SPRING
And so the winter melted away. Try as I may, I could not stop it. Yellow-green buds, those bright eyes of youth, appeared in the trees, in the bushes, on the ground—I could not look anywhere without meeting their gaze. Maria mastered the alphabet, she was fond of taking dictation letter by letter, Var ceased carving animals and began carving gnomes. I had never been happier and lived in fear of losing my happiness; it seemed to be made of a substance similar to winter itself, one that chilled and dazzled but, in accordance with the laws of nature, would not last. I recalled with increasing frequency the time the young man had spent quietly striking the keys of the public computer, the then-unfamiliar headphones touching him, bringing him music or messages I could not hear. I could have asked him about that day directly and perhaps put my fears to rest, but knowledge of the future often aggravates me, so I didn’t dare. If he was going to leave I wanted his leaving to come upon me suddenly, without warning, in the way of a natural disaster; I wanted a blow dealt to me not by him but by fate.
Spring is always a bit of a miser’s bargain—apple blossoms rain down from the trees even as lilacs open, falling to bits beneath irises fast on their way to becoming desiccated scrolls. That spring I had the sense of the bargain being a losing one, the young man nothing more than a loan that I would soon have to make good on.
As the weather grew milder, the high school girls, instead of walking from the bus to the library, returned to their places at the long wooden bench on the porch of the general store. Maria and I sat on the glider and watched them as they strode off the bus, threw their bags roughly down on the bench, and disappeared into the store. When they returned a few minutes later with their Starbursts and their miniature Reese’s, their salt and vinegar potato chips and their Almond Joys, we studied them, each with her own purpose in mind. Maria eyed their junk food and their gestures as she eyed everything in the world, as things she might possibly try, and I, how closely I studied them now, his potential suitors; my left eye a loving mother’s, admiring their long, tumbling hair, their fresh cheeks, my right eye a watchful rival’s, assessing various sorts of compatibility.
As these and countless blossoms continued thoughtlessly to display themselves, the apartment grew cozily warm then unbearably hot. Not even I could be persuaded that the attic inferno was preferable to the heavenly outdoors. Despite my professed dread of the season, like the Sophias and the Rosamonds of the world, I too felt compelled to go out and join with the soft, fragrant air.
The thought of a girl his own age one day materializing never frightened me as much as the thought of the world at large—the mainland, other countries, other continents, other languages and customs—possessing him. I could live with, perhaps even learn to love, watching him grow into a man alongside a Sophia or a Rosamond, glimpsing them in shops on occasion, issuing library cards to their young children with my liver-spotted hands, but I could not abide the idea of his total disappearance. And when I turned to my own steadfastness for comfort, my longstanding ability to work and to wait years for something I wanted (it was a well-known fact that a large percentage of islanders who left eventually returned) it only accentuated my problem. Time was becoming a currency I could no longer deal in. In twenty years he would be middle-aged, but I would be in my sixties—the phrase “my sixties” already frighteningly intimate. Indeed in fifty years he would be almost seventy and I would likely be mingling with the sandy loam of an island cemetery.
The young man—if he can be called a man—was closer to Maria’s age than my own. At the time she was four and I was forty-one. On those rare occasions when I doubted his capacity to meet me as an equal, or when I doubted my choice to commune with a mind so young, I thought of Keats. I would open The Poems, read a line or two, and then, unable to focus long enough to read a poem in its entirety, I would turn to the timeline at the front. On a piece of scrap paper I had taken from the library, I would solve the equation 1821 minus 1795, taking into account the month of his birth and the month of his death. Twenty-five, I would say to myself. See what youth can accomplish. See how capable the young.
While I made my useless calculations, he was learning to make Portuguese kale and sausage soup alongside sushi and cheese-stuffed canapés for parties of ten or more in the catering unit of his twelfth-grade cooking class. He was beating other boys at Frolf, yes Frolf, which he’d taught me was an energetic, pastoral hybrid of golf and Frisbee. He was learning to tie a tie, he had gone with Violet (whose phone number lay like an ember next to its twin in my wooden letter drawer, the pair of them threatening to set Var and his trim moustache ablaze) to a mall in Rhode Island and had driven on a highway for the first time. She must have marveled at his latest increase in size when she bought him the new high-tops and black jeans; she must have feared for his life at the sight of him, manlike, steering the wheel of her car.
How I envied Violet’s natural right to watch him grow all the rest of her days, her right to grow old before him. I had no natural right to him except that afforded one in love, and such a right was not typically granted to one in my degraded position. As for my love, there was no earthly proof of it. My right, if I had a right, was ethereal. Compared to that of a mothers (concrete as breast milk or large, dark eyes) mine was vapor or fog. Then again, surely I romanticized Violet’s position; surely she too lived in fear of the day he would leave. When one departs an island one departs a world, one puts a sea between oneself and one’s loved ones. Those who are left (and those who are leaving) feel it more acutely. She must have shared some of my dread and when the day came—somehow I knew it would—perhaps it wouldn’t be easy for him either.
Since the young man was ten and had read Treasure Island, he had wanted to “get off the rock.” His vision of the world was a touching embroidery of scenes from Stevenson, Melville, and celebrity cooking shows, and a Mother Earth at once pregnant with beauty and at risk of being destroyed. He wanted to discover all that was alluring about the world and repair all that was broken about her. He wanted to save trees from being cut down, animals from impending extinction, he wanted to save the very air from the fumes of factories and cars.
I too had once been young, I too had found reasons to leave my first island, but my reasons, like those of my parents before me, had not been so noble. My mother left Stockingford in search of work and my father emigrated from Tokyo to study at Oxford. He hired her to clean his modest apartment when he was an assistant professor; she moved with him from apartment to house to manor until at last, when he was no longer required to teach, he married her, mop and all. In every way, she was his housekeeper and he her employer. It was a dynamic that persisted throughout their marriage and followed them to their graves.
My father’s being an economist was not analogous to my being a librarian. He was in love with numbers and systems, addicted to the solving of equations and the isolating of patterns and perfectly suited to it. (While I was in love with books and forbidden to read on the job. Indeed I spent my days abstaining from books so that others might more easily read them.) His blue-black eyes sparked like lightning when he was on the verge of a solution or had just been struck by a new idea. His thinking process was totalizing. The sky of his being changed completely when he was deep in thought; customary modes of communication ceased to function between us. He was his own weather system, a storm moving about the room.
How I envied the natural forces that shone from within him and what seemed to be his natural right (yet another natural right I had not been endowed with) to succumb to them—my mother like a Red Cross worker forever at the ready with a tray of food for him to hurriedly devour or a pressed suit and a polished pair of shoes for him to absently put on while reviewing aloud his forthcoming lecture. When I was old enough I too was expected to carry the tray and deliver the clothes and shoes but I was never allowed in the kitchen, not even to learn to cook. (This I taught myself later using library books.) It was as if my mother was cooking
for a god and would not—even if I pleaded—relinquish her sacred duty.
As one outside their natural disaster, there was little left for me to do but praise her efforts and so I left, as soon as I was able. My parents, in their aversion to all things American, were, as in most other matters, a united front and I, in my decision to study here, was a deserting rebel. I never quite knew whether I was the child of the employer or the child of the help or schizophrenically both. This was another reason why I ventured to America for my education. I imagined it to be a place where equality was functioning at its height, a place where I might be less of a walking contradiction. Imagine my confusion when I was called a chink while on special scholarship for Japanese Americans.
During my second year at university, my parents died in quick succession. First my father, setting the schedule until the end, and then my mother, eternally happy to comply with his itinerary. Once they had gone off together without me for good, I was left alone in America and resolved to stay. How selfish my choices seemed when I considered them against the young man’s desire to leave an island of happiness to tend a sea of despair. He wished to make others happy whereas I wished only to avoid despair.
* * *
It was an unusually mild spring. This made summer seem nearer still and caused one to wonder if the rapidly warming globe was not yet another bomb busy ticking. Maria celebrated her fifth birthday in the back garden with four friends. In years past it had always been too chilly. I sat at the round glass table with its white cloth, its chocolate cake and pink candles, watching the children as each one in turn, in a manner reflecting her temperament, swung the bamboo stick at the rabbit-shaped piñata. Charlotte fairly stroked the rabbit’s hindquarter while Sophia (my heart quickening each time a child shouted her name) clutched the stick in terror and did not so much as tap it. Ella swung happily but ineffectively at it several times. Josie, in her zeal, let go of the stick and it went flying into the air behind her and had to be chased down by the party’s hostess. It was Maria who gored the rabbit’s neck; then its stomach burst open and all the peppermints gushed out onto the grass. The little girls looked like rabbits scampering to retrieve them.
After her fifth birthday, I began to suffer from the fear that not only would I die before Maria, I would die without her.
Nightly, I began to hope, more ardently than I had ever hoped for anything, that when I was on my deathbed I would be able to recall perfectly the many hours I’d spent alternating between reading a novel in translation by book light and watching her sleep. Under the minute light, I studied her—the way she turned her right wrist in sleep, the way her lips pursed to a point and her eyebrows lifted slightly as if in amazement—for proof that she was the same child who’d been brought to me five years prior in the narrow hospital room whose only lit feature was a steel stink, the same child who’d known me in the dark, without features, and without a name.
Only the prospect of memory relieved my fear of dying without her. If not Maria, then the memory of Maria. Nothing and no one were equal to that. If one’s beloved can’t be at one’s side, it must be easier to die in the presence of a benevolent stranger, easier to weaken in the face of one who has never known your strength, to relinquish while pressing the palm of one whom you’ve never held onto. To accept someone as they die requires either deep love or immense distance.
Conversely, I felt an aversion to the thought of the young man attending my death, which caused me to further doubt my already dubious motivations. Perhaps I was no different than the filthy old men of the world who chased after young girls as after fountains of youth, that red-cheeked nubility so incompatible with deathbeds. Being reminded that he was not my child nor could he take her place disturbed me. I did not like staring into the chasm that stood between my affection for them; it diminished him, which diminished me, and at a time when I had thought I could not be further diminished. She was she and he was he and if I were dying it would be Maria who I’d want in the bed with me. And if somehow if she were terrifyingly missing from the scene, better a kind nurse or a lonely passerby than my seventeen-year-old lover watching raptly my flame extinguish. Yes, let him remember me as flame, as fire, as the heat that kept him warm in the un-winterized house.
* * *
“If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and could only bring one book, what would it be?” he posed the question one day over an irresistibly wabi lunch of rosemary beans and olive bread, accompanied by a wedge of Manchego. I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life.
I burst out laughing, astonished that he should care to know the slightest thing about me.
“What’s so funny?” he demanded softly.
“You,” I said and looked at him while trying to imagine what he would look like when he was a grown man. It was a dangerous habit of mine. “I like knowing in advance that I’ll be stranded. There’s something funny about that. I mean the whole notion of being stranded typically implies something unforeseen. I’ve always thought your question was designed for one not already stranded on an island. Your use of the conditional is funny.”
“But you’re not stranded, you have a library. And you have your collection at home and you can go to the bookstore and buy new books anytime. I’m talking about one book for life. That’s it. One.”
“Like ‘One Book, One Island’,” I said, referring to the island-wide community reading program of which neither of us was a member, “except it’s till death.”
“You would look at it like that,” he said cuttingly but not, I thought, without affection.
“Is it because you’re young that you don’t consider yourself to be already stranded on an island?”
“No. Neither of us is stranded. No one is.”
“No one?”
“Well, almost no one. Maybe there are a few people who are physically incapable of moving but they would be stranded anywhere.” He was cocksure as he said it, his logic fairly overwhelmed me.
“You’re going to be such a handsome man,” I said, slipping my hand under his curls to stroke the fine hairs on the back of his neck.
He looked away, as if insulted, and in the process disengaged my hand. I had indirectly violated our unspoken agreement never to speak of the future and implied as well that he was not yet a man.
He ran the calloused tips of his fingers along the blue ticking of the mattress and turned toward me again. “If you don’t choose a book in the next five minutes, you won’t be allowed to bring one.”
“A difficult question for anyone,” I said, “but especially for me.”
“Why? Because you work at a library?” With that bewildered, immigrant gaze of his, he seemed intent on mastering my world, its customs and mannerisms, its ethics and currency.
“No, I should think that would make it easier—so many titles fresh in my mind all the time. It’s because I’ve recently and rather drastically changed. I’m not the person I was before I met you. Before I might have said Wings of the Dove or Ethan Frome or some such nonsense but now the thought of reading those books for eternity is a nightmare.” I too had traveled a great distance.
“Why?” he asked, perhaps not understanding the literary references or perhaps not wanting to assume anything about them or about me, yes, likely more open to others and to the world than I ever was even when young.
“It’s one thing to read about tragic love affairs when one is happily living outside such circumstances, it’s another thing entirely to…”
“Three more minutes,” he said. “Choose a book now or you’ll be doomed to live the rest of your days without one.”
I paged nimbly through my inner card catalog. None of my old favorites made sense anymore. After what seemed like more than three minutes (time must have passed more quickly for me than it did for him), I announced my choice, “Saint-Saëns Concerto in G minor for the piano.”
“No musical
instruments allowed on the island.”
“God, I really will be stranded.”
“Yep, thirty seconds,” he said and began raising the palm of one hand to meet the fingertips of the other.
“Keats’s Collected!” I fired just as his two hands touched to make a T.
“I thought you’d had your fill of tragedy,” he said, surprising me with the insinuation that he had read Keats. I replaced my hands upon his neck.
“Poetry is different,” I said at once. But he was right. I was not ready to give tragedy up just yet. I clasped his neck more tightly. I studied his face until I saw the man I thought he would someday become and felt him rise to meet me.
Ritual accomplished, candles snuffed, chalice generously filled, I lay on the ascetic’s slim mattress content as a nun (save for the young man lying next to me) who has said her prayers and can now rest. I began dreaming of us renting the little gray house, painting the inside walls a pale yellow, sewing eyelet curtains, baking cakes, roasting chickens, adding a window to the loft and a real bed, lying together under a red coverlet watching the cardinal fly and the snow fall and the sun rise until the young man rolled off the mattress and put on his jeans.
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Page 14
