Radiance (25 page)

“Oh my,” he said, unable to look.

He dropped his hat and it rolled down all three steps.

They sat out front, unsure of what to say to each other—the late sun behind the house no longer warming them. Daisy could hear Junie bouncing her ball in the Warburghs’ car port and the sound of the Good Humor Man ringing his bell. As the big white truck rounded the crescent, Jimmy Jr. and Joey Palmer came tearing from the direction of the fields, waving at the driver to stop.

“Would you like a Fudgsicle?”

Tom came back with two, the outer paper covered in shards of ice, then showed Keiko how to balloon the paper cover by breathing into it so that it slipped off easily.

After a while he spoke haltingly but eagerly about his family’s farm. He compared the fields around Riverside Meadows to the fields of Iowa, the Long Island potatoes to Iowa potatoes. There was a silence, during which he must have looked at the cloudless sky, the sun hitting the edge of the neighbour’s rain gutter, because after a while he compared the sky to the one back home, how it felt standing in a field as though on a tabletop, looking in every direction to see the sky so near the ground. “Like a huge bowl,” he said.

Walter came home to find the two of them still sitting on the front steps, Tom chewing his Fudgsicle stick. Daisy rushed out to introduce them. Walter shook hands calmly enough, though
Daisy noticed a small vein ticking in his right temple. “A friend of Keiko’s. You don’t say. Come on in then. Stay for supper—you’ve made enough, haven’t you, Daisy?”

At the table Tom caught Keiko’s eye, pointed to the blue Pyrex bowl piled high with steaming white potatoes. Potatoes—his special interest, Daisy thought. Oh, dear. But then he reached out his fingers to touch the deep blue of the bowl. “That’s the colour of the Iowa sky at dusk,” he said softly.

He smiled at her.

And through the thick mask of bandages she smiled back.

Often Keiko rested in the afternoon—lying on her made bed, or on the couch, while Daisy brought her Jell-O or soup. If she was sleeping, the neighbourhood wives gathered on the front steps, not wanting to disturb her. They whispered about her condition—was she healing, under those thick bandages? They asked about the exact status of the graft, the catgut sutures, but there was little Daisy could tell them. She had never seen beneath the bandages. It was, she told the women, a surgical task to unroll those layers of cotton gauze, open Keiko’s face to the light, wipe away the peroxide cream, clean the sutures with a Q-tip. It required Dr. Carney. The women nodded. Dr. Carney came three times a week, and the women became used to seeing his mushroom-coloured coupe driving down Linden Street.

“You’d better get Fran a chair,” Joan said one afternoon as they sat on the steps. “She doesn’t fit there any more.”

Daisy sprang up to fetch a deck chair from behind the house, but Fran reached up and squeezed her hand. “Don’t bother, I can’t stay. Ed’s expected. Ooh!” She squirmed and held her belly.

Joan looked at Daisy. “The baby’s kicking,” she said, holding Daisy’s eyes a fraction longer than necessary, those eyes of Joan’s, with their violent flecks of black against the blue. Daisy
had read in a magazine that dark flecks in an iris showed trauma, each spot marking a time of pain.

“I felt my baby kick once,” Daisy said. “Just once. I think it was the baby anyway. It felt like champagne fizzing in my stomach.”

“That’s what it feels like at first,” Joan said.

“Here—feel now.” Fran leant back, elbows propped on the step and pulled up her checked shirt. Daisy put her palm to the taut skin, covered in tiny pale hairs, while Joan watched proprietarily. The movement was sudden and sharp against her palm and Daisy jumped. Joan laughed.

“That was his heel,” Fran said.

L
ATE AFTERNOON.
Late summer. Fran wrapped a strand of Keiko’s hair onto one of the foam rollers from her home permanent set, clipping a strand of it in place. She worked slowly. Keiko’s hair was fine, and though it had grown since she had arrived, it only brushed her shoulders.

They had just heard on the radio that a group of housewives outside Chicago had begun to collect children’s teeth to protest atomic testing. So far they had collected a hundred. They planned to get them tested for strontium-
90
.

Slowly, carefully, Fran wrapped another strand of Keiko’s wet hair around a roller.

“And what is the Hiroshima Project doing?”
Irene’s voice speaking to Daisy on the telephone had been squeaky, out of control. “They’re collecting teeth and we’re doing nothing. Am I the only one who notices any more? You know,” Irene added, musingly,
“I’ve never heard Keiko say an actual word about the bomb. Not once in all this time. How do we even know it was the bomb that damaged her face? Maybe she was caught in the firebombing in Tokyo. You know it caused more destruction than Hiroshima? Maybe she’s not a war victim at all. Maybe she burnt herself with a pot of soup.” There was a pause. Irene was probably searching for her cigarettes. Daisy heard the click of Irene’s lighter. She was high up in her
Sunday Review
office, probably standing by the window, looking out at the people far below on the street. They’d be small—not the size of ants, but miniature people nonetheless.

“Maybe she never planned to speak, have you thought of that? Maybe she always planned just to come here, get her face fixed—an operation costing us, what? Thousands of dollars—and then leave. Go back to Japan. Go to hairdressing school.” Irene laughed.

“You’re not being fair.”

Again Daisy heard her drag on her cigarette. “She’s a sly one.”

“I have to go,” Daisy said.

“Yes, you go—but make sure she knows she’ll be speaking at any number of public venues soon. And remind her about the H-bomb, will you? It can kill three hundred times more people than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Shouldn’t that mean something to her?”

In the kitchen, Keiko was standing behind Fran now. On the table they had laid out the things they needed to do each other’s hair: rollers, bobby pins, hair spray, setting lotion, barrettes. Daisy watched as Keiko parted Fran’s hair down the centre, then parted it again, from the centre to the ear, rolling the strand in a sponge. She wore Walter’s pale blue cardigan, the one with leather patches at the elbows. Under the sweater she had on a loose housedress that Joan Palmer had given to her—rayon, with forget-me-nots in blurry bunches.

“That was Irene.”

Daisy waited, but neither Fran nor Keiko said a thing. Keiko squeezed some blue setting solution onto a plate, and then combed it through Fran’s red hair. She wrapped a strand in a foam curler and clipped it. Daisy could imagine the pleasant weight of it on Fran’s scalp.

Daisy looked hard at Keiko, but she was studying the sponge on one of the rollers. She’s sly, Irene had said. A word that sounded like what it meant: thin and wily, able to change shape according to what was called for. Daisy watched Keiko’s fingers on the sponge-roller, her soft nails, almost like a baby’s. She remembered Fran saying that the best way to cut a baby’s nails was to bite them off as the baby slept, rather than using scissors.

T
HE DAYS WERE LONG NOW
. Pale light streamed through the window at
4
:
00
a.m., followed by bursts of robin song. Night didn’t fall until after nine. On days Walter went to town, Daisy would ask if Keiko wanted to walk to the store, or drive to the beach. But as often as not Keiko declined, saying she was tired. She would have one of her long showers, then the rounds of visitors began. Fran, with Patti under her arm.
(Can Keiko come out to play? That
was what Fran’s visits were like.) Then Joan and Evelyn, carrying platters of squares or brownies, wanting the strange taste of Daisy’s house, which was better than a lunchtime gin and tonic. Then along sauntered Tom, strolling up Linden Street from the train station.

Daisy watched Keiko, noticing how easy she was with them all. There was something missing in her during these daylight hours. Then, when Walter arrived home, Keiko’s orbit again subtly switched, as they talked in low voices on the back porch, or in the living room.

“Will you work on your book tonight?” Keiko’s voice.

Daisy was in the kitchen, whisking lemon and eggs for a mayonnaise. She couldn’t hear Walter’s reply for the life of her, though she strained to hear. Anyway, he wasn’t writing any more. He must have hit a snag, or he just preferred this—to laugh quietly, out of her hearing, to speak quietly, letting his words form as they would. Any shape acceptable. Daisy thought of the invisible horses moving steadily into the movie theatre—how hard he had laughed at that simple idea.

More whispering. More.

Daisy put down the bowl, spilling mayonnaise on her dress, and went to the living room. They were sitting on the couch, a magazine spread on their laps. It showed a picture of a television set—a ruby console, burnished cherrywood. He looked shyly at Daisy, as though caught in an act he couldn’t altogether explain.

Cherrywood, the ad said, real veneer.

“A television!” she said, as though it was the first time such an idea had ever occurred to her. “But you’re a radio man, aren’t you, Walter?”

He shrugged, sheepish, but full of sly mischief too, as he must have been in the days before she knew him, out on the town with David Greenberg, throwing rocks at Trixie Baxter’s window.

After dinner Walter walked, as he always did, out the door, past the turnpike. She imagined territory more alien than anything in the triangle of Riverside Meadows, Stoney Creek and the Parkway. She imagined pine forests, the earth covered in thick layers of needles.
That was how their days went, but nighttime was different. More than once, at midnight, or one in the morning, Daisy would be woken by Keiko calling out, fumbling at the window latch. Daisy went to her. Because of the sleepwalking she had to go. She sat beside the girl and spoke to her softly, lulling her back to sleep. Once, while Daisy sat at the end of the bed, rubbing Keiko’s feet, the girl said,
You are like my mother.
But, of course, Daisy knew better, because of the photograph: such a pretty mother, and so slender. Still, she liked the idea.

“How so?” she asked. “Is my face like hers?”

“Your expression. It is your expression.”

There were other conversations too. At night, her bandaged face turned to the wall, Keiko said all sorts of things she didn’t say in the daytime, as though night had erased the distinction between them. Perhaps Dr. Carney had been right about one thing, even as he was wrong about most: the pressure to tell her story seemed to have started a flow in her. There was so little time left now, before the bandages would come off and the speaking tour would begin—and Keiko seemed, almost, to be rehearsing what she might say, lightly circling closer to the unthinkable.

She had come all the way to Manhattan to erase the scar, but there were things, after all, that couldn’t be left behind. She had stolen a lipstick. She had lied to get out of school. Later, she had walked to the bridge—the bridge near the Inari shrine. When people asked for water, she had said sorry, no, I am looking for my mother. Forgive me, I can’t. The bridge was at the centre of the worst memories—that much was clear.

“You’re young,” Daisy said. “You don’t realize that now, but you are.” She wanted Keiko to understand that things can be left behind, no matter how terrible. To illustrate what she meant, she described her miscarriages. She didn’t go into detail: it wasn’t to
expiate her own sorrow that she spoke, but only to help the girl see how the healing could happen. She described the baby—how something had been wrong with it, which she was sure she herself must have caused. How it was taken from her before she could hold it, or cover its face with a handkerchief.

Keiko was silent a long time.

“Did you say a prayer?” she asked at last.

“There wasn’t time. But if I could have, I would have said a prayer.”

“Tell me what you would have said.”

“I’m not sure. Something from chapel.”

Again she was silent, absorbing every word. Then she said, “You would have covered its face with a handkerchief?”

“Yes, Keiko. That is what I would have done.”

She lay down beside Keiko in the bed, Keiko making room for her, their two heads on the same pillow.

Her speech must have had its effect, because Keiko began to speak about what Dr. Carney and the others had done to her at the hospital. Done or not done. From one angle it was all quite normal, just the sort of treatment any medical establishment would give a Hiroshima survivor in a hospital. From another angle, it was darker. Everything was like that now: carrying a double shadow, so that you could never be sure if what you saw was strange or natural.

That first day in hospital the nurses had had her take her clothes off: a perfectly normal preliminary. She had stripped, folding her clothes neatly, placing them on the orange chair. Then she had lain on the table, covering herself with a sheet. The table was cold and gave her goosebumps.

When Dr. Carney came in, he told her to put her feet in the stirrups. “It’s routine,” he smiled, but Keiko had never heard of this routine before. “This will only take a minute,” he said, and then he lifted the sheet and she could feel one of his hands, surprisingly
warm, palpitating her stomach, while the other found the mouth of her opening. While she stared at the wall, something cold slipped deep inside, pressing against interior walls. She spoke in Japanese, forgetting her English:
Why are you doing this?

He breathed hard through his nose and mouth. She had stared at the ceiling, counting, as the doctor pushed open her legs and felt inside with his hard, despotic hands, searching for whatever he was searching for. After a while he had left, with his metal shoehorn and his scrapings. The nurse came back and told her to get dressed.

That was what Dr. Carney had done to her: a routine physical exam.

Daisy tried to explain that such things were standard in America, but Keiko did not reply. Instead she said, “After the operation, he asked me questions.”