by Ruth Ozeki
His white hair, fine spun and charged with static from the friction, clung to the nubbly fabric. When he opened his eyes again, the pale blue irises were covered in a greasy film. He blinked, then let his watery gaze roam around the room to the lawyer, then to Will, to Momoko, and finally to Cass. Looking for answers. Cass looked away.
“All right,” he said. “Give me a pen, then. Let’s get this over with.”
“That’s right, Lloyd,” Duggin said, handing him a ballpoint. “It’s the only sensible thing to do.”
“Lloyd? Momoko?”
Cass slowly climbed, listening to the groan of the stairs underfoot and Momoko’s murmuring from above. As her head came level with the floorboards, the odor she’d noticed downstairs grew stronger. She ran up the remaining stairs.
She knew the house. She’d known it since she was a child, running along the creaky corridors, adding scuff marks to the doors, sliding down the rickety banister and fingering the scratches in the plaster walls. For all its flaws it was a far better house than her parents’ ranch-style prefab, where she and Will lived now. She was looking forward to the day when they could move in and start fixing it up. The door to the master bedroom was closed. She knew that the knob was loose, that it wiggled, and its screws were in need of tightening. She knocked, then peeked in. The bed was messy, but no one was there. She hurried down the hallway to the bathroom.
Momoko was perched like a child on the edge of the bathtub, rocking back and forth and talking quietly to herself. Lloyd lay on the floor in front of her, toppled like a giant on the slick tiles in front of the toilet. He had apparently been using it when he fell, because there was dark yellow urine pooled on the tile around him, and his pajama bottoms were wet in front. His toes, normally pale and waxlike, had turned dark, the color of a bruise. The small nub of his penis stuck out from the slit in the damp flannel.
Cass knelt down and put her hand on the side of his neck, then felt for his pulse. The acrid smell of old man’s urine made her gag. She cupped one hand over her nose and the other hand over his mouth. She felt warm breath in the palms of both. She slid open his eye with her thumb.
“When did this happen? When did he fall?”
Momo shrugged her shoulders.
“When did you find him? Was it just now?”
Momoko pointed to her husband’s penis. “O-chin-chin ga dashite iru wa panashi . . .”
There was a phone in the hallway. Cass dialed for an ambulance. If it gets too much, Will had said. Yes, suddenly it was much too much.
From the bathroom, Momoko cried, “Damé! Damé! O-shikko tarashite!”
Cass finished with 911 and ran back to the bathroom. Momoko was squatting down next to Lloyd, slapping his thigh with her tiny, crooked hand.
“Mrs. Fuller! Don’t!”
The old woman looked up at Cass, her silver hair hanging down on either side of her face. She shook her head, sternly.
“Damé! Very bad. He did o-shikko in his pants!”
Then she stood up as straight as she could, which wasn’t very straight at all, brought her hands to her eyes, and let out a low, keening wail. She shuffled backward, two baby steps, just far enough to bump the backs of her knees against the edge of the tub, whereupon she sat abruptly on the tub’s rim, then kept on going, sliding with her behind first into the smooth porcelain depression. She lay there on the bottom, in a small curl, sobbing quietly.
“It’s his heart,” Cass explained for the hundredth time to yet another social worker. “He’s had a couple of heart attacks, plus a bout with colon cancer. He had a colostomy last year and wears a bag, but he can’t change it himself. And she’s pretty senile. They really need services.”
The social worker nodded. “I agree, but it’s just not practical to be sending aides all the way out to the farm several times a day. In a case like this, usually we recommend one of the children or a family member helping out. . . .”
“I’m not a family member,” Cass said quickly. “I just live next door.”
“Don’t they have any children?”
“A daughter. But nobody knows where she is.”
“Have you asked them?”
Cass tried, but she knew there was no point. “Lloyd? Can you hear me?”
Momoko shook her head. “He can hear. He don’t want talking.”
“Wouldn’t you like Yummy to come home and take care of you?”
Lloyd lay perfectly still under the thin sheet.
“He don’t want nobody,” Momoko said.
Cass sighed. “Momoko, do you have any idea where Yummy is?”
“Yumi?” The old lady’s eyes turned inward. “Oh, yes. She is at whatchamacallit.”
“Where?”
“Where you go for studying.”
“You mean, like a school? A college?”
“That’s right,” she nodded. “You know, too. You go to same one. How come you not go today? You sick or something?”
Lloyd shifted his long legs under the sheet. “She doesn’t know anything,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “We haven’t heard from her in years.”
“I know! I know! You playing hooky!” Momoko screeched with laughter.
Will jerked on the sagging screen door to see if he could straighten the hinges.
“Don’t bother,” Cass said. “We’ll have plenty to fix once we take possession.” She looked around the kitchen. The air was close and still, and her voice sounded loud. “I’ll start in here and then go upstairs. You do the living room. Look for bankbooks, too. Maybe they sent her money.”
Will hesitated. “Bankbooks? That’s awfully personal . . .”
“What else can we do? Lloyd said they hadn’t heard from her in years, but that means they heard from her sometime. I want to know when, and where she was living, and—”
“Maybe she phoned.”
Cass tugged at the top drawer. It stuck. “I’ll bet she wrote. She was always writing things down.” She pulled harder, forced it open.
The contents illustrated the virtue of thrift gone mad. Nothing had been taken out in years, just added to, until each drawer was crammed full of rusting twisties, wads of cling wrap that had lost its cling, twists of tinfoil filled with crumbs, crumbling rubber bands. There were miniature shower caps made of grimy vinyl for popping over leftovers. Dingy sandwich bags that smelled of old onion. Stained paper towels folded and stacked for reuse. Cass longed to discard, to disinfect, but she finished the kitchen quickly and went upstairs.
She searched the master bedroom, then continued down the hall to the bedroom that had once been Yummy’s. She remembered the room as it used to be, with shelves of books and a plastic record player and albums in stacks on the floor. Flower Power decals on the walls, the ceiling speckled with constellations that glowed in the dark. The room’s only ornament now sat on top of a white wooden dresser. It was a small framed photograph, in black and white, of a solemn Indian princess standing in front of the screen door of the farmhouse, hand in hand with Lloyd. Noble Pilgrim. The tip of her feather barely reached his hipbone.
Cass opened the dresser drawer, expecting to find the good linens or Lloyd’s spare winter underwear, but it was filled with Yummy’s old clothes. Socks, some underpants, T-shirts and jeans, all neatly folded, but musty. Cass lifted a T-shirt speckled with blue paisleys and held it to her nose. A familiar smell clung to the fibers—a little animal, some sandalwood, a hint of patchouli. A mother would hide things here. Cass dug beneath a pile of underclothes. Sure enough.
It was a small bundle, carefully wrapped in a worn freezer bag and secured with a thick rubber band. Inside, wrapped in yet another plastic bag, was a collection of photographs and letters. Cass set the photos aside and flipped through the envelopes. There weren’t many, maybe two dozen or so, all addressed to Momoko in Yummy’s wild, loopy handwriting. The earliest was on the bottom, dated April 1976. The most recent was from 1997. Cass slid her fingers under the rest of the clothing but found nothing more. As she leaned on
the drawer to close it, the blue paisley again caught her eye. She pulled out the T-shirt and held it up against her. She’d lost so much weight, it might fit her now. She tossed it around her neck like a gym towel and went downstairs.
Will sat at the old rolltop desk. Cass draped her arms over his broad shoulders and laid her face against the plane of his jaw. She waved the letters in front of his face.
“Got ’em.”
“Good girl. You find an address?” He was poring over a ledger of old farm reports, handwritten in Lloyd’s antique script. “Poor old guy. What happened in ’75?”
“’Seventy-five?” Cass started flipping through the letters in her hand.
“The year he leased out over half his acreage to your father.”
“I don’t know. I was just a kid. Why?” She checked the postmarks: San Francisco, Berkeley, several from Texas—all places that Cass could imagine.
“He was doing so well up until then. Look at this. Those Nine-Dollar Potatoes in ’74, and then next season he goes and leases to your father. How come?”
Cass looked up. “That was the year after Yummy ran away. He had a heart attack. His first one.”
“Weird. Look at this. Two years later, after he took the acreage back, he was fighting soil contamination more or less constantly. From what he was spraying, he must have had a problem with leafroll.”
“He did. I remember Daddy going on about the aphids. Lloyd hired Daddy on to run the operation for him, but they never saw eye to eye. Daddy was a lousy farmer and lost a lot of the crop to net necrosis. He blamed Momoko’s peach tree for attracting those aphids. Wanted to chop it down, but Lloyd wouldn’t let him. Momo means ‘peach’ in Japanese.”
“I’m with your Daddy on this one. That tree’s just asking for trouble. Do you think I can take these records? It’s helpful to know.”
“You mean, do I think it’s stealing? I don’t care if it is, Will. Anyway, we own the land now. We got a right to it, I should think.”
“I asked him to show me these way back in ’83 when we started leasing. But he kept putting it off.”
“Well, now you know why.”
“He’s a proud man.”
“Daddy said he was a cheat.”
“Ornery, maybe. You know he’s not a cheat.” Will would always give anyone the benefit of the doubt, and he was right to do so.
Cass draped her arms around his neck again and held the stack of letters in front of his nose. “Look,” she said, pointing to a postmark. “Where’s Pahoa?”
yummy
Two peas in a pod. You remember how that went?
Lloyd would come in for lunch. He’d be sitting at the kitchen table, and you’d dance up behind him and throw your arms around his neck, still hot from the sun, and there would be dirt in the pores under his collar and the sour smell of fertilizer on his fingertips as he reached up to cup your chin and hold you still—remember what his cheek felt like, pressed against yours? Then Momoko, sitting across, would compare the two of you, her large husband and her eager little daughter. She’d peer, long and slow—the same appraising look she gave to a pair of melons, figuring how much longer until they’d be ripe enough to pick—and your heart would be racing. You were always so anxious. How did you know? That growing up meant you were becoming less of him. That this was something, inevitably, that any daddy would dread. Finally Momoko would press her lips together. “Hmm,” she would grunt. “Two peas in a pod.” Only she’d pronounce it more like “Tsu pi-su ina pod-do,” and then she’d give a little nod that made it for sure. Did he teach her that phrase? She seemed to enjoy saying it, enjoy her role in your ceremony, although with that act of abnegation, she put herself outside the two of you. What did that cost her? At least a small twinge of belonging, because if your heart was any measure, your face must have lit up like the sun, to hear her pronouncement. Did that hurt her, too? It was triumph to you. Flesh of her flesh, turning from her—you would have banished her entirely, had you not needed the power of her affirmation. Oh, yeah, your allegiances were firmly with Daddy.
And Daddy would chuckle. Pat your cheek. He was always as shy with his love as you were ferocious with yours, but even if its expression was tentative, the fact of his love was absolute. Then. So what the fuck happened?
It wasn’t your fault! you wanted to cry. It was just life, filtering into your prattle at the supper table, that so offended him, and how were you to know? You’d always shared what you’d learned in school, playing teacher even then, telling him all about the Pilgrims, for example, or how the telegraph was invented, or the names for the parts of a flower. “Pistil, stamen, stigma . . .” He’d frown with concentration, repeating the names after you, slowly, as though he’d never heard them before. “And what does a stamen do?” he’d prompt, pretending to be confused. And you would proudly teach, “A stamen does this and such,” and he would nod and smile at you and say, “My, my, my!” like he just couldn’t believe how one little daughter—and his, at that—could be so bright. His love for you was absolute, all right. Until you changed the subject.
It wasn’t your fault that the sexual reproduction of flowering plants failed to hold your interest. You were becoming an adolescent, after all. When your conversation veered off like a car out of control, toward shades of frosted lipstick and the boys who smoked Pall Malls in the weeds behind the maintenance shed at school, Lloyd’s face froze. He grew surly at the sight of your love beads, recoiled at any mention of rock and roll. The first time you used the word “groovy,” he choked on his gravy.
“You are not leaving the house dressed like that,” he said, catching you sneaking out the door in your worn jeans with all the holes and patches. “I won’t have you parading all over town dressed like a beggar.” You turned around to face him. “Your navel is showing,” he added, eyeing it with disgust.
If he couldn’t even tolerate your navel, then how was he to cope when life kick-started changes inside you that went deeper still?
The next year, in ninth grade, there was a man, a history teacher named Elliot Rhodes, slouching in front of the blackboard in a rumpled flannel shirt, stroking his mustache. When he read out loud in class, he looked right at you. At first you thought it was your imagination, but after a couple of times you knew it was for real, and your stomach heaved so violently you could hardly breathe at all. At first you mistook this passion for vocation—you’d always known you would be a teacher (or an explorer or a poet, you weren’t exactly sure which), and now you understood why! The power of his knowledge made you weak in the knees. That fall, he taught you all about the great civilizations of the world. He pressed you to question your beliefs, to think about real ideas. He considered Japan to be spiritual and deep, and he taught you a koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? You carried it home in your heart and whispered it to yourself every day, stunned at its poetic profundity. When you told it to Momoko, she looked at you like you were nuts.
“But, Mom, it’s Japanese. It’s Zen.”
“Stupid. Make no sense.”
“It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s supposed to help you reach enlightenment.”
“Never heard of it. Anyway, why you need enlighten when you got good Methodist church to go to?”
“Oh, Mom.” You sighed, glancing at Lloyd before going one step further. “I don’t believe in organized religion.”
Lloyd looked up and shuddered.
At church there’d been talk. Rhodes had just graduated from some liberal college in California. He was a hippie, a commie, an anarchist, a freak. What did they know? In fact, he was a conscientious objector, and you knew this because he told you, after school, the day you lingered in the classroom once the other kids had gone home. He’d protested the war in Vietnam. He’d marched on Washington. He admired Asian culture. He could never go over there, as a soldier, to kill. You leaned against the edge of his desk. He looked at you with an enormous aching, and for the first time you understood the tragedy that was war. He reac
hed up, traced the slant of your eye with his thumb, told you he had a thing for—
Abruptly he turned away. Tugged at his mustache and sent you home, but even though you had to walk for miles because you missed the bus, you were brimming with such a wild joy it felt like flying. You’d sensed his struggle, the sudden gruffness in his voice, the violence in the muscles of his back as he attacked the blackboard with his eraser. The back of a grown man. The fall sky turned steely, then darkened to dusk. You did a skippy little jig in the gravel. The stars were out by the time you sauntered into the kitchen.
Momoko looked at Lloyd. Lloyd cleared his throat, wiped pie from the corner of his mouth. “You’re late.”
“I stayed after school.” Surfing the edge of a long-suffering sigh.
“You in some kinda trouble?” Momoko asked, bringing a plate of franks and beans that she had kept hot in the oven.
“No.” Pricking the rubbery pink lozenges with your tines. “I had to help Mr. Rhodes.”
Lloyd hemmed and hawed, and you could feel the slow ache of his thinking. He took a toothpick from his shirt pocket and started excavating his back molars. When he got to the front incisors, he snapped the toothpick in half and placed it on the edge of his plate. Finally he wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I don’t trust that man. He has dubious morals.”
“He does not! He’s an activist. A man of conscience! Just because he won’t go fight a war in Asia. That’s more than you can say!”
Lloyd drew in his breath like he’d been sucker-punched. Put down his fork and napkin and pushed to his feet. His eyes were as cold and bright as the sun on snow in winter. It was as if he could see into the corners of your mind, know thoughts before you had a chance to think them, track the rebel contents of your heart. As a child you were secure in his omniscience, knowing that everything occurring on this earth did so with his blessing, according to his will. Now you looked away.
