Planning for Escape

by Sara Dillon

  In fact, the week passed and Gramma said no more about where I was living or what would happen when I left. This had always happened, about everything I did. The resistance, then the long silence, the pause button pushed, for how long one never knew. I spent time in the bookshops, trawling for things to teach in the seminar.

  Una was always very generous, and gave the kids beautiful gifts. By contrast, I hadn’t done nearly as much for Hughie, though in my defense, Hughie was very picky about presents. For Sven, I’d merely got a stainless steel flask for taking nips in the great outdoors. Great for ice fishing, he quipped. For Una, a purple wool scarf. They’d given Emmet a huge yellow crane and he spent hours cranking the hook up and down, up and down. Madina had a new handbag and lovely books.

  As for the seminar, about which I kept trying to talk, Una said, It might work out fine for you, but I’m not holding my breath.

  What Daddy had always said was true. When you crossed the Vermont border, things really did look different.

  Stannard, 2007; Yukito, 1979 and beyond

  I’m not sure why it was that getting ready to teach one lone seminar in comp lit should have brought me to see the sad and sorry ruin that was my life; apart from the kids, at least. I thought first about introducing a post-modern note and quickly realized that I was in fact not even modern; alas, I was pre-modern. I had lived for love, and love had not done an awful lot for me.

  Living for love, I had put myself in the least likely places to find it. Were I a lady writer of two centuries ago, I would put it down to something like She had self-regard and self-punishment in equal measure. But most clearly, self-punishment had the upper hand.

  Why had I gone where I did and why done what I did; there was no easy answer. I had been as little Emmet was in the orphanage—alone in his crib, waiting to be picked up and told he was wonderful. Why above all I’d turned to law; enough there to keep me busy a lifetime, an eternity of endeavor. Enough to completely ruin me; and chosen it seems by me.

  The seminar could be on Courtly Love and Beyond; Love as Buried Treasure; Love as Culture; Love as Deep Dark Secret. Love as Tragedy, Love as Silence; Love as Enemy, but that was getting too post-modern. It was all self-serving, and of course that was why I was so suddenly happy. I hadn’t merely escaped, but had been asked, yes, been asked to consider my self. I scribbled into little notebooks, the ones I’d bought everywhere I went, but left empty. I wrote notes to myself in the kitchen. In my slipper socks and LL Bean pajamas, there I was, taking notes on mediated desire, on Dazai and the almost there, on, well, me. I didn’t want to be Lily Briscoe, too quaint, or Grandma Moses, paintbrush and bun; but I did allow myself to write little notes that came out so well. I was surprised to see I could still pull something up; a thought, a still life with plums. Mauve plums on a violet cloth.

  So then there I was; washed up on the beach at Stannard State. I was standing in front of the students. I had never liked teaching, truth be told. I hated being looked at. Maybe the sort of class where you all sit around the table might do. I liked being a student; not a teacher. As a student, I could be clever, wise, ironic, off the cuff; rebalancing the talk, introducing a bit of madness. But as the teacher, I knew that I was at the other end of a lightning rod of various unknown complexes and neuroses; it was too frightening. They hated you or admired you, despised you for your clothes and your car, made assumptions about your life. God, it was horrifying. More so in the law school, so many people watching, and I was rowing away from everything they wanted to be. They hated me for it, couldn’t wait to get their hands on a slam book and denounce me.

  I couldn’t help remembering the student evaluation from Brooklyn, the angry young man who had written, It makes me sick to see the way she runs out of the building to pick up her child. What clearer threat could there be, a death wish against me.

  Yet at Stannard, I could just about enjoy the small classroom. I didn’t even have an office, so no need to feel guilty about my chronic failure to hang pictures on the wall. I had to meet students outside of class in a cubby in the library, being shushed by people reading. It was wonderfully contingent and strange. Underfunded and unadorned, Stannard in the woods, timeless.

  I found myself laughing quietly in the little cubby.

  I thought of the twinkling little poem I had chased all along, like a stream or river that followed the road.

  I thought about the days when I had had to write about law. I couldn’t quite swing it with the tone, and ended up sounding like this.

  Dear Editor: I enclose for your perusal an article recently finished on the subject of various heinous outrages upon the souls of humankind. This article will expose law generally as a fraudulent activity, a makework scheme, professionalized obstruction, all designed to forestall awareness of murder, mayhem and disappointment. Yours in outrage, etc., etc . . . .

  Or,

  Dear Indifferent Sir: Long Have I struggled in vain against the cross currents of our time; I have written up, in haste and with footnotes incomplete, a chronicle of misspent determination, for, as you will see, I did attempt to turn back several tides of staggering proportions.

  That sort of thing.

  And now, here I was, the big event of the day was to buy a new Vermont key ring. Instant coffee, a pack of blue envelopes. A 40-watt light bulb to cast a softer light. The kids and I went upstairs in Willey’s when it was open, to see how they had cleverly rearranged the hats, gloves and rain boots. I would not ever succeed in forcing a redefinition of the international war crime. I had checked out. I must go pick up a good-bye card.

  But oh yes, there was the seminar; it was all new to me again, entry level, ingénue.

  The Self: Love, Art and All of the Above

  It sounded like The Sword in the Stone, but this was Stannard after all. Eva Trout, my favorite book, one I had never understood but felt some rare affinity for. The Sun Also Rises. The Setting Sun. Remember, I was pre-modern. But I was pre-modern living in the post-modern; that was the difference. I’d no intention of doing Moll Flanders; wrong self. I needed something Russian and felt myself at a loss. I kept coming back to Uncle Vanya and Quiet Flows the Don. What if I could ask Miles Bradford, I thought incongruously, long dead as he was.

  How could I be so exuberant about a cubby in the unrenovated end of the library at Stannard State? I felt, irrationally, that I had come home. I was home. Hey, I’m home! Though anyone who might have hoped to hear my footsteps coming up the drive was gone at this stage. There was no one to greet me; only strangers.

  The class, as I had predicted, was small. Maybe eight or nine, not a disaster. After class, I strolled into Stannard for coffee. I knew every change in the light. I remembered everything. I had taken it with me; I had treasured it. A hapless, hangdog young Russian named Sasha took to stopping by my cubby at office hours, running his hands though his hair and telling me about his family troubles. He wanted to know more about the Japanese. When conversation lagged, we sat and looked out into the trees. I had never, ever liked winter so well.

  At the law school, I would never discuss Japan or Japanese, not really. I would wave my hand in the air and say, Oh, that’s another world, or Another life, he de ha, funny me, thus avoiding any talk of the place. In the eighties I always thought, well, I used to say, I was Japanese, I mean, I felt I was, but then you get to a point, you know, um.

  What’s that, Catherine?

  Oh, nothing. Nothing.

  It became as remote and artificial as a Japanese calendar hanging on my office wall. Full stop. No more to be said about Japan than that. I refused to speak nonsense, though. I never used clichés; that was absolute. I refused to chat about corporate governance, or problems of gender equality. Better to leave the mere impression, if such there was, of something tragic, subtle, light sensitive.

  Well, Japan too, or especially, made me think that I could have everything I wanted. Even before that night I arrived in the early 1980s, the summer night when I stepped out into the warm, hu
mid air and saw the sun setting like a huge red disk over the city, I knew Japan well. Knew it before seeing it. Arrived, and was completely at home. Here I am, and stepped off into the maze of trains and tunnels and escalators, perfectly fine and content, the smell of tea in baskets in the heat, the summer markets, the beautiful mornings and precious evenings.

  As it happened, I had spent the summer at my parents’ house; the summer after I left Sandy. A fellowship came through from one of the big midwestern universities; I would go and start a PhD in English; start again, move again, pretend I had not spent any time in that garden flat with Sandy. It was never mentioned by my family. I arrived in Chicago by train; then onto a bus, across the alien farmland, the red barns, the open landscape without any definition of the kind I was used to.

  And then, well, soon after, I started another escape.

  I took a Japanese language class, in addition to my English literature classes. Just because I wanted to. I saw from day one it suited me so well. So neurotic, so exaggerated, so emotional. So vague, so full of hints. I am so, so sorry, but I must bother you and then run away to just over there . . . . Please forgive me for writing to you like this, I know you are so busy, and perhaps you do not even recall our conversation, how sorry I am to make you recall it . . . . On these hot and uncomfortable days, are you taking care?

  Amid the Chaucer, the Henry James, shibboleths and narrative dissonance, I also learned the language of girls drawing baths for customers at postwar ryōkan.

  Lay out the futon.

  Right away, of course . . . .

  And into this mix, poor Yukito walked. I don’t envy him having met me.

  I was introduced to him at a dinner party, a young professor of applied mathematics, shiny hair like a seal. He revealed that he wore special contact lenses, but had terrible vision even with them, nearsighted, farsighted, almost blind. He’d grown up wealthy and privileged in Shibuya; now he ran marathons, and lived alone in his modern house in a midwestern subdivision. Mismatched as we were, Yukito and I found some peculiar form of common cause; I needed not to feel so much, while he needed to feel more.

  Something, that is. He needed to feel something.

  He was in his way a good-hearted sort. He was helpful. When I met him, he had a saying that went: no wife, no plants, no pets. He was reserved and secretive, critical, but with happy memories of touch football with his rich Tokyo friends.

  You could say that we had not one slightest clue about the other, and it would be true. Yet, reader, I married him.

  I was not good to Yukito. He managed to pay me back for my misdeeds, I suppose, but still, it left a bitter taste, and I couldn’t help but feel extremes of guilt over it.

  Though he wouldn’t have agreed, I saw that Yukito was so like his mother; she a small, elegant Edokko, quiet and sarcastic. When he was young, she would phone ahead to every place she knew he was on his way to; he would arrive at the bookshop, and be hailed with, Oh, is it you? Your mother has phoned, she needs you to phone her right away. And, phoning back, Yukito would be given commissions of things to buy and look up. In her quiet way, she kept busy buying up property; small office buildings and restaurants, apartments. His father never revealed just where he came from; he made his fortune during the war, ferrying goods and raw materials across to the Japanese army in continental Asia. Then after the war, he filled his suitcases with household products and went to sell them in the Middle East. Yukito’s mother made his dad respectable; his father made his mother rich.

  They liked me. This was their mistake and misjudgment.

  His father thought I was sweet, and cute, and charming, but I was not. I was devious and confused, and nothing at all like what they were looking for on behalf of their only son. Yukito had a sister Miyako who believed she could become an opera singer through force of will; she locked herself up in her apartment in San Francisco and sang along to records.

  Yukito was oddly pleased that his family liked me. But in fact it was mainly because their view of Americans was that they were mostly big and wore sweatshirts; because I wasn’t and didn’t, they saw me as trim and stylish and appealing. I was also studying Japanese. My accent, despite the short time I’d been studying, was bordering on native. I oddly meshed with the language and this led Yukito’s father to send me cartloads of books geared to helping small children learn kanji. I practiced and practiced; stroke order right, kanji tilted slightly backwards, as if running away on the page.

  I used to be certain it mattered, mattered enormously about Kido, the singer, but now I don’t know. That first night Yukito and I went out, out into the Midwestern college town where neither of us belonged, he said, I have some Japanese music I think you might like to hear; you might find it interesting. And back we went to his modern townhouse in his tidy subdivision, to hear this music.

  And you could say I found it most interesting.

  We listened to Kido, Kido Ansé, though most Japanese seemed to call him by just his first name, Ansé. Kido was a genius; that I knew instantly, knew through my meager Japanese, knew through his combination of traditional longing and poetic surprises; there was a good deal I knew about Kido after just a few moments of listening.

  It’s hard to look back from here, from not wanting or expecting anything, to those days when I expected everything, believed there was a promise made in the stars to me. Poor Yukito, who assumed it was just nice music, of interest to this girl who liked Japanese and had a strange affinity for it.

  That first album was named just Ansé, with an accent mark. Kido was standing in a field, I don’t know what kind of field, wearing a jean jacket too small for him. His hair was wild, curly and wild, he had tiny eyes that looked embarrassed. He sang about riding his bike on hot nights in a small Japanese town, and about the sound of the barrier that comes down when a train is about to pass. He sang about things that would never happen. And if it provides any hint of what is to come, Kido Ansé was the one thing from which I actually did not, as far as I know, wish to escape.

  Never mind Kido.

  I don’t know if I ever managed to escape from him. But, never mind.

  Una did not like my Japan motif. She resisted it as family members resist bad boyfriends, or the wrong house purchased. She wanted me to ditch that motif; it did not interest her. But at the time I was busy escaping my PhD in English; ditching the perfect fellowship, requesting to convert it to a Master’s degree instead, complaining vociferously about the boring midwestern town, about the concrete buildings, the lakes with their joggers. Yet everything I did or wrote created such a stir, the PhD would have been easy. The professors adored every word I produced; small assignments were done brilliantly; I was needed in medieval studies; I was needed by the Edwardians; I was needed by journals that sought out work on narrative disjunctions and dislocations.

  But there I was, fast away as greased lightning, at the picnics and potlucks with other students in the Japanese classes, plotting and planning and becoming Japanese.

  Oh, dear; poor Yukito. I was not good to him. He was distant and secretive, but overall kind, complimentary. He did not require someone like me, but then again, perhaps I changed things for the better, humiliating though it must have been.

  So we listened to Kido, and read Japanese books. We went to restaurants, and even on occasion rode out into the midwestern countryside. I complained about my program and about the boring town. The long winter slowly passed, and I made plans to go to Japan to teach in the spring, when the Master’s exams would be over. Yukito disapproved because I’d accepted an offer to teach in a country town and would develop a provincial accent, something his family could not bear. Through some strange complications, the school in question turned out not to be as good as the director had advertised; Yukito got on the phone with him and berated him for deceiving an American girl. He was pleased that it had fallen through; I would not be going away, I would not be going to the south of Japan and developing what he and his mother insisted was a terrible accent
. I would not be a mere English teacher. But from my point of view, I would not be meeting Kido any time soon.

  So, Master’s all done, and no plans, I hung about in Yukito’s modern house, with its beige Japanese colors and lines. Yukito liked to cook and bake, so we ate and ate, cold noodles and puff pastries. And then we decided, rather foolishly and precipitously, and with no anticipation of pleasure, to get married. I would take classes to prepare me for a PhD in Japanese literature, and I would be married to Yukito.

  We drove out to the farmland and Yukito parked the car. He looked at me, and in many ways he appeared to me as a stranger.

  You will hate being married to me, he said. He was clever, and fairly honest.

  Yes, probably, I replied.

  Yet, impelled by some force we could not have named, we went ahead and got married. Once secretly, and once with the knowledge of our families.

  Marriage

  What do you need to marry him for? Una shouted at me. I had no answer for her. It was true, I didn’t need to.

  I do not to this day care for married people; I don’t like the way they band together and find a common interest against others. I don’t like talking to a married couple, and then imagining what they say to each other when they are alone. They may not like one another, but their common interest requires that they dislike others. At least, that is usually the case.

  And even Yukito and I, for all our oddity as a unit, had a certain loyalty to one another, a certain desire to oppose the world, a certain commitment to seeing the other one recognized by outsiders.

  Yukito’s father, Papa as we called him, showered me with gifts.