Picking Bones from Ash (5 page)

Meanwhile, my mother peeled off her clothes with unusually brisk movements. I did the same.

“Excuse me,” one of the women finally said, “this bath is not for
mura-hachibu
.”

My mother looked her straight in the eye. “Satomi and I are members of this town. You know that.”

“Well, but you do live near the train station. By those bars. Technically, you aren’t part of
central
Kuma-ume.”

“Yes,” agreed another woman. “Perhaps the next town over will not mind if you bathe there.”

Just then, a woman opened the sliding door separating the changing area from the actual bath. I caught a glimpse of women relaxing in the hot pools. I yearned to be in there with them, completely warm and nearly weightless. And clean. Then the door shut and the woman stood in front of it, arms crossed meaningfully.

“Did you see that?” I asked my mother once we had dressed again and gone outside.

She had tears in her eyes. “I didn’t think they would do that while you were here too.”

“This morning … ?”

“The same thing.”

The following day she went to the bath with me again as usual, and the women—a different group this time—once again prevented us from bathing. After that, my mother refused to go to the bath with me. “It’s not that I care,” she said. “I don’t. But I can see that
you
care so it’s better if you go alone.”

Tomoko’s mother invited us to come bathe at their home, and we did go once. But it was awkward. Tomoko and I weren’t really close anymore, and there was Tomoko’s mother speaking to us both with overeager enthusiasm, as though we were still best friends. We limped through the meeting halfheartedly, like bad actors in an even worse play. My mother resorted to other means after that. She sent me to the bathhouse by myself while she took a bus to the nearby temple, run by a famously compassionate priest and his mother. Every other day my mother assembled a small package of goods—
sake
or pickles she had made—and ventured to Empukuji for her bath.

But our problems didn’t end with the bathhouse. When my mother went to the vegetable shops to buy food for dinner, doors closed before she could enter. It fell to me to go shopping after school. Then business slowed in the
izakaya
. Only the most loyal customers, the men without wives, came in to drink. I noticed that my mother cut her weekly orders of beer for the store and that our meals became even leaner.

“Are we going to have to close?” I asked timidly one night.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother huffed. “Things won’t stay bad like this forever.”

But I wondered.

Of these things, though, the worst was the humiliation at the bath. For the very fact that others in the town thought we were unclean made me feel as though I was in fact dirty. During that period of my life, I began to inspect myself, my hair, the backs of my ears, and the bottom of my feet before I climbed into the water. I was doubtless cleaner than ever during this time, but you cannot endure such an active shunning without wondering if perhaps you have done something offensive after all.

“How long is this going to last?” I asked my mother one day.

“What?”

“You know.”

“Satomi,” she snapped. “I don’t ever want you to ask that question again. If you ignore this treatment, it will go away like a bad dream. I expect you to be tougher than this.”

She made fun of the townspeople behind their backs, calling them ignorant, like “ants who methodically dissect the same rice ball, when a nice
omanju
is sitting in plain view.” At night, she told me she wasn’t hungry and gave me the majority of the food. But as much as she insisted she didn’t care about our treatment, I know that she did. Her playful mood all but disappeared, and no matter how well I did in school or in my lessons, she couldn’t muster even the slightest words of praise.

Then, a few weeks into November, we had our first snowfall of that year. Overnight people in town began to wear quilted jackets made of indigo and stuffed with
wata
cotton or
mawata
silkworm fibers. Farmers wore straw snowshoes and snowboots into town. My mother put on a pair of heavy gloves and shoveled the snow off the entryway to her store.

“Satomi,” she called to me. “I need your help. Go to the market and buy an extra dozen eggs, three large
daikon
, and some fish cake. Hurry.”

I pulled on my boots and donned a thick jacket and strode out in the fading light to the nearest store.

That evening, a group of men, her old customers who’d been missing for so many weeks, burst into the shop demanding
sake
and
oden
to eat. “It’s so cold!” they exclaimed.

“I just couldn’t stand being cooped up with my wife for one more minute!” another declared.

My mother was all smiles. “What makes you think I’ll serve you anything after the way you’ve ignored me?”

“Aw, come on. We weren’t ignoring you. We thought of you every day! We missed you!”

She laughed and began to ladle boiled eggs and fish cake out of a pot of broth. The
izakaya
stayed open well past the hour I went to sleep, and I was only dimly aware of my mother slipping into the
futon
beside me, humming to herself. When I came home from school the following day, she greeted me with a girlish giggle. “I’ve been waiting for you! It’s so cold. Let’s go sit in the bath.”

In the warm water, the women gathered in groups of twos and threes, and all said the same thing. It was so cold already, and not even December yet! Thank goodness for the bathhouse where we could all warm up.

And so our public humiliation had ended on account of a change in the weather.

I will never know the extent to which our treatment by the other women in the town affected my mother and prompted her to do what happened next. She must already have been thinking about my future. She knew that if I were really going to be able to compete against that Korean girl and others like her, I was going to have to have better lessons.

Toward the end of winter, I noticed that my mother was eating very little again. She’d also taken to checking and rechecking the mirror and patting her flushed cheeks.

“Do you have a fever? Are you sick?” I asked her, point blank. Up until then, that was my greatest fear. I was terrified that my mother might catch tuberculosis or some equally insidious disease.

“No,” she panted. “A little nauseous, maybe.”

She was thirty years old. I thought of her as an old woman, but I’ve come to understand now that she was still young enough to have plenty of dreams, to want to see herself as a romantic prize.

At dinner one evening, not too long after the first cherry blossoms had released a froth of pink against the green of the mountains, she told me that she was tired of working at the bar. She wanted me to live in a house where I could have my own room. She wanted us to have our own bath.

We were moving.

She was going to get married.

Certainly the possibility had always loomed. She was good with men and more than a few had wanted to marry her. In the past she had always
demurred because, she told me, marriage would get in the way of our plans, by which I understood her to mean that a man would greatly interfere with her ambitions for me.

Looking back now, I think that she felt her plans had become more complicated than she’d anticipated. She must have realized that the shunning could happen again the moment the women felt compelled to enforce their judgments on us.

A Mr. Horie came to her rescue. She said they’d been friends for some time, though how this could be true and I not know about it seemed a mystery. Then again, there were hours of the day when I didn’t see her, when I was at school or at the piano teacher’s house, or, as I was still prone to do, exploring the woods for treasures. She might have been meeting with Mr. Horie then. He ran a fishing business near Hachinohe, a city so far north it was inhospitable to bamboo. Many boats bearing the Horie name braved the Pacific waters each morning to snatch purses of
bonita
tuna, squid, crab,
sanma
mackerel, and other seafood to send to the markets in Tokyo. My mother told me that the house in Hachinohe had a natural hot spring for a bath. “It will be like we’re in a
ryokan
every day,” she said enthusiastically.

Mr. Horie had two daughters a few years older than me; their mother had died two years ago after an illness. He was willing to buy me a proper piano and pay for my lessons, but in return, he wanted and needed a wife.

I knew from the moment I met the Horie girls that they would have joined in with the women in Kuma-ume to shun us in the bathhouse. They had that quality that sends married men running from their wives and into the shelter of a bar or an
izakaya
. It was an ability to look at you reproachfully, as though they just
knew
that you had done something terrible, even if they knew nothing at all.

Chieko was the older of the two. She was fifteen when I arrived, and very pale, with long straight hair and a face that could have been pretty, my mother liked to whisper to me, if only she tried. She was a hard worker, studying to an almost abstemious, Zen-like degree. I had good grades too, but I would never punish myself in the extreme way that Chieko did, and I found it amusing that I was able to be so much better a student with so much less effort.

“You roll your eyes and move your body too much when you play,”
Chieko complained to me about two weeks after I had arrived at her house with my ragtag wardrobe of hand-me-downs carefully picked and coordinated by my mother.

“That’s because I play with feeling.”

“Have
you
lost your mother recently?” she asked me sharply. “Talk to me when that happens and then maybe you’ll know something about the sincerity of feeling.”

Mineko was thirteen, but determined to remain eight years old for as long as possible. She had a little lisp, which apparently people had made the mistake of telling her over the years was charming, and she liked to twist her body from side to side as she talked, as if she believed this made her girlishly appealing. She was constantly scribbling secret observations on little pieces of paper that she stuffed in crevices around the house. Then she spied on us to see who would find her notes.

My mother would uncover scraps of paper that read: “Today you looked at my mother’s funeral portrait for an hour” or “I do not like
satoimo
sticky potatoes for dinner” or “Satomi should learn to line up the toilet slippers when she is done going to the bathroom.” My mother would gather up the notes for Mr. Horie to read at dinner. He thought they were very funny.

To my surprise, my mother took to writing back on the notes and putting them where she had found them. In her lovely handwriting she would pen: “Your mother was very beautiful” or “I will try to give you extra fish cake instead” or “I will speak to Satomi about this.” I wondered why my mother had fallen so naturally into this game. One night, looking up at the sky, I remembered. My mother had once lived in a house full of sisters.

Although Mineko was different from her sister, they were very close to each other. One of their favorite activities was to follow the daily
manga
that appeared in the newspapers. They would sit side by side and look at the drawings and make little comments about the stories and sigh and speculate on what might happen next.

Mineko herself was a fairly good artist. The first month that I was in that large house with its glossy black wood hallways and the kitchen with the bright-orange linoleum floor, Chieko quietly celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Mineko gave her sister a large hand-drawn portrait of their favorite
manga
character, a hero named Antares. That night, and for many nights after, both Mineko and Chieko refused to sleep until they’d kissed
the portrait of Antares on the mouth and said good night to him. Over time, the lips on his penciled-in face grew darker and grayer, and I hated to think what kinds of germs were congregating on just that one part of the paper. But such, I suppose, is the power of a romantic idea. It goes without saying that I was never allowed to kiss Antares.

After that Mineko began to draw a lot. Instead of notes, she started leaving sketches around the house. I found one of her sketches in a glass cabinet. My mother had sent me to bring four glasses to the kitchen so we could refresh ourselves with
mugi-cha
. There in between the two yellow glasses was a piece of paper, hastily folded, the corners not lining up. I opened it.

The picture, while done in the hand of a child, was still quite good. There were two animals. A cat was admiring one particularly long eyelash in the mirror. The other animal, a badger, stood on its hind legs, eating a bunch of candies till its belly had become distended so it looked like a balloon. The drawing was a caricature of my mother and me.

I said nothing, just sat in the kitchen while my mother patiently poured the tea and tried to engage the girls in conversation. Cavorting with the enemy, I thought. I didn’t have the chance to tell her about the note in private, for we no longer slept together. I’d been given my own room, a somewhat hastily converted storage chamber that had formerly held canned goods and an old wooden
tansu
chest and was now just large enough for a desk, a closet, and enough
tatami
space for a
futon
for one girl. I lay there at night and wondered what other secrets the house might hold.

As it happened, the secret observations were everywhere. The cracks in the floor whispered comments, windows yawned with insults, drawers squeaked with complaints. Always I was an awkward animal pounding away at the piano while the other girls in the pictures laughed at me or mimicked my sad, clumsy ways. My mother was sketched in exaggerated ballerina poses, or shown wearing a
tengu
mask with its red face and long nose while she was making powdered tea. She wore outrageous
kimonos
with the
obi
backward, or tottered around on high-heeled shoes like a flashy
oiran
prostitute. More than once I considered running away to our old apartment. My mother would come and find me and I would convince her that we could go on living there as we had before, with the bar downstairs to pay for my lessons and me hunting for vegetables during the day
to supplement our diet. But I never did run away. I wasn’t even really sure which way our old house lay.