If You Follow Me (2 page)

“Temporary people probably shouldn't drive,” he warned me at the used-car dealership, having accompanied me there with reluctance to translate the epic sheaf of paperwork. “The rules here are different, the roads are
semai
, and how could you communicate in case of accident?” I assured him that I was a good driver, and that
since the only vehicle I could afford was so small—a Honda Today! with a two-cylinder engine and Big Wheel-sized tires—Shika's narrow roads wouldn't be a problem. This did not turn out to be true. A week after buying the car, I scraped the left side against a telephone pole, knocking off the handle and side-view mirror. A month later I skidded on an ice patch, crashing the other side against the Dumpster in front of Mister Donuts. Now the car looks like it was squeezed by a giant pair of tongs. Neither door opens anymore, and we have to leave both windows down at all times, so we can crawl in and out like thieves.

The upholstery is dusted with snow, which soaks through my tights and sears the backs of my legs. The heater activates the smell of mildew and cat piss. Keeping both windows down, I drive to the end of our block, turning onto Shika's commercial strip. I pass a shop with a window display of dusty trophies, sporting goods, and knitting supplies, a store selling tofu in buckets of cloudy water and mountain yams still packed in dirt, a police station that doubles as a post office, and a liquor store with a wall of bootleg videos and a cooler of imported cheese. This is downtown Shika, the town where the Japanese Ministry of Education placed us, despite our request to live in a major Japanese city.

I turn onto the coastal highway, a narrow ribbon of a road at the edge of the cliff s, high above the Sea of Japan, which stretches blue as a bruise all the way to Korea. Steering with my knees, I open the glove compartment and grope among the crumpled rice ball wrappers for the pack of cigarettes I forgot to throw away when I decided to quit. I light one and stick my head out the window to exhale. Harvested rice fields stretch to the bottoms of distant hills, and water surrounds the cropped brown stalks, reflecting the silver-bellied clouds. When the wind blows, the earth shimmers. Every quarter mile or so, a blocky apartment building sprouts from these
rice fields, deserted-looking except for the occasional futon flung over a chipping red fire escape. “Always air your futons,” Miyoshi-sensei told me when we got here, “so your neighbors will see you are clean.”

Carolyn is standing on the curb in front of Hakui High School, a three-story beige stucco edifice that looks like a carbon copy of Shika High School, down to the round analog clock set in the second story grille. She's shivering in a pink miniskirt, which she borrowed from me, a black cardigan, green argyle knee socks, and her ancient army boots. Her hair is growing out from its old buzz cut, the cherry dye faded to a more conservative auburn, and she looks almost girly. She glances around before lifting one leg into the passenger-side window and then the other, arching her back and lowering herself onto the seat like someone doing the limbo. White circles of chalk dust her breasts, where she must have rubbed against the blackboard while teaching. I reach out to brush off the front of her sweater, and she seizes my fingers as a pair of high school girls skip in front of our car, pausing to wave and yell, “Bye-bye Miss Kyarorin!”

“Be careful,” she says.

“Sorry,” I say, squeezing her knee instead.

“It reeks of cigarettes in here,” she says as she opens the glove compartment and fishes out the pack. Carolyn claims to hate everything about smoking—the smell, the taste, the look she describes as my “craving face.” She claims never to have been addicted to anything, only to smoke the occasional cigarette to make me feel guilty for corrupting her, but I think she wants a vice of her own, something to tether her. The matchbook is limp and she tears through a half-dozen matches before I take the cigarette and light it for her. She smokes like a kid: fingers stiff, cigarette close to her palm, lips pursed. I ask how her day was and she says that it was crappy.

“Didn't you read my fax? My supervisor kept insisting that I have a secret lover.”

“Do you think she knows about us?” My pulse jump-starts at the thought.

“She has no clue. She thinks I'm dating Joe.”

“Joe Pope?” I laugh. “What gave her that idea?”

“I don't know,” she shrugs. “Because we're both foreign, I guess. I couldn't possibly be with a Japanese guy, let alone another woman.”

“Maybe you were right about being open with people from the start,” I say. “They would've had to deal with it. Now it seems too late to tell them, like they'll think we were lying to them or something.”

“We were,” she says. “We are.”

Carolyn came out in high school. She has been with a thirty-year-old biker chick, a homeless busker, a divorced lawyer with two kids. We met in college, where we lived in the same dorm, our rooms stacked one over the other, and I sometimes think our relationship bored her in its simplicity. We had to make our own complications.

“I'm actually glad no one knows,” she says, throwing her cigarette out the window.

“You are?” I say. This is a first. “Why?”

“It's been hard enough. I don't want to stand out more than we already do.” She pulls off her boots, plants her heels on the edge of her seat and wraps her arms around her knees, looking out at the rice fields. I look out my own window, at the ocean pounding the cliff s. There is no guardrail here. It would be so easy to miss a turn, tumble over the rocks and into the water below. All you'd have to do is close your eyes. I don't want to think these thoughts. These are not my thoughts. But I can't help but see the world as full of traps. Tempting, if you lean that way.

 

“Just look at this place.” Carolyn shudders as I park in front of our house. A slumped and rusting storage area made of corrugated aluminum surrounds it, blocking all of the windows on the ground floor. This storage area is filled with the possessions left behind by decades of tenants, in boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. When she's bored, Carolyn likes to go shopping in storage. She has rescued a poster of the human skeleton with every bone labeled in Japanese, a set of lacquered nesting bowls, and two china bulldogs joined at the throat by a chain. She has a great eye for finding treasures in trash. She always gets to these things first, and then I wonder why I didn't notice them.

The cat climbs out of the drainage ditch, greeting us with a meow that sounds like a newborn baby's cry. Carolyn scoops her up, burying her face in the scruff of her neck. From the beginning, loyalties have been clear. We both love Amana but she belongs to Carolyn, who knows just how to pet her, how to play with her, when to pick her up, and when to leave her alone. She honors her feline whims and is rewarded with canine loyalty. Amana follows us whenever we go on walks, running in the bushes and then stalling until we catch up. Once we came out of the supermarket and found her waiting in the basket of a stranger's bicycle. She likes to sleep right in between us, the middle spoon.

“The
gomi
froze,” Carolyn says, as she sets the cat down and peers into the garbage can in front of our house. Sure enough, water has dripped from the roof and filled the can, melted and frozen solid, forming a giant cube of ice sealing in the garbage. She pushes the can onto its side and the cube slides heavily to the pavement. The setting sun, faint as a headlight pushing through fog, illuminates the cylinder of yellow-veined ice. Like scraps of insects trapped in amber, I see a wine bottle, a milk carton, kibble, and cigarette butts.

“It's a trashsicle,” I say.

“An unsorted trashsicle,” she says, looking at me from beneath one arched brow.

“At least Ogawa-san won't be able to get at it with his tongs,” I point out.

“We can't let him see it,” she says, looking around almost furtively. “Bring it inside and put it in the bathtub. After it thaws, you can sort through the melted trash.”

“Why is this my job?” I ask. “We both ate that stuff.”

“But you didn't sort the trash before you threw it away. You never sort the trash.” She's right. She bought a special sectioned garbage can, but it's hard to remember what goes in what compartment. There are so many rules to keep straight. When I make this argument, she rolls her eyes and says, “It's really not that hard. You just have to listen.”

“I listen,” I protest.

“Well we wouldn't be stuck in this house, dealing with the
gomi
police every day, if you'd listened to me in the first place.”

I can't argue with that.

gomi:
(
N
.)
garbage; trash; waste

T
he original
gomi
sin was not my fault.

Four months ago, we arrived in Shika on a hot and moonless night, after having spent five days at a training seminar in Tokyo with three thousand other English teachers on their way to every corner of Japan. We traveled twelve hours by bus from Tokyo to Kanazawa, then two hours by train to Hakui, then completed the final leg of the journey by taxi. By the time the white-gloved driver reached our new address, the only light came from his headlights, which shone off the aluminum siding, two yellow tunnels attracting a flurry of insects. The back doors of the cab opened automatically. The driver handed us our luggage, bowed and sped off. In the darkness, I fumbled to find the key that Miyoshi-sensei had sent to New York, along with a letter apologizing for the fact that his vacation coincided with our arrival, so he couldn't come to the station to meet us. I'd barely opened the door when the stench hit us, a physical blow.

“Something must have died in there,” Carolyn said, gagging as she backed away.

She wasn't that far off.

The refrigerator loomed inside the
genkan
, the Japanese entry
way traditionally reserved for taking off shoes, putting on slippers, and displaying a floral arrangement. It was a hulking vintage Amana with rounded corners and a cherry red handle, the enamel yellowing like old teeth and splotched with the pale ghosts of lost alphabet magnets, the words “jesussaves” arced at eye level. Pinned behind one remaining magnet was a receipt from a slaughterhouse in Nebraska. The previous tenants, a pair of Mennonite missionaries, had ordered half a cow to be shipped on dry ice to Japan. But in the month of July that elapsed between their departure and our arrival, the house electricity was cut. The stench of rotten meat had seeped out of the refrigerator and into the walls, which are made of a plaster that holds odor like an old sponge. We pinched our noses, but the smell was so foul that we could taste it.

“I told you we should've seen the house before signing a lease,” Carolyn said, pressing her face to the inside of her elbow. “I don't know why you were in such a big fucking hurry.” It didn't seem like the moment to admit the truth. In Miyoshi-sensei's welcome letter, he'd told me that aside from this house, “a traditional Japanese house built in the Showa period,” the only local apartments for rent were six tatami mat studios, “too small for two Americans to share.” Carolyn had brought up the idea of renting separate apartments of our own. She thought that living together for the first time in Japan could put too much pressure on our relationship, that we risked becoming overly dependent on each other. But I persuaded her that we shouldn't pass up the chance to live in a traditional Japanese house. I also convinced her to use the tips she'd saved waiting tables all year to cover the “key money,” six months' rent up front, which was nonrefundable.

“I'm sure the rest of the house is nice,” I said, crossing my fingers that this was true.

To get past the fridge, we had to turn sideways and squeeze
through the gap between the wall, which crumbled at the slightest contact, bits of plaster and twigs falling to the Smurf-blue carpet. A narrow hallway led to a room dwarfed by a ripped vinyl couch the color of root beer, which faced a big TV propped on a sagging cardboard box. In the bathroom, the toilet was a porcelain-lined hole set right into the floor. This “Japanese drop toilet” was something else Miyoshi-sensei had warned me of in his letter, something else I'd failed to mention to Carolyn, since it didn't sound like a selling point.

The kitchen at the back of the house was smaller than an airplane galley, smaller than the refrigerator itself. It had no oven, just a single electric burner lined with scorched aluminum foil. Carolyn loves to cook and had been looking forward to having her first real kitchen. Her face was blotchy, she kept retching, and I felt terribly guilty.

“I'm so sorry, Caro,” I said. “It's not what I pictured either.”

“It's just so dark and seedy,” she said. “It feels like an abandoned storage unit.”

“We can make it better,” I said. “You're good at that.” It was true. Her dorm room had been identical to mine, a shoebox with institutional furniture and zero charm. But with just a few yards of fabric, some plants and random thrift store finds, she had turned it into an oasis of calm. “But the smell…” She clapped her hand over her mouth and I was afraid she might throw up. Her nose is sharper than mine, and I was gagging too. The house smelled like death. I said that it would fade as soon as we took out the trash and she agreed, visibly steeling herself.

Carolyn is great in a crisis. She doesn't shirk from a mess, just cleans it up. Luckily, the cupboard under the sink was stocked with garbage bags and cleaning supplies. She had the good idea to smear toothpaste mustaches across our upper lips, and we laughed at how ridiculous we looked as we set to work. Into a trash bag I dumped
parcels labeled “ribs,” and “ground round,” and a disgustingly soft triangle marked “heart,” trying not to visualize its sloshing contents. She attacked the inside of the freezer with bleach while I carried the bag of trash down the street, holding it away from my body. I hoped that once the smell did fade, the episode would become a funny anecdote. I hoped we could still make a fresh start on our new life together.

When I got back, Carolyn was seated on the floor in the entryway, hunched forward, her back to the fridge and her hair falling in her eyes. I heard a rumble and at first I thought she was crying, but when she straightened I saw that there was a cat curled up on her lap. She told me the cat had been hiding behind the Amana, that she'd lured her out with a can of tuna she found in the cupboard. “Poor kitty,” she said. “Did they just abandon you here? You must be starving!” Someone had obviously been feeding her. She had the dark mask of a Siamese but the body of an overweight sheep, a belly that bulged over spindly legs that ended in ridiculously tiny paws. She looked like one of those old claw-foot bathtubs. Her stomach hit the stairs as she climbed them, leading us to the second floor room with its pitched roof, tomato red walls, silk-edged tatami mats, and large window—the only one in the whole house with a view.

“This is more like what I thought a traditional Japanese house would look like,” Carolyn said, sounding as relieved as I felt. She opened the window while I found two futons folded in a cupboard and unfurled them on the tatami. Too tired to undress, we lay side by side, listening to the cicadas chirp. They all kept the same rhythmic beat, and the sound reminded me of a car alarm. If I closed my eyes, I might have still been in New York.

The stench of rotten beef wasn't gone, but it had faded enough that I could smell other things: the slightly fishy scent of the woven straw mats, the powdery old cotton of the futons, the bleach on
Carolyn's hands, and the tang of sweat dried on her skin. We were alone for the first time in our new bedroom, but we didn't touch. In her stiff ness and silence I read a copy of my nervousness. It was as if we'd gotten ourselves this far on a dare and now there was no turning back. Not that I wanted to. I just didn't know what came next. Then the cat crawled into the gap between our bodies. She stretched long, rolled onto her back, and started to purr like a diesel engine. Carolyn suggested that we call her Amana, after the refrigerator she'd been hiding behind. “Amana,” I repeated, and the cat actually meowed. She acted like she knew us already, like she'd been waiting for us to come home and there we were.

 

The next morning, at dawn, I awoke to
The Four Seasons.
Staticky and loud, the music seemed to come from all sides, as if everyone in the neighborhood had simultaneously turned their radios to the same classical station. I joined Carolyn at the window, taking in my first daylit glimpse of Shika. The road was so narrow that I could have reached out and grabbed the boughs of the pine tree across the street. Planted in front of every house were telephone poles, topped with large speakers blasting Vivaldi.

“What is this?” I said groggily, “some evil alarm clock?”

“I've been up for ages,” Carolyn said. “I can't believe you slept through it.”

“Through what?”

“The smell,” she said, making a face. “I kept waking up gagging.”

“Poor Caro.” Now that I was awake I could smell it too, the sweet and putrid smell of decay. The circles under her eyes looked like thumbprints. She asked how far away the trash can was where I'd thrown the beef away and I pointed to the end of the block, where concrete stairs led to a grassy path bordering a river that looked as
green as Scope mouthwash. On the riverbank, a group of senior citizens was performing calisthenics to the sounds of Vivaldi. Following the lead of a lean, gray-haired man in a red jumpsuit, they all rose on their toes and then crouched down again, swinging their arms in unison. Carolyn said that since she couldn't sleep, she wanted to ask the neighbors if she could join them, but she didn't want to impose herself.

“I'm sure they wouldn't mind,” I said. “You want me to come with you?”

“That's okay,” she said. “I'd be too self-conscious if you were there. Besides, we should really try to make our own friends right away. I don't want people to think we're joined at the hip, just because we're living together. First impressions are so important here. They're almost impossible to undo.”

Carolyn, always a perfectionist, was determined to do everything right. For months she'd been studying Japanese, reading up on the culture in every spare moment. When we found out that we'd both been assigned to teach at schools on the Noto Peninsula, a region so remote and conservative that our Japanese teacher in New York likened it to rural Georgia, she was actually excited. As the only foreigners in the area, she said, we wouldn't be able to hide in a
gaijin
enclave. We'd have a rare opportunity to see the real Japan.

Before she left the house, she made me promise not to watch her exercise, saying that she'd be too self-conscious if she knew that I was looking. Carolyn hates to put herself on display, to make a spectacle of herself. But I couldn't resist stealing a peek. She bowed deeply, and our new neighbors stopped in mid-jumping jack to stare back at her. She's not a large person, maybe five foot five, with a delicate bone structure and a small face, yet she suddenly seemed enormous. She was taller than the tallest man in the group, and her cherry-red hair stuck up like a Kewpie doll. She was wearing voluminous baby
blue basketball shorts and a pink sports bra under a green tank top, and from a distance the pumpkin-colored freckles on her shoulders and thighs blended together. She looked Technicolor bright compared to the senior citizens in their earth tone tracksuits, as if she'd been painted into a black-and-white picture. They didn't seem to grasp what she was doing there, so to demonstrate she started doing jumping jacks, scissoring the air with her arms, her breasts bouncing. Watching them watch her, I felt embarrassed but also proud. She was so brave. After a moment, the old man who'd been leading the class either got it or gave in. He took over again, bending down to touch his toes, and the other old people smiled when Carolyn followed his example.

As
The Four Seasons
continued to play, I lay back down and thought about the last time I really paid attention to that piece of music. I must have been nine or ten, home alone with a cold, when I found the record in my father's hutch, its jacket printed with Botticelli's
Autumn
. I wasn't allowed to play his records, but I figured that if I was careful and covered my tracks, he'd never know. I'd heard the piece before—it was one of my dad's favorites—but for some reason, on that particular day, it matched my mood perfectly. I turned the stereo up as loud as it could go and bounced the needle back again and again to hear the best parts, twirling around the living room in the hazy golden sunlight, so entranced in my private rapture that I didn't notice my father standing in his hospital scrubs until the record started skipping where I must have scratched it. He didn't say a word. He just walked across the room and picked the record up, cupped in one large hand, and then he sailed it out the apartment window like a Frisbee, where it shattered on the sidewalk below. My mom swept up the shards from the sidewalk when she got home, but for weeks I'd find slivers of vinyl kicked against the curb, like splinters that only gradually work their way to the surface of your skin.

Carolyn returned home sweaty, red-faced, and grinning. She told me that the neighbors had been patient and welcoming, that she felt like she'd already participated in a real Japanese experience. “Participated instead of just observing,” she stressed. She was vowing to keep going every morning for the rest of the year when our doorbell rang. There stood the old man who'd taught the class. Still dressed in his red jumpsuit, holding a black plastic bag over one shoulder, he looked like a gaunt and angry Japanese Santa. He used a pair of long tongs to pull the parcels of rotten beef from the garbage bag, stacking them at our doorstep while he lectured us in Japanese, somehow managing to smile as he scolded us.

“I think that means ‘today we don't burn,'” Carolyn attempted to translate what he was saying. “Did you throw our trash in his garbage can?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “The can was at the end of the block, and it was empty.”

“Maybe that should've told you something.”

“What?”

“I don't know, but this sucks. We've been here less than twenty-four hours, and already the neighbors hate us.”

“Say something in Japanese,” I pleaded with her. “Tell him it wasn't our fault.”

“I didn't get that far,” she hissed.