The Diving Pool

by Yoko Ogawa

  "It's quiet in the exam room, just a little shuffling of medical charts, tweezers clicking, needles being taken out of boxes. The nurses and the doctor seem to communicate by signals only they understand. The doctor just moves slightly or glances toward something and a nurse immediately hands him a thermometer, or the results of a blood test, or whatever. It's fascinating how they do it." She sat back on the sofa and crossed her legs.

  "Has the clinic changed much?" I asked.

  "Not a bit," she said, shaking her head. "After the elementary school gate, I turned at the flower shop, and when I saw the sign I felt as though I'd gone through a time warp. It was like being sucked back into the past." Her cheeks still looked cold and transparent from the walk.

  "The examination room is exactly the same, too," she said. "That tall, narrow cabinet, the big chair where the doctor sat, the screen made out of frosted glass—it all looked just the way I remembered it. Everything seems old and out-of-date, but it's absolutely spotless. The only new addition is the ultrasound machine." She pronounced the words slowly, as if she were speaking about something very important. "Every time I go, they make me lie down on a bed next to it. Then I have to pull up my blouse and tug my underwear down below my belly. One of the nurses comes with a big tube and squeezes this clear gel all over it. I love how it feels, all smooth and slippery—it drives me crazy." She let out a long sigh before continuing. "Then the doctor rubs my belly with a thing that looks like a walkie-talkie; it's connected to the ultrasound by a black cable. The gel keeps it stuck to the skin, and they get a picture of what's inside on the screen."

  Her finger reached out and flipped over the photograph that lay on the table.

  "When they're finished, one of the nurses wipes my stomach with a piece of gauze. I always want it to go on a little longer, so that makes me a little sad." The words seemed to flow out of her. "When they're done, the first thing I do is go to the restroom and pull up my blouse again to look at my stomach. I always hope there's some gel left, but there never is. It's not even smooth when I rub it—I feel so let down." She sighed again.

  One of the socks she'd pulled off tumbled to the floor. Outside, a light snow had begun to fall.

  "How does it feel to have a picture taken of your insides?" I asked, staring out at the snowflakes dancing in the wind.

  "I suppose it's about the same as when he takes an X-ray of my teeth."

  "Your husband?"

  "Yes. It's a little embarrassing, and it tickles." Her lips closed slowly, and she was quiet at last. She has a habit of talking for a long time without a break and then suddenly falling silent. But all that talking didn't seem to do her much good—she was always so nervous afterward. I was sure that she would be running off to see Dr. Nikaido before long.

  The baby haunted the shadows that fell between us.

  JANUARY 28 (WEDNESDAY), 10 WEEKS + 2 DAYS

  Her morning sickness is getting worse. She seems convinced it will never get any better nor disappear, and that depresses her. At any rate, she can't eat anything. I've suggested just about every food imaginable, but she refuses everything. I even got out all the cookbooks in the house and went through them with her, but it didn't help. I realize now that eating is actually an extremely delicate undertaking.

  Still, her stomach is so empty it must ache, and she finally said that she needed to put something in her mouth. (She couldn't bring herself to say "eat.") She decided on a croissant. A waffle or some potato chips might have done just as well, but a croissant left over from breakfast happened to be peeking out of the bread basket. She tore off a piece, forced it into her mouth, and swallowed it almost without chewing. Then, to wash it down, she took a tiny sip from a can of sports drink, grimacing with disgust as she swallowed. It didn't seem like eating at all, more like some difficult ritual.

  My brother-in-law has been bringing home articles that he thinks will help: "How I Beat Morning Sickness" or "What Fathers Can Do for Morning Sickness." It's hard to believe, but the pregnancy seems to be affecting his appetite as well. At the table, he just pokes at his food and barely eats anything. "I can't eat when she's feeling so bad," he says, sighing. She seems to think that he's acting this way just to be nice, but I've noticed that when he's massaging her back while she forces down a croissant he gets terribly pale and clutches his other hand to his mouth. They huddle together like a pair of injured birds and shuffle off to their bedroom, not to be seen again until morning.

  My brother-in-law seems particularly pitiful to me, since he has no reason to feel sick, and I find myself getting angry over his little sighs and whimpers. It occurs to me that I'd fall in love with a man who could put away a three-course French dinner even when he knew I was paralyzed by morning sickness.

  FEBRUARY 6 (FRIDAY), 11 WEEKS + 4 DAYS

  I eat all my meals alone now. I take my time, looking out at the flower beds or the shovel abandoned in the garden or the clouds floating by. I enjoy these quiet moments, and I sometimes even have a beer at lunch or smoke a cigarette, which my sister hates. I'm not lonely. Eating by myself seems to suit me. But this morning, as I was frying some bacon and eggs, she came running down the stairs.

  "What's that awful smell?" she screamed, tearing at her hair. "Can't you do something?" She seemed ready to burst into tears. The bare feet protruding from the legs of her pajamas looked icy and as transparent as glass. She switched off the burner, nearly tearing the knob from the stove.

  "It's just bacon and eggs," I whispered.

  "Then why is the whole house filled with that disgusting smell? Butter, grease, egg, pork—I can't breathe!" Putting her head down on the table, she began to sob. I didn't know what to do, so I turned on the exhaust fan and opened a window.

  By this time, she was crying in earnest. It was remarkable to watch, almost like a scene from a play. Her hair hung down over her face, and her shoulders heaved. I put my hand on her back to comfort her.

  "You have to do something!" she said between sobs. "When I woke up, my whole body was filled with that awful stench. It's in my mouth and my lungs. My insides feel like they're coated with it. How did that awful smell take over the whole house?"

  "I'm sorry," I said timidly. "I'll try to be more careful."

  "It's not just the bacon and eggs. It's the frying pan and the dishes, the soap in the bathroom, the curtains in the bedroom—everything stinks. It's spreading all over the house, like a giant amoeba eating up all the other odors around it, on and on forever." She sat there weeping, her tear-covered face resting on the table, and I stood, my hand still on her back, studying the check pattern on her pajamas. The motor on the exhaust fan sounded louder than usual.

  "Do you know how terrifying odors can be?" she asked. "You can't get away from them. I want to go somewhere where nothing smells, like a sterile room in a hospital, where I could pull out my guts and wash them clean."

  "I know, I know," I murmured. I took a deep breath, but I couldn't smell anything at all. Just the kitchen in the morning. The coffee cups were lined up neatly in the cupboard. The white dish towels were drying on the rack. A patch of frozen blue sky was visible through the window.

  I have no idea how long she cried. It might have been only a few minutes, but it seemed much longer. In any case, she cried until she couldn't cry anymore. Then she let out a long, slow breath and looked up at me. Her cheeks and eyelashes were damp with tears, but her expression was calm.

  "It's not that I don't want to eat," she said quietly. "In fact, I'm starved and I feel as though I could eat just about anything. I get sad when I remember how I used to enjoy it. I go back over old meals in my head—roses on the table, candles reflected in the wineglasses, steam rising from the soup or a roast. Of course, nothing has any smell in my imagination. But I think a lot about what I'll eat first when the morning sickness ends—if it ever ends. I try to picture it: sole meunière or spareribs or broccoli salad. I imagine every detail, so it's more real than real. I think about eating day and night—like a kid starvi
ng during the war. I guess that must sound silly."

  She rubbed at her tears with the sleeve of her pajamas.

  "Not at all," I said. "There's nothing you can do."

  "Thank you," she muttered.

  "From now on, I won't use the kitchen when you're here," I said. She nodded. My cold bacon and eggs lay quietly in the pan.

  FEBRUARY 10 (TUESDAY), 12 WEEKS + 1 DAY

  Twelve weeks—and the morning sickness is as bad as ever. It clings to her like a wet blouse. Which may be why she went to see Dr. Nikaido today. Her nerves and her hormones and her emotions seem all out of whack. As she always does before these visits, she spent a long time deciding what to wear. She lined up all her coats and skirts, her sweaters and her scarves on the bed and studied them carefully. She also spent a lot of time on her makeup. I worry that all this fuss will make my brother-in-law jealous. The morning sickness has made her hips narrower, her cheeks a little sunken, and her jaw more defined; she's even prettier than ever. You'd never guess that she was pregnant.

  I met Dr. Nikaido once, when he brought her home during a typhoon. He's a middle-aged man with an unremarkable face, and he made no impression on me at all. In fact, afterward I couldn't recall a single feature— thick earlobes, for example, or strong fingers—nothing. He just stood quietly behind my sister, looking down at the ground. Perhaps because his shoulders and hair were wet from the rain, he seemed terribly sad. I don't really know what kind of therapy he practices, but my sister has mentioned psychological tests and medication of some sort. In any case, she's been going to him since she was in high school, more than ten years now without a break, but I can't see that she's got any better. Her emotional problems seem to come in waves, like seaweed tossed around in the ocean, and she's never found a safe, calm shore to rest on. Still, she told me she feels much better when she's at his office.

  "It's like when they're shampooing your hair at the salon," she said. "The feeling that someone's taking care of you—it's wonderful." Her eyes narrowed with pleasure at the thought of him.

  But it's hard for me to believe that Dr. Nikaido is a good psychiatrist. As he stood mutely in the doorway on the night of the typhoon, he looked more like a frightened patient than a doctor.

  The sun had set and a golden moon had risen in the darkness, but she still hadn't come home. "She shouldn't be out in this cold," my brother-in-law muttered. When a taxi finally stopped at the gate, he hurried out to meet her. Her eyes glistened as she unwound her scarf, and she seemed much calmer than she was this morning. But no matter how often she goes to see Dr. Nikaido, her morning sickness is as bad as ever.

  MARCH 1 (SUNDAY), 14 WEEKS + 6 DAYS

  It suddenly occurred to me that I haven't been thinking about the baby. I suppose I should be wondering whether it's a boy or a girl, what they'll name it, what sorts of baby clothes to buy. I imagine people usually enjoy thinking about those kinds of things. But my sister and her husband never talk about the baby in front of me. They act as if there's no connection between the pregnancy and the fact that there's a baby in her belly. Which may explain why it has no concrete existence for me.

  At the moment, I use the word "chromosome" to help me remember that there's actually a baby in there. "Chromosome" helps me give it some kind of form. I once saw a picture of chromosomes in a science magazine. They looked like pairs of butterfly cocoons lined up in a row. They were oblong, and just the right size and shape to pinch in your fingers. The pairs were all different: some were curved at the ends like a cane, others were perfectly straight and parallel, and others were backed up against each other like Siamese twins. When I think about my sister's baby, I count off these twin cocoons in my head.

  MARCH 14 (SATURDAY), 16 WEEKS + 5 DAYS

  She hardly looks pregnant at all, even though she's entering her fifth month. For weeks now, she's consumed nothing but croissants and sports drinks, and she's losing a lot of weight. Except for her visits to the clinic and to Dr. Nikaido, she stays in bed all day, as if she were seriously ill.

  About the only thing I can do for her is to avoid creating any kind of odor, so I've changed every bar of soap in the house to an unscented brand, and I took the paprika and thyme and sage from the spice rack and put them in a tin. I moved all the makeup that was in her room to mine, and, since she'd started complaining about the smell of the toothpaste, my brother-in-law went out and bought a Water Pik. Needless to say, I try not to cook when she's around. But, if I absolutely have to make something, I take the rice cooker or the microwave or the coffee grinder out to the garden and spread a mat on the ground.

  It's peaceful eating outside by myself, looking up at the night sky. The evenings are warmer now that spring is almost here, and the air feels soft. My hands and feet pressed against the mat are dull and numb, but everything else—the crepe myrtle, the bricks lining the flower beds, the twinkling stars—is sharp and clear. Except for a dog barking in the distance, the evening is perfectly still.

  I plug the rice cooker into the extension cord I've strung out from the kitchen, and within a few minutes a cloud of steam rises from the vent and vanishes into the darkness. A packet of instant stew warms in the microwave. From time to time, a light breeze blows, rustling the leaves and carrying away the vapor.

  I eat more slowly when I'm in the garden. The cups and dishes set out on the mat are all at slightly different angles. As I serve myself the stew, being careful not to spill it, I feel as though I were playing house. A faint light is burning in my sister's window on the second floor. I think about her, curled up in bed, surrounded by all those odors, and then I open my mouth wide to take in the darkness with my bite of stew.

  MARCH 22 (SUNDAY), 17 WEEKS + 6 DAYS

  My brother-in-law's parents came to visit, and they brought along an odd-looking package wrapped in a scarf. Even after his mother unwrapped it, I had no idea what it was. It was just a long strip of white cloth about a foot wide. My brother-in-law unfolded it, and then we could see that it had a design of a dog printed at the edge. The dog's ears were standing up, and it looked alert and lively.

  "Today is the Dog Day of the fifth month," said my sister. Her voice was weak and she couldn't hide her nausea, even in front of her husband's parents.

  "I hope you don't mind, but these are supposed to bring good luck." As she spoke, her mother-in-law brought out a piece of bamboo, a ball of red cord, and a little silver bell, and lined them up in front of us. Finally, she produced a pamphlet from a shrine explaining how to use all these things to make a charm for a safe delivery.

  "It even comes with instructions," I said, duly impressed.

  "They sell it as a set at the shrine," she said, smiling cheerfully. As I watched my sister's slender fingers play over the pamphlet, I wondered whether the dye in the material or the mysterious piece of bamboo would give off odors. We passed the charms around, nodding solemnly and turning them over in our hands.

  As soon as they were gone, my sister retreated to her room, forgetting about the gifts from the shrine. My brother-in-law wrapped them in the scarf, just as they'd come. The bell made a faint tinkling sound.

  "Why is there a dog on the cloth?" I asked him.

  "Dogs have lots of puppies without too much trouble. So they use them on these charms."

  "Do animals know the difference between an easy birth and a hard one?"

  "I imagine they do."

  "Do you suppose puppies pop out like peas popping out of the pod?"

  "You've got me." The dog on the scarf seemed to be watching us.

  MARCH 31 (TUESDAY), 19 WEEKS + 1 DAY

  I got up early today, since the supermarket I had to go to for my part-time job was quite far away. It was foggy, and my eyelashes were cold and damp by the time I reached the station.

  The job suits me because my boss always sends me to a different supermarket in an unfamiliar part of town, and I never go to the same place twice. The supermarket is usually situated on a little plaza in front of a train station, with a pedestria
n crossing, bicycle racks, and a bus terminal nearby. As I watch people come into the store, it makes me feel as though I'd gone away somewhere on a trip.