by Kyoko Mori
“Good,” Sachiko said, “except for something really strange that happened to me on the train.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know how you keep seeing the same people if you take the same train to school everyday?”
“Yes,” Yuki said, though she had never taken a train to school. She walked to the public school near her house, while Sachiko rode the commuter train to her private school in the suburbs.
“On the train, there was a boy who kept staring at me. He was tall and thin, with long hair almost down to his shoulders. Every day from Monday to Thursday, he ended up standing next to me. He got on one stop after mine, so he might have been looking for me.”
They were at the end of their first five blocks. They fell silent as they picked up the pace and sprinted uphill.
“Anyway,” Sachiko continued once they had turned east and slowed down, “on Friday, he came on the train again. He must go to the boys’ high school in eastern Kobe. He gets off two stops before me. On the first four days, he nodded and smiled at me before he got off.”
“He smiled? But you didn’t know him?” Yuki asked. “Maybe it’s someone you went to grade school with and forgot.”
“No,” Sachiko said. “You’re funny.”
Yuki looked away. What she said had been stupid. Still, if she met somebody from fifth grade, she might never recognize him. Grade school seemed like a long time ago, when she lived in another part of town with her mother.
“It’s no one I knew before,” Sachiko said. “I’m sure because I know his name now.”
“Oh. How did that come about?”
“I was trying to tell you before you interrupted me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“On Friday, when the door opened at his stop, he smiled and stuck his hand out, like he was going to shake my hand. Next thing I knew, he’d slipped something into my hand, the door was closing, and he was running out. He barely made it. He waved at me from the platform. The train started moving. What he gave me turned out to be a corner torn from a notebook with his name and phone number written on it. Can you imagine that? He expected me to call him.” Sachiko smiled and shook her head.
“He said that on the paper?”
“No, no. The paper had only his name and phone number. But why would he be writing them down if he didn’t expect me to call?”
They were coming to the corner. In someone’s yard to their right, yellow marigolds and pink snapdragons looked faded since the cool weather. The petals had begun to curl at the edges. Soon, the frost would break them into a pile of broken stems. Sprinting uphill, Yuki concentrated on pumping her arms as the incline shortened her stride. Sachiko finished first and ran in place. Yuki caught up and they slowed down.
“So you’re going to call him?” Yuki asked.
Sachiko almost stopped as she turned sideways to face Yuki. Then she shook her head and continued running, staring straight ahead. “I can’t believe you would think that about me,” she said.
“Think what?”
“Come on, Yuki. I’m not going to call a boy I don’t know, just because that’s what he wants. Nobody does that.”
“But I thought—” Yuki stopped. “Never mind,” she said. Her face felt hot.
“You thought what?” Sachiko was frowning.
“I don’t know what I was saying.”
“Tell me what you were going to say. It’s rude to start saying something and stop. Now I’ll be wondering what you were going to say.”
“Okay.” Yuki shrugged. “I was going to say that you sounded like you might want to call him.”
Sachiko said nothing for two blocks. Yuki looked down at the blacktop. There were no sidewalks this far up the hill. In July and August, bubbles had burst on the surface of the road and tar stuck to the soles of their shoes. Now, there were small scars of darker black where the road had melted. Yuki wished she had said something else.
“So how did I sound like I wanted to call him?” Sachiko asked her finally.
“I don’t know. You sounded—well, you sounded like you weren’t upset about his staring at you, for one thing.” Her own voice sounded whiny and stupid, but it was too late not to go on with the truth.
“How is that? What did I say that made you think that?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe I was mistaken about the whole thing. Can we stop talking about this?”
“No. You must have had some reason.”
“Okay.” Yuki sighed. “Maybe you would have taken a different train if you had really minded.”
“I would be late for school if I took a later train.”
“You could have taken an earlier one.”
“Let me tell you something.” Sachiko’s voice was quiet and icy. “I’m not going to get up half an hour earlier and catch a different train because some boy has a crush on me and stares at me. That’s his problem. I won’t go out of my way because of that.”
Yuki didn’t answer. The more she said, the worse it was.
“What would you do,” Sachiko asked, “if some boy stared at you like that?” She didn’t give Yuki time to answer. She took off in a sprint for the rest of the block and up the hill.
Breathing hard to keep up, Yuki tried to think of the right answer but couldn’t. At her school, boys and girls weren’t together much outside classes. At lunch, boys sat with boys, girls with girls. It was the same in the library or at assembly. Even in sports after school, boys’ teams and girls’ teams didn’t practice together. Some afternoons when she ran along the fence that separated the track from the baseball field, Yuki heard the players calling to each other. Their voices sounded so ugly, choked up and croaking. Most of the boys in the field were tall and bony. They were much taller than she was. Yuki couldn’t believe that only a few years ago she used to have fistfights with boys in grade school and win. If she went up to the baseball players and tried to punch them, they would only laugh at her. They wouldn’t even take offense.
She caught up with Sachiko on the next flat street and said, “If a boy stared at me, I would think I had put on the wrong skirt with my blouse so they didn’t match and the boy was laughing at me. Or else there’s a smudge on my face or my hair might be sticking out a funny way.”
Sachiko burst out laughing. “Oh, Yuki,” she said. “You’re so innocent.”
“I’m not being funny,” Yuki insisted. “Those would be the only reasons a boy would stare at me. No one has ever had a crush on me.”
“I’m sure you’re wrong.” Sachiko smiled.
They ran on in silence. Yuki remembered one of the few times when she and her mother had been really angry at each other, back when she was in sixth grade. They were in the fabric section of a department store. Her mother wanted to get a pattern for Yuki’s new dress. She held up one that had a lace collar and a bow that tied in the back. She said she would make it in pink. Yuki said, “I don’t want a pink dress. I hate the lace on the collar. And the bow makes it look like an apron.” In the end, they walked away without choosing a pattern. Shizuko needed some new pots and pans from the kitchen section. When a clerk came to help them, Yuki and her mother both smiled at her and chatted but said nothing to each other. After her mother bought the pots and pans, they walked on in silence. Halfway down the stairs that led to the exit, Yuki said, “Mama, I just want you to know something. I’m not clammed up because I’m sulking on purpose. I’m not acting childish. I’m truly too angry to speak.” Her mother stopped and grabbed hold of the handrail because she was suddenly laughing. “Yuki,” she said between gasps of laughter. “You are simply too much.” Yuki started laughing then because, come to think of it, what she said was ridiculous. That had been the end of their argument.
But this was different. Though Yuki was relieved that Sachiko was not angry anymore, she didn’t think what she had said was funny. It was just the truth.
Soon, they were at the top of the hill. They slowed down as they ran along the ridge. The city stretche
d below—a thin strip of green, white, and brown between the mountains and the sea. Yuki followed the curve of the coast to the area she had lived in till fifth grade. Her old house was five blocks from the sea. From the kitchen window, she used to see one of the pine trees planted by the breakwater. It looked like a fox wearing a long dress. “The fox in a wedding dress,” she and her mother had called it. From the ridge, she could pick out the green blur where the pines were.
“Ready for the last leg?” Sachiko asked.
Yuki nodded.
They turned south and went downhill. As usual, Sachiko picked up the pace in the last four blocks, and Yuki struggled to keep up. She would have a better chance, she knew, if they sped up sooner or much later. In track, she was good at a short all-out kick at the end or else a long steady surge, not the medium kick Sachiko chose. As usual, she finished several steps behind her friend inside the park, both of them bent over and panting with their hands on their knees. Gradually, they straightened up and walked to the drinking fountain. Though it was cool, they were still thirsty. They drank and then sat on the grass to stretch.
“It was a lot of fun running with you this summer,” Sachiko said as, side by side, they bent their knees into the hurdler’s stretch.
“Maybe we could continue, somehow,” Yuki said.
Sachiko said nothing. She switched her legs and bent the other way.
“My coach says we should take weekends off, but I don’t know. What does yours say?”
Sachiko pulled her knees to her chest and sat with her chin on her kneecaps. “I’m not going out for cross-country after all.”
“What?” Yuki sat up and crossed her ankles.
Sachiko shrugged. “I’m going to be in the school play in November. I have the leading part. We tried out the last week of vacation and just found out the results on Thursday.”
Yuki said nothing. The breeze made her shiver.
“We rehearse almost every day after school, so I can’t make the practice.”
“Well,” Yuki said, “maybe you can still be on the team anyway, by practicing on your own. You’re so good. I bet your coach wouldn’t mind.”
“She already talked to me. She said she could meet me an hour before school and watch me run.”
“So?”
“I said I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“My mother doesn’t want me to be in the play and on the team both. She’s afraid I’d be tired and sick, or I wouldn’t have time for homework and my grades would drop.” Sachiko picked at the grass.
Yuki pulled her long sleeves over her hands. Her fingers were freezing. The back of her T-shirt was soaked from her sweat.
“You’re cold,” Sachiko noticed. “Here. Let’s get going.” She stood up.
They walked across the grass toward the park entrance.
“I don’t mind about missing cross-country,” Sachiko said. “I did well last year. I don’t want to be under a lot of pressure this year to break my own records, or watch someone else break them.” She paused and smiled. “You, for instance. When I read about your new records in the paper, I’ll be happy because I won’t be running anymore myself. I’m very competitive. I can’t stand losing.”
“But you’ll always beat me.”
They stopped at the gate. Sachiko lived five blocks southwest and Yuki four blocks east.
“All summer, you finished first,” Yuki said. “I could hardly keep up.”
“I finished first because you let me.”
“That’s not true. I would never lose on purpose.”
“But you could have sped up sooner without waiting for me to choose the right time for myself. You could have pushed the pace before I was ready.” Sachiko put her hand on the white fence that stretched along the outside of the park. “Isn’t that true?”
“I don’t know.”
“Believe me, you’re good enough to beat me, especially once your coach starts training you.”
But I don’t want to beat you, Yuki thought but didn’t say.
“Well,” Sachiko said. “Thank you for running with me all summer.”
“Maybe I can talk to my coach,” Yuki said. “I can ask for one day off practice so I can run with you on Sundays, at least until the meets start up. You’ll keep running on your own to stay in shape for indoor track in January, right? The play will be over long before that.”
“It’s very kind of you to think of me. Don’t change your schedule to suit me, though.”
“I wouldn’t mind. Even if the coach doesn’t let me off, I can run on Sundays anyway. He doesn’t have to know about it.”
Sachiko took her hand off the fence and pushed the stray hair out of her face. “The thing is,” she said, “I’ll be busy on Sundays. My mother wants me to start taking flower arrangement lessons. I’ll be in high school come April. She thinks it’s time for me to stop being such a tomboy and learn something feminine.”
“You’ll still go out for track, won’t you?”
“I’m not sure. We’ll have to see.”
Sachiko shrugged, the corners of her lips turned down slightly. Yuki kicked at the grass with her toes. In flower arrangement, Sachiko would sit Zen-style on the floor with her legs folded under, feet tucked in. Yuki imagined her long fingers clenched around small, sharp scissors as she cut through the thick stems of lilies, irises, birds-of-paradise. She would wind thin wires tight around the flowers and stick them into small clusters of needles to keep them standing straight. The flowers must hurt, Yuki used to think every time she saw such traditional arrangements at restaurants or teahouses. Her mother had put garden flowers in big white urns and let them spill over every whichway just like they did outside. In flower arrangement, nothing looked the way it did in the garden.
“I hope to read about your running in the newspapers,” Sachiko said. “Good luck, and thanks.” She held out her right hand.
Yuki reached out. Sachiko’s hand was warm even through the glove, her fingers smooth in contrast to the grainy texture of the cloth. Yuki’s hand was freezing. They shook and let go.
“You’d better get home before you catch a cold,” Sachiko said. “See you around,” she said as she walked away.
“Yes, see you around,” Yuki said more loudly than she had intended. Sachiko was only a few steps away. She didn’t look back.
Yuki stood and watched Sachiko as she rounded the corner and disappeared. She thought of the boy on the train. She wondered what his handwriting had looked like—perhaps it was small and cramped like her own; the more nervous he was, the more cramped. Yuki imagined him double checking his phone number to make sure it was right. Even his own number, which he must have known by heart, could have sounded strange to him when he thought of Sachiko’s long hair or the way she smiled with her lips closed. As he slipped the paper into her palm, his heart must have beaten hard. He must have run out of the train in a panic as the doors came sliding shut, almost catching him in the middle.
* * *
Yuki walked down the street and stopped under the chestnut trees. She was shivering, but she didn’t want to go home. She leaned back against the stone wall of someone’s house.
“See you around,” Sachiko had said, but she didn’t really mean it. They would never meet again, Yuki thought, maybe not even by accident. Though their houses were close enough, they had never met until the track season in the spring.
Yuki looked up at the trees. She could remember, back in late May, when they were covered with white flowers that looked like long torches. Chestnuts flowered after the cherries and plums of April, before the wisteria and oranges of June. Spring and summer had been a long progression of trees flowering and shedding in turn. The last time Yuki had been invited to Sachiko’s house after the run, the pomegranate tree in their front yard had been in flower. Its petals were glossy red and crinkled, almost as though they were made of paper. The flowers smelled like chewing gum or sticky candy. By now, the fruit would be ripe.
On that la
st visit, Sachiko’s mother had sat in the kitchen with them while they drank their orange juice. Flicking the ashes from her cigarette on the side of her glass ashtray, Mrs. Murai asked Yuki what her family did for a living.
“My father works in an office downtown,” she answered. “He’s an engineer at the steel company. My mother’s passed away. My father’s remarried. She used to be his secretary, but she stays home now that they’re married.”
Mrs. Murai frowned. She crushed out her cigarette. “Well,” she said, “you’re so young to have lost your mother. That must be very hard. Was she ill for a long time?”
Sachiko had put down her glass and was looking at Yuki, waiting for the answer. Sachiko and her mother were sitting side by side across the table from Yuki. “No, my mother wasn’t ill,” Yuki said. “It was an accident.”
“How terrible,” Mrs. Murai said. “In a car?”
“No,” Yuki said, feeling the blood rush to her face. “At home.”
The room was quiet. Sachiko finished her juice and stood up to put the empty glass in the sink. She came back and sat down next to her mother. Yuki looked down at the table. The half glass she had drunk tasted sour in the back of her throat. She got up without finishing.
“I’d better go,” she said, already heading for the door. Sachiko and her mother didn’t get up from the table and say, “No, no, you must stay” the way people did when a guest was about to leave. They sat in silence. Yuki ran out of the house into the chewing-gum smell of the pomegranates. She was never asked back. Her father had told her to say that her mother had died of cancer, if anyone ever asked. There wasn’t much else a person her age could have died of. It was foolish to admit the truth and cause suspicions, her father had warned. People would say that she came from a mentally unstable family.
The stone wall was cold. Yuki began walking the rest of the way home. She continued to think of that day back in June. At least in her mind, she could go back and correct her mistake, make everything come out right.
The way she imagined it, the way it should have been, she would calmly finish her juice, put down the glass, and tell the truth.
“My mother died because she was unhappy,” she would say. “It was no accident. She meant to die.” And while Sachiko and her mother sat speechless with shock, Yuki would stand up and add, “I want to work hard and be happy for her because that’s what she wanted. I promised her I’d go on. I want to live and be a good person.”
