Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  Dina did not want to talk about food but found herself describing the salmon croquettes her mother made the week before she died. Vats of collards and kale, the small islands of grease floating atop the pot liquor, cornbread spotted with dashes of hot sauce. It was not the food she ate all the time, or even the kind she preferred, but it was the kind she wanted whenever she was sick or lonely; the kind of food that—when she got it—she stuffed in her mouth like a pacifier. Even recollecting food from the corner stores made her stomach constrict with pleasure and yearning: barbecue, Chong’s take-out, peach cobbler. All of it delicious in a lardy, fatty, condiment-heavy way. Miasmas of it so strong that they pushed through the styrofoam boxes bagged in brown paper.

  “Well,” Ari said, when Dina finished speaking.

  Since they had nothing else to eat, they smoked.

  They waited to see what Sayeed would do, and as the hours passed, waited for him to leave. He never did. That night Ari gave him a blanket and Sayeed stretched out on a tatami, in the very middle of the room. Instead of pushing aside the low tea table, he simply arranged his blanket under it, and as he lay down, head under the tea table, he looked as though he had been trying to retrieve something from under it and had gotten stuck.

  Over the next few days they found out that Sayeed had married a non-Moroccan woman instead of the woman he was arranged to marry. His family, her family, the whole country of Morocco, it seemed, disowned him. Then his wife left him. He had moved to Tokyo in the hope of opening a business, but the money that was supposed to have been sent to him was not sent.

  “They know! They know!” he’d mutter while smoking or praying or boiling an egg. Dina assumed he meant that whoever was supposed to send Sayeed money knew about his non-Moroccan ex-wife, but she could never be sure. Whenever Sayeed mused over how life had gone wrong, how his wife had left him, how his family had refused to speak to him, he glared at Dina, as though she were responsible.

  One night she awoke to find Sayeed panting over her, holding a knife at her throat. His chest was bare; his pajama bottoms glowed from the streetlights outside the window. Dina screamed, waking Petra, who turned on a light and promptly began to cry. Ari and Zoltan gradually turtled out of their sleep, saw Sayeed holding the knife at her throat, saw that she was still alive, and looked at her hopelessly, as though she were an actress failing to play her part and die on cue. When Zoltan saw that it had nothing to do with him, he went back to sleep. Sayeed rattled off accusingly at Dina in Arabic until Ari led him into the hallway.

  She sat straight up in the one pair of jeans she hadn’t sold and a nearly threadbare green bra. Ari came back, exhausted. She didn’t know where Sayeed was, but she could hear Japanese voices in the hallway, their anger and complaints couched in vague, seemingly innocuous phrases. They have a lot of people living there, don’t they? meant, Those foreigners! Can’t they be quiet and leave us in peace! And I wonder if Roppongi would offer them more opportunities meant, They should go to Roppongi where their own kind live! Ari tried to slam the door shut, as if to defy the neighbors, as if to add a dramatic coda to the evening, but Zoltan had broken the door in one of his rages, and it barely closed at all.

  “He probably won’t do it again,” he said.

  “What! What do you mean by ‘probably won’t’?”

  Zoltan sleepily yelled for her to shut up. Petra sat in her corner with a stray tear running in a rivulet along one of her scars.

  Then Ari was suddenly beside Dina, talking to her in broken English she hadn’t the energy to try to understand. He turned the light out, his arm around her neck. Soon they heard Petra and Zoltan going at it, panting and pounding at each other till it seemed as though they’d destroy the tatami under them.

  Dina and Ari usually slept side by side, not touching, but that night he’d settled right beside her and put his arm around her neck. Ari smelled like fresh bread, and as she inhaled his scent it occurred to her that his arm around her neck was meant to calm her, to shut her up—nothing romantic. Nevertheless, she nudged him, ran her palm against his arm, the smoothest she ever remembered touching, the hairs like extensions of liquid skin. He politely rolled away. “You should wear more clothes.”

  She tugged the sheet away from him and said. “I can’t take this.”

  She hated how they all had to sleep in the tiny, six-tatami room, how they slept so close to one another that in the dark Dina could tell who was who by smell alone. She hated how they never had enough to eat, and how Ari just kept inviting more people to stay. It should have been just he and she, but now there were three others, one of whom had just tried to kill her, and she swore she could not—would not—take it anymore.

  “Can’t take?” he asked, managing to yell without actually yelling. “Can’t take, can’t take!” he tried to mimic. He turned on the light as if to get a better look at her, as if he’d have to check to make sure it was the same woman he’d let sleep under his roof. “But you must!”

  She had nowhere else to go. So she and Sayeed worked out a schedule—not a schedule exactly, but a way of doing things. If he returned from a day of looking for work, he might ask everyone how the day had gone. In that case, she would not answer, because she was to understand that he was not speaking to her. If she was in one corner of the room, he would go to another.

  Sometimes she would take a crate and sit outside the stoopless apartment building and try to re-create the neighborhood feeling she’d had at home with Miss Gloria. The sun would shine hotly on the pavement, and the movement of people everywhere, busy and self-absorbed, would have to stand in for the human music of Baltimore. The corner grocery stores back home were comforting in their dinginess, packed high with candies in their rainbow-colored wrappings, menthols, tallboys and magnums, racks of chips and sodas, but best of all, homemade barbecue sandwiches, the triangled white bread sopping up the orange-red sauce like a sponge. Oh, how she missed it. The men who loitered outside playing their lottery numbers and giving advice to people too young to take it, the mothers who yelled viciously at their children one minute, only to hug and kiss them the next. How primping young boys played loud music to say the things they couldn’t say. How they followed the unspoken rules of the neighborhood: Never advertise your poverty. Dress immaculately. Always smell good, not just clean.

  For a few minutes, the daydream would work, even in Japan.

  Once, when looking for a job in Shibuya, she eyed a cellophane Popsicle wrapper nestled up against a ginkgo. It was gaudily beautiful with its stripes of orange ooze from where a kid had licked it. Just when she felt a rush of homesickness, a Japanese streetworker, humbly brown from daily hours in the sun, conscientiously swept the little wrapper into his flip-top box, and it was gone.

  The day after Sayeed tried to kill her, she took the train to Roppongi, and though she had no money for train fare, she pounded on the window of the information booth, speaking wildly in English, peppering her rant with a few words of Japanese. She said the machine hadn’t issued her a ticket. The Japanese girl at the information counter looked dumbly at the Plexiglas, repeating that the machine had never broken. They would not outwit her: Dina knew that the Japanese did not like to cause scenes, nor be recipients of them. She pitched her voice loudly, until everyone in the station turned around. Finally, the information girl pressed a hidden button and let her through.

  She did not want to go back to Roppongi, where she’d first lived, where she had unsuccessfully searched for jobs before, but Sayeed’s knife convinced her to redouble her efforts. She hoped to get a job from Australians or Canadians who might overlook her lack of visa. She wished she’d taken the job at the pachinko parlor, but now it was gone; she hoped for a job doing anything—dishwasher, street cleaner, glass polisher, leaflet passer—but she did not get one.

  They could not go starving, so they began to steal. While Ari was away at work, Zoltan swiped packaged steaks, Sayeed swiped fruit and bread and one time even couscous, opening the package and pouring every sing
le grain into two pants pockets. Even though she never would have stolen anything in America, stealing in Japan gave Dina the same giddy, weightlessness that cursing in another language did. You did it because it was unimportant and foreign. She stole spaghetti, rice, fruit, Keebler cookies all the way from America. But Petra outdid them all. She went in with a sack rigged across her stomach, then stuffed a sweater in it to look as though she was pregnant, and began shopping. When the sack got full, she’d go to the bathroom, put on her sweater, and pay for a loaf of bread.

  But Petra’s trick didn’t last long. She went to get Zoltan a water-melon for his birthday and the sack gave way. She gave birth to the watermelon, which split open wide and red, right in front of her. The store manager, a nervous Japanese man in his forties, brought her to Zoltan, telling him, in smiling, broken English, to keep her at home.

  Since then, the stores in the area became suspicious of foreigners, pregnant or otherwise. They’d all been caught. They’d all made mad dashes down the street, losing themselves in crowds and alleys. And they didn’t even have the money to get on the train to steal food elsewhere. It was impossible to jump the turnstiles—they were all electronic. Eventually they got to a point where they never left their one-room flat, knowing that they would see people selling food, stores selling food, people eating food, people whose faces reminded them of food.

  And then they simply gave up. Some alloy of disgust and indifference checked the most human instinct, propelling them into a stagnant one-room dementia. It was a secret they shared: there were two types of hunger—one in which you would do anything for food, the other in which you could not bring yourself to complete the smallest task for it.

  Ari came home from work and declared that they must all go to the park. They looked at him uncomprehendingly. Sayeed went to his corner of the room and said, under his breath, “They know.” Zoltan stood there, looking as though he had somewhere to go but had forgotten where. Petra bit her fingernails, her sunset-blond hair in unwashed clumps, framing her scars.

  “Why the park?” Dina asked.

  “Look,” he said, reaching into his back pack to show them a block of cheese that was hardened on the ends, some paprika, a box of crackers, a plum. Dina remembered that all that was left in the refrigerator were two grapefruits. She salivated when her gaze settled on the bunch of bananas on the countertop. These he did not take.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Sayeed rose from where he’d been sitting on the tatami; Zoltan grabbed Petra’s arm and led her toward the door. Once they’d gathered at the doorway, they looked at one another in silence, as if they had nothing further to say. Ari did not bother to lock the door.

  They sat in Shakuji-koen Park, dazed with the sunlight, surrounded by an autumn of yellow ginkgo trees. For the most part, the sky was gray, shot through with fibrous clouds. The Japanese families sat like cookies arranged on a plate. The son of the family closest to them was as bronzed as Dina, a holdover tan from the summer. He bit into the kind of neat, crustless sandwiches Dina had seen mothers unwrap at Summerland. The girl was singing while her mother was talking to another mother, who agreed, “Ne, ne, ne!” as she bounced a swaddled baby on her hip. The father dozed off on a blanket of red and white squares.

  The boy nibbled at his sandwich as the five of them watched. When the boy saw the foreigners staring at him, at his sandwich, he ran to his sister and pointed. Five gaijin, all together, sitting Buddha-like. The boy looked as though he wanted to come right up and ask them questions in the monosyllabic English he had learned from older boys who had spoken to gaijin before. Do you have tails? If so, would you kindly show them to me and my sister? Do you come out at night and suck blood? He would look at Dina and ask if the color rubbed off. He wanted to ask them these questions and more, if his limited English permitted, but the girl had enough shyness for the both of them, and held him back, a frightened smile on her face.

  Ari took out the crackers, the cheese with the hard ends, the paprika, the salt, and the plum.

  “I lost my job,” he said.

  Quietly, shamefully, they mustered out their Sorrys. She’d expected him to lash out, tell all of them to leave, but he didn’t.

  “I’ll pay you back,” Dina said, “every penny.”

  “You mean yen,” Ari said.

  They ate the crackers with sliced plum and cheese on top. Then Petra spoke.

  “I do not like cheese,” she said. Everyone looked at her, her pouting lips and unblinking eyes. Zoltan clenched her arm. Petra had taken her slices of cheese off her sandwiches and Zoltan grabbed the slices with one fist and thrust them at her. They fell humbly into the folds of her shirt.

  “You don’t have to eat them,” Ari said. But Petra knew she had to eat the cheese, that the cheese mattered. She ate it and looked as if she might cry, but didn’t. They sat for a while. The food melted in Dina’s stomach just as the sunset melted, their synchronized fading seeming to make the whole world go dimmer and volumeless. Then she felt a sharp pain, as though the corners of the crackers had gone down her throat unchewed. None of them spoke, and that seemed to make the pain in her stomach worse. They watched the people and the lake and the sun, now only a thread of light.

  “Look,” Sayeed said.

  Geese. Stretching their necks, paying no mind to humans. Zoltan bolted upright from where he lay and ran after them. For a few moments, the geese flew hysterically, but then landed yards away from him, waddling toward escape, all the while snapping up bits of crackers the Japanese had thrown just for them. When Zoltan started the chase anew, Dina realized he was not after the crackers but the geese themselves. She imagined Zoltan grabbing one of the thin, long necks, breaking it with a deft turn of wrist. And what would all the Japanese, quietly sitting in the park, make of it all? She skipped over that scene, speeding ahead to the apartment, everyone happily defeathering the bird, feathers lifting and floating then descending on their futons and blankets, the down like snow, the underfeathers like ash. They’d land on Petra’s trunks, empty now that all her clothes had been sold, and they’d land on the tea table at which they used to eat. They would make a game of adjusting the oven dials, then wait out the hours as the roasted gamy smell of the goose made them stagger and salivate. And there would be a wishbone, but it wouldn’t matter, because they’d all have the same wish.

  Zoltan ran as haphazard as a child chasing after them, and when he seemed within grasp of a few tailfeathers, the geese flew off for good. When he returned, he dusted off the blanket before sitting down, as though nothing had happened.

  All Japanese eyes were on them, and it was the first time Dina thought she had actually felt embarrassment in the true Japanese sense. Everyone was looking at them, and she’d never felt more foreign, more gaijin. Someone laughed. At first she thought it was Sayeed, his high-pitched laughter that made you happy. Then Dina saw that it was one of the Japanese picnickers. Families clapped, one after the other, cautious, tentative, like the first heavy rains on a rooftop, then suddenly everyone was clapping. Applause and even whistles, all for Zoltan, as though he had meant to entertain them. Ari made a motion for them to stop, but they continued for what seemed like minutes, as if demanding an encore. They did not stop, even when Zoltan nuzzled his head into Petra’s gray corduroy shirt so no one could see him weep.

  It was a week after they saw the geese that Ari sliced up the grapefruit and banana into six pieces each. Dina watched them eat. Sayeed, his face dim as a brown fist, took his banana slice and put it underneath his tongue. He would transfer the warm disk of banana from side to side in his mouth until, it seemed, it had grown so soft that he swallowed it like liquid. He nibbled away at half a wedge of the grapefruit, tearing the fibers from fruit to skin with his bitten-down lips. He popped what was left of his grapefruit into his mouth like a piece of chewing gum.

  Petra let her slices sit for a while and finally chewed the banana, looking off from the side of her eye as if someone had a gun pointed to her head
. She wrapped up her grapefruit slice in a bit of leftover Saran Wrap and went to her corner to lie down.

  Zoltan rubbed his eyes, put the banana slice on the flat side of the grapefruit and swallowed them both whole, grapefruit peel and all.

  Ari ate his slices with delicate motions, and after he’d finished, smiled like a Buddha.

  Dina ate her fruit the way she thought any straightforward, normal American would. She bit into it. One more piece sat on the plate.

  “Anybody want that?” Dina asked. No one said anything. She looked around to make sure. No one had changed. She ate the last piece, wiped the grapefruit juice from around the corners of her mouth, looked at the semicircle of foreign faces around her, and knew she had done the wrong thing.

  She needed to go to Shinjuku. Once again, she claimed the turnstile wouldn’t issue her a ticket, and although the girl at the counter didn’t look convinced, she gave Dina a ticket. When she got to Shinjuku, it was going on noon. Sararimen hurled by, smiling with their colleagues, bowing for their bosses to enter doors first. Mothers shopped, factory workers sighed, shopworkers chattered with other shopworkers. The secretaries and receptionists—the “Office Ladies”—all freshened their lipstick and straightened their hairbows. The women in the miniskirts rushed past as though late.

  She stood in the Shinjuku station, though she hadn’t ridden the train to get there. She read an old magazine she’d brought along. Finally, a sarariman approached her.

  “Verrrry sexy.”

  He paid for the love motel with a wad of yen. “CAN RENT ROOM BY OUR!” screamed a red-lettered sign on the counter. Dina ascended the dark winding staircase, the sarariman following. The room had only a bed and a nightstand, though these simple furnishings now seemed like luxuries. He watched her undress and felt her skin only after she’d taken everything off. He rubbed it as if he were trying to find something underneath.