anything else, so when the supermarket was all out of their beef and pork mixture, I had to go all the way to the butcher shop on the other side of the station. T h e n the minute I get home and start dinner, your mother calls and won't let me go for nearly an hour, wanting to know when we're going to have another baby, browbeating me to quit my job and think about more important things. I finally got back to the kitchen a little bit ago, but now Akari refuses to let me cook."

163

And that's not the half of it,
she went on inside her head. I'm so
hungry I could drop. I worked straight through without any lunch, and
then had to run all the way to the station, fight the rush-hour crowds
on the train, and pedal like crazy to pick Akari up in time, so I haven't
had a bite to eat all day.

Suddenly aware that the living room was strangely quiet, she looked up. The TV was on, but Shuji was nowhere in sight, and a dry-eyed Akari sat enthralled by a Mickey Mouse commercial.

"Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes!" she yelled, loud enough for Shuji to hear her in the bedroom where she assumed he'd gone to change.

Just then her husband reappeared in a T-shirt. "I already ate today," he said. He came into the kitchen and pushed past Sayoko to get to the refrigerator.

"Why can't you call when you decide to eat out?" Sayoko snapped, on the verge of hysteria. "What good is your cell phone if you won't use it?"

Taking a beer from the refrigerator, Shuji glanced at her but held his tongue and went back to the living room. He plopped down on the sofa and spread open the evening paper.

Sayoko began dropping meatballs into the pan of bubbling tomato sauce. Doing her best to control her voice, she said, "Honey, if you're not doing anything, could you give Akari a quick bath?"

Shuji got to his feet and lifted Akari into his arms. "Look out, kiddo, I think we want to stay out of Mommy's way tonight. Let's go take a bath," he said, and went out the door. The low but unmistak-able click of the tongue Sayoko caught as he stood up clung to her ears like the glue from a messy sticker.

"You know, if you're in over your head, you can quit anytime you want," Shuji said when Sayoko came back to their bedroom after putting Akari to bed.

164

Sitting at her dresser, she looked at Shuji in the mirror. He lay in bed flipping through a magazine.

"In what over my head? Quit what?"

"This housekeeping job," he promptly replied. "Seems like things have been a little bit off kilter around the house lately. You're on edge a lot, and sometimes I think you come down too hard on Akari.

I don't think it's a bad thing for you to be working, but it doesn't make sense if it's too much for you."

"It's not."

"That woman the other day, she owns the company, right? She's got some nerve barging in here on the weekend like that. You'd think she'd have more consideration. I bet she's one of those bosses who'll push you right over the edge if you let them. If you ask me, I don't think she's a good fit for you."

"That's not h o w . . . " Sayoko started to say, but then pursed her lips. She couldn't very well tell him that she'd asked Aoi to come so she could get out of going to his mother's.

"Don't they say personality development depends a lot on how much time you spend with your mother before the age of three? I mean, Akari just turned three this year, and up to now she spent all her time at home with you, so maybe it's not such a good idea to suddenly shove her out of the nest. Why not wait to go back to work till she's a little older? Cleaning other people's houses is fine, but it seems counterproductive if it means you have to neglect more important things at home."

Sayoko opened her mouth to respond, but the rejoinders she wanted to offer piled up so fast they made her head spin. Not knowing where to start, she simply said, "You think just like your mother."

"My mom always stayed at home, so naturally she thinks that's best."

"Are you even aware that Akari has changed? Have you been 165

paying attention? She's learned to make friends, and she's talking a whole lot more than she used to."

And that goes for me, too—not just Akari. Why can't you see that?

she added to herself, annoyed at how obtuse he could be.

"I'm not saying you shouldn't work," he said. "In fact, if you remember, for a long time I was actually urging you to work, back before Akari was born. But you chose to stay at home. Now suddenly you decide to go back to work, and things start to feel kind of out of whack for Akari and me, and even for you. That's all I'm saying. Besides, what you're doing now isn't like your other job, where you had real responsibility and put together projects on your own. I mean, nothing's going to grind to a halt if you're not there, right? So I'm just thinking maybe you should quit this job, take some time off, and then when you eventually go back on the market, give yourself all the time you need to find something more worthwhile, like the job you had before."

Sayoko stopped dabbing cream on her face and turned to look at him. "More worthwhile?"

She was trying so hard to keep her voice from shaking that the words came out in a throaty whisper.

Shuji apparently didn't hear. "Just think about it, okay?" He tossed the magazine on the floor and closed his eyes.

Quickly smoothing the dabs of cream into her skin, Sayoko sat and stared at herself in the mirror for a time, then turned to pick up the magazine he'd dropped on the floor and started down the hall. Instead of taking the magazine directly to the rack in the living room as she'd intended, she laid it on the table while she went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of iced tea.

She retraced her steps and sat down in the semidarkness of the dining table, lit only by the light spilling from the kitchen.

After a moment she reached over to draw the magazine closer and began flipping mechanically through the pages one by one without consciously looking at any of them. Soon her eyes began to fill, blurring the words and pictures that were flashing by. A tear spilled from her right eye, and she hastily brushed it away. This is silly, she told herself. There's nothing to cry about.

She distinctly remembered telling Shuji that the old wives' tale he'd unquestioningly repeated about kids before the age of three was no longer considered valid today, and it had never in fact had any scientific basis. She'd also spoken to him more than once about how amazingly lucky they were to have a place open up for Akari in the nursery school at such an odd time of year, as well as about the school's educational philosophy and classroom atmosphere. His attitude always seemed to be that it wasn't his problem, and since it was true that everything stemmed from Sayoko deciding to go back to work, she'd resigned herself to this just being the way it was.

She continued slowly turning the pages of the magazine she had no interest in reading.

When she found her job, Sayoko had promised herself several things to make sure there wouldn't be any problems. No matter how busy she got, she would keep up her house. She would not put ready-to-serve food from the deli bin on the dinner table. She would not let dirty dishes pile up in the sink. She would not send clothes that required ironing out to the cleaner's. To her mind, she had kept these promises. But she was beginning to wonder what she gained from them. A tidy house, meals made from scratch, and drawers full of neatly ironed clothes represented what Shuji took for granted—the zero point. Let one thing go awry, however small, and she was immediately in negative territory. No matter how frantically she drove herself, no matter how much loving attention she gave her family, she would never be adding, only multiplying, and no matter how many times you multiply zero, you still have nothing but zero; you never get a positive number.

Sayoko turned another page and stopped. She lifted the magazine a little to catch more light from the kitchen and leaned in for a closer look. The picture seemed familiar. "Bring in the New Year in a Tropical Paradise," it said in large display type emblazoned across the two-page spread. Along the edge of the right-hand page was a description of the Garden Group hotels, and at the very bottom it said, "For further information, call Platinum Planet, Inc." She realized it was a picture she'd seen at the office—a spectacular undersea shot of coral and tropical fish in breathtaking turquoise-blue water.

In the darkened dining room, Sayoko stared on and on at the picture as if doing so might allow her to pass through the page into the dazzling sea beyond.

August was nearly over, and the training period with Noriko Nakazato came to a close. To the bitter end, Noriko had continued to nag her about her manner with clients, so part of Sayoko still felt nervous about coming out from under her instructor's wing; but another part of her breathed a sigh of relief. On the final day, Noriko took her to a large home center, where they went over the various tools she'd need for different cleaning tasks, from buckets to scrapers to chopsticks to ice picks and more, and Sayoko purchased all the items she recommended. An agreement was already in place for Noriko to supply Platinum Planet with cleaning agents and vacuum cleaners at wholesale. All that remained was to wait for job orders to start coming in.