Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  Ghostly hands twisted, bent, and prodded her feet day and night. Phantom nails dug into each crevice of flesh. Yuki didn’t feel fine.

  “Remember to give your insurance details to my secretary on your way out.”

  Each stop and start of the car stabbed at her toe bones. It hurt so much that she pulled over and pressed her head to the steering wheel. Ghost pain. Her mother had once explained that it was important to feed the ancestors because the dead stay hungry. They long for heat, light, food, and drink. A hungry ghost is an angry ghost. When she couldn’t drive any more Yuki pulled over and lifted her feet up onto the driver’s seat. “I can’t feed any starving ghosts,” she said.

  Yuki looked up and saw that she had parked outside the local gallery, if you could call it that. She’d visited once, but could not bear to spend long with the sloppy river paintings, the birds too clumsy to ever fly. From the car the paintings were only blue, brown, and yellow bruises. She supposed even in Westport there was grace, but these were not the artists to excavate it. Then again, nor was she.

  The pains clutched at her. The gas pedal was stiff, and each burst of speed ached as if she were running rather than driving.

  Edison pressed his fingers between her toes, rubbed figures of eight around her anklebones and thumbed the chalky edges of her heels. His hands were steady and strong, honed by the drafting table.

  “I love you,” Edison said.

  “Why?” she asked. He had massaged her feet every night that month.

  “The same reason I loved you yesterday.” His nails were trim, perfect for massage. She’d let hers grow out unevenly. The right ring finger grew to a sharp talon; the left thumb was cracked down the middle; the right index had snapped to the quick. Waiting for them to break was a way to distinguish one day from the next.

  “Because you’re you. Is there any better reason?”

  There had to be, somewhere. She looked down at him and thought, my marriage is love-fogged. He can’t see me through the humidity. And I can’t see him. I see his feet and his hands. I can smell the strawberry tea he has put by my bedside. But I can’t see him. She pulled her feet up and crawled toward Edison. Outside, ducks squawked in the dark. She pressed her face close to his and aligned their eyes and lips.

  “Leave me.” Yuki said it soft as a sweet nothing.

  “No.” He kissed her, and it was all teeth.

  She held on to his face and his crooked ears. She’d tried to paint him so many times. Edison was purple around the eyes. He had a line of freckles down his back. But where was this love? What were its proportions?

  He held her down by the shoulders and pressed her into the bed. Her feet still hurt as they curled. Edison was fierce in desire. Once or twice, she whimpered, and he didn’t ask if she was okay. Eyes closed, he tilted his chin toward the ceiling. At the last minute his eyes opened to reveal a huge dilation. His nails dug into her back and she wondered what he saw. Sex was the only time he was violent, but Yuki suspected all men of having some measure of violence. Some clubbed you with silence, and some relied on their fists. Feeling Edison’s fury, she was relieved, no longer becalmed in false gentleness.

  When he was done, her tea was cold.

  “Do you want me to make you another cup?” His voice had shifted back into kindness, as if his hands had not held her so tight she could still feel where the fingers had slotted between her ribs. She told herself it was desire, nothing more.

  “I’m fine.” She looked up at him, and wondered how they could be married and she still not know if he was trying to hold her or hurt her. Don’t be stupid; his hand around her shoulder was nothing but kind.

  “I have to do some more work. Will you be okay? Do you need anything?” She lay sprawled out on the covers. He lifted the cup and saucer from the table. For a moment, he stopped in the doorway, looking at her.

  “Go. I’m fine.” Water gurgled. They had a dishwasher, but he liked to hand-wash things. He scrubbed the dishwasher more often than he used it.

  The next morning, the pins in her feet were sharper than ever. They pierced with each step she took from the bed to the studio.

  Today was day 365: the final time she’d glare at the scuffed mirror screwed to the studio wall. The last time she would echo her features in white, pink, and yellow ochre; a twist on the proportions recommended for flesh in A Beginner Watercolorist’s Guide. Her skin was yellower, also greener, than “skin-tone.” She’d drawn herself inch-high, life-size, she’d devoted a 20 x 20-inch canvas to a fallen eyelash. She’d embroidered herself, collaged herself from trash, collaged from dollar bills: 364 iterations of herself—each one blander and flatter than the last. She hated this tally of days. Her life had once swung between cause and effect, action and consequence, each day linked to the next. Now the days had fallen off their hinges, and doors without hinges aren’t doors but wood for the burning.

  Dating Lou, there’d been dry days, when he knocked her off course. But the same fists sometimes jolted the vision into her. On the ugly days, when she woke in the dark and the whole room smelled like the yellow of his breath, she’d painted great ugly scrawls, but a sea of color had surged from her fingertips, the tide of color so strong that if she didn’t sluice it, she thought it might come out of her eyeballs and the roots of her hair. She’d filled the office trashcan with scribbled studies. They were never the way she envisioned them, but they were better than these robo-women. These static pictures of a suburban housewife.

  Today, she’d draw herself simply. She’d start with her mushroom-cap haircut and finish with the paint-spackled fisherman’s sweater. In the middle, she’d find a way to bare her stubby eyelashes and the promise of wrinkles around her lips.

  The new pain was no ghost. A slam to the gut. Heat in her ears. She dropped the brush and ran to the bathroom. Sludgy, sticky discharge wet between her thighs. The clotted brown of the bottom of the paint jar. She’d missed a period, and the second period was late. Here it was squeezing out of her. Her feet, shouting for attention, felt swollen, and she kicked off her slippers. Two months. More blood than there should be. Browner, like something had been rotting inside her. Not old-paint brown, she decided; the liquid that accumulated at the bottom of the kitchen trash when she forgot to change it. Lillian used to say Odile’s siblings had been liquefied. Her body just closed up shop after the first. She used to say it with such a tight look on her face. Upcoming in Chapter Fifteen of her memoirs, she’d said.

  Yuki ran a finger along the brown fluid that was soaking through her tights. It was warm. Were you a person? She decided that today was not a day that she could paint her own face.

  1981,

  Japanese for gray is usually: ash color. But it can also be: mouse color. Even after I forgot most of my Japanese, I remembered that. I think because gray clouds always look like fat mice to me. But sometimes the whole sky went dark and then I thought: wolf sky.

  Edison loved the lump. He loved how taut it was. He was using her ink to trace a spiral over the dome. His black track ran over the nubs where her hipbones had once been and dipped over and under her thighs. His fingers were cold, and she shivered, jogging the line.

  “I’m teaching her Zen,” Edison said.

  “You don’t know anything about Zen.”

  “Maybe not.” And he blew a raspberry into Yuki’s belly button. Her knees twitched, slamming into the side of his head. He pulled away, still smiling but rubbing his temples.

  “What the hell is that supposed to teach him?” she asked.

  “Joy.” And then he stared intently at her belly button. “I hope you’re a girl.”

  “Hope not,” said Yuki.

  She didn’t believe that the baby would stick until five months in. She hadn’t trusted the acid in her mouth, the swelling of her nipples, or the aches in her feet. She didn’t call her mother. But this baby kept on getting heavier.

  It was then that she started the painting. And she thought of it as the painting.

  Edison
said that after the baby was born, there would be nothing stopping her going to art school. He was a partner. Not a junior partner but an actual partner. He was talented, although when she looked at the thin, ruled lines of his work, all she saw were window bars, dark stairwells winding up and up, office mazes for lives to get lost in. But those traps would pay for paints and pads, sketchbooks and professors. 365 days alone with her miserable face was more than enough.

  Even now at twenty-nine, she could pass for a college student. She was often carded. High-school kids whistled at her. And even if they thought her strange, so what? She had always been strange.

  She was going to paint a bicycle, and it would melt their eyes. The bicycle store was on the Post Road on the perimeter of the town, a place with trees planted in every yard. Ornamental apples hung glossy and green. Sun sheered off the bright rims of the bike wheels and the steel twists of the bike racks that stood in front of the store. The racing bikes rested poised, their handles coiled ram-like, ready to charge. She wore her father’s faded blue yukata. She’d written to her mother asking that it be mailed to her. Her mother had sent three, perfectly ironed. The accompanying note apologized; the better yukata had been given away to nephews. This one had a hole in the sleeve neatly stitched by her mother’s regular hand. Yuki preferred it. This way, she could wear both of her parents. She craved them more than any food. She wondered if it was the baby wishing for grandparents. Yuki had finally invited her mother to visit her newly respectable life. But her mother’s health wouldn’t allow it. Yuki was too cowardly to ask why, too scared to know what was gnawing away at her. Even though she’d seen photographs of a mother tipping over the edge of middle age, her memory-mother was younger than Yuki was now. Yuki couldn’t bear to see that change.

  The loose garment, cut for a man, was comfortable in the summer heat. She moved easily in it. She wore white leather sneakers, comfortable for driving and easy on her arches, and Edison’s blue aviators. She looked like no one normally seen around Westport. But having no friends in the town, she had none to lose.

  The boy who came out of the shop was wearing pale jeans, threads curling from a tear in the right knee, and his T-shirt was oil-striped.

  “Can I help you, Ma’am?”

  “I want to buy a bicycle.”

  “For yourself? Were you thinking a road bike, a street bike? What sort of price point? British? Japanese? We have the latest Shimano gears in all our top models.” The boy talked fast, pulling at the back of his hair as he spoke, as if willing it to grow.

  “I don’t know.”

  The boy wiped a sheet of sweat from his forehead.

  “At the moment, I’m just looking,” she added.

  The boy slouched against the doorframe, watching as Yuki bent down and touched the hot rubber treads. They felt sticky, but her fingers came up clean. At her touch, the wheel began to turn. The rack suspended the bikes two inches above the ground, so this Raleigh seemed to be riding on air. She pressed harder, listening to the hiss. There was a light cricket-like clicking from the spokes. She worked her way down the line stroking and pressing, leaning into the whir. Sometimes she stopped a wheel with the dab of a finger, others she let hiss. She closed her eyes, listening to the metallic swarm and the sounds of speed.

  The bikes locked in place seemed so much faster than the Honda that Edison had bought her for her birthday. She looked at the car parked in the lot, green and dusty. She rubbed her pelvis and thought about the painkillers in the glove compartment. The boy was still watching her under thin, drooping lids.

  She bought a red Raleigh. It looked the way bicycles do in dreams, the Platonic ideal of a bike. Inside the store, fans thwacked the dusty air. She paid with the card Edison had signed her up for. The boy carried the bike to the car and eased it onto the back seat. All the way home, she glanced into her rearview. For all the bikes she’d drawn, she’d never owned one. It hadn’t been safe to be a little girl on two wheels in the Village.

  She didn’t have a precise plan for the bicycle. She just wanted to get to know it, the real thing, not the idea of the thing. She could, she supposed, make her submission a Duchamp reference. Instead of a bicycle neutered, screwed to a stool, just send in the genuine article, its freedom intact, manifesto peeking out of the basket. But she didn’t think so.

  Westport was hilly and woody and the only flat, easy-riding strip was along the Saugatuck River. There, the wetland birds pulled grubs from the mud, and the main street sold overpriced silk shawls to the overpriced wives of hedge fund managers. She didn’t need a bike to travel along that quarter-mile. But this was for art.

  Yuki didn’t feel like cooking, so she stopped at the local diner and ordered tea and toast with butter. The diner was cool. Kids drank milkshakes through long straws. It was a far leap from New York; it had no hustle or speed. There were no bright notes of Spanish from the kitchen. A group of girls had their heads craned around a magazine spread. There was Odile’s face on the cover yet again. Yuki had seen it at the grocery store earlier, her gold hair teased up so big it didn’t fit in the front page. She was smiling, one eyebrow lowered, sharing a joke with the reader, though Yuki didn’t know what. Had she ever known what? Yuki felt pursued, and she shifted on her chair away from the laughing girls, whose faces were pressed so near they must be sharing the same air. Her new angle faced her towards a couple, well she assumed they were a couple. A boy, with a cattish face and long dimples that crinkled like whiskers, had his hands wrapped around those of a tall busty girl. Silently, Yuki blessed the pair. She enjoyed odd couples. She looked down at her yukata; of course, she was odd all on her own.

  She removed the bike from her car. The light was low, and the leaves cast mauve silhouettes on the asphalt. She leaned on the handlebars, pressing down on the bike. The wheels were firm with a slight give. Like breasts, she thought, it would be fun to tell Edison and shock him.

  Their house was at the top of a short but steep hill. Edison said it was because the churchyard had been built on the hill either so the souls could be closer to God or so that the flood embraces of the Saugatuck didn’t sweep the bodies up and out of the ground. Their house might once have belonged to the rector. Regardless, the hill sloped steeply away, and as she unloaded the bicycle, she felt gravity tug the handlebars.

  She hitched up the fabric of her yukata and swung her leg over the top. It was an exertion, her belly adding an ungainly sway. Her left foot touched the left pedal; she lifted her right foot off the ground, and fell. Pebbles bit her hand. A dot of blood opened at her knee. The side of the road was still warm from the heat of the day.

  “Gotta get back on the horse,” she said to nobody. It was one of those American sayings. She doubted she’d ever ride a horse.

  This time she got in two full turns of the wheel before crashing to her right. Blood spotted the yukata. But it was old blood, just the first wound smearing. Again, she got on the bike, and again. Each time, the throb of pain grew. But she stayed on longer. Her balance improved. Slowly, with many shakes to right and left, she made it down the hill. She didn’t have to pedal; gravity did the work. When she reached the bottom, she pushed the bike back up. She wasn’t thinking about art. Or what she would paint. It took too much concentration to hold each limb just right, to keep her back straight and her elbows level. It was a good feeling.

  She sweated as she walked the bike back up to the top of the hill. The sun was a lemon drizzle in the sky. This would be her last run, and she wanted to reach the bottom in one perfect swoop. She clambered on, slowly. Her body was hatched by cuts and scrapes. The seat vibrated beneath her. Light swirled on the polished bicycle bell. She looked ahead. Loose hair tickled her neck. She was going so fast. And at the bottom of the hill, she didn’t stop but pedaled fast chasing the speed. No wonder no one forgot how to do this.

  The car came fast round the bend. The last sun caught the bright fenders. She braked. She tipped, crashing into the side of the road. A fallen branch smacked her on the forehe
ad. The sound of her fall covered the car’s scream, but she smelled the smoking rubber.

  Edison stood over her, his thin eyebrows pulled together.

  “Jesus!” They’d been together for three years, and she’d never heard him shout. He handled a bad day at work by walking straight to the shower. Now, he was shouting. The bicycle pressed down on her side, and he didn’t move to lift it. He stood over her. All the blood in his face had gone to his lips. His cheeks looked almost green. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Help?” She thought another branch had cut her thigh. He lifted the bike, flipping it off her. She stood without his help, levering herself on the fingers of her right hand. The palm was cut. She’d been going fast. She stood. One sneaker had come off, leaving her off balance.

  “How could you?”

  She wished he’d step closer. She wished he’d hit her across the face with the fists his hands had already made. She wanted to fall again, in one last crash. His pain could move through his hands into her. They could share it. He took a step backward. He lifted a fist, but his palm unclenched. He pushed back the hair from his forehead. Quietly, he asked, “Are you trying to lose our baby?”

  Jay

  16.

  Berlin, October 2016

  I woke late. We had no set appointment time, but I sensed my own lag. I’d woken up three times in the night to the sound of Eliot crying, which was insane since not even bats can hear across oceans. There were no crows at my window. I looked for them against the thin, flat clouds. Finally, in a distant tree, I saw black-winged buds clustered in the highest branches. I’d finished the bread, but I left an offering of pink ham on the railing. The crows were after all, my only German allies.

  I left for my mother’s, bringing Celeste along in her box. I wasn’t taking any chances with my verticality. The S-Bahn was crowded, and a large boy in a sheepskin coat kept knocking into the cage. Any weight, however small, carried for a long time becomes exhausting. When that weight is a plastic and metal cage containing the cat that you are supposed to have grown out of, it strains the biceps. Finally out of the hot tube of Germans, I looked about the street. It was East Germany, but the builders were pre-Soviet. In an empty playground, a tree dripped with berries. As I checked the number of each house, I thought is this where she lives? Or here? I scolded myself that I was being idiotic as a pre-teen picking up his first date. I was here to get the papers signed and to leave.