If You Follow Me (14 page)

“Relaxing?” I repeat weakly.

She opens an art book to a painting of a plump white woman lying on her side, wearing only a black ribbon tied around her throat. She tells me not to worry; I don't have to take off my clothes. The kids laugh. An eerie feeling comes over me as I climb up onto the table, which hammocks under my weight. My scalp prickles and I feel like I'm floating outside of myself. My mom has a story she likes to tell about the day of my birth. There were complications, she had to have an emergency C-section, and in the middle of it she started to regain feeling. The doctors administered a shot of anesthesia that went to her heart, stopping it for a full minute, in which she was technically dead. She swears that she remembers rising above herself and seeing the heads of the doctors and my own head being lifted out of her, and fighting to get back into her body. She says that it felt like trying to swim down to the bottom of a pool.

Slowly, in bits and pieces, I watch my portrait take shape on paper. One little boy draws only my hair, a floating yellow wig. Another starts with my feet, which take up two-thirds of the page. But most begin with my nose. By all accounts, I'm overdue for a nose job. It could hold up a heavy winter coat.

“Draw what you see,” Keiko keeps telling them. “Don't make a
karakuta
.”

As she passes by the table where I'm reclining, I notice scratch marks rising out of the collar of her shirt, ascending her neck to the base of her earlobe. It looks like she was attacked by a cat or something. “I don't like to teach sixth-grade art,” she says. “I prefer younger children. They still see something new. By twelve years, they only copy.”

“But I don't look like that,” I say. “At least I hope I don't!”

“They copy idea of you,” she explains. “They know Western face
has tall nose, folded eyelid, so they draw tall nose, folded eyelid. They can't really see you.”

At the end of the period, after the students file out of the room, I stand beside her as she leafs through the stack and I see what she means. In picture after picture, I've been turned into a cartoon version of myself, my eyes two hooded balloons, my nose a big 7, with no mouth to speak of—or through—just like Kitty-chan. Keiko sighs, shuts the classroom door and turns the bolt. Then she raises the window, rummages in her Vuitton shoulder bag and pulls out a pack of Dunhill's. When she holds it out, eyebrows lifted, I nod and she sticks two cigarettes in her mouth, lighting them off the same match. I remember how Miyoshi-sensei once told me that women teachers here never smoke. I'm glad to meet another exception to the rule.

“Secret from principal,” she says, handing me one. “Secret from husband too.”

“Shhh,” I whisper and she laughs, curved lines like parentheses cupping her mouth. “I don't smoke often,” she says. “But when Koji runs away I feel so frighten. Kobayashi-sensei gives me cigarettes, to help relax.”

“I'm so sorry you were scared,” I say, “but Koji didn't run away. He just wanted to show me the rabbits. I was with him the whole time.”

“Mmm,” she says. “This time yes. He's with you. But last week he runs away after school and we can't find him until morning.”

“Shit,” I say. “Are you serious? He was missing all night?”

“Mmm.” She takes a drag, the ember lengthening from her deep inhalation. I ask where the boy was and she says that he was down by the sea. “Shit,” I say again. The cliff s in this part of town are so steep that I get vertigo just thinking about the edge. “Children have no idea how vulnerable they are,” I pronounce. This is something my mom
used to say when I was little and did something stupid, like jumping from roof to roof on our block.

“Vulnerable means what?” Keiko asks me.

“They don't know how easily they can get hurt.”

“He knows,” she says. “He wants to.”

“He wants to get hurt?” I repeat, certain there's a language gap here.

“Mmm.” She nods again. “It's how to get my attention.”

When the bell rings to signal the start of the next period, Keiko says that I can return to the faculty room if I'd like, or I can stay and pose for a third-grade class. I opt to stay with her. The kerosene heater is right behind me, bathing me in waves of oily heat, and the fumes go to my head in a not unpleasant way. I stretch out my arm for a moment, rest my cheek on my shoulder, and Keiko tells me to go ahead and shut my eyes, telling me that my eyes are hard to draw and it will be easier for the kids this way.

Before long, I feel myself drifting into a shallow dream. I know that I'm dreaming, but this doesn't justify the fact that I can't think of the words for the most basic things, like the pronged metal instrument that carries food from plate to mouth, or the numbered grid of paper where people write their schedules. My father is there with me, testing me in a laboratory that looks a lot like the elementary school art room. He holds up one object after another while I tell him to wait, just wait a minute, to give me time to think. “Umhmm,” he says, jotting something down. “And my name is?” I try to bargain my way out of this one. “Why do I need to know that anymore?” I ask, and when he says, “What do you mean?” I realize that he has no idea he's dead. I don't want to break the news, good or bad.

I wake to the feeling of fingers running through my hair. My teeth ache from grinding them in my sleep. Koji Ishii is standing be
side me, studying me with his wide-set gray eyes. I want to grab the little boy and hold him tight like a teddy bear. Instead I grip his hand and he flinches. I sit up and find that the art room is almost empty. The sky outside is skim-milk white with a cast of blue, and already it's dark enough that shapes are becoming blurry, indistinct. Kim is the only other child in the room, drawing by herself at a table. Keiko stands facing the window, hanging pictures from a clothesline while gazing outside.

“I'm sorry I fell asleep,” I say, standing beside her. “It's so late!”

“It's fine,” she says. “I have to clean up. Kim and Koji make your portrait.”

“You drew me?” I ask the little boy, placing a hand on his silky head.

“Not draw,” his mother says. “He won't draw. Only
koraji
.”

Koraji
must mean what it sounds like, collage, because the boy has assembled my portrait from scraps. The body is a triangle of paper torn from my own self-introduction worksheet, the face that of a Japanese model cut from a magazine, with green construction paper circles glued over her eyes. For hair he used a few sprigs of hay that must have lined the rabbits' hutch, and I've got two American flag stickers—pilfered from my own box of props—for feet. “
Kawaii
,” I say, wishing I knew a better word than “cute” to let him know how much I like this piece of art. I feel like that, I want to tell him: piecing together an identity, cobbling a self from scraps. Then I remember the word Keiko taught me after I attended her
ikebana
club that one time.

“It's very
wabi-sabi
,” I say. Perfectly imperfect.

“You're right,” Keiko says, smiling. “You have good memory too.”

I tell him that I will hang it in my kitchen and think of him whenever I look at it.

“Ah, you want it?” his mom says. “I had better ask.” She crouches and addresses her son in Japanese. He brings his gloved fingertips to the bridge of his nose, then shakes his head slowly. “Koji wants to keep portrait of Miss Marina,” she explains. “I think he likes you so much,” she says. “Usually he resists a teacher.”

“Maybe that's because I'm not really his teacher,” I point out.

“So desu ne
,” she agrees.

Kim gets up and hands me her drawing. She has given me a stick-figure body and a smiley face, devoting her artistic energy to sketching the school's two rabbits on either side of me, scaled big as dogs, discernible by their tall ears and cotton-ball tails, and by the fact that one is fat and smiling while the other looks like a bunny skeleton with fangs.

“Kurai
,” Keiko says. Dark.

“Someone should really help that poor rabbit,” I say.

“What can we do?” she asks me. “When vice-principal buys him, he is cute baby. Since then his teeth don't stop growing. He becomes rabbit monster.”

“Maybe he should be put to sleep,” I suggest.

“I think he sleeps at night,” she says.

“No,” I say. “
Put
to sleep…Like…Forever?”

“Kurai
,” she repeats. “In Japan this is forbidden.”

“Even for rabbits?” I ask.

“What if you are rabbit next time?”

“But if he's suffering,” I say. “If he's going to die…”

“This is part of life,” she says with a shrug.

“Are we taking Kim home?” Koji asks, interrupting.

“Of course,” Keiko says. “We take her home every day. You know that.”

“But which home are we taking her to?”

“What do you mean, which home?”

“Kim has two homes,” he says, looking at me. “No one lives in the other one.”

“That's not true,” his mother says. “She has only one home.”

“Too bad.” The little boy sighs. “I thought I could go live in the empty one.”

“That's not very nice,” Keiko says. “I'd be lonely, you know.”

“You could visit,” he says. “But
only
you. And Miss Marina.”

“Arigato
,” I say, allowing my hand to fall on his silky head once more.

Keiko tells the kids to get their stuff and meet her in the parking lot. I try to give Kim back her drawing but she won't take it. “
Dozo
,” she says in her gravelly little voice.

“For me?” I say, to make sure, and she nods. “
Arigato
.”

“Arigato
.”

The kids have barely closed the door before Keiko turns, seizing my shoulders. “Kim can speak Japanese! She says
dozo
and
arigato
! You are good teacher, Marina-sensei!”

“I didn't teach her those words,” I protest. “I hardly speak Japanese myself!”

“Maybe that's why,” Keiko muses. “You can't speak much Japanese, so she must try harder to speak with you.” I laugh, once more impressed by her willingness to say it like it is. She peers at me with gray eyes as focused and hypnotizing as her son's. “Marina-sensei,” she says, “do you have any free time?”

“Sure,” I say. “I have lots of free time.”

“How about coming to my home one evening after school?”

“I'd love to,” I say, not bothering to conceal my eagerness. After six months here, I still don't know where Miyoshi-sensei lives, or which apartment behind the grocery store Noriko rents. Back at our teacher training seminar in Tokyo, we were warned that the Japanese seldom entertain at home, that only a person who wants to be your
close friend will invite you over for dinner. This has yet to happen, to Carolyn or me.

“How about Thursday?” she says. “Five to seven okay?”

“Thank you so much,” I say, thinking it funny, charming, and very Japanese that she is already setting a cap on our time together.

“Thank
you
so much,” she repeats, bowing deeply.

kamoshirenai:
(
EXP
.)
maybe; perhaps; possibly

O
n the drive home, I feel happier than I have in a long time. I love the big, dilapidated houses, the steamed kitchen windows with their tempered glass to prevent people from seeing inside, the fox-shaped dogs that howl and chase after my car. I love the road, the way it bends around the cliff s and follows ancient property lines, the magnificence of the sea absorbing the swirls of falling snow. I turn on the tape deck and listen to the mix Carolyn made for me after we got here. One side is labeled, “Way to school,” the other side, “Way back home.” Wistfully I listen to side two. Between songs, she speaks. “Hurry home,” she says. “I'll be waiting for you.”

I am looking down, hitting Rewind just to hear her say this again, when my seat belt snaps taut. I slam on the brakes and sit up as an avalanche of giant orange hail pelts my car. It takes a moment before I realize they're sweet potatoes.

Stopped on the road ahead of me, the speaker bolted to the yam truck keeps repeating the same line over and over. “
Oishii o-imo. Oishii kamoshirenai
.” When Carolyn and I first heard this, sung by an old man with a warbling tremolo, we thought we were listening to the chanting of a monk from the temple down the block. But the truck
kept passing our house at the same time every evening, its speaker blaring the same two lines on a loop, and one day I found myself suddenly able to decipher the words.

“Delicious potatoes. Delicious, perhaps…”

The song cuts off and the driver steps out of the truck. He is an old man and he's wearing a neck brace, a big, stiff, plastic cone that rises from the collar of his shirt and pushes at the underside of his chin. I climb out of the car window, slipping on a sweet potato that squishes under my foot.

“Gomen nasai
,” I say. I'm sorry. “
Shitsureishimashita.
” But I've committed more than a rude this time. Without speaking, he walks around the back of his truck, surveying the damage. To my relief, his vehicle looks more or less intact. It was protected from the collision by the heavy metal staircase welded to its back, leading up to the bed where a charcoal grill was roasting the sweet potatoes now covering the road. But the front of my car is crumpled, pushed in like a bulldog's snout.

“Itai
?” I ask the man. Are you hurt?

“I…can't…speak…Englishverywell,” he manages.

In Japanese I ask if he's okay and again he tells me in English that he can't speak English. I wonder if he can't understand my Japanese. Maybe my accent is that bad, or maybe he's so flustered to find himself in a fender-bender with a Westerner that he can't even register the fact that I'm trying to communicate in his language.

“How are you?” I try.

“I'mfinethankyou,” he says, “and you?”

“I'm fine,” I say. “How is your neck?”

“Your neck,” he repeats.

“Your neck,” I say, pointing to his brace. “Fine? Not fine?”

“Not fine,” he says, shaking his head and then wincing. “Not fine!”

“I'm so sorry,” I say. “It was all my fault.” I don't know how to say this in Japanese, though it's another line I should have mastered. He squats to pick up the yams. He bends from the knees and keeps his torso perfectly erect and still, like someone trying to balance a pot of boiling water on top of his head. The sappy skins of the yams are coated with grit from the road. He tries to polish one with his flannel shirttail, tearing the skin. “Your car not fine,” he says, and Miyoshi-sensei's words come back to me.
Temporary people probably shouldn't own a car here. The rules are different, the roads are narrow, and what would you do in case of accident?
I don't know the numbers of any tow companies. There's no AAA. And if I call the police, they will call my supervisor. I can't bear the thought of seeing him again, for the first time in months, at the scene of an accident I caused. So I'm thankful when I lean into the window, turn the key in the ignition and the engine starts.

“It's fine,” I say brightly. “
Daijoubu
.”

Then he says something in Japanese that I don't understand. I think he's telling me that without filing an accident report, I won't be able to collect insurance. “
Daijoubu
,” I say once more. He frowns as he takes one of the yams and throws it back onto the grill. Not knowing what else to do, I follow his example, throwing yam after yam into the back of the truck until we have cleaned the mess off the road.

“Delicious potatoes. Delicious, perhaps…”

 

When I get home, I hear Carolyn upstairs in the bedroom doing the Tae-Bo videotape my mom sent us. She is stomping overhead, practicing high kicks as Billy Blanks calls out, “repeater, repeater, repeater,” over a pornolike soundtrack of synthesizer music and studio audience
groans. I wonder if the noise bothers the neighbors, what they think we're doing in our windowless home. Not what it sounds like.

There's a new care package in the entryway, the padded envelope covered with bright red apples. My mom buys these envelopes in bulk from the teaching supply company where she gets her festive bulletin board trimmings and Way To Go! stickers. She has been an elementary school teacher since before I was born. She's a natural. She knows how to talk to children so that they listen, and how to listen to them so that they feel heard, how to cultivate their strengths and make them feel unique and loved, each and every one. She has been teaching for so long that her voice, trained to project over the din of children, can't be turned down. And her entire wardrobe was chosen to appeal to kids, from her seasonal sweaters to the zoo that is her jewelry box.

I tear the envelope open and riffle through the contents, pulling out two packs of gold star stickers, two ballpoint pens, two boxes of Annie's organic mac-and-cheese, and two tubes of Tom's natural toothpaste. There is also a copy of
Prevention
magazine, dog-eared to an article on the fertility-damaging properties of cigarettes. I open a card with a picture of Virginia Woolf looking down her own tall nose. “
Share the goodies with Carolyn,
” she wrote in her perfect penmanship, each letter made to be copied by kids. “
Hugs, Mom.
”

Over the phone last spring, I broke the news to my mom that I had a girlfriend and that we were moving to Japan together to teach English. I hoped that this second piece of news would soften the blow of the first. She'd told me many times that she hoped that I would become a teacher too, that the job had brought her so much joy. “Is this forever?” she asked in a voice that was small and brittle, unfamiliar and awful. I told her that it was only for a year, pretending not to know what she was really asking, holding the phone away from my ear so that I wouldn't have to listen to her cry. When I was little,
I used to give her love tests. Would she still love me if I cheated? Robbed a bank? If I murdered someone? She always said yes without missing a beat. “I'd be very sad and disappointed, but I'll always love you.” I suddenly realized that I'd given her one of these love tests, and that I was feeling the sting of her disappointment for the first time.

“I'm sorry,” she cried, “but I wanted to see you get married and have children.”

“I can still have those things,” I said. I felt like I had swallowed broken glass and was trying to talk around it. “Lots of gay people have kids,” I managed.

“Have you always known?” she asked. “Because I thought you were in love with Luke. I still don't understand what happened between you two.”

Luke was my high school boyfriend. We went to college in different states, but we always got back together in the summers. He had four brothers and two sisters, and I liked the chaos of his family, the way I could get lost in the shuffle. He liked my home for the opposite reason, because it was quiet and he was taken seriously, and because he liked my father. Luke wanted to be an engineer, and the two of them would spend hours talking about their ideas, sitting hip to hip on the couch, sketching on graph paper. Luke was one of the people who noticed that something was seriously wrong with my dad. That's how he put it when he refused to come over anymore. “It's too depressing,” he said. “You might be able to pretend like nothing's wrong, but I can't.” At the time, I was glad to spend more time at Luke's, to have somewhere else to go, to get away. But after my dad killed himself, I couldn't be in the same room as Luke anymore. When he came to my father's memorial ser vice, I refused to talk to him. Later, when he flew out to New York, I wouldn't even let him upstairs. I finally told him that I had a girlfriend, that I'd never really been attracted to him. He left me alone after that.

“Is this about your dad?” my mom asked on the phone. “Are you so angry with him for killing himself that you're turning your back on all men?” I lashed out and told her that this was the one thing in my life that wasn't about my dad, the one thing that was just mine. I said that I wished she could be happy for me, happy that I'd found someone to love, and who loved me too. “I'm sorry if you're disappointed in me,” I said, “but I'm just trying to get on with my life. I hope you can get on with yours eventually too.” The next time I flew out to San Francisco, there was a Gay Pride bumper sticker on the back of her car. She was wearing a rainbow-striped pin on her denim vest, and she had a key chain to match. She looked more like a lesbian than I did, and I felt a little uneasy. “You know, this might not be forever,” I said.

“So it's a choice?” my mom asked me.

“I guess,” I said. “I don't know.”

“Because if it's a choice, if you're not gay”—in spite of her props, the word was obviously hard for her to say—“then why would you choose to make your life harder than it already is?”

 

“Hi,” Carolyn says, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. “What did your mom send us this time?” She takes the envelope from me, reaches inside and pulls out a red fleece garment that looks like a giant version of the footie pajamas that I wore as a kid, except that instead of having two legs, it's just one big tube with arm holes.

“It's a sleep sack,” I say. “Does my mom think I'm still two?”

“Your mom sends the best stuff,” Carolyn says.

“Are you kidding?” I say. “I've never seen anything less sexy in my life.”

“Who cares?” she says. “It looks warm.”

“You can have it,” I say.

“Thanks.” She takes it from me and heads back upstairs, closing the bedroom door behind her.

Ever since the cat died, things between us have been even more strained. After we buried Amana's body at the edge of the river, we went back home and she collapsed on the futon in our bedroom, crying as she stroked the pillow—still matted with Amana's fur—while I stroked her arm. I asked what would make her feel better. “We could go for a walk on the beach,” I suggested. “We could take a drive or go to the baths…”

“I don't want to take a bath,” she said. “I don't want to
do
anything.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just want to help you feel better.”

“I don't want to feel better,” she sobbed. “I'm sad, and I want to be sad, if that's okay with you.”

“Of course not,” I said, lying down beside her. She cried like a small child—openly, unembarrassed, snot streaming from her nose—and I thought of how young she'd been when her mom died, how a part of her had been forced to grow up right then and a part of her probably never would. She rolled over and I spooned her, tucking my knees into the backs of hers and holding her close. “That boy killed our cat,” she kept saying, “and we're going to have to keep seeing him every single fucking day.” Looking out our window, at the drawn blinds covering Haruki's, I wondered if he was inside. “I'll bet that's the last time Ogawa-san returns our trash,” I said. “If I'm right, it's almost worth it.”

“Almost worth it?” she choked.

“Of course not,” I said. “I was just joking…”

She flipped over and I noticed that her breath smelled funny, like the rotten water in a vase holding the slimy stems of an old bouquet, or the stale mouthpiece of a telephone.

“Why aren't you sad?” she asked me.

“I am sad,” I said. “Of course I'm sad.”

“You don't seem sad.”

“Just because I show my feelings differently—”

“I used to think that you were afraid of them,” she said. “I used to think you held them in so tightly because they were so intense. I thought you'd buried your sadness deep inside of you where you wouldn't have to feel it all the time. I got that. But now I'm starting to wonder if you have any feelings. Maybe you're just cold.”

“If you think that,” I said, “then you don't know me at all.”

I left her in the bedroom and went downstairs where I lay on the brown vinyl couch, hoping that she'd come down after me, but she didn't. “Our cat is dead,” I said in a soft voice, trying to trigger the appropriate response, the wave of grief, the cathartic collapse. I was reminded of the hours and days and weeks after my dad died. Over and over I had to remind myself that he had committed suicide, that he was dead, and over and over I'd forget, and remembering was a shock every time. I had a hard time crying, even at the memorial ser vice, where my mom cried enough for both of us, accepting comfort from anyone who wanted to give it, weeping on the shoulders of near strangers. Like Carolyn, she kept asking if I was sad. Wasn't I sad? Of course, I said then too. I could tell that she wanted me to be sadder, or more transparent in my sadness, to share it with her, split the pain. But “sad” was a pathetic little word, too small to contain what I felt. I was a shattered windshield: one tap and I'd collapse. The whole world had been pulled out from under me and I was still waiting to fall. I had wasted tears on so many silly things. How could I cry for this too?