Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  “I’m fine, fine, fine, fine. Really, fine. So, so, fine.” The unstoppered words streamed upward.

  As she said the fine, she began to feel fine, or finer. The word regulated her breath. He eased away from her. Edison was her friend. Her friend who knew her.

  “What happened?” Edison asked. He appeared upset. She looked down at her sandals; they were rocking forward and backward. She told the slingbacks to stop.

  “I didn’t think that would happen, again, sorry.”

  “Again?” He sounded angry, parental.

  “It happened once, years ago.”

  As her brain slowed, she tried to fix on what had made it happen. Was it the televisions, the fat woman, the old women with the suitcases, the helicopters that were never coming down to save them? She thought of all the anti-Vietnam murals, posters, poorly dyed T-shirts. She thought of her Harmless Little Girls and how she’d never retrieved them from the bacon grease and fork clatter. Had she even cared for them? Or only wanted to? Edison was still holding her shoulders, but the panic had receded. The bodies on TV were dead strangers. Barely people, silhouettes, like the holes Wile E. Coyote made in the canyon floor.

  She felt calmer, but also sticky, so sticky.

  “I’m going to have to bail on dinner. I need to swim.” She needed to plunge into lustrous cold water.

  “No,” he said. “Not after that. I’m not letting you wander about New York by yourself.”

  “Fine, you can walk me.”

  “No, you need to eat.”

  “I’m going. You can follow me or not.” He was nice, but she couldn’t look at him. He looked too much like someone who would be saved by the helicopters. So he followed her, all the way to the YMCA. He followed her inside.

  “You’re not coming with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Edison.” She shoved him gently with the palm of her hand. “I need to think.”

  “I don’t understand what happened.”

  “I know. Please just go home.”

  “You’ll be okay?”

  “I promise.”

  She bought a new swimsuit. Black and full-body, the model sported by older women doing water aerobics. It was all they had at the YMCA store, but Yuki didn’t mind. Was it a warm day in Vietnam? Was it a warm day in Japan? Her mother wrote regularly now. Mostly about the younger cousins. Taro dreams of being the first Japanese man on the moon. I told him he’d need to practice his math, but I think he could do it. He’s as stubborn as your father. Mentions of her father were brief bubbles of grief that her mother quickly popped by writing about the egg prices or some American show they were finally dubbing for NHK. Still his death didn’t seem real to Yuki. After all, nothing had changed. For years, she hadn’t seen him. For years, they’d barely spoken. It seemed impossible that he was no longer a plane flight away. Yuki hoped the sale of the house would be enough to take care of her mother, who’d moved in with Yuki’s aunt. Lou’s home was now truly the only one Yuki could claim.

  She pulled on the new swimsuit. It bit her shoulders. She felt bloated from the heat and she banged on the round drum of her waterlogged belly. The summer always made her feel pregnant. In September, she’d deflate. She called these swellings her sunshine babies.

  Old men circled the pool, the buds of their rubber bathing caps in spring green and yellow. She wondered what wars they’d seen. Their skin was loose and pale. In the thick pool air, Yuki couldn’t smell that male smell. She couldn’t smell anything but disinfectant. Odile was back. This ghost-riddled day, she almost expected to see her father streaming past in his blue pinstriped bathing suit. But of course, there were places from which it was impossible to return.

  1978, Ivory Black

  Also known as bone black.

  The shops were closed, but the drunks hadn’t hit the sidewalks yet. All summer, fruit flies had blown through the apartment. Spirals of yellow flypaper hung from the ceiling. Lou left them up, even after ten or twenty flies were caught in the resin. Yuki blew on the sticky spiral closest to her face and it swayed, throwing sunlight across the table. A wing beat out the most diminutive of death throes. Was this tiny death what she was meant to paint?

  One of Lou’s friends ran a club that hosted a monthly poetry night. A club where artists were known to come. This man had seen her café show, and he’d said next time she had a series together, she could show at his club. A place where people came in from the night with their sorrows. He’d bought the painting of her mother for the price of a pair of shoes at Macy’s. It was something and yet, she’d let three years pass without making anything worthwhile. She’d signed up for life drawing again, and though her proportions were stronger, the figures looking solid, she still couldn’t see why anyone should care for yet another naked body. After her father died she couldn’t focus on any theme; nothing she put together was coherent. She’d get an idea, scratch out preliminary sketches at work, and by the time she came home the idea would have dried out. And then she’d struggled so long, but nothing she made would ever cause even a caught breath.

  Then just this week her mother had mailed the goat-hair brushes her father had used for calligraphy. And she thought that perhaps she could still make something worth showing her mother. She washed her hands in the kitchen sink and splashed her face with the hard, cold water. Waterfalls trickled over the dirty dishes, raining through the holes in the colander. She lifted a mug from the stack, filled it, rinsed it, filled it again, took a long cool glug, and filled it again. She’d need it for ink work.

  A Japanese paintbrush should be held perpendicular to the paper. The fibres shouldn’t slouch left or right. Balancing on the tip, the calligrapher can duck and dive, letting the stroke bloat and squeeze. But her hand had westernized. The brush slipped into a pencil’s casual lean. The strokes stiffened and left squat inky stabs. When had her hands forgotten?

  She slashed out the curve of the flypaper. But the flies only looked like blots, and the paper’s stroke was too thick. A wet mess. Something simpler then. She tried for bamboo. Bamboo was a dashed line. Unlike a bird or a flower, it was barely a living thing at all. Surely she could accomplish that. The ink spread, fogging up the paper with mottled gray clouds. Too much water. She tried again. A bit better. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen living bamboo. The Chinese dumpling place had three dry yellow stalks, the leaves cracked. They were hung about with dead Christmas lights. Yuki lifted the fine point of her brush, trying to trace out the wires.

  She’d known her father would forgive her when he saw her first real show. How could either of them have predicted the American Ford on a Tokyo street after dark?

  Run over. Run over by a car made by his competitors. Three years ago today. An ugly joke. Her mother had wanted to visit for this anniversary. But Yuki had put her off. The apartment was small and dirty; there was nowhere for her mother to sleep. And even if they could’ve put her up in the Plaza, there was nothing about Yuki’s life worthy of a trans-Pacific flight.

  She had to try. This was her chance to show with artists and then maybe get a show in a real gallery. The gallery would issue embossed invitations that she could send to Tokyo. She lifted her left hand and gently smacked her left cheek, just to get some blood back into her eyes. She felt more awake, so she hit herself properly. It made a clapping sound. One hand clapping, she thought, and didn’t laugh. She hit herself again and again in a stream of vigorous applause. Her left cheek felt numb, so then she hit the right. Why wasn’t Lou home? He was an asshole, so why couldn’t he do the one thing he was good for? She’d read that Victorian doctors slapped women out of hysteria. She needed to snap out of this numbness. But lately, Lou was never home. Where did he go? Even she knew that the baseball played at 3 a.m. used only flesh-bats. When she asked, he said only that he was with The Guys. Could he really want their repetitive rhyme-schemes, more than the soft hollow of the apartment’s bed?

  This heavy sadness would smother her. She needed some flight or fig
ht, but her limbs felt too heavy for either.

  She called Edison. No answer. He was probably still at work. He would have smiled. He would have told her that bamboo and Christmas lights were a comment on something. Westernization, commodification, something. He would have made those smears seem beautiful.

  She put the brushes back in her art box. The box was small, too small for all her papers, brushes, pens, pencils, erasers, gouaches. Each time she opened it, she was irritated. Lou complained about her paint-lipped jam jars and the quinacridone gold fingerprints she left on the kitchen cabinets. He wanted her to keep everything in this box, but there wasn’t space. Last Monday, he stepped on a tube and got white acrylic on his shoe. It looked like pigeon shit. She was looking at the smear and so didn’t see his flat hand coming.

  When she fell, the corner of the art box had wedged between her shoulder blades, leaving a triangular bruise. After fighting, her hands shook, more from adrenaline than pain.

  A draught blew through the apartment. The strips of flypaper spun and scattered golden spots of light across the table. If she didn’t thrash against this silent world, she’d drown in it. She stood and went to Lou’s filing cabinet. She lifted out his poetry. What was so special about these nonsense words? What about them was worth imprinting in her skin? She held the papers close to her face, glaring at the pubic curls of the letters. Fury coiled in her mouth; she felt her face move. Starting in the very middle of the page, she licked it, using the whole wide flat of her tongue. The paper was gluey, and a little bit sour like unclean skin. She shut her eyes. No wonder he hit her. She was mad. When he saw how his words smeared he would be furious. She opened her eyes. The ink hadn’t run. It just sat there. The paper a little bit grayer, where tongue had hit page. She could dry it. He would never know.

  She licked it again. The ink didn’t run. The nonsense words stuck to the paper. Her fingers ripped the page in half. She heaved it, bunched it, tore it, balled it in her fists. She papered the apartment with his words. A single sheet stuck to the flytape.

  She lay down in the center of her paper-storm and shut her eyes. The pages were cool against the palms of her hands. She called, “Ko-chan, Ko-chan.” Recently her mother’s letters were all memories of the time when they all lived in Tokyo. Apparently, Yuki had loved her grandparents’ dog: a shiba inu with a curling tail and sharp ears. She wrote that the dog didn’t know how to play dead. But when Yuki lay down with her eyes shut, the dog had licked her eyelids, tickling her until she rose from the dead. That was a better trick.

  Now no black tongue licked her face. So she lay still and waited for Lou and his white knuckles, a poor second best. Still, maybe then she’d find the right thing to say, the blade that would slice through the glass walls in her head. She would climb out and meet these poets, saxophonists, artists. In her mind the artists did not look anything like Lou’s poets. They looked like nothing at all, only the shimmering word—artists.

  Eventually, she crawled into bed. Lou woke her up when he came home. The landlord turned the heat off at night. It was so frigid; she could’ve sworn she saw her breath in the dark. He was running the sink in the kitchen. Perhaps he was making coffee. He said it helped him sleep. But the gas didn’t click on, so just water. That meant he hadn’t drunk too much. She pulled the blankets closer around her, rolling in them so he wouldn’t be able to get inside. She would keep the heat to herself. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to breathe slowly.

  “Wake up.”

  “Mm.”

  “I said, Wake Up.”

  “What time is it?”

  “We need to talk.”

  Her throat squeezed. She had thought he wanted the sheets. Now she remembered the mess she’d made. Like a sulky teenager, she said, “I’m sleeping.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  She sat up still, rolled in sheets.

  “You need to move out.” He said it in a measured voice as if he was saying they needed more trash bags. All because of his poetry? She should’ve burned it. She pulled the thin sheet over nose and mouth. When she didn’t respond, he added, “Tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry. It was stupid. I was stupid. I’ll put them back together.” Yuki stood, letting the sheets drop. The draught nipped at her breasts and belly. She clambered for the door.

  “Stop,” he said. “I’m getting married.”

  “You’re what? To who?” Her brain was clogged with dream logic. “Because I read your poems? I mean, I didn’t read them. I was just—”

  “I’m getting married. We’re having a baby.” He was telling her he was having a baby, and he hadn’t even bothered flicking the switch on. The blinds were missing a strip. A line of yellow streetlight cut across his face. Only his eyes were visible. He could have been wearing a shadow-balaclava. It was right that he looked like a criminal.

  “You don’t believe in marriage.”

  “I’m going to try it. I was going to tell you, soon. What you did, well,” he sighed, sounding supercilious. “It’s probably healthy you got that out of your system.”

  “What system? I’m not a system, with boxes and charts,” she said. “You sound like a stranger.” He didn’t reply.

  They sat together in the dark. She couldn’t hear his breathing. Yuki put her palm over her mouth. Her breath was slow and even. She ran her fingers over her cheeks. She felt the curve of her eye socket bones. She couldn’t feel tears. Sands of sleep had collected in her eyes. She wondered why she wasn’t crying. She knew how it felt to leap into madness. But now she could see only miles and miles of arid sanity.

  “We’re going to call the baby Avery. It’ll work for a boy or a girl.”

  Yuki had always thought she’d be the one to leave. She was young. Her teeth were whiter, and her skin was softer. But she’d stayed. He’d been the organizing principle of her days. When you have one clock it’s impossible to know if it’s slow or fast. Even so, there must’ve been a clue.

  “Is she a redhead?”

  “How—?”

  “The other day, I was washing the floor. I found a hair. It seemed too long to be yours. I thought one of us must have tracked it in.”

  She felt strangely proud. She hadn’t seen it coming, but at least she understood the evidence. She got up. She no longer felt cold.

  “I’ll go now.”

  They still had the yellow case she’d moved in with. She poured the contents of the art box into it. But she left her paintings and her photographs. They were drafts. She felt tired. Why was it that when a fist slammed into your face, it was a jump-start, but heartbreak was a leak in the gas tank? She laughed. What would her father have made of Yuki the car? She certainly wasn’t reliable or fuel-efficient. She was some petroleum-burning beast. A true American.

  “What’re you laughing about?”

  “None of your damn business.” But he didn’t hit her. He would never hit her again. A strange thought. She couldn’t tell the shape of it yet, whether it was good or bad. She thought of the diamond scar on her back, the ruby bruises on her knees, and the amethysts on her thighs.

  “Do me a favor? Don’t hit the kid.”

  Oh, she’d been wrong: this was the last time he’d hit her. It stung, as departures do.

  Sitting on the steps of their apartment building, she began to ache. It was as if every bruise un-healed. They rose to the surface in a rush. She rested her head on the suitcase. The handle pressed into her cheek. Their contract had exchanged her youth for his loyalty. The pain had been their shared sorrow. And now it was hers alone. Inside her shoes, she scrunched and unscrunched her feet. But, she couldn’t force herself to stand. Where would she go?

  She hadn’t thought the last smack had been that vicious, but her face pulsed. Soon petals of red and purple would push through her skin. The tears stained the concrete steps like the first indication of rain. Yuki stuck her hand out to check. No, the sky was dry. It was just her. She shoved her fists back in her pockets, where they jangled against the laundry quarte
rs.

  Yuki jerked upright. The nearest payphone was five blocks away. The suitcase was heavy with paint and pastels. She’d taken no paintings. The only one she wanted to keep, her father’s portrait, was in the reception desk. As she lugged the suitcase, the base scraped along the pavement. She thrust her whole body into the movement: like dragging a corpse, she thought. Yuki looked left and right for strangers in the dark. Her neighborhood felt dangerous now that it was no longer hers.

  “Mom,” she said. “It’s me.”

  “Yuki-chan.” There was a deep intake of breath on the other line. Yuki sniffled. She was still expected somewhere. Then again, she’d cheated, speaking English. Would her mother recognize her voice in Japanese?

  “Are you sick? Add some ginger to the boiling water. That’s what I was telling your cousins, the other day. Of course, you’re in America, so I’m sure you can buy something better.”

  “Mom, I don’t think the drugstores here are any better than yours.”

  “Did you know you can’t even get mozzarella here, or Brie? They just call it all cheese.”

  More tears speckled the phone booth floor. How could she know that? Japan wasn’t home. Home was stretchy yellow strings of pizza cheese that got stuck between her teeth and stuck to her chin until Lou nibbled it off. Home was the Philly cream cheese on the bagels that Lou picked up on the way back from work. Home was Lou thrashing in his sleep. Home was Lou’s bad poetry. Home was the two of them.

  “Mom, my money is—” The phone line beeped. “Running out.”

  With her last dime, she rang Edison. She’d never been his, and yet he’d never left her. When he picked up, voice sleep-crackly, she just cried.

  “Lou, he—”

  “What’s going on? Are you okay? Did he hurt you? Is he hurt?” How could she explain. She paused, not knowing what to say. Did he hurt you? The sentence strangled her tongue. Edison sounded so earnest and ridiculous.

  “Do I need to punch someone?”