Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

by Jennifer Tseng

  I wondered if Violet had sent the young man to the library to borrow Crime and Punishment or if he had chosen it for her.

  “She seems to have moved beyond her Dostoevsky phase,” I said, thinking more of him than of her, though I was beginning to have difficulty distinguishing between the two modes. Siobhan must have known and indulged me.

  “No more guilt, my Lowly Lady!” she cheered. “It’s time to love yourself while making Gouda!”

  “What do you think she has to feel guilty about?” I asked, feeling a shiver of guilt myself. But before Siobhan could answer, I heard Violet’s tread on the stairs and shushed her.

  “She’s mine!” I hissed.

  “What?” Siobhan asked. She hadn’t recognized that light-footed ascent.

  Violet approached the desk like a woman who has lost her luggage. She wore a brown sweater and carried nothing but a look of concern which quickly changed to one of disorientation as she began to speak (as if she’d left her map in one of the misplaced cases and was lost without it, would continue to be lost without it until one of us came to her aid). She addressed us equally, first Siobhan, then me, her eyes finally resting on the smooth, green lake of the counter.

  “I wonder if one of you might recommend a good novel?”

  As soon as her question was uttered, I lost heart. Mine indeed. Ravaged by cowardice, tormented by my hidden conflict of interest, I looked wide-eyed at my own hands and then at Siobhan. She cast an uncomprehending glance in my direction and then answered with the unflappable calm of the uninvolved, “This is our resident literary librarian. She’s the perfect person to help you.” Siobhan turned to me and patted my shoulder.

  Violet thanked her and then gazed at me, waiting for my perfection to show. We managed to make our way to the basement (as if she needed me for that), the ungraceful lurchings and silences of our descent embarrassing but merely accessory to the terror of the literary underworld to come.

  I reached the foot of the stairs feeling coarse and ineffectual, unworthy of my task. Before I could even begin my self-soothing Conscientious Librarian routine, Violet put in eagerly, “Maybe you could just recommend one of your favorites?” Patrons short on time often suggested this method, failing to realize that we were two different readers whose preferences would likely have little or no overlap. It was a mild nuisance, not to mention, ironically, a waste of time. In this case I allowed myself to receive Violet’s suggestion as a compliment, a sign that she saw some affinity between us, as if she was sure to love any book I loved.

  As I perused my mental catalog of favorites, a dangerous well of possibility opened before me: sensuality, deception, obsession, the many forms of inappropriate love. Books containing these themes now took on a sinister quality. I did not want to be misconstrued, to inadvertently communicate a message. Or, if I was doomed to communicate (was it possible not to be?) I wanted to communicate innocence, anything but my own guilt. And yet I was innocent. I had done nothing. It was only with my mind I had sinned.

  “What kinds of books do you usually enjoy?” I was stalling for time, having realized that to rule out sinister subject matter was to reduce my list of favorite books considerably.

  “Well, I’ve read lots of classics but it’s been years since I read something contemporary.”

  Yes, I thought with a rush of sympathy. And by now those contemporary novels have become classics.

  “What are some of your favorites?” I asked. I imagined something old-fashioned in which guilt, shame, and anxiety figured prominently. Or perhaps, if she was feeling adventurous, one in which a prisoner is set free.

  She hesitated before answering and in that moment’s hesitation I noticed that she was eyeing my name tag, though her birdlike gaze did not alight there for more than a few seconds before it flew to the nearby shelves.

  “I’ve always liked Crime and Punishment. I like Wings of the Dove and Anna Karenina.”

  So she had read the Dostoevsky before. She was a rereader.

  “Have you read The Lost Daughter?” I asked, thinking that if one stretched one’s imagination it had something fundamentaly in common with Crime and Punishment. “The author is living, though no one knows her true identity. Elena Ferrante is her pen name. She’s a complete recluse.”

  “People on this island can relate,” she said.

  “Yes.” I imagined a reclusive life in which my sole companion was her son.

  “She lives somewhere in Italy,” I drifted.

  “I love Italy,” she whispered, perhaps drifting a little herself.

  “Why?” I imagined tins of amaretti and flatbread for sale in her shop.

  “Oh, everything. The food, the churches, the weather.” I’d never cared for spaghetti or popes, though a Mediterranean climate had its appeal. Italy had never interested me. That is, not until now. Violet could have said the London squats and I would have been intrigued.

  “It’s this way,” I pointed, and began walking toward the F’s. She followed. I handed her the book.

  She glanced at the cover and blushed, then quickly turned the book over. The cover photograph was of the backside of a doll whose dress was unbuttoned to reveal her plastic bottom. “Thank you,” she said, reading the back cover. “I think this will be just the thing for me. What’s your name?” she asked, for we had never been formally introduced. And when I didn’t answer immediately she added, “Where are you from?” The latter was a question some people asked after hearing me speak. My accent was slight but those who listened carefully could detect it.

  I lifted my sweater toward her slightly so that she could better see my name tag. “It’s Mayumi,” I said. “I’m originally from England.”

  My name means “truth, reason, beauty” or, depending on the kanji, sometimes “linen” or “bow.” I felt a dim pang of self-consciousness at the thought of these exalted meanings, none of which I seemed equal to.

  “Whereabouts in England?”

  “Stockingford.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “No.”

  “Do you visit?”

  “Not often. I don’t like to leave the island.”

  “I understand.”

  It was my turn to give a Japanese nod. I was at a loss as to what to do with my body, afraid that if I opened my mouth I might let slip an incriminating sentence: Your son’s so attractive! And yet I also felt a teenage desire to impress, which only further undermined my ability to speak. It seemed better to say nothing than to offend or disappoint.

  “Thanks again for the book. I hope I’ll be able to finish it in time.” Gingerly, she pressed her lips together.

  “You can always renew it,” I said, hurrying forward in my mind to our next encounter, my next chance. As if she’d known I hadn’t needed to be told, she left without telling me her name.

  It was one of those fall days that bears more resemblance to summer or spring, the colored leaves like bright flowers, the sky blindingly blue. The world, as I ran through it toward the apartment, surrounded me in shelves of color. There was the cocoa ash of the soil, the fields of hay marked by occasional scarlet, the gray umber trunks of the trees, their green tops just beginning to be dotted with red, yellow, and orange. The sky burned with sunshine, its bright white clouds dense as flames, the air ravished by an invisible sun. And beyond everything, also unseen, lay the darker blue shelf of the sea. I felt closer to him now and, of course, closer to her. I hoped she would like the Ferrante. Come back to me, Violet, I said to the day, whatever you do, come back.

  She returned, wearing the same brown sweater, to thank me for the recommendation. “I liked it a lot. I think I’ll get another of hers,” she said, and walked self-sufficiently to the F’s.

  “I’m so glad,” I said, keeping my eyes on the spine to which I was affixing a sticker and then a clear piece of tape. “I haven’t read that one. You’ll have to tell
me how it is.” At last I looked up.

  “I’d like that,” she said. She smiled the smile of pleasure shadowed by pain and I thought I saw a gap between her top teeth. She paused in front of the desk with The Days of Abandonment in her arms; she was enfolding it the way I had many times imagined her son would enfold me.

  A woman with only one sweater, I thought, is typically austere or practical or of little means. I wondered which, if any, applied to Violet. I began to dream of knitting her a new sweater using a warm cherry yarn and a fine gauge stitch, although I did not know how to knit.

  “Shall I check it out for you?” I asked, trying to imagine how she would look wearing the finished sweater. Indeed, a warm cherry would suit her.

  “Oh no, that’s all right. I’ll bring it upstairs.” Like a girl on her way to a literature class, she clutched the book more tightly and hurried away.

  We were no longer strangers. We were coterminous, like distant neighbors whose common boundaries were the young man and a woman who had yet to reveal her true name.

  * * *

  Although I love books and although I have obviously devised ways of benefitting from my position, I am, in many ways, ill-suited to being a librarian. Though I shelve cart after cart without complaint, though I give excellent recommendations and can intuit a patron’s needs, I otherwise have few, if any, of the appropriate talents. My ability to lose myself while engaged in mindless tasks notwithstanding, I don’t like to smile when I’m in a foul mood, I’m prone to carpal tunnel syndrome (nowadays everything in the library is done on computers), I don’t feel the need to pick up the phone during the first ring (or at all frankly), nor do I want so desperately to please others that I will skip a lunch break in order to do so. I care little for best-seller lists and book reviews, I fail to watch PBS, to listen to NPR, to read The New Yorker, not to mention mainland newspapers. Indeed I am embarrassingly out of touch with what is popular in the book world. I have a strong musical voice that lends itself to whispering on occasion but for which the daily imperative is a prison. My most glaring deficiency is that I am not detail-oriented, although I lied unwittingly during my preliminary interview and described myself as such. In truth, before being initiated into that Mansion of Minutiae, I had no idea the true meaning of the phrase. Put another way, I had no idea how well the librarian’s vocation lends itself to existential crisis.

  The entrance of Mother and Son into said Mansion enhanced my vocation and its meaning considerably. The seasonal Japanese restaurant worker who accelerated my pulse every summer and fall, the one-hundred-year-old woman whose barbed comments regularly stung me, the savage children whose despicable manners once annoyed me, now had a tranquilizing effect. All patrons now had a tranquilizing effect. They belonged to a race of people who were other than the young man. In their presence, I was unassailable. I exuded confidence. Behavior I might once have found irritating now amused me if it touched me at all. I was overwhelmed by a new sense of ease, with every breath conscious of my remarkable lack of nervousness. All of this was in contrast to the feverish, heart-racing state of wanting and agitation I experienced in his presence.

  No longer was the library a saltbox of Time, Patience, and Tedium that I approached with a sense of duty and occasional hesitation. Now it was a fulminous palace of Fate, Beauty, and Possibility waiting to be entered. Existential crisis averted, meaning revealed, weather uncertain, engine revved, for the first time in years, I was eager to go to work. I saw myself lurching forward, careening when necessary, pressing my foot casually yet heavily upon the gas, daring even, on occasion, to lift my hands from the wheel. And yet the word “wheel” misleads, for I was not driving but being driven. (Indeed I did not even have a driver’s license!) But by what or by whom? A boy in high school? The power differential be damned, whatever the force, I could not stop it. And why should I? No crime had yet been committed, not a single offense taken. My joy was everywhere evident.

  Who dares to block joy’s tidal wave? Who if they try can stop it? But I defend myself, a useless exercise. Then it was like reading of love in a book. One feels the many pleasures without inflicting any pain. In the end, no one is hurt or saved but the solitary reader. When one closes the book, life resumes. The husband continues to irritate, the child continues to breathe heavily in her sleep, her skin persists in smelling like cake, her washed hair of flowers.

  Prior to the young man, I had avoided my own reflection (unlike Maria who climbed and then sat for hours upon the dresser like a cat, luxuriating in the sight of herself, rapt with her own facial expressions, her own ability to move: a sly squinting of the eyes, a feline flicking of her tongue, the tart raising of her bare backside up in the air). Now I peered curiously into the mirror, I lingered in the moments during which I changed out of my white flannelette, a gown given to me by my chaste Aunt Tomoko. I gazed at the back of myself in particular, at once with a mother’s loving eye (I had become much less critical of the human form since becoming a mother) and with the shy yet avid eyes of the young man, recalling expressions I had seen upon his face across the counter. To my surprise, I, he, we, liked what we saw. I began indulging in daily showers, a habit I’d given up the day Maria was born. I primped myself like never before (not that I had a very impressive primping history) and felt an irrepressible sense of buoyancy during the hour before going to work.

  More than ever, I read. I visited other libraries (another old habit revived), perhaps searching for the book that would inform me of what to do next, perhaps hoping to find that in one of these parallel universes, the young man still existed. There is a library in every town on this island. I fought the urge to borrow sensational nonfiction paperbacks pertaining to our situation, as well as reference books containing relevant laws and legal precedents. It was, I reasoned, too risky; no one understands better than a small-town librarian how little privacy borrowers possess.

  I would wander the stacks of the strange library in search of nothing in particular, sometimes choosing a letter of the alphabet to guide me, sometimes a subject like dark matter or French cooking. There were days I chose a book because I liked or disliked the cover or because I liked or disliked the author’s name. Other days I would go straight to a beloved book and borrow the book that was to the immediate left or right of it. Books are not so different than people. Often the person across the room with whom you first lock eyes should be bypassed in favor of the quieter, less charismatic person standing next to them. What’s more, one’s longing for a stranger can be a longing for someone invisibly connected to that stranger.

  As if to practice understanding said stranger, I began reading books in translation. Like a schoolgirl for whom passion is a novelty, I read love stories. I read more than one book in which a pair of lovers meets for the first time on a train. In one, translated from the Greek, the two encounter one another on a commuter train. Daily they observe one another until at last one morning they speak. In another, translated from the Spanish, a man is traveling cross-continent and for several hours he observes intently a woman sleeping across from him. How I envied these lovers their proximity to one another, their being at liberty to observe!

  Then again, had the young man and I met on a train, I might have wished we had met in a library (one is doubly afloat in an island library, surrounded by water, surrounded by books), in a sanctuary that never arrives late or suddenly, one that never departs slowly, only to disappear out of sight. In its intimacy and safety, a library is the opposite of a train. It is that which remains, that which holds people (children are the exception here) while they are, for the most part, not in motion, that which holds people while they dream, while they resist travel even as they read of other worlds.

  The young man was like one of these exceptional children. He never paused for long in front of any bookshelf, he never sat in an armchair and fell asleep, only twice did I see him sit at a computer terminal for more than ten minutes. To be writing intently while w
earing headphones does not compare to being asleep. The beloved’s degree of oblivion dictates one’s freedom to observe. And I, busy with my endless sequence of minute tasks, I, in my furrowed brow and compulsive friendliness, could not have been further from the man who sits idly in his train seat with a smooth, placid face, inspecting alternately and at his leisure the landscape to his right and the sleeping woman before him.

  In fact, it disturbed me to think of having met the young man on a train, for there were no trains on the island. Residents who wished to visit the mainland traveled by ferry or, if they were endowed with wealth, by propeller plane. There was once a railroad but it was destroyed over a century ago, dead before either of us was born. Many islanders, especially the young who cannot come and go as they please, have never seen a train, much less traveled on one. If I had met him on a train it would not have been him at all but another version, perhaps a Londoner or a Bostonian. I had no interest whatsoever in meeting any such foreign replacement. In the end, every book I read left me in the place where I’d started: on the island again. In the apartment, in the woods, at the library. No trains, no daily observances, no sign whatsoever of the young man.

  * * *

  One night in the parking lot, Siobhan finally posed the question that even I had begun to consider but did not want to hear.

  “What if he never comes back?” she asked. I feel a strange tenderness for her now, a gratitude in retrospect for her willingness to be so direct with one so convoluted.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” I snapped, sounding haughty and imperious yet feeling bereft. “I’d rather not think of it in those terms if you don’t mind.”

  “Terms?” she queried. “I’m not talking about terms, I’m talking about reality. There’s a fifty percent chance he’ll come in, a fifty percent chance he won’t. All I’m sayin’ is what if he doesn’t? What if that’s the outcome?” She was standing on the asphalt next to her car and I was standing at the opening in the trees that led to the museum garden. We always parted ways there.