Picking Bones from Ash (37 page)

“Rolo and Rami,” my mother said. Behind her, the assistants struggled to pronounce the r’s and the l’s.

There was an armoire in one corner and a small couch in another, and the latter was covered with blue-glass-eyed blond dolls wearing pinafores. On top of a dresser, Japanese dolls of various heights wore
kimonos
in shades of red and navy blue.

“It’s a small room,” my mother said, “but quiet.” She picked a few dolls
up off the couch and held them to her lap, then sat down on the couch. With her petticoats and lace blouse she looked like a doll herself, albeit an oversized one. “Shinobu’s children were taken from her.”

The admission startled me. “Why? When?”

“A long time ago. She hasn’t seen them in years. When we were in college together, a man seduced her and she became his mistress. She thought he was going to keep her. It turned out he was looking for someone
like
her—a gifted musician—so he could produce children with talent. His wife is wealthy but not talented, you see.
Their
children all became bankers and he wanted some who would become artists.”

“That’s … awful.”

“She discovered she could cook. So she stays here and cooks for everyone and occasionally gives piano lessons when one of the girls is interested. Everyone, you see, does something.”

“I’m not asking to stay here for free. I just wanted to meet you.” I picked up the little red box with the bone in it and held it on my lap. “I’m feeling a lot better now. You could just take me back to the temple.”

This was not the response she expected. She smoothed the hair on the head of one of the dolls. Then she picked up another to hold along with the others. “What do adult mothers and daughters do in America?”

“They talk on the phone. They have lunch and they go shopping. I think sometimes they fight.”

My mother winced.

“Do you have friends?” I asked.

“Everyone here is my friend. Shinobu has always been my best friend.”

“I mean, outside of here.”

“Not really. Do you have friends?”

I thought about François and Akira. “Not that many. Most people at home think that what I do is strange.”

“Well, it is.”

I shrugged.

She sighed and stood up suddenly, then placed the dolls back on the couch. “I will keep thinking.”

“About?”

“What you can do.” She nodded. Then she wished me goodnight, reminding me that I knew where the bath was, and that someone was always
awake and keeping guard in the dining room if I needed anything in the middle of the night.

When I went to sleep, I kept the elephant and the lamb on the floor beside me. Once I woke up to see their plastic eyes gazing at me sadly. Then I went back to sleep and dreamed about a girl—or was it a woman—dressed in white and clutching two teddy bears on her lap as she sat on the couch. She gazed right at me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world that we should be looking at each other.

“How did you get in here?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. Then she smiled and closed her eyes and seemed to sway back into the sea of toy animals and dolls and they passed through her skin. “Oh,” I said, not completely disappointed. “It’s you.”

She smiled in salutation and then her dress and finally her face dissolved into mist. When I woke, I heard the space heater clatter to attention. The room looked completely normal and, slowly, I fell back to sleep.

I helped Shinobu with the housework in the morning, and separated the laundry, and helped her to cut vegetables. She was precise in everything that she did, and I felt clumsy by comparison. I could not cut the carrots into uniform pieces and she laughed when she saw my oddly shaped pellets in the glass bowl. I did not know how to slice a green onion finely enough. But still, we tried to work together. Later, she took me into the study, which was connected to the dining room, and seated me at the piano. She lifted the cover, placed a book on the stand, and pointed to the keys. “She,” she said.

“She,” I said.

She shook her head. “A, B, She.”

“C,” I said.

She nodded and pointed to a figure on the book. “She.”

“That’s C,” I said.

She struck a white key beside C and said, “D.” Then she pointed to a spot on the notebook again. Taking my unwieldy hands, she tried to guide me through a scale. My fingers felt fat. I imagined toddlers taking their first steps, or the one time I’d tried to climb a ladder onto the roof. “No,” I said to Shinobu. “I don’t think so.”

Shinobu nodded with encouragement. “She. D.” I tried to send my
graceless fingers up and down the piano. And I really did try. Shinobu was a good sport, laughing at my mistakes and patiently trying to fix my fingers as I wobbled through a version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Finally, I’d had enough of playing the piano, and though I was glad to see Shinobu smiling, I wanted to give my fingers a rest. “Shinobu,” I said to get her attention. Then I pointed at her. “You have children. Babies.” I cradled an imaginary child in my arms.

She grew sad then and nodded and held up two fingers as her eyes moistened.

“Satomi?” I asked. “Does she have any other children?” I pointed to myself and held up one finger. “Just one?”

It took her a moment to understand but then she nodded. “One,” she said, her voice hesitant in trying to speak my language. Then she pointed at me.

“Just me.”

Shinobu placed her hand on her heart. “Satomi,” she said, patting her heart a few times. Then she put her two fists together and separated them, as though to break an invisible object in the air. “Mother.”

“What happened?”

Between the two of us we did not have enough vocabulary to flesh out the story, but I understood the gist of what Shinobu had wanted to tell me. Between my mother and her mother, something had been broken. Then Shinobu pointed at me and put her hands together again. “You want me to fix something? Or the fact that I’m here means I’ve fixed something?” Shinobu laughed and shook her head regretfully and the two of us sat quietly for a time, and I was sorry that our language abilities made it almost impossible to discuss these difficult things that pained us both.

At dinner, I asked Satomi, “What happened to your mother?”

It took a moment for her to answer. “She became sick and she died.”

“How long ago?”

“This isn’t dinner conversation.” She smiled at me with her full, glamorous smile, the one that was supposed to keep me pinned in place, unable to press her further.

“Well, do you know where she was from? I mean, do you have brothers and sisters? Do I have more family I can see?”

“No.”

“No, there isn’t any more family for me to meet, or no you don’t know where she was from?”

My mother set her chopsticks down on the table and took a deep breath. She lit a cigarette and began to inhale and exhale fiercely. One by one, everyone around us stopped eating. I hated this feeling, that one person’s mood was responsible for everyone else’s, and I tried to fight her influence and to keep chewing and swallowing. Finally, she said, “I don’t know anything about her family, or where she was from.”

“Have you ever tried to find out?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I accept the life that I have here, Rumi.”

“Wouldn’t it be good to find out?”

“Why?”

“So … you would know?”

She smashed the cigarette in the ashtray. Her face became blank. It was the strangest thing. It was as though a curtain had simply closed across her heart and her face would no longer betray any emotion at all. I’d noticed versions of this behavior during my stay in Japan: how the professor had acted with propriety on our drive to Muryojuji as though he hadn’t teased me with the demon festival, and how Akira had retreated into a neutral pose in front of his family. It was a kind of disappearing act and I found it frustrating and almost alarming

“Satomi … ?”

“Please enjoy the rest of your food,” she said with exaggerated decorum as she stood up from the table. “I have work to do.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, but my mother had already disappeared from the room.

I turned to Shinobu, who had watched all this with an increasingly sorrowful expression. She, too, stood up from the table and retreated from the room in the direction Satomi had gone. The other girls would not meet my eyes. One by one, they ceased eating and left, and finally I, too, finished my dinner and made a hasty retreat to my room.

At breakfast the next morning, Satomi said to me, “I know you want to return to Muryojuji, Rumi. If you’d like, we can arrange for you to go today.”

“Today?”

“You are feeling better, aren’t you? And you’ve been asking to return.”

So, this was to be my idea.

She went on to explain, somewhat stiffly, that I was always welcome for visits, but there was now a great deal of work for everyone to do and if I was not going to be able to help her in some way, then it was best for everyone that I return to the temple. She spoke in vague terms, something about how nice it had been to meet me and that she was happy I was healthy. I only half listened.

Then I went to the room where I had been sleeping and changed into the clothes I’d worn on Osorezan, now cleaned and pressed. When I came back to the dining room, I found my mother, Shinobu, and a few of the assistants waiting. Shinobu was arguing about something with my mother, and Kumi and Keiko were hesitantly chiming in, clearly torn between the two women.

“Shinobu thinks I should take the day and go with you.”

I shrugged. I didn’t see how traveling together would change things between us. “It’s up to you. I mean, I know Masayoshi wants to see you. But I know you’re busy.”

My mother exhaled roughly. “He could come here if he wanted to see me so badly.” Shinobu began to insist on something again and Satomi rattled off a response. I stood and listened, feeling uncomfortable, until my mother again sighed harshly. “It’s true. I should thank him in person. I suppose we can use the driving time to do some work.” Then she walked briskly out of the room, calling back to us over her shoulder that she needed to get her coat.

My mother, Kumi, Keiko, Megumi, and I all left together in a small minivan, painted pink and white and made to look like a cat, with the headlights as eyes and special attachments to the side mirrors to look like ears. Kumi took the wheel, wearing white gloves and a little black conductor’s cap, while Shinobu waved good-bye to us, smiling and nodding, I thought, with particular intensity to me. The minivan was outfitted with a video screen, and as we drove to Muryojuji temple, my mother played tapes of her favorite cartoons for me, commenting on the characters and the settings and how her travels had inspired both. Now that I was in the thrall of her world again, her mood improved considerably. If she had
really intended to do any real work on that trip, I never saw her lift a pencil.

It was a long drive, perhaps four hours, and it became clear to me that my mother did not at all live “near Osorezan” as she had told me the first day I’d woken up in her house recovering from the gas. We stopped just once at a rest area to use the toilet and to buy some tea, and then we were on our way again. Eventually, Kumi turned off the expressway and began to take a series of increasingly narrow roads. I started to recognize my surroundings.

Muryojuji temple came into view as it had before, with the two priests standing on the cliff watching our van approach. We parked and climbed out of the van, stretched our legs, and bowed in greeting. Later, we drank tea and made small talk. Masayoshi sat like a man in his palace, while his twitchy Tomohiro eyed us all, ready to protect his father if need be. Satomi, the assistants, and I crammed all together on the other end, and Akira was by himself. I looked to him for some hint that he would acknowledge what had happened to us on the mountain, but he had retreated to a characteristic aloofness, nodding at me only once.

Masayoshi seemed almost amused to see my mother, as though she were a child entertaining him with her antics. For the first time since I’d met him, he shed his somber, grave demeanor to smile broadly. He interrupted her every now and then as she spoke, and then she would chastise him and he would blush.

I felt as though the two of them were bound together by invisible thread and between them was suspended a precious object. Pull one string too tightly and I imagined that the treasure would shatter. It had grown windy outside, and gusts of air battered the windows and ceiling. Meanwhile, Satomi and Masayoshi continued their game, maintaining a delicate balance, pulling against each other so hard over the course of the next hour, they seemed to have lifted one another into a room of their own, while around them, the wind seemed to whirl like a cyclone.

About an hour after we had arrived, Tomohiro went out of the room, returning with an envelope, which he handed to my mother. The tense atmosphere in the room took a turn. My mother became aware of the rest of us seated around her. Glancing at us all first, she briskly undid the clasp and pulled out two photographs. Her fingers trembled slightly while
Masayoshi spoke to her. Then Akira said something to her in Japanese and, after a moment, she slid the pictures across the table to me.

“Your grandmother,” Satomi said to me curtly. The invisible thread binding her to Masayoshi began to fray.

I saw a young woman standing outside a building with a sloped roof. She was very small and very serious, yet with a little bit of mischief playing in her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.

The other picture was a similar portrait of my grandmother taken by the same building, but at a slightly different angle. In this photo my grandmother was not posing alone. Another young woman stood next to her with a cautious, almost suspicious expression on her face.

“We don’t know who that is,” Akira explained, suddenly sitting beside me. “We think it’s your grandmother’s servant.”

The rest of the envelope contained documents, papers, and a small piece of wood, flat and five-sided, not like a pentagon but like a square house with a triangular roof on top. Traces of paint and writing clung to the surface. Akira explained to me that this was an old
emma
, or Shinto charm. Shrines made these tablets and sold them to the public, and most came with a little picture of the zodiac animal corresponding to the year in which it was painted. This
emma
had a monkey. Most of the time people wrote wishes or hopes on the
emma
, then left it at a designated place at the shrine where it would be blessed and burned, the smoke delivering the prayers to the gods. In this case, though, my grandmother had kept the
emma
, along with these two photos and the other documents my mother was looking at now.