Tale of the Warrior Geisha

by Margaret Dilloway

  My mother wants me to get a book.

  From her sewing room? Or what used to be her sewing room? And Drew, of all people, knows? As far as I know, my sister’s never set foot in that room. That was Mom’s sacred space. I’m going to have to call my little sister. Which means bumping up our phone calls from birthday-and-holiday-only to an out-of-the-ordinary one.

  I imagine Drew’s voice, smooth as melted sugar, coating over her real emotions. It used to be so easy, second nature, to tell what my sister was thinking. Now there’s a thick invisible wall between us, and it’s like we’re little girls again, our beds on each side of the wall, tapping and hoping the other will hear, after the other one’s already deep asleep.

  Drew coming home from the hospital is one of my very first memories. I was four when Drew was born. I wasn’t too excited about having a baby in the house. I didn’t even like baby dolls.

  Mom told me to sit quietly on the couch. She put Drew in my lap. “Hold her while I get her bottle ready,” she instructed me. “Do not move.” Drew lay perfectly still, wrapped up like a sausage in her blanket. I thought Mom had tricked me, brought me a heavy doll. I stared at her. She slept, immobile. Boring. She smelled like sour milk. Her head was pointy, her face wrinkled and homely.

  I poked her in the cheek with my finger, dimpling the soft skin like dough. I poked her again, a little harder. “Wake up.”

  Drew opened her eyes and stared right at me. Her eyes were the deepest gray-brown then, like polished obsidian mixed with dark chocolate. Her stubborn little arm busted free and her tiny hand clutched my finger.

  My heart stuttered. “Hello,” I whispered, and I swore to God she smiled, though everyone said newborns couldn’t. I kissed the spots where I’d poked her. That night, I slept in her room, on the floor next to her crib, until Mom caught me and made me go back to my own bed.

  It was my sister who taught me how to love.

  “Feel like a race, Rachel?” the sleek woman to my right says. Shelley, another mother who swims laps here regularly. She pulls her dark goggles down over her tanned face and white swim cap and stretches her wide, muscular shoulders. “It’ll be good for both of us.”

  My own shoulder gives a twinge of anticipatory pain. “That’s okay. You go on with your bad self.”

  She sticks out her lips. “You’re no fun.”

  “I know, I know.” I wave her off and she dives in. Wet blanket. Hey, somebody’s got to be the sensible one, even if it’s not much fun sometimes. I bend over again, grabbing for the water, diving in without a splash. Perfect, even when nobody cares.

  Water has its own time. Inside, under the water, you can’t hear anything but muffled sounds from the people on shore. Bubbles and sloshing from whoever or whatever’s in there with you. Nothing to look at but the black lines painted on the bottom of the pool.

  Usually I don’t think of anything at all while I swim, which is why I love it so much. Even with my bum shoulder, which still flares up like a barometer on thunderous days.

  But today. Today I do my usual crawl, two strokes and then a breath, two strokes and then a breath, my big feet like turtle fins propelling me along. I look down at the white lines and instead I see the familiar faces of my mother, my sister, and my daughter. The three women closest to me.

  It strikes me that even though I could sketch all these faces in my sleep—even though one gave birth to me, one inhabited the same womb I did, and I literally grew the other one inside of me—all of them are really strangers now. Unknown to me, really. And I’m unknown to them. Because isn’t that what happens when we grow up? We leave each other.

  I close my eyes and swim faster.

  —

  Drew decides to drown this afternoon’s humiliation in a diet Pepsi. What she really needs is a kick-in-the-sternum Jack and Coke. Jack, like the musician she met today. She almost giggles at the reference. “I’m losing it,” she whispers to the photo of the English sheepdog drooling over a Milk-Bone.

  She opens the mini fridge under the desk, hoping that she missed a little whiskey or vodka bottle amid the old bagged salads and half-eaten Dannons. It’s turned up too high, filming ice over everything. She pushes a spot clean on the desk, amid papers and tufts of dog hair in blacks and tans and whites. She cracks the can open slowly, and pours it into a child’s plastic take-out cup, pleased to see that the soda comes out the consistency of a Slurpee. Perfect. This, at least, is the bright spot in her day. She sits back in the ergonomic chair her employer, Liza, bought. An awfully expensive chair, considering this office is essentially a storage closet.

  This is Dogwarts Dog Grooming, located in a little strip mall off of Beverly Boulevard. Not the Beverly Hills part of Beverly Boulevard, but further east, next to an all-night burrito joint and a legalized marijuana shop, the parking lot always crowded with red-eyed, sleepy people. The interior looks like a preschooler’s approximation of an English castle, with fake stone walls and a built-in turret on which a fake sleeping dog sleeps, his nylon-furred, black-and-white sides moving up and down eternally. Dogwarts is closed today, because Drew had another job and Liza is off on what she called a “cleansing cruise” for the next three weeks, where she’ll get her aura purified and lots of hot stone massages, or something of that nature.

  Drew’s not a hundred percent sure. She only knows that Liza, a never-married woman in her late fifties, has called Drew three times during her vacation and requested wire transfers of thousands of dollars. It’s making Drew nervous, this hemorrhaging when there’s so little coming in; but tomorrow she’s got two groomings, an overgrown Labradoodle and a Newfoundland, so that will eat up at least half the day. The viola gig came at just the right time.

  The viola gig. Drew takes a big pull of the soda, getting a chunk of ice. Today was the final recording session of Drew’s backup strings for an alternative rock band, Time in Purgatory, working along with ten other classically trained instrumentalists.

  Everyone else had already left the studio, except for Drew and the lead singer. Drew fiddled with the locks on her viola case, feeling, she thought, a warmth between them.

  This band’s about to take off, U2-style. Radio stations are already playing tracks off the second album, and everybody’s talking about the release of this one. She’s still humming the song they recorded today. It’ll be one of those songs they play ten times a day until you’re properly sick of it, like it’s some radio conspiracy to make people hate songs they once loved. But right now, it’s still new.

  A musicians’ agency books Drew for these gigs. She’s played viola for chocolate and lotion commercials, for Italian restaurant radio ads (she’s always playing that cheesily romantic “Bella Notte” song from Lady and the Tramp), for educational baby DVDs. (Drew still can’t believe anybody lets babies watch television—her sister, Rachel, would have rather poked her own eyes out than let her precious babies be stunted by television. Okay, exaggeration. But not by much.)

  These gigs aren’t bad work by any means. Not that steady, but Drew’s got it better than most musicians. The occasional gig supplements her dog-grooming job. And who knows—one could turn into something one day.

  Maybe even a relationship.

  Drew sinks down into her comfortable chair and takes a pull so strong on her soda that she gets brain freeze. Relationship. Yeah, right. She’d rather forget.

  How Drew had smiled at the lead singer, Jack, as he packed up reams of sheet music into an accordion folder, carefully sorting by instrumental part. It reminded her, with a twinge in her stomach (regret? annoyance? she couldn’t identify the feeling; they felt interchangeable sometimes, in her untrustworthy gut) of the old days, when Drew used to arrange music for the rock band she was in, Out Stealing Horses.

  Drew quit grad school at twenty-five to be in that band, quit for her boyfriend, Jonah, because she didn’t want him traveling, having fun, without her. They didn’t want a
viola player, so she banged the tambourine, standing in the background, stage left of the drummer, hundreds of cables swirled around her ankles like chains. Her most important role was that of the music arranger, as Drew was the only one with a music degree and the only one who could do notation.

  For seven years, off and on, with Drew always working some job that could easily be left if need be, they’d traveled from one club to another, to every dive on the West Coast until they were signed by a minor label; then to every county fair and second-rate musical festival in the country. The crowds grew at each venue. Drew wrote some music, hoped she’d prove her worth and get a larger role. Once she wrote an entire song, “Out of Bounds,” with a beautiful viola part that backed up and supported the other instruments, like the frame of a house. That’s not the kind of music we play, Yoko, the bassist said. The guitar’s the frame, not you. Jonah told her it wasn’t quite right for them. She told herself it didn’t matter, that she was only sticking around because of Jonah, The One. She wouldn’t have put up with that for anyone else.

  That’s what you get for putting all your eggs in one basket. Her literal ovarian eggs—nearly all of them wasted on Jonah. They’d broken up almost two years ago now.

  Drew was lucky to be doing anything even semi-professional with music. Most of the other music majors in her year went into other fields after graduation, their student loans and then mortgages and weddings and babies absorbing their freshly hatched ambitions. Drew would see her old friends and they’d tell her, You’re so lucky to be doing what you love, I just became a corporate cubicle slave. And Drew would feel a glimmer of gratitude and pride.

  Finally, Jonah’s band signed with a big label and embarked on a European tour, and Drew was unceremoniously released from both the band and the relationship. “It wouldn’t have worked out long term anyway,” Drew told Jonah, wanting to be the one to say it first. Jonah, staring at Drew with his large Siamese cat eyes, had at least been kind enough to give her that courtesy. “If we had kids, both of us can’t be traveling the world, and I hate being left behind.” This was absolutely true. At least this all had ended before Drew hit her mid-thirties, and really lost all of the best years of her life.

  And so Drew returned to Los Angeles, to her viola and her side jobs. Then, at some point, her side job became the viola instead, and the side job became the main job, the transition taking place so fluidly that Drew didn’t notice it had happened until Rachel had asked her about it last Christmas. “Are you spending most of your time at the grooming salon these days?” Rachel asked, encased in the bubble of her perfect family. “Not too many music jobs in this economy, I suppose.” Rachel couldn’t see how much this question hurt Drew. Or possibly she did. Drew could no longer tell.

  Drew put her viola case on the floor with a bang. Snap out of it, she told herself. Here she sat in this studio, wasting her chance with Jack as she questioned every life choice she’d made since high school graduation.

  Jack turned to her. “How do you think the final version sounds?”

  Drew’s eyes snapped up to meet his green ones. She was unable to think of anything to say except, Quit talking and kiss me. “Um, good,” she said instead, and wished she hadn’t. She hated it when someone told her she was “really good,” after a performance. Good could mean anything—Okay, Great, I was asleep. Good meant you didn’t care. “Fantastic. It’s going to be a hit.”

  He nodded and looked back down at the papers with a pleased smile. She wasn’t attracted to Jack because he was about to hit it big. Drew liked him because of his clear, wavering tenor; because he closed his eyes when he sang; because he had tousled blond hair like a Lab puppy’s; because the muscles of his tanned skin were visible under his white T-shirt. And when he smiled at her (often and more than he smiled at anyone else—Drew counted), pleasant shivers, as if she’d just tasted an ice cream cone, traveled all over her body. “More robust,” he said to Drew after the first rehearsal this morning.

  “Robust like Arabica beans?” She nodded toward his coffee.

  “Robust as those coffee beans they have to dig out of squirrel poop.” Everyone laughed.

  All day they’d been flirting, bantering, and now Drew thought this was her big chance. She stared at him from under her thick ebony lashes. In certain lights, her eyes were as amber as pieces of petrified tree resin, the effect magnified (she hoped) by the thick black eyeliner that had been Drew’s signature look since the age of fourteen. Without the eyeliner, Drew thought her half-Asian eyes disappeared into her face.

  She glanced at her phone. It was nearly three, and the traffic on the 405 was only going to get worse. If she wanted to get home, she’d have to leave immediately or be gridlocked for two hours. That was what her love life came down to: traffic-based decisions. Come on, she willed. We haven’t got all day. She smoothed down her denim mini and crossed her long legs in a casual attempt to get him to look at her.

  “Hey,” she said huskily to Jack, who finally finished organizing his papers. “Feel like getting a drink?”

  Jack blinked, blatant surprise and mild dismay on his suddenly awfully young-looking face, though he was her exact age. A mottled flush settled over Drew’s fair skin. Well, shit. She’d read that wrong? Really?

  She’d been doing a lot of that lately. Reading things wrong.

  To cover herself, she rolled her shoulders. “Alcohol. Relaxes the muscles. You know.” She pointed vaguely at her chin, which she knew bore the mark of her chin rest. “My neck. It’s super sore.”

  “Ah, yeah.” Jack snapped the folder closed. “We’re meeting at the Black Crow around the corner. If you want to join us.” He flashed her a quick, friendly smile. But that was all it was. Friendly.

  The studio door opened and a young woman walked in. At least ten years younger than Drew, who was thirty-four and therefore decrepit by Los Angeles standards. She smiled at Drew, her big teeth so young they still had those serrated edges. “Hey, Jack. Ready to load the van?” She had long brown hair, like Drew, and high cheekbones and full lips. All not unlike Drew. Even her frame, a tallish five-seven and bones thin enough to wrap a hand around and overlap a finger, was about the same size as Drew. But this girl had that youthful sleekness Drew was starting to lose, as if Drew’s skin had already begun pulling away from her bones. It didn’t seem fair, to deteriorate physically so fast in her mid-thirties, before she even had the chance to have a baby. Drew swallowed, aware suddenly of the gap between her and this woman, the unspoken biological need that made men desire younger and younger women, no matter how close to her age the men were.

  When she first moved to L.A. for college, Drew had been horrified by all the plasticky-looking people. Women with enlarged lips looking for all the world like wax candy, with their bolted on breasts and shiny waxen skin. The weirdest thing, she thought, was that nobody acted like this was anything out of the ordinary, these aliens walking amongst them. Now she seriously considered joining them.

  Back then, Drew felt so superior about her own skin situation. “Half-Asian skin, baby,” she told people, and held her hand up for a high-five. “Doesn’t get wrinkly until you’re at least sixty.” The indestructible twenties, when you’re superior to everyone and everything. Back then, she would have been this girl, smiling with perfect confidence at this elderly interloper. Nobody could take a man from Drew. How bitchily powerful that had felt. She hadn’t felt like a bitch at the time, of course, but now she sees that she probably was.

  Jack lifted his beautiful face for a kiss from the other beautiful face. “Priscilla, Drew.”

  “Hello,” Priscilla chirped, picking up the accordion folder. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Drew echoed numbly.

  “See you at the bar, maybe.” Jack nodded at her and exited the glass-walled studio, Priscilla close behind.

  Drew dropped her head, staring at the pocked black plastic of her viola case.
There was no sound in here except for the air faintly whistling through her nose, a by-product of seasonal allergies. Suddenly she saw herself how Jack must see her. A semi-employed cougar, practically Basic Instinct–ing herself at him. Pitiable. She caught sight of herself in the glass between the sound booth and the studio. Her eyeliner’s streaked into the fine lines beneath her eyes. Well, great. The cherry on it all.

  In the pet grooming office, Drew shudders at the memory and pretends that this soda is making everything all better, forcing herself to drink it all fast so she gets a throbbing headache. “That hit the spot,” she says to a picture of a hairy mutt, a grooming guide stuck up on the wall, arrows pointing at all the places that needed trimming with various shear sizes.

  She fires up the laptop so she can wire Liza another two grand, her stomach tensing at the dwindling balance. Honestly, she isn’t sure how Liza stays in business. Liza comes from a rich family, the offspring of someone who’d invested early in Wendy’s, so this business is mostly a way for Liza to stay busy. A vanity operation. But lately money hasn’t been being deposited, and Drew doesn’t know where it’s gone, or if it’s gone for good.

  Drew waits for the laptop to hum to life and regards the empty plastic cup sitting in front of her, where Mickey and Minnie Mouse hold hands and proclaim in Gothic script, The Happiest Place on Earth. She doesn’t know precisely when her life turned into this big sticky oatmeal cookie of a mess. One, two wrong turns—detours, really—and she’d veered completely off the path to wherever she was headed. But Drew kept thinking that if she only turned around, turned right, she could find her way back.

  If she had a destination. Something’s got to change.

  She takes a small black spiral-bound notebook out of her bag. She’s carried one around since she was a kid, to write down ideas for song lyrics and music notes. Drew used to set it on the toilet tank outside the shower because that’s where she thought of her best ideas, and the notebook would get wet and curled, the ink running. When she was in the band, she’d fill up one every two weeks.