by Kyoko Mori
Almost nightly, when she lived here, Maya dreamed about her mother chasing her through their house in Minnesota with a huge knitting needle, a baseball bat, a metal ruler—always something hard and grim. Maya would escape through a long stairway, only to find herself back in the house in Osaka, where the garage was on fire. Her father would be painting inside his cocoon of canvas, utterly unaware of his own clothes and hair catching fire; all Maya could do was watch as he and his painting turned into columns of bright orange flames. No matter where she was in these dreams, there were always secret passageways that led her, against her will, back to the houses of her past. The dreams went on even after she moved to the efficiency. Sitting up in Yuko’s futon bed, Maya hopes they won’t follow her back to the places where she sleeps now—Jeff’s house with white daisies on the blue wallpaper, her loft above the boutique.
Outside, the wind is whipping the bare trees in the backyard, and snow is blowing around, hitting the windows with a dry, tinny sound. Maya goes out to the hallway between the two bedrooms. Yuko’s door is open and the light is on, but her bed is empty. The furnace starts up, sounding like a labored sigh. Maya runs down the stairs. Yuko’s not in the living room or the kitchen, but the light is on over the stairway to the basement.
Her bare feet make almost no sound on the wooden steps. Yuko is seated in an old rocking chair next to the laundry machines. She’s wearing a T-shirt like the one she gave Maya, only gray instead of white. Reaching up to the ashtray on top of the washer, she flicks the ashes from her cigarette.
Maya stops under the bare bulb that hangs from the ceiling. “You scared me,” she says. “I thought maybe you went outside in this weather.”
“I’m sorry.” Yuko stands up and shakes her pack of Marlboros. Maya accepts the cigarette even though she quit smoking soon after college. Taking the Bic lighter Yuko hands her, she lights the cigarette and inhales the smoke. In silence, they tap the cigarettes against the blue ashtray Maya made in her ceramics class at college. The indentations around the rim were made with peach pits. She can remember the feel of their hard dry skin against her fingers.
The basement is still crowded with Dan’s woodworking machines and tools. The boxes he packed are against the wall on the other side of the laundry machines. From the pipes overhead hang the five model planes he made. They’re fighter jets—three B52s and two Japanese Zero’s—strung on a fishing line. Each plane tilts forward, looking like it’s ready to go into a tailspin.
Yuko points her cigarette at the planes. “Dan made those when he was really depressed. He forgot to take them down when he packed his stuff. Or maybe he didn’t want to be reminded of that time. It was a couple of springs ago. He had to go build basements because no one was ordering furniture.”
“I remember. He was on a construction crew.”
“Every night, he ate supper without a word and holed up down here, working on his models. He took to calling in sick and building planes instead. I asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. ‘Don’t pressure me when I’m already feeling bad,’ he said. He’d be down here till two or three in the morning. If I came down, he’d just continue painting and pasting those little parts together, like I wasn’t even there. After about a month, I couldn’t take it anymore. I told him I was sick of his tight-lipped misery.” She stubs out her cigarette, which has burned down to the filter. There is a deep crease between her dark eyebrows. “I said some harsh things to him.”
“You were angry because you were worried about him. He can’t hold that against you. Anyone would be upset if her husband missed work to build planes and refused to talk.”
Yuko shakes her head. “You wouldn’t. You’d never scream at Jeff the way I did at Dan, even if Jeff was doing something you didn’t understand. You’d leave him alone and let him figure things out on his own.”
For the last two years, Jeff has been sitting in his armchair night after night, grading stacks of papers with the TV on, while Maya drives back to the loft to weave. Maya and Jeff had never confided in each other much, but they had more things to talk about once—anecdotes about their days at work, a piece of gossip about people they knew, the books they were reading. They used to make each other laugh. Nowadays, when she thinks of their time together, it’s like a silent movie.
“Maybe you’re right,” Maya says to Yuko. “I’d leave Jeff alone no matter what he was doing, but that’s because I don’t know how to talk to him. Leaving people alone isn’t always a sign of love or generosity.”
“You don’t think so?”
Maya shakes her head.
Yuko lights another cigarette. “One afternoon that same spring, at a grocery store, I was shoving my cart toward the dairy case to get some milk. I almost bumped into this guy. We’d gotten there exactly at the same time, reaching for the same carton of milk. He put the milk in my cart and got another one for himself. He smiled and walked away before I could thank him. I stood there wanting to cry all of a sudden. I was floored by the kind gesture because I’d been so unhappy. When I got home, though, I was madder than ever at Dan. Even a stranger was kinder to me than he was, I thought, but that was the wrong way to look at the situation. Instead of yelling at him, I should have told him I knew how he felt. I was unhappy, too; he wasn’t alone.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. How could you tell him you felt lonely when he wasn’t talking to you?”
“I should have tried. Maybe that’s when Dan and I started drifting apart. If I hadn’t said all the wrong things then, we’d still be together now.”
Maya pictures Yuko pushing her cart down the cold aisle by the dairy case, stunned by her loneliness, while Dan was probably in this basement, gluing tiny propellers and wing decals. For Maya, loneliness like that is as permanent as a piece of metal some people have, fusing their broken bones. Even in their first months together, she never expected that Jeff or anyone else could take away that feeling.
“I want to give you something.” Yuko holds her left hand out to Maya. She opens her fingers. On her palm is the charm Maya made fourteen years ago. It’s smaller than she remembered, the size of her thumbnail. The red beads and stitches are still bright against the navy blue. “I want you to keep this for me. I have the cap somewhere, too. Remember? You gave it to me the night before my wedding?”
Maya takes the charm from Yuko. It’s surprisingly soft, with the hair coiled inside.
“I woke up wondering what Dan was doing. Maybe he’s curled in bed with the ticket girl, crying about how bad he feels for me and being consoled by her for being such a sensitive guy. The thought drove me nuts. I came down here to burn this charm. I remembered the time you torched your last letter to your father.”
“Do you want me to burn it?”
“No, I changed my mind while I was sitting here. Who am I kidding? I’m not going to feel better even if I burn down my whole house. There’s no instant cure for heartbreak and misery. You know how they say a cold will go away in seven days if you take really good care of yourself and in a week if you don’t? Heartbreak is a massive, psychic head cold. I have to feel bad until I don’t feel bad anymore. I want you to hold on to the charm and promise you’ll see me through this.”
Closing her hand around the old charm, Maya steps forward and embraces Yuko. “I’m going to be with you always,” she tells her. “You know that.” She can see the crooked line Yuko’s hair makes across her neck. Yuko was like a person whose long hair has gotten caught in a machine. The original spell had turned against her and was now churning around, trying to eat her alive. Taking the scissors to her hair was the only way she could get free.
5
From the rooftop of Yuko’s new apartment, Maya can spot the comet to the northwest. Low in the sky among the constellations she remembers from grade school—the upside-down question mark of the Big Dipper, the tilted W of Cassiopeia, and the North Star—the comet blurs white, larger than any star. When Maya raises her binoculars to her eyes, the lenses isolate the h
azy light and rearrange it into a cone fanning out to the upper right, its center resembling a silver disk. No longer stationary, the comet is plunging toward the horizon, trailing a path of light; but as soon as she puts down the binoculars, it turns back into a large star going nowhere.
Her breath rises into the dark, a scattering of white puffs. There may not be another comet in her lifetime. A week ago on the spring equinox, her thirty-fifth birthday, she imagined herself walking around the elliptical circle her teachers drew to demonstrate the movement of the earth around the sun. She had reached the midpoint of her circle, but while the earth moved toward longer days this year, she would travel in the opposite direction, toward longer nights. Training the lenses again on the white tail of the comet, Maya notes its exact shape, its cold silver light, wanting to memorize every detail as if she were bearing witness or saying good-bye. Finally, she walks back to the square opening on the roof where a ladder goes down to Yuko’s back porch on the fourth floor.
Her steps clonk against the metal rungs. The door opens into the kitchen, the linoleum floor covered with the cardboard boxes they moved this afternoon. Down the narrow hallway is the only bedroom, which Yuko has set up as her music room: a piano by the window, two acoustic guitars and an electric bass in the middle of the room, a standup bass by the door. Last Sunday, Yuko’s four brothers drove down from Minneapolis to help her move her instruments. Though the rest of the apartment is crowded with boxes, her music room is ready for tomorrow morning’s practice. For the last year, Yuko has been playing with an all-female, all-Asian-American rock band called the Demographics. The band is booked to play in Chicago, Minneapolis, Asheville, and Seattle this summer. Yuko’s desk is scattered with the notes for the songs she’s been writing.
Maya walks to the living room, where Yuko is kneeling on the beige-carpeted floor among the boxes, taking the books out a handful at a time and stacking them up. The ceiling has no overhead light; the inverted clay bowl that covers the old fixture looks like the breast on a cheap statue. Yuko has plugged in her two floor lamps and four reading lamps and placed them around herself. Bathed in this circle of white and orange light, wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, she looks like a character from a one-act play—the kind of experimental theater they used to see in college. Behind her in the corner is the futon she has put on the floor, neatly made up with pale blue sheets, a navy blue blanket, a flat thin pillow.
Maya stops in the doorway and surveys the room in which her friend plans to sleep, read, and eat, dedicating her one bedroom to her music. “I don’t need a special room to sleep in,” Yuko said, when she decided to leave the house to Dan and his girlfriend and move into an old apartment building a mile north of Maya’s house. “I can sleep anywhere.”
Maya sits down, facing Yuko across the pile of books and boxes. It’s surprisingly warm in the light. She takes off her sweater and puts it on the floor next to the binoculars.
“I found the comet. Do you want to see it?”
“I don’t know. This place is a disaster area. I can’t decide where to start.” Yuko runs her hand through her hair, which has been cut in a trendy asymmetrical style: one side flush with her earlobe and the other side cropped close to her temple, the bangs trimmed over her eyebrows. The morning after Yuko chopped off her braid, Maya drove her to a hairdresser. “We had too much to drink last night,” Maya told the hairdresser. “At the time, it seemed like a good idea to cut her hair. As you can see, I made a big mess.” She felt pathetic, as though she had really given her best friend a botched haircut. The blizzard of the night before had coated the freeway signs with a thick layer of snow. On the drive back, Maya missed the North Avenue exit, though she has lived within three miles of it for the last seventeen years. Yuko had fallen asleep in the car. She didn’t wake up until Maya parked on the driveway and shook her shoulder.
“Where are your tapes and CDs?” Maya asks. The stereo is against one of the walls in the living room. “We should play some music while we unpack.”
“I have no idea where anything is. I did such a lame job of marking my boxes. I can’t remember what I meant by the abbreviations I made up. All I understand is LV for living room.”
“Maybe we should first sort through the boxes then—just open the top and see what’s inside each.”
“You know what we should really do?” Yuko looks at her wristwatch. “We should quit. It’s eight o’clock on a Friday night. We should order a pizza.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want you to unpack by yourself. I have to work tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m exhausted anyway. It’ll be better to start out fresh tomorrow morning. I’m going to be living here a long time. I don’t have to unpack right away.”
“Where’s the phone? I’ll call Pizza Man. Pizza Man Delivers.” Maya holds up her right hand, palm up, and turns her face to the side, imitating the man on the restaurant’s logo, but Yuko doesn’t laugh. She just points to the wall behind Maya. The phone is on top of a makeshift bookcase: four long pine boards supported by cinder blocks. They haven’t had shelves like these since college.
“I might have to put my clothes on some of those shelves,” Yuko says. “My desk’s blocking the bedroom closet because my brothers and I couldn’t figure out where else to put it, and the only drawers are in the kitchen pantry. I don’t have a place for my sweaters or coats unless I take down the shower curtain and hang them over the tub. Maybe I’ll just forget about the shower and take baths.”
“You don’t have to do that. I have plenty of room in my closet at the loft. You can store your winter clothes there.”
“Thanks.” Yuko stands up. “Let’s grab a beer, okay?”
“I’ll call for the pizza first. We can drink our beer on the roof while we wait. You really have to see the comet.”
“If you say so.”
“It’s the brightest one we’re likely to see in our lifetime. I’ve been reading up on it. Time magazine says the comet isn’t really a falling star but a burning dust ball hurtling through space. This one looks very similar to the one in the Bayeux tapestry. People used to think comets were messages from God, a warning about the end of the world.”
“Oh, Maya,” Yuko says, smiling faintly. “Only you can get so excited about a dust ball in outer space.”
“Give it a chance,” Maya coaxes. “This particular dust ball is spectacular.”
* * *
Jeff has left the porch light on for her. Maya parks her Civic in the driveway behind his station wagon. The bike rack on the roof is beginning to rust, but her car, at one hundred seventy-five thousand miles, is still running fine. If she had to leave her marriage, she would at least have a vehicle that works. Yuko turned down everything Dan said she could have: the house, the furniture he’d made, even the dishes her parents had given them. She gave him the Barracuda and bought an old Ford Escort for two hundred dollars. “I need to start from scratch,” she said. “How else can I find out who I am without him?” Yuko has been with Dan almost as long as she had lived with her parents before college, longer than she was with her youngest brothers. It wouldn’t be the same for Maya. There is a clear line that slices through her life with Jeff, distinguishing what is hers from what is his, who she is from who he is. She was thirty and he was thirty-five when they met. They’d already lived a whole lifetime without each other.
The house is dark except for the night-light in the upstairs hallway. Jeff is asleep beneath the quilt his mother made. Maya walks quietly to her dresser by the window. A pale white light comes through the blinds from the aquarium lamp their new neighbor leaves on every night. In January, Mrs. Nordstrom’s son came up from Kentucky to move his mother to a nursing home in Lexington. The new owner of the house, a young woman with a child, leaves their aquarium light on all night, and Jeff worries about the fish, who must be going blind. Unlike mammals, fish have no eyelids—their eyes burn out if the light never goes off. “Maybe we should tell her,” Maya suggested. “No,
” Jeff said. “She’d feel funny about us if we did.” Maya joked about sending an anonymous note. Just the picture of a lightbulb next to a fish with dark glasses and a white cane, and the woman would get the idea. Jeff frowned and shook his head. “Everything is a joke to you,” he said. “You’re so quiet most of the time, but in your head you’re always making fun of people. You should have a little more compassion.”
Maya puts the binoculars on top of her dresser and takes off her sweater. As she pulls out the drawer, the fragrance of the cypress wood rises in the dark, mixed with the rich wool smell of her hand-knit sweaters and woven scarves. Her great-grandmother, for whom the dresser was made, would have kept her heavy silk kimonos in these drawers. The dresser was the only thing Kay asked to have sent to her when she told Maya’s father that she wasn’t coming back. On the day the movers came, Minoru continued to paint in the garage with the door thrown open—it was August, at the height of summer heat. The rest of that summer, Maya was afraid to sleep in the dark, and the brown moths that came through the holes in the screen bumped into the bare bulb above her futon, singeing their wings and falling down on the white sheets all night long. For years in Minneapolis, Maya couldn’t look at this dresser in Kay and Bill’s bedroom without being reminded of that time, but when Kay left the second time, forsaking the dresser and leaving it to Maya by default, it became a piece of her childhood home she could finally reclaim. She brought it from Bill’s house and put her handmade sweaters and scarves inside, along with the clothes she had saved: the red hooded jacket she was wearing on the day she left Osaka, the dresses and sweaters her father had packed in her suitcase. Yuko burned sage and scattered dried chrysanthemum petals. She made up a musical mantra for the dresser’s new life and played it on her guitar while Maya scratched her name in Japanese inside the bottom drawer.
