If You Follow Me (21 page)

“Bullshit,” I say as we walk up the school stairs. Each one dips down in the middle, a smooth stone trough. Miyoshi-sensei went to school here. I wonder how many times he has walked up and down this flight of stairs.

“Bullshit is bad word,
ne
?”

“Sorry,” I say.

“That's fine. For me, ‘bullshit' has no meaning.”

“It's what you say when someone's not telling the truth.”

“Of course,” he says. “I know usage of the word bullshit, but I can't feel it. It's same when students speak English. Words have no power. They are just…having fun.”

“Making fun,” I correct him. He sinks into the faculty room couch and I sit next to him, careful to leave a foot of distance between us. He offers me a cigarette and I accept, lighting it for myself. “How do you say ‘homo' in Japanese?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

“Homo,” he repeats.

“Yeah,” I say. “In Japanese.”

“It's same,” he says.

“I think Nakajima knew what he was saying when he called me a homo.” I recall the many times I've seen Nakajima bike past our house on the river path, how he slowed down to watch me and Carolyn hanging up our bras and underwear to dry from the clothesline.

“He was talking to me,” Miyoshi-sensei says.

“What?” I say. “Why?”

“He calls me this often. It's his favorite way to get…under my skin?”

“We shouldn't let them get away with it,” I say.

“I told you before, these boys are like fish. Can fish even see us, with their small, cold eyes? I don't think so.”

“But they're not fish,” I say, my frustration boiling to a hot, thick stew. “They're our students, and we don't even try to discipline them. We're not really trying to teach them anything either. We're just killing time, and it's driving me crazy. I mean honestly, look at that textbook.” He glances down at the cover of
English for Busy People
, at a row of cartoon figures wearing hard hats. “If I were them,
I wouldn't pay attention either. We're certainly not making our English lessons fun or useful.” He takes a drag off his cigarette, holding the smoke in as long as he can before exhaling. “Fine,” he says at last, rolling up the textbook and sailing it across the faculty room, where it lands in the recycling bin. “I give out.”

“What do you mean?” I laugh nervously at what I'm sure must be a joke.

“For three years I taught these boys,” he says. “Do you think I didn't try every method to hook their attention? I brought pop music. I played Hollywood video. I took them to MosBurger. My treat! Nothing succeeded.” He looks at me directly. “When I think about these boys, even when I am home alone in my bed, I feel sick. If you think you can do better, I hope so too. From now on, I leave everything up to you.”

“Miyoshi-sensei,” I say, “you're a great teacher. I wasn't trying to—”

“Gambatte
,” he cuts me off. Good luck.

gokiburi:
(
N
.)
cockroach

C
arolyn is sorting things into three piles: hers, mine, and discards. I am pretending not to watch as I eat a bowl of noodles, perched on the edge of the
gokiburi
couch, its vinyl the same glossy brown as the shells of the roaches who camouflage themselves against it. Now that it's spring, the
gokiburi
have returned in droves. Amana used to hunt for them in the middle of the night, scampering over our bodies to drop her twitching prey between us, expecting praise. It was a horrible way to wake up, but at least the roaches were sufficiently stunned that we could wrap them in toilet paper and flush them away. Now we have no alarm system, and it's like they know it. They are brazen, these
gokiburi
. They are huge, glutted on our waste. They can fly.

“Stop it,” Carolyn says, as I jump up from the couch to inspect the cracks in the vinyl where the roaches like to hide in the foam. “You're making me paranoid.” I tell her that I was sure I felt the brush of feelers against my arm and she reminds me that cockroaches aren't dangerous. “They might not bite,” I say, “but when my dad was working in the ER, he had to remove one from a little girl's ear.” She grimaces and I continue. “The girl could hear it in there, burrowing
deeper and deeper. Did you know that cockroaches can't move in reverse? They can only move forward. So once it got in there, it was stuck. It couldn't get out even if it wanted to.”

“Stop it,” she says again, sealing a box with tape.

Even though it's only April, Carolyn has started a countdown of the number of days we have left in Japan. When I ask what she wants to do next, she always says that she doesn't know yet, we still have X days to go. She never loses track of that number. She crosses it off in the morning.

“We should get away for the weekend,” I say. “Let's go to Kyoto.”

“We just went there last month,” Carolyn reminds me. I suggest that we go back to Tokyo, where we haven't been since our orientation, and she tells me that it takes eleven hours by bus and we'd just have to turn around as soon as we got there. “I wish I could get away from myself,” she says. “Be someone else for a weekend. Wouldn't that be great? To be someone else for a change?”

“Would you know that you were someone else?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “You'd be able to forget all about yourself.”

“Then wouldn't that other person's problems just feel like your own?”

“At least they'd be different problems.”

“I'd like to be you for a weekend,” I say.

“That's creepy.” She shudders. “It's like you want to spy on my thoughts.”

“No I don't,” I defend myself, stung. “But what's wrong with wanting to know what you're thinking? We hardly talk anymore.”

“What do you mean?” she says. “That's all we do. You're the only person I talk to.”

“You talk to Joe,” I say.

“Have you been reading my journal?” she asks.

“Of course not,” I say. Not that I could, I might add. Carolyn has started sealing the pages of her journal with tape. I only know this because the notebook happened to be lying there one day when I needed to take a phone message from her dad. I held it up to the light, but the writing was too faint to make out. “Are we breaking up?” I ask, pushing out the words. “Because if that's what's happening, I wish you'd let me know.”

“I just need some space,” she says. “We're buried under so much junk here. I want to send some boxes home so that I can enjoy my last four months.”

“Well you can't take all the pickle dishes,” I say. “We bought those together.”

“At the hundred-yen store,” she reminds me. “I'll give you the money to buy your own set if you want.”

“That's not the point,” I say.

“What is the point? Making this as hard as possible?”

“It should be hard,” I say. “If we're breaking up.” This time she doesn't answer. She just picks up another pickle dish. “What if I want to eat pickles?” I say, and without looking up she sails the dish through the air. I manage—barely—to catch it.

“You almost hit me!” I say.

“That was the point,” she says. “Haven't you ever hit someone?” Before I can answer, she rolls her eyes and says, “Of course not. You never lose control. You're always standing back, watching yourself. You're like an understudy in your own life.”

I want to protest, to say how wrong she is, that I lose control all the time, but I know she wouldn't believe me, even if I told her that I almost hit a boy in class today. Almost doesn't count. Almost just proves her point. So I take the pickle dish, hold it overhead and throw. She ducks and it crashes into one of the windows looking out onto the storage area. Rain blows through a hole in the rusted alumi
num siding, streaking the
tatami
. For a moment, we just look at each other. Then the doorbell rings and she jumps to her feet. “Ogawa-san must have heard the glass break and sent the cat murderer to investigate,” she says. “I can't deal with him tonight. You made this mess, you clean it up.”

Every month or so, Haruki Ogawa delivers a peace offering. At least I think they're peace offerings. He has brought us a tin of roasted tea, a tray of grilled
mochi
, a bag of sweet bean cakes wrapped in moist cherry blossom leaves. His grandfather always watches from the yard across the street to make sure that he returns empty-handed, which is impossible when Carolyn answers the door. She refuses to touch any of it, even the fruit, convinced the boy might have injected the rind with poison. She shuts the door in his face and he has to come back again to complete the transaction with me.

But tonight I open the door to find not Haruki but Miyoshi-sensei. It takes me a moment to recognize him, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, his hair damp from the rain and falling in his eyes. He apologizes for disturbing me at home in the evening, saying that he has something important to discuss, something that couldn't wait. I invite him in with a heavy heart, wondering what I did wrong this time. As he steps out of his Converse, he surveys the garbage bags filled with Carolyn's discards crowding the entryway.

“Now I understand why you don't have any
gomi
troubles recently,” he ruminates. “Maybe it's because you aren't throwing anything away.”

“That's not garbage,” I say. “It's stuff that Carolyn is sending home.”

“She is moving out?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “Just clearing some space.”

“Ah,” he says, eyeing the countdown on the refrigerator. As I lead
him to the living room, we pass the kitchen where one bag that actually contains garbage is lying tipped on its side, exposing an empty carton of aloe juice and an eggshell filled with coffee grounds. At least he can see that we're sorting our burnables. He sinks into the
gokiburi
couch and I bring him a cup of tea in a ridiculous Mickey Mouse beer stein—the only cup I can find. He hands me a letter and sips his tea in silence while I read.

At the end of the month, the mayor of Eureka, California, is coming to Shika to sign a sister-city contract. There is going to be a festival to welcome him, and I've been asked to run the English speech contest, for which no one so far has volunteered.

“Your English has been very useful to me,” I say. “You've explained so much about Japanese life and culture. If not for you, I wouldn't even have known where to throw my garbage away.” He raises one eyebrow, then looks over at the trash bag tipped on its side. “Okay,” I concede, laughing. “Maybe that's not such a great example.”

“You should see my own
gomi
bin,” he says. “Filled with paper balls. When I try to write my speech, my pen becomes my enemy.”

“I love the way you speak English,” I say.

“The way
I
speak English?” He raises his eyebrows. “Is it so different?”

“No,” I say. “It's just that you have a unique way of putting things.”

“I'm happy you think so,” he says, sounding miserable, “but I can't write this speech. I can't write in English. It's too difficult.”

“Of course you can,” I say, holding up the letter he's just given me as proof.

“That's different,” he says, waving a dismissive hand. “When I write to you, I picture your face. It's like talking with you. So easy and natural.”
It is
? I think, but don't say. Instead, I suggest that perhaps he could write a draft of his speech as a letter to me, describing
different times in his life that English has been useful. I offer to help him turn it into a speech once he gets out a rough draft.

“I don't know,” he says. “
Maybe
I could write a letter to you…”

“Maybe
you could,” I agree, laughing again as I wave his letter in the air. It takes a moment, but finally he starts to laugh too, and soon we're both clutching our sides, doubled over, and I don't even realize that Carolyn is standing in the doorway until she clears her throat. She is dressed in sushi pajamas, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Hey,” I say. “Hiro just stopped by to talk about something important.”

“Hiro?” she says.

“Hiroshi,” he says, standing up and sticking out his hand, nodding like a bobble-headed dashboard doll. “Nice to meet you.”

“We've met,” she says. “It's kind of late, isn't it?”

“It's like nine,” I say.

“What's so funny?” she asks, and it's not that I want to exclude her from the joke, but I'm not sure how to explain. I ask if she wants to join us for a cup of tea, but she shakes her head and says that she's heading to bed. Lately she goes to bed earlier and earlier, as if in her haste to get through that countdown.

“I'm sorry to loiter,” Hiro says. “I should go.”

“You can finish your tea,” I say.

“Right,” Carolyn says. “I'm the one who should apologize for interrupting.”

After she heads back upstairs I want to say something, to explain why the good feeling has been zapped from the room, but Miyoshi-sensei claps his knees and stands up. Where he was seated, a huge cockroach slides into a rip in the vinyl couch.

“Sorry,” I say, disgusted and embarrassed. “I guess we should throw out that trash.”

“Mari-chan,” he says, “it must be kind of nice, living as a temporary person here.”

“No it's not,” I say. “And I hate when you call me a temporary person.”

“This was not criticism.” He begins walking down the hallway, stepping over the overstuff ed garbage bags. “Of course I know it's difficult to be a foreigner here in Japan. There are so many rules to follow. So many people watching all the time to see if you fail. But you can choose to follow our rules or not. When you leave Japan, you will leave everything behind, including reputation. It's a kind of freedom,
ne
?”

He opens the front door and the light from the entryway illuminates my car. With both sides crushed, it looks like it went through a trash compactor, or like it was squeezed by a giant pair of tongs. He doesn't say anything, but I know that what he sees confirms what he just said. I am a temporary person, leading a disposable life.