Hopeful Monsters

by Hiromi Goto

  “Don’t be mad,” Hisako said. Her cheeks were flushed and her chest heaved up and down.

  “It’s just that we’re not making good time.” Megumi brushed off the snow that was piled on top of her okā-san’s toque.

  “Time! You said it was fifteen minutes from the car! We’ve been walking for over an hour!”

  “Well if you wouldn’t stop every ten steps you take!”

  Snow hissed and slithered off trees.

  “I’m not young, you know!” Hisako stated. “I’m almost sixty!”

  “You’re almost sixty?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Ummm,” Megumi bit her lip. Frowning. “I guess I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess I just thought you were, well, Okā-san-aged. But sixty?”

  “My heart is palpitating!”

  “Don’t exaggerate.”

  “It is. It’s roaring in my ears. What if I have a heart attack?”

  “You won’t have a heart attack.”

  “You don’t know where you’re going, do you?” Hisako held both hands to her chest like an alien was going to burst out.

  “I do! We’re almost there. . . .”

  “But you said fifteen minutes –”.

  “We walked in when there wasn’t any snow,” Megumi said weakly. And didn’t add that she’d tried some ‘shrooms that tasted quite healthy, and she was sure they hadn’t worked at all. She hadn’t felt particularly giddy or happy afterwards. Who knows, maybe it had altered time?

  “We’re almost there, I swear,” Megumi encouraged. “You want a little chocolate for energy?”

  “All right,” Hisako sighed. Puffing slower and slower.

  “I really want you to see those hot springs, Okā-san. They’re really special and I want to share them with you.”

  Hisako patted chocolate-scented fingers against Megumi’s rosy cheek.

  When Hisako finished her snack, Megumi shouldered the backpack again.

  “Why don’t I walk ahead and scout out the road. You just take your time and I’ll double back.”

  “You go,” Hisako nodded. “I’ll follow.”

  Megumi walked briskly, glancing up at the sky. The snow still fell, fat and smug and, somehow, not as pretty. But they were almost there! She knew it! And once they were in the water, the walk would be nothing. The warm sulfur breath of heat would melt the soreness from their muscles.

  The road pitched into a steeper grade and Megumi’s own breath wheezed in her chest. Guiltily, she looked around and her mother was a small figure trudging back-bent, like an old woman. What if she really did have a heart attack? Megumi didn’t know real first aid. She thought she could build a travois with the towels and some saplings. At least she knew how they were made in theory. . . . She looped back down the steep road to her okā-san.

  “I have to pee,” her mother wheezed. Great puffs of breath clouding around her head. The temperature was dropping.

  “Just pee here,” Megumi pointed.

  “Here?”

  “No one’s coming!” Megumi exclaimed.

  “But here. Plain as day. In the middle of a forest on a logging road. . . .” Hisako said unhappily. Blinking.

  “Animals pee here all the time!”

  Her okā-san’s lower lip trembled.

  “Oh, for god’s sake!” Megumi lowered the backpack and got out one of the bath towels. Held up the two corners to make a screen.

  When Hisako was done, she furiously kicked snow over the tell-tale yellow hole that melted deep into the drift.

  “No one’s going to know that it was a person,” Megumi pointed out.

  “I’ll know,” Hisako determinedly kicked some more.

  Megumi sighed. The sun was much lower. And the sky had a light mauve cast. “Let’s eat our lunch,” she said. Eyeing Marker Six that glowed tantalizingly from a tree.

  Hisako led Megumi a good distance away from the yellow snow. Megumi took out two plastic shopping bags for them to sit on, and opened their lunch of onigiris and sweet egg omelet. They didn’t talk. Just ate. Megumi realizing how bone-tired she was herself, when the food settled into her stomach. She fished her mother’s camera out of the pack and stood back to take a picture. Her okā-san’s cheeks were flushed bright red and her eyes drooped with exhaustion. Hisako smiled weakly, bravely holding up the water bottle for a pose. Snap. Shot of an almost sixty-year-old mother before collapsing from a heart attack. Young woman forces mother on winter hike, walks her to exhaustion. This and more on tonight’s news at ten. Megumi sighed. Glanced once more at Marker Six, then put away the camera.

  “Should we turn back after lunch?” she offered.

  Hisako looked up from her snow picnic hesitantly. “I know how badly you want to go to the hot springs.”

  “I don’t want to go so badly I’ll force you when it’s making you feel awful.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a holiday, right?”

  “You won’t be mad at me later?”

  “What do you take me for?” Megumi asked.

  “I felt like I was a child, being dragged along behind a mean mother. I even had tears in my eyes.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t know you felt that bad. We can drive down to the public one. It’s not as nice, but it’ll be warm.”

  “We’ve been walking for over three hours,” Hisako looked at her watch. “It’s getting kind of dark, don’t you think, ha-ha.”

  “It’ll be faster going downhill,” Megumi promised.

  It was faster going downhill, but it still took over an hour. Almost full dark by the time they were in the car, Hisako was sniffing and Megumi didn’t know if it was only her nose, or if she was crying. The snow fell faster and heavier and the road was a white blur. It wound and turned such lakeside curves that Megumi’s mother scrabbled in her handbag for Kleenex to wring.

  Finally, there was a faint glow of light among the screen of trees. Megumi sighed with relief. The parking lot was empty. The orange light was an eerie circle of bright in the falling snow. Hisako, too weary to talk, followed her daughter into the wooden building. They rented coarse baggy swimsuits from a bored young man and changed in a room that smelled of chlorine and wet cedar. Hisako sat slouched on a bench, too exhausted to be worried about catching communicable diseases from the public wood.

  “Megumi-chan?”

  “Hai?”

  “Why did you and Barney part ways?”

  Megumi gulped, ducked her head to pull on her swimming suit. Turned her back to stuff her clothes into a locker. “I was lonely,” she said slowly. Slipped the token into the slot and listened to it drop. “I was really lonely for a long time.” Megumi briskly turned around. “Shall we go?”

  The cold outside was a gasp against their skin, but the pool. . . . The dark night circled the bubble of light around the pool, and the water, lit from beneath, was a translucent blue green. The snow fell in huge wet flakes, straight up and down in the windless sky. Megumi could almost hear the hiss of ice crystals melting in the glowing water. She looked across to her okā-san, and they smiled at each other.

  “Oh,” they sighed, when they stepped inside. Ankles, calves, wet warmth curling up their knees and across their thighs. The liquid heat seeped into muscles, bone, and they lay back to float as if in outer space. Heat all around, only the surface chill of snow melting on their faces, their palms. Megumi reached out to hold her mother’s hand. Fingers clasped, they gazed upward, the snow falling down looked like stars flying past.

  Home Stay

  “I’ve got single portions of ground beef all froze up in the freezer. That standing one, not the lying down one,” Gloria yelled into the phone, across endless prairie miles, endless winter-dried coulees, sorry stretches of willow shrub and, miraculously, into Jun’s ear. “We should be back by eleven the latest and you can fry up ground beef even if it’s froze through. There’s spaghetti sauce in the pantry.”

  Jun pulled the receiver five centimetres away from his head. No
dded in reply.

  “Just keep on stirring is all,” Gloria shouted.

  “Don’t burn down the house, ha, ha,” Karl bellowed from the background.

  “Oh dear,” Jun heard Gloria murmuring to her husband as she set down the receiver, “he might not –” Click.

  Jun shivered, shuddered, his palms burning with ice, but he could not drop what he held in his hands. His stomach writhed like a salt-sprinkled slug and he could actually feel beads of sweat sliding down the bones of his spine.

  The stuff he had casually unwrapped, the stuff he had found in the upright deep freeze with its old-fashioned press lock. The stuff was not ground beef.

  Five bulbous goldfish.

  They were swollen fatter than bursting, eyes protruding gelatinous, each tattered fin, every glittering scale gleaming in a thin casing of ice. Mouths gaped forever.

  Salt pooled tidal in the deep of Jun’s mouth and he ran to the washroom, hands held out in front of him. Spine convulsing, his stomach milking bile, Jun didn’t drop the fish, just ran, cradling the very thing that revolted. But he made it, some strange sensibility made him toss the goldfish into the toilet, and he bent his back to heave dryly into the sink.

  Janine had called his back poetic. Said she could never imagine loving anyone with chest hair now that she’d been with him. Janine said a lot of things and meant them. At the time. But she had left him for good when he brought her Baywatch beach sandals as a souvenir from San Diego.

  “How could you?” she’d uttered coldly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know what kind of program Baywatch is?”

  “Well, it’s about lifeguards, I think. Does it matter?”

  “Jun,” Janine sank down to the floor.

  Jun blinked rapidly. Janine was so, well, strong. Never show weakness or be damned. He squatted down, peered at her face while he blinked and blinked. She swung away from his gaze.

  “I’m sorry?” Jun started.

  “Jun,” Janine pinched her lips until they disappeared inside her mouth. She caught his hands. Clenched. Let them go. “It’s not going to work out. I’m sorry. I thought I might get used to it, but I can’t.”

  “What?”

  Love is never enough.

  They had been married thirteen months.

  Jun never did figure out exactly what “it” was. He could only begin at the sandals and trace a vague route backwards. The sandals, the Japanese condoms, the butternut squash, the recliner. . . . Gloria and Karl had been horrified. And guilt-ridden.

  “It’s because we spoiled her something awful, she came to us when we were almost forty,” Karl apologized. Bobbing his bearish head.

  “She’s not a bad girl,” Gloria dripped tears. “She just gets set in her ways and nothing can change her mind.”

  “You’re a good son-in-law, Jun. I wasn’t none too pleased when we first met, to be honest,” Karl confessed, ignoring Gloria’s tiny jerk of chin. “I don’t hold much on folks marrying people from different countries, hard enough when you’re marrying your own. But you’re a decent man. Kind. Generous. Janine could have done a lot worse. She probably will,” Karl said. Picked at a blackened thumbnail that was starting to come off.

  “You move on in with us,” Gloria offered. “Until you get your bearings. It’s the least we can do.”

  “We need a young guy to look after our livestock!” Karl winked.

  Janine had wanted to keep the pizza shop they ran together. Jun didn’t care much for pizza or the business, so Janine bought him out, kept their old apartment, and Jun moved in with her parents.

  Jun quite liked the chores, the repetitive nature of caring for animals. The sensible dailiness about it was comforting and he slipped into the pattern with satisfaction if not pleasure. The dawn walk-about to look for early dropped calves. Hauling hay and feed to the wintering pasture. Milking the dreamy-eyed Jersey, old-fashioned style. The frantic flurry of chickens, Guinea hens, the wonder of their blue eggs. Slops and hash for the tragic pigs. Jun wished there were horses so he could write postcards to his college friends: “Married a white girl, got divorced. Now I’m a cowboy.” Just as well, Jun thought. He’d started noticing that things he’d thought were matter of fact, concrete, weren’t necessarily so. A wife. A home. What was solid could turn liquid. It confused him and made him terribly absentminded. Probably break his neck if he was on a horse.

  Jun dabbed toilet paper to the seam of his lips. He ran the faucet even though there was nothing to wash away, concerned that there might be an invisible film of odour on the surface of the sink and Gloria might wonder.

  Goldfish! Dead goldfish! What were they doing in the freezer? Jun shuddered and he clenched his teeth to bite back the salt that rose once more. He couldn’t bear to look at them, now golden blobs bobbing in the toilet bowl. Four hours until Gloria and Karl got home. He’d decide what to do with them after he’d settled his stomach, might help if he ate something. Tomato sauce was out of the question.

  The freezer door was still open, cold misting the kitchen. Jun hurried to press it shut and tried not to imagine what else might be frozen inside. A well-loved cat that Gloria and Karl had euthanized? A treasured parakeet? Still-born puppies? Jun shuddered, wrapped icy arms around his middle. Who could have done this thing? Practical Gloria? Tell-it-like-it-is Karl? What kind of person saved dead goldfish in a deep freeze?

  Jun boiled spaghetti, but didn’t bother with a sauce, just fried the noodles with a good dab of home-made butter, fresh garlic, salt, and parmesan cheese. He liked Gloria’s kitchen. She had the habit of keeping a kettle on low boil on the gas stove. For moisture, she said and Jun had taken to the habit too. The thin wet whine was almost companionable. He ate his simple dinner and drank iron-tasting water that came out of Gloria and Karl’s well.

  “Don’t go,” his mother had said, looking at the clock that hung above the doorway. The always-on television blared behind his back.

  Jun hadn’t answered. Blinked. Blinked. Had stared at the hot water pot, plastic decal of a tiger, peeling and brown-curled. It was so old. He should have got her a new one.

  “You’re the only one now.” His okā-san tapped tea leaves into the red-clay tea pot. She palmed the press on the hot water urn, hiss of liquid boiled, spouting. His mother poured tea with her diamond-shaped hands, nudged a cup into his palms. They drank. Jun, sip, sipping. The always-on television, pots dangling on hooks above the sink tinked through the dull roar of a semi-trailer on the raised freeway, Kubota’s, next door, laughing over a late dinner, the noodle soup seller playing his plaintive tune, a beacon for the last hungry business men straggling off a late subway. Jun sipped and sipped loudly until his cup was empty, until his mother reached out her hand. She poured more tea for him. They drank, filling the pot from the electric urn, nudging cups back and forth until all of the water was gone.

  “Well,” his okā-san wrapped up sweet bean manju for him to take back to college. “I guess it’s time.”

  Jun ducked his head and slipped his light jacket over his graceful back. The air was sweet with fall and the metal stairs click-clacked under his shoes. When he looked up, his mother was not watching from the kitchen window.

  His mother never cooked with butter, but that was something he’d taken to as well, since living with Gloria and Karl. Janine wouldn’t touch the stuff, called it teat grease. Cooked butter always tasted good, but Jun hated the way the stuff congealed after it cooled down. Traces left on his plate squirming with the pattern of pasta, weals of hardening grease like sand-worm tracks left on the beach. And how awful, the water. When Janine had first taken Jun to visit her parents and he tasted their well water, he had spewed it back out into the sink. Gloria and Karl had laughed.

  “It’s because there’s so much iron and the water’s so hard,” Karl had gasped. Wiping his eyes. “You’ll get used to it. And you can’t even tell when you make up some coffee.”

  Later on in the day, Jun had poured the kettle for t
ea and was shocked when chunks of white rock fell out. He had thought they were playing a trick on him, hard water, ha, ha. And when he told them this, they burst out laughing until they cried, Janine rolling on the linoleum, then running to the washroom, bladder held by desperate hands.

  “Come in,” his mother had said, a small dimple in her cheek though she wasn’t smiling. His okā-san in the steamy pool of the public bath and the water cupped her neck. Jun had taken small, careful steps on slippery tiles. Had placed one foot in the hot liquid.

  “Ohhhh,” he mouthed. One step. Then another. The silky water sliding up his thin and childish legs, his still baby-blue bum. The public bath echoed with the voices of other small children, laughing with mothers, grandmothers, aunties. But the steam softened the sounds cloudy. The other patrons were misty shapes, not solid.

  “Lie back,” his mother murmured. And Jun had. The soft silk heat of liquid surrounding. His mother held him, floating, with only one diamond-shaped hand gently cupping the back of his neck.

  Jun smiled. Stopped smiling with a sudden flurry of blinks.

  The goldfish. Still in the toilet. Shit. But he didn’t feel squeamish any more. Funny, he thought. Why had he in the first place? He put the frying pan, plate, cutlery into the sink, and poured perpetually boiling water on top of everything. Watched the reams of used butter melt away. Jun ignored the washroom and went in to watch television.

  He never sat in Karl’s recliner, some sort of territorial reflex, he wasn’t sure, but Karl had etched his body into the leather, and sitting in it would be like sitting in his lap.

  “Let’s fuck here,” Janine had giggled. Gloria and Karl long gone to bed, still chuckling about hard water.

  “What?”

  “I want to fuck in Karl’s chair!” Janine pushed Jun backward so he thumped heavily into the Karl-shaped leather, Janine tugging her sweater over her head as she giggled. Jun withered in his underpants. Janine stuck her tongue between Jun’s slender lips, curved her hands down the graceful lines of his back. When Janine slipped her hand inside Jun’s waistband, he felt innocuous. An exposed salamander.