The Letter Opener

by Kyo Maclear

  My mother, years later, denied the dinner had ever taken place. She said, “You must have dreamt it,” then she fell silent. But I have enough memories for the both of us.

  I remember the oval table, the amber light and the wine-red velvet upholstery. I remember watching the diners around us—the men with their white cuffs, the women with their tasteful bracelets (my mother with her heavy silver bangles, courtesy of Kana). I remember that Kana insisted on wearing her coat throughout the meal despite the wood fire roaring a few metres away. I remember my mother putting down her soup spoon to ruffle and rearrange the flowers in front of her, my father bending down to pick up the serviette that had fallen from his lap. The server kept refilling his water glass and my father kept drinking it in long gulps, as if he needed to flush something inside himself.

  I remember the white candles, bowls of liquid wax melting around the wick. I tipped drops onto the linen tablecloth. No one scolded me. Deft hands came and removed the filigreed soup bowls; the server’s steps were light, so as not to scuff the polished floor. The quails on my plate were too small to eat. The steaming pool of meat juice that seeped off them made my stomach churn. I stared ahead at a painting of a dead fox draped over a man’s shoulder. I remember thinking that my family was like a dead fox that I would carry around for a long time.

  I wanted to scream: WHY CAN’T YOU LOVE EACH OTHER? ISN’T LOVE SUPPOSED TO LAST FOREVER? WHAT DID I DO?

  I wanted to say so much, but I didn’t. I never do.

  My father left again, and finally, one afternoon in late November, my mother got out of bed. I came home from school and my mother was walking around the house in white jeans and a floppy peasant shirt, calmly watering plants. I wasn’t prepared to see her upright and without the sweatpants. The whole thing took some adjusting to.

  “I like your shirt, Mama. You look pretty.”

  “Thank you, Nai-chan.” She touched her hair.

  I smelled a faint whiff of starch, rice steaming in the kitchen. After so many weeks, the scent filled the house with promise.

  My mother quickly set about restoring order. She sent me on an errand to buy scouring pads, bleach and a bottle of detergent. When I returned she was heaving a wooden hutch away from the wall. Beneath it, in a dust mound containing hair, bread crumbs and shrivelled grapes, was a desiccated mouse. Without a moment’s hesitation, she pulled a rubber glove from under the sink slipped it over her hand.

  It was soon clear that my mother’s hibernation had worked wonders. She had never looked or acted younger. Toward spring, she called up an old friend and got a job working at his art supply shop. She liked touching all the fancy paper and grouping the paints together by colour. It turned out she had a knack for dealing with the customers, and before we knew it she was dating—nothing lasting or serious, but the attention boosted her confidence. One guy came by every Friday night for several months. He was a painter with long silvery hair and eyes that were too close to his nose, so they always looked crossed. He wore a brown sweatshirt with a mandala silk-screened on the front. When I told my mother that his face reminded me of a ferret’s, she just laughed. She was now as permanently happy as she had once been tired. Everything around her was showered with affection.

  Even her body language began to change. As our father became more clean-cut in appearance and more reserved in his mannerisms, our mother became less inhibited. I saw it in the way she interacted with people on the street and at the store. She pressed up close in a way that made me squirm in embarrassment. She was constantly pinching her cheeks to make them rosier and throwing her jeans in the dryer so the fabric tightened and hugged her bottom in an alluring way.

  Kana said our mother was experiencing a sexual rebirth.

  I came home from school one day and found Kana in our mother’s bathroom. She was sitting on the counter in front of the mirror, her mouth puckered, dabbing on Nivea face cream before slowly smoothing it into her cheeks with her fingertips. She made small circles, moving up from her jaw, just the way our mother did.

  When she saw me staring at her, she stopped and said, “The Ferret slept over again last night.”

  I picked up a tube of lipstick, rolled it up, gave it a sniff. “Why is she acting this way?” I said.

  “Don’t be a knob. People have sex. Grandpa and Grandma had sex. Mom and Dad had sex.” She washed her hands. “How do you think we got here?”

  “Oh God. Kana,” I groaned. “But how do you know Mom and he—?”

  “Come with me,” she said. Then, to prove her point, she pulled my hand, towed me into the bedroom and opened the sliding door to our mother’s closet.

  “Exhibit A,” she declared triumphantly.

  In front of me were fancy blouses and slinky dresses I had not seen our mother wear in years. The hangers poked out at angles, indicating how recently and how hurriedly she had tried the clothes on. On the floor were stilettos, sling-back pumps and sequined shoes that we used to slip onto our small feet when we played dress-up. I turned around and noticed several puddles of black silk on the bed.

  “She’s doing her own thing,” Kana said.

  “She’s totally lost her mind.”

  Kana flipped her hair. “People change.”

  “Not mothers. Not like this,” I said in horror.

  She stood back and studied herself in the full-length mirror, and said, “As long as it makes her happy…” She poked her chest out and ran her hands across the two lumps there.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She glanced at me and smiled. “You’ll see,” she said. “‘It’s a woman’s problem,’” she added in a low voice, imitating the doctor who had paid us the house visit. Then, in her normal voice, she repeated, “One day—when you’re older—you’ll see.”

  PAOLO ONCE ASKED ME if I thought that period of my life had left a mark on me. “No,” I said. But he pointed to the way films and television shows stick in my mind, affecting my moods. A good film can fill me with optimism or a sense of inadequacy. He says that unlike most people who see movies as art or entertainment, I seem to turn to them as personal allegories. Paolo is convinced, for instance, that I graft his head onto the bodies of unreliable men.

  On the night before I returned to work after being sick, he came over with a film called Another Woman. Because it was right beside Woody Allen’s Sleeper on the video store shelf, he assumed it was a comedy, something light and cheerful, and failed to notice the orange genre sticker on the cover that said Drama. Within a few minutes it became clear that we were in for a depressing two hours. Paolo made a noble effort to step in and save the evening, but I resisted.

  “Oh. Boring movie,” he said quickly. “Let’s find something on TV instead.” He reached for the converter.

  “No.” I held his arm.

  So we watched Gena Rowlands reckon with a missed turn in her life—the fear that prevented her from ever succumbing to her passions, her crumbling relationship with her husband (Ian Holm)—and I felt a salty sting rise up my nostrils. Before I knew it the tears were plopping onto my lap. Paolo looked over at me, concerned, not sure whether to hang back or move closer. His torso had a strange twist to it, caught between flight and approach. He held out his hand, which I ignored as I searched in my pocket for a tissue.

  “These aren’t autobiographical tears.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Paolo, I can hardly imagine putting your head on the body of Ian Holm or Gene Hackman!”

  “Then look at me.”

  “I am.”

  It was impossible not to feel foolish. I blew into the tissue and then stuffed it back into my pocket. There was a loose thread on my pants I felt a sudden urge to tug. Paolo noted my attempts to look absorbed and laughed.

  “Come here. Let’s just forget it.” He reached toward me.

  I stood up. “I should probably go to bed. I have to be up early.”

  Paolo grabbed my hips from behind and pulled me back down. He kissed my neck, my shoulder
and then my neck again. I felt my breathing change. This time, I didn’t move away.

  Thirteen

  A few days’ rest had distracted my mind. But when I returned to work after my flu, there was a lot of catching up to do. Two overflowing bins awaited me. The nation’s hastily and carelessly wrapped Christmas presents had sprung open. I could see the bins from a distance and their contents looked like multicoloured candy. An explosion of plastic toys was combined with the usual bric-a-brac.

  I could feel people’s eyes on me as I passed. I heard, or imagined, Doreen whisper something to the manager. Something was odd, and deciding that it must be my appearance, I sent my fingers instinctively combing for leftover breakfast bits, unruly hair. I was still patting around my head when I reached my work area, at which point I suddenly understood what all the staring had been about.

  Andrei’s desk had been packed up. The pile of packages had been taken away. His workstation was now completely anonymous, the last trace of Andrei erased.

  My head pounded and I sank into my seat. In the distance, I could hear the racket of Marvin arriving with the morning delivery. I felt a rush of grief and I picked up the phone to call Paolo, but he hadn’t arrived at work yet. So I put the receiver back and looked around me, feeling how the world floated, nothing anchored. Everywhere there were careening wheels clattering across concrete floor, big yellow buckets full of things lost. My people were unmoored, close friends carried away: Andrei, then Gloria.

  The people working around me were behaving as though Andrei had never existed. I felt a pit opening in my stomach. They had bagged him up. Baba was standing near the middle of the room, his back to me, discussing something with Maria, who was visiting from another department. It was a lively conversation, and on several occasions they burst into laughter.

  It was Baba who eventually came to my desk to tell me that they had hired someone to replace Andrei. He would be starting in two days, to help with the Christmas surplus. I noticed a touch of embarrassment in his voice, but I could also see that something had happened to Baba while I was away. He seemed practically euphoric.

  “Thank goodness you’re back,” he said. “I’ve been waiting to give you my good news. Françoise and I found out we’re having twins. A girl and a boy.”

  “Twins! Baba, that’s crazy. Congratulations!”

  “I don’t know how we’ll afford it, but Françoise is thrilled.”

  At that moment, Baba revealed a side of himself I had never seen before: he stepped forward and hugged me. I laughed at this impulsive display of affection and we chatted for a bit about Françoise. When we finished, I turned to face Andrei’s desk.

  “Baba, we have to stop them.”

  Baba placed his fingers over his mouth, raked them toward his chin.

  “No. Don’t tell me,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. My face fell.

  “Naiko,” he said quietly.

  I shook my head. “They’ve convinced you, too.”

  Baba stared down at my desk. “It’s too late. The manager made up his mind. Really, he waited as long as he could. You saw how much work had piled up.”

  “But what if Andrei comes back? He’s bound to turn up, just like you said happened last time.” I tried to quell the panic I felt creeping into my voice.

  “It’s not the same as last time. He’s been gone too long.”

  “So you’ve given up on him,” I said, more as a statement to myself than an accusation. But his face froze.

  “No. Not me. They have.” He said it bluntly, pointing toward the manager’s office, then continued, “Naiko, you know what I think? I think you should be angry instead of worried. Remember, he deserted us. Not the other way around.”

  He excused himself and retreated to the valuables room.

  I felt ashamed at having upset Baba when he had been so excited; now I watched him walk away, as if he had turned his back on me. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was wasting my time.

  I took a deep breath and tackled the workload, my hands resuming their familiar tasks. Counting came first. Wallets, picture frames, fountain pens, tape cassettes, passports, handkerchiefs and cufflinks. My calming stacks, my benevolent rows. I counted to keep order, to keep from crying. By mid-afternoon, I was surprised at how much time had passed and I wolfed down a sandwich. For the rest of the day, the others gave me a wide berth, perhaps believing that anything they said or did would set me off. Aside from Baba, no one talked to me about what had transpired. Was it human nature, or just the nature of government employees, to live in constant complacency? I wondered bitterly.

  The next morning I went straight to Baba’s desk and apologized to him for my behaviour the day before. He was gracious, but it was plain to see that things had changed between us. There was a certain reserve that had never been there before. Nonetheless, I contented myself with the fact that I had made an effort, and vowed to keep quiet about Andrei in the future.

  It was still before 9 a.m. when I sat down, so I took a few minutes to glance at my newspaper. As I was reading, a moth flitted by and landed on my sorting tray. I tapped my finger beside it and it fluttered away, along a crooked path, before landing on the shelf beside me.

  At exactly 9 a.m., I folded away the newspaper, popped a vitamin in my mouth and began looking through customer claims letters. I was halfway through my first pile when I heard a gasp from above and the exclamation “God Almighty.” When I looked up, Marvin was gaping over the pile, craning dramatically as if it took great effort to find me. Oh no, he said. They. Squashed You. His stomach sagged over the bucket he had wheeled across the room. His shirt looked old and faded and said: “Draft beer, not boys.”

  The contents of his bucket, my morning delivery, merely added to my steeple of work, objects piled so high that an avalanche could have been triggered by a gust of air. I was literally days behind, but for some reason it no longer mattered. I felt strangely calm. Why keep rushing to catch up? Come morning there would always be a new pile.

  A sunbeam hit my desk and the warmth pleased me, made me stretch, catlike. I watched Marvin as he continued to make his rounds. My fingers bumped against something soft. I slipped a pair of cufflinks from a black velvet pillow, turning one from side to side to watch the light bounce off a circle of tiny blue stones. The absurdity of concentrating on anything so tiny, given the mountain of material at hand, was perversely appealing.

  Periodically, my mind buzzed with a thought: what if Andrei had left me a message somewhere? Where would he have put it? (I pictured myself entering his apartment and discovering an unshaven Andrei rocking back and forth on the floor, pen in hand, suitcase beside him.) Suppose I found a body? (This last image blasted away any fear I had of finding his room bare.)

  Then the thoughts would pass and my eyes would fix on something else. A lacquer box with a hand-painted portrait of John F. Kennedy, inscribed in Vietnamese. A tribute or a hex? I brought out the magnifying glass, copied the script onto a scrap of paper and made a mental note to ask Nhi at the library. Next, a pair of men’s briefs flattened in a glass frame…In this manner the morning passed. Poke as I might at the pile of objects, it did not seem to diminish.

  Had my curiosity deserted me?

  Thankfully not. There was an old wristwatch. A curved rectangle with a dirty yellow leather band. Popeye and Swee’ Pea on the discoloured watch face. The winding pinion had stiffened from age, so that the time was always 4:25. The watch wasn’t well preserved and it didn’t look especially valuable. Why was a watch that no longer functioned being presented as a gift (tied to an unsigned card addressed to “Darling Adrian”)? I lifted my magnifying glass to the back to look for an inscription.

  Silverplated. 1957.

  Could an object acquire life, a “soul” of some kind? Might this leather band recall the wrist it once touched, remember the sweat, the grime, perhaps even the passing of that person?

  Baba had turned on the radio in the kitchen. A woman said something about Tchaiko
vsky and played the “Dance of the Reed Pipes” from The Nutcracker Suite. I watched him pour a coffee and open two packets of sugar.

  What is the measure of love? Persistence in the face of brokenness? Devotion in the face of rejection?

  In Japan, there is a tradition of honouring broken things, things that people have used for many years, in particular belongings that they have worn close to their bodies. It is a pleasing thought that something spiritual might rub off on objects that age with us. When the time comes for damaged possessions to be discarded, they are collected together and Shinto or Buddhist prayers—prayers of thanks—are said over them. Harikuyo, the Festival of Broken Needles, held annually on the eighth of February at shrines and temples across Japan, is typical of the practice. The festival allows seamstresses and tailors to express gratitude to the tools of the sewing trade they have used and worn out during the previous year.

  Inasmuch as they are still practised, these Mass-like rituals teach people to pay attention to things that are near to them, to respect the disregarded or abandoned. A cracked rice bowl that has provided a year of nourishment. A damaged pair of straw sandals that have offered many miles of comfort. A decorative comb with snapped teeth that has adorned the hair of generations of women. Life’s hierarchy of importance is turned on its head.

  And here perhaps lies the true measure of devotion. Dedication to that which is beyond usefulness.

  ON THE DAY OF my mother’s cognitive evaluation test, two months before she moved to Sakura, the social worker asked if he could talk with me privately. As my mother napped, we sat at the table drinking tea. He had a clipboard in front of him and was writing something down. He said he needed my help in completing my mother’s assessment.

  What, in my opinion, he asked, was the strongest indication of her mental deterioration? He avoided my eyes and gazed at my hairline as he spoke, an affectation that I found disconcerting.

  I shouldn’t have answered; it made me an accomplice.

  “She collects stuff,” I told him.