An Uncommon Education (34 page)

Keigo jabbed me in the shoulder. “Dinner,” he said. And then Jun was there, directing me to sit next to her, showing me how to use all the utensils, draping the napkin over my lap with mock solemnity and making sure that I had a fork and spoon, should I need them.

I was glad that I didn’t recognize anything on the table. I received constant attention from Keigo, who appointed himself my tutor. Ayame jumped in earnestly when she felt he was explaining something inadequately, or confusing me, her even brow deeply wrinkled, and Keigo only messed up all the more when she did. He was deeply witty, both in English and Japanese, but I missed most of it. I felt like a thief, pretending to listen while I studied the strong lines in his face, his quick smile. I hadn’t spoken about Weingarten to anyone but Phyllis and Jun, and as far as I knew, they were the only ones who knew. Still, I felt like I wore my fleeting, first tryst with the wrong man on my face like a banner.

The meal was a kaleidoscope of structural and sensual details, rounded out by the natural, deep colors of raw foods beautifully displayed. At the end of the meal, though, several pies emerged with a flourish. The party clapped and laughed, and I was asked to make the first incision.

“Apple pear . . .” Jun’s father’s voice broke across the table, bearing a hush in its wake. I looked up, and he nodded at me. A contented, though significant, silence fell as I cut the first piece. I was suddenly nervous, my hand shaking just a little, enough so that I was afraid anyone near me might notice. I lifted the piece to the somber caterer standing beside me, bowing my head just slightly. Mr. Oko finished his sentence, “. . . in honor of our American guest,” and smiled at me, echoing my own slight bow. Jun was pleased, too, and I felt flush with the attention.

We all stayed up late that night, and the next day I awoke to a silent apartment. I felt overheated and still tired. I dressed quickly and wandered from the bedroom, wondering how so much silence had fallen after yesterday’s chaos. I imagined the entire Oko clan leaving in a line as I slept, chatting in low tones as they hurried out. I sat in the living room for a while with a Japanese magazine, then put it down and walked to the window. The view was even more expansive in the day and the light, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stare for long before having to look away. A headache had dawned and the sun felt hot. I turned around when I heard a small noise behind me.

Mr. Oko bowed his head just slightly in acknowledgment. “Good afternoon,” he said, formally.

I returned the greeting.

“Jun-ko said you did not sleep well. She was worried. You should sit,” he said, eyeing me closely. “Indeed you do not look well.” He was wearing something very much like what my father would wear were he as well groomed: pressed khaki pants in a light color, a white button-down shirt with a blue sweater-vest over it, a pair of thin glasses. He was quite small, in person, though what was far more noticeable was the way his even expression spoke to a profound sense of self-command. “I am glad to see Jun bringing a friend home from Wellesley College,” he began. He added, “I am sorry to hear that your mother’s health has not been good.” Each sentence he spoke was uncrowded by the next.

“Thank you,” I said again. I wondered when Jun had told him this. I could recall few, if any, of her calls home from our room, and wondered if she waited until I left the room to speak to her parents. I looked at Mr. Oko, the straight way he stood in a small body. “She’s doing much better now,” I added, though it felt like a lie.

Mr. Oko nodded. “I am sorry that I must work this Thanksgiving,” he attempted to use the word casually, though it sounded awkward in his mouth. “I am sorry that I work so often when our family comes together. Jun-ko must mention this to you.”

I shook my head.

He nodded again. “She is a good girl. We are very proud of her.” I thought he wanted to say something else, but he shook his head instead. When he spoke again, it nearly surprised me; I was growing accustomed to the silence that had settled. “You have met my son, Hiroshi,” he said.

“Yes.”

“He is our oldest child,” he said. He stopped a moment and took a deep breath and held it, puffing his chest out.

“He is a good boy. When the doctors told us of his condition, my wife and I, we felt we had a great sorrow.” He stared into the middle distance. “We had great hopes for a firstborn son. Sometimes hope is too great, becomes a curse.

“When Jun was born”—he hesitated just briefly—“we were so pleased to have such a healthy child, so strong and laughing so hard. Jun-ko has good lungs, right from the beginning. Maybe too good. She actually climbed the roof, one summer, in Okinawa. We were sure she would burn her hands. I had to climb up after her. She was standing there in a cape, well as could be, explaining to me why she thought she could fly. I found myself wanting to believe her.” I wondered if Rosemary’s father had wanted to believe her. Maybe wanting to believe was an act of love not many daughters received from their fathers, though Jun and I had both received it from ours. Mr. Oko brought his hands into his lap and looked at them there before continuing.

“And then, her mind, in school. She did not only bring home good marks. She burst through the door with them.” He smiled as he looked back up, and I did, too. He took another deep breath, as though his speech winded him. “Sometimes the firstborn comes second, we say, my wife and I. Our daughter is a leader,” he said, and although there was a hint of force in his voice, I felt he was confidently sealing something he was sure I knew rather than trying to convince me of something I might doubt. “And a leader needs friends. A leader needs a better friend than someone who is not a leader. Jun has always been busy, how do you say, high-strung maybe, though around you, she is quieter, perhaps softer. This is a good thing,” he said and nodded. “Good,” he said once more, apparently confirming something for himself.

“Do you know what?” he added. “I have never done what you just did, stand by the window to see what is in the view.” He laughed, I believe at himself. “My wife has chosen where we will live in Japan, and here it is my brother’s wife who chooses. Have men no eyes?” And he laughed again, just as the front door opened, just as I had begun to like him.

Jun was not the first through the door, but she was the first to notice us together, and it stopped her in her tracks like a caught animal, though it was us she wanted to capture, for study, without drawing attention to her curiosity. I smiled, trying to reassure her, but she seemed to be looking through me. By then many other people had filtered into the house.

The gentle sheen of fever took over shortly after that, softening my memory, so that the next thing I remember is staring at Keigo until he waved a hand in front of my face, and then standing outside with Jun, waiting for the car to come, our bags beside us, goodbyes being made. I was now quite comfortable being in the eye of the Oko storm, standing in the midst of them as they went to each other.

I noticed, though, that although Jun was hugging and talking, she seemed to be standing alone as well, as though she had already left. I studied her, so tall. I wondered why she was a leader, why this was the word her father had chosen for her. As if sensing my gaze, Jun turned and looked at me.

It was as if we were alone, when I spoke, because no one would listen but Jun, “Do you have any pictures of yourself when you were young?” I asked her. She looked at me quizzically, and I don’t remember her answer. I do remember sitting, or maybe falling, down on the cement steps of the building a few moments later, noticing the quartz in the paving, a small hand on mine matched to a face that blurred when I looked up.

I
was sick enough to be delivered to the Wellesley infirmary instead of my dorm when we returned. We had left a day early to try to avoid the forecasted storm, but it meant that we arrived to a cold, empty campus. I lay in bed, disappointed that I hadn’t had more time to spend in the warm hub of Jun’s family, wondering if I’d get to see Keigo again. It was a bad flu that year, and the newscasters were claiming that nearly half of the Northeast was down with it. I landed in the infirmary a few steps behind a nor’easter, which shut the roads down and stranded my parents at home.

My nurse was primarily lumpy and dressed in a Kelly green jumper. She dressed me in the kind of paper that hospitals barely render into cloth. When I was awake and she was in the room, I kept thinking of how comfortable she looked. On the second afternoon, she flipped on the television in front of my bed. She must have thought I was asleep or too groggy to notice, but instead the lights and sounds came spilling over me like an alarm. A woman in a spiderweb of a bob—twisted within, precisely outlined—told us exactly how much snow had fallen, and two men were interviewed with footage of their cars hemmed in on the Back Bay. Chet Curtis told us that a few rural schools in Maine and Vermont had closed due to flu. Someone had been clever with the images here, or the computers were down, and sketch drawings of ministrations during the 1918 flu were thrown up on the screen and lightly mocked by the news team. Their fake laughter comforted me. We were beyond catastrophe. I closed my eyes.

I opened them a moment later when the nurse emerged from the tiny bathroom with towels draped over her arm. I caught her eye when she came out, and she acted just shy of startled, maybe even offended, when I did. I had meant to ask her to turn off the television but she had actually looked at me, and now we had seen something of each other. She walked over to my bed, huffing down into the chair beside it and looking into my face.

“My nephew had it, too,” she said, squinting, as if we were continuing a conversation. She sighed, her breath stale with a long-past cigarette break. “Poor kid looked almost as pathetic as you. I’m guessing you haven’t been taking very good care of yourself at school.” She frowned, then put a hand to my forehead. “So few of you do.” I wondered if, with her hand on my forehead, she could read something of what was in there. “If this doesn’t break, I’ll sponge you,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now rest.” And I smiled, maybe even giggled a little.

She did end up having to sponge me. I woke up, thinking she was my mother, and grabbed her wrist. I had wanted to look in her face, to be sure, but she thought I was stopping her. “Shh,” she demanded, “hold still.”

Fortunately, the flu left almost as suddenly as it had come; I still felt sore and weak for a while, but enormously better, too, and a nice, lighthearted feeling set in, the giddiness we feel just after we’ve been very sick and everyday experience becomes saturated with the pleasures we usually overlook.

Twenty-Five

I
showed up for Josephine’s
Troilus and Cressida
auditions instead of diving deeper into my studies when the spring semester began, ignoring the fact that my name wasn’t on the list. I don’t know what brought me there, other than that I had spent the morning buying more textbooks and filing my work from last semester while noting that spring was insinuating its way across campus, prompting me to open the windows wide, which led me to take a walk that brought me to the front steps of the society.

I scribbled my name on the list as I chatted with Ellie about a vision she was claiming to have had about the costumes. She was getting stranger and more likable the longer I knew her. She was one of those girls who used anachronisms studiously and with pride. She weeded contractions from her sentences so that every statement of being or having been was carefully, almost awkwardly, pronounced by her small lips, halting her conversation just slightly in a charming, offbeat way. Occasionally she tried to work in an “I shall” into her sentences, though she smiled right along with me when I noticed it.

Josephine granted me the role of Cressida, despite my subpar acting, she told me. She had a gift for capitalizing on the weaknesses in her players to enhance her play, and she claimed I was the perfect mix of coldness and vulnerability. Tiney was cast as the solipsistic, hungry Paris; A.J. an insistent Diomedes; Ruth a winning Ajax; and Julie, in her first play since her semester at Oxford, an earnest and arrogant Hector. Most everyone else got to romp around and play stupidly inflated soldiers; I felt left out. But Josephine had been right when she’d defended her choice of play, telling us that it was begging to be staged. All those Trojan warriors fell flat on the page, but as embodied characters they miraculously came to life. Despite this triumph, though, Josephine still didn’t like me just as she didn’t like the character of Cressida, and she made no effort to hide her distaste. It made for tense rehearsals.

“Your first monologue is a flop,” she said frankly after we’d worked on it several times. “It’s not a great speech, but it deserves a better performance.” She took off her glasses. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” she asked bluntly. I told her I was. It was no secret that she was majoring in theology, had her eye on Harvard Divinity School and a rabbinical ordination shortly after that. I envied and resented her purposefulness. She acted as if she were better than most of us, and sometimes I wondered if she was.

“Your mother’s a convert, though, right?” she went on. I confirmed this, also, too surprised at her invasive frankness to ask how she knew all of this. She nodded to herself, a prejudice satisfied. “So you know what it is not fully to belong, yes? To want to belong to something close to you? But to feel like you never will?” I barely had a moment to feel offended. “You just don’t seem Jewish.” She sighed, her dislike effectively expressed. “But then, you know isolation. Use it. It’s the most interesting thing about the role. Otherwise she just comes across as a traitor.”

Jun helped me with lines but kept her distance from the society. She attended meetings, but they were the only time she relaxed, oftentimes into that laugh leaking relief. But it was clear that her mind was elsewhere.

The choice role of Helen in
Troilus and Cressida
had fallen to Elena Page, a newcomer who landed the role because she promised Jo she was going to take some pole-dancing lessons to make her cheapness authentic. She also swore to share her newfound knowledge with the company.