by Kyoko Mori
“Maya,” Jeff says. “You’re back.” He’s half lying down, half sitting up, rubbing his eyes.
“Sorry I’m so late. I should have called.”
“Did everything go okay?”
“Fine. I told you her brothers moved most of the heavy stuff last weekend. The two of us just had the boxes.”
“You could have called me if you needed extra hands.”
“I know, but we didn’t have to.”
Jeff hasn’t sat up because he is planning to go back to sleep. It’s one-thirty in the morning.
“I want to ask you something,” Maya says.
“What’s that?”
“Do you think I can put my sweaters in the linen closet for a while?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I want Yuko to have this dresser.” She puts her hand on top of the dresser as if she needed to show him which one she meant. Hers is the only one nearby; his is clear on the other side of the room.
“Yuko asked to borrow your dresser?”
“No, she didn’t say anything about it.”
Jeff sits up and sighs, his silence saying, So what’s the point?
“I want to help her out. I can take my sweaters to the loft, if you’d rather. I’ll need to borrow your station wagon, that’s all.”
Several seconds pass after she’s finished, before he says, “Why do you always come up with these big projects in the middle of the night? Do you know what time it is?”
“I’m not asking you to do anything right now.”
He scoots back toward the headboard. Pulling the pillows from behind his back, he tugs at them hard and plonks them back down.
“Don’t be angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Yes, you are, but you shouldn’t be. Moving a dresser ten blocks isn’t a big project.”
“Why don’t you come to bed?” he says, in such a begrudging voice that it’s scarcely an invitation. “We can talk about this in the morning. We don’t have to decide in the middle of the night.”
“No. I don’t want to come to bed. There’s nothing to decide or talk about.”
“So what are you going to do? Sleep standing up?”
“Yeah, like a horse.”
He shakes his head and they start laughing.
“Okay,” he says. “I lose. We’ll move your dresser in the morning. Now I want to go back to sleep.”
“Fine, go ahead and sleep away.” She waves her hand as though the bad feeling in the room could be cleared up by a joke.
Jeff makes a neighing noise and then plops back down under the covers.
* * *
Maya brushes her hair in the harsh yellow light from the bulbs that frame the bathroom mirror. If this were really her house, she would have taken out the bulbs and put in an overhead light. But it isn’t her house; it never will be. When Maya moved here a week before the wedding, Yuko was worried. “People leave their energy behind long after they’re gone,” she said. “I’m worried about you living in the place where Jeff and his first wife must have felt a lot of anger between them. The fallout from their fights might be floating around in there. If we live near big power lines, we’re more prone to getting cancer or leukemia. Anger is worse than a power line. I don’t want you to get sick.”
Maya pictured anger like electric currents surging through big steel towers, but she wasn’t worried then. Not everyone is capable of rage that leaves a mark on the universe, strong enough to make people sick. Her mother was about the only person who had anger like that. Jeff and his first wife, Nancy, must have bickered in the same half-hearted way that Maya did with Jeff, letting their arguments peter out in lame apologies and silent resentments until something else stirred them up again. They couldn’t have had terrible fights that left psychic marks on the house even if such a thing were possible: it takes two to fight like that. If Nancy had yelled at him, Jeff would have stayed quiet.
Nancy had been a social worker at the high school where Jeff still teaches. She and Jeff grew up together on the south side and got married at eighteen. Sixteen years later, she divorced him and moved to Colorado with a man she met at a rock-climbers’ convention. That’s all Maya knows about her. She’d been gone a year before Dan introduced Jeff and Maya. Jeff has said little about his marriage, and Maya hasn’t asked. Someone else’s past is like a box of newspaper clippings from a faraway city. The details would not make sense even if he told her. Nancy is living hundreds of miles away, married to someone else. If she was the one who chose the couch in the living room or the wallpaper in the kitchen, these things are no different from the traces left by numerous other owners. The house is seventy years old. People have come and gone. The only person who can make her feel slighted is Jeff, who is still here.
In the bedroom, Jeff is snoring softly and hugging the pillow. Maya gets a shawl from her dresser and wraps it around her shoulders. Downstairs in the kitchen, she opens a drawer, the top one to the farthest left, where she keeps everything from a ball of twine to bills, scraps of yarn, beads that fell out of old necklaces. Jeff gave her this drawer when she moved in. “Everyone needs one private drawer,” he said, pulling his papers and bills and old letters out of it. Maya thought it was a generous gesture then, but now the drawer looks merely cluttered.
The padded envelope Maya received in November is at the bottom, along with the letter on onionskin paper. The photograph of her father and the picture he drew are at her loft, but for months she moved the envelope and the letter between the house and the loft, trying to find a moment when she could be alone and concentrate on a reply. Around the end of February, she gave up. Even when she lived alone, she seldom found inspiration to do something she didn’t want to do in the first place. Now, her mind feels like a chalkboard that hasn’t been cleaned completely. The minor irritation from her talk with Jeff is like the lesson from a previous class—too faint to make sense but legible enough to be a distraction.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Maya rereads the letter. Like the business letters they studied in her advanced Japanese class at college, this one is full of elaborate greetings and formalities. It’s hard to separate them from the actual content. After reading it over three more times, Maya still finds no information about how long her father had been ill, what kind of cancer he had, what his last months were like, whether he was at home or at the hospital, if he left any last words.
Maya tries to picture Mr. Kubo, a man with a wife and two daughters. He must be thirty-five or forty, Maya’s own age. She wants to imagine him as someone she might have gone to college with, but instead, she is thinking about the Japanese businessmen she met during her freshman year when she worked as an interpreter. Always dressed in black as though they were attending a funeral, they whispered to each other and never gave straight answers. While the American businessmen asked her what she was studying at college or where she grew up, the Japanese men never looked her in the eye. Her mother had been right: her Japanese wasn’t good enough, and Japanese businessmen treated her as though she were nothing more than a machine—a special tape recorder that repeated everything in two languages.
“The Japanese are such hypocrites,” Kay used to say before she was married to Nate. Even though she said the same things at least once a month, her voice always cracked with bitterness as if she had just discovered something new to be angry about. “If you want someone from Japan, especially a man, to do you a favor, you have to pretend that it’s not important. Otherwise, they won’t say yes and they won’t say no. But if you pretend to be dumb, they’ll let their guard down and you’ll get what you want. I had to leave the country because I was too honest to play that stupid game.”
Since Maya left Kay at the restaurant, they have only talked on the phone once or twice a month, and every time Kay mentions how she sat alone for an hour, worried and then upset, before she gave up on Maya and called her husband. “I waited,” she said, “because I couldn’t imagine you’d leave me. Why did yo
u do that to me?” Maya wonders how many times she’ll be forced to go over what happened that night. In the previous years, she visited her mother in January after spending Christmas with Yuko’s family, but this year she sent her gifts and didn’t offer any excuses.
Maya writes down a few sentences, thanking Mr. Kubo for sending her the news. She comments on the weather. There is still half a page left blank. Trying not to sound too blunt, she asks him to give her more details concerning her father’s death. In particular, she would like to know if her father said anything about her in his last days. Even if it was the smallest remark, she would like to hear it. She repeats the polite formalities as best she can and closes the letter.
Her handwriting looks like a child’s. The letter sounds alternately insincere and diffident, but it’s the best she can do. Sealing the envelope, Maya slips it inside her coat pocket on her way upstairs.
* * *
Her back toward Jeff, she curls up tight under the covers, but she can’t stop shaking. Jeff puts his arms around her. His breath is warm against her back.
“Hey,” he whispers. “Are you all right?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He hugs her tighter. “Was it because I acted like a jerk about your dresser?”
She shakes her head. Her ear scratches against his jaw and makes a muffled noise.
“No, I wasn’t a jerk or no, that wasn’t the problem?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go back to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“It is morning. I don’t feel better.”
Pulling herself out of his arms, Maya sits up. Jeff turns on his side and leans on his elbow. Compared to everything that happened in her past, their fight—their whole marriage, really—is minuscule, nothing Maya would lose sleep over. But that isn’t the right thing to tell him. I am upset about something else. I wasn’t even thinking about you.
“Listen,” he says. “I know you’ve been upset about Dan and Yuko. You’ve known both of them a long time. I should have been more sensitive. I’m sorry.” He sits up and moves closer.
Leaning toward him, she lets her shoulder touch his. “I’m sorry too. I haven’t been myself because I was so upset about them.”
“I understand. I’d be mad at Dan too, if Yuko were my best friend. You’re irritable with me because I’m guilty by association. I shouldn’t have made such a big deal about moving a piece of furniture.”
She doesn’t move away when he takes her hand into his, but she can hardly look at his face. When they were first married, Maya believed that their silence about the past was a sign of trust. Jeff didn’t ask her about her childhood and accuse her of being cold when she refused to talk about it. He didn’t use what little he knew about her history against her; he would never say, as Scott did, “You’re afraid to love me because of what happened in your family.” He asked no questions and assumed the best about her. Comfortable silence seemed like the closest she could come to love. If it had been up to her, they would have gone on seeing each other indefinitely without getting married. But Jeff promised that nothing would change between them if they married. Now she is sure they are separated forever by everything she’s kept from telling him.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Jeff says, pulling her close.
Maya puts her arms around him and buries her face in his chest. His T-shirt is warm and soft, with the familiar scent of his soap and laundry detergent. She is overcome by terrible, sudden fondness, like regret, as though they were already parting. “I know. I’m sorry too,” she murmurs. Across the few feet of darkness on the other side of their window, her neighbor’s fish circle the aquarium, their bodies glittering like a handful of small coins.
6
On the hardwood floor of the boutique, three dead mice are lined up, their heads pointed toward the cash register. Their legs are bent at odd angles. Maya picks them up by the tails as her cat comes bouncing down the stairs.
“Thanks, Casper.” She pats him on the head and goes back outside to throw the mice in the trash. When she comes back in, Casper flops down at her feet. He’s grown tall and lanky, with a long tail that has a crook at the end. Maya closes the door and kneels down to scratch his stomach. Purring loudly, he jumps on her left shoulder and perches there while she rearranges the chairs and the tables for the party Peg is throwing to celebrate her sheep’s birthday. The caterer should be here any minute. Peg has hired a string quartet to play Mozart. As Maya goes about her work, Casper keeps his paws on her shoulder and leans into her as if they were dancing cheek-to-cheek.
Casper hissed at Yuko the afternoon she named him. “Casper the Ghost,” she said to him, backing away a little. “Don’t tell me you don’t like the name.” He has settled down since then. Shy with everyone but Maya, he runs up the stairs to the loft as soon as customers come in. The mice who used to nest in the drawers have no chance. Every week, Maya finds several dead ones on the floor, lined up in a neat row. Casper is paying her back for saving his life. Like her friends at college who picked up squashed birds from the roadside to put into collages and stuck their dead tropical fish in the freezer so they could cast them in plaster, Casper arranges the mice with meticulous care, sometimes surrounding them with rubber bands and twisty-ties he’s been stashing somewhere, as if he were making a series of small installations on the theme of mice.
Jennifer, the caterer’s new help, stands in the doorway with her hands full, her mouth open. “Oh, that’s not a real person,” she says, in a surprised voice.
“No, that’s just Wilbur.” The life-sized doll Peg made is seated at the table. Jennifer approaches gingerly and lowers the punch bowl, careful to keep a couple of empty chairs between herself and Wilbur. Casper scampered upstairs as soon as Jennifer opened the door.
“So what’s with the doll?” Jennifer asks, when she’s finished setting up. Maya can divide the people who come into the store into two groups. Some are drawn immediately to Wilbur, tugging at his stuffed arms inside the surgeon’s coat, tousling his mop of hair, and pulling at the stethoscope around his neck. Once, three elderly women unzipped his pants and marveled at what Peg had accomplished with the fleece of her black sheep, Baba, and flesh-colored pantyhose stuffed with cotton. “My boss says it’s practically the best sewing she’s done,” Maya told them. The women squealed with laughter and promised to sign up if Peg offered a class in doll making. But most people are like this girl—they give Wilbur a wide berth.
“Peg made Wilbur in a class in Wyoming,” Maya explains. “She wanted to make a nurse doll, but she couldn’t get the face to look like a woman’s. So she made a man and dressed him like a doctor.”
“Huh. That’s pretty far out.” Jennifer stares at Wilbur without another word.
Maya is witnessing the wordless bovine quality Jeff laments in his students. “You’ll show them the most amazing things,” he often complains, “and they’ll stare and say nothing. I wish they would talk.” Last night, he and Maya quarreled after coming home from a dinner with Dan and Meredith. “You scarcely said a word to that poor girl,” Jeff said. “You kept talking to Dan about when the two of you were in college. It was so obvious; you brought up the past to exclude Meredith. I was ashamed to be with you.” Maya’s face burned when she remembered her own thin voice rehashing the past, her hands fluttering over the plates. Dan had sat with one arm around Meredith. Now and then, he drew her closer and kissed her. As they walked back to the car, Dan slowed down, matching his steps with Meredith’s. He used to stride on ahead while Yuko stopped to look at something or to talk to an acquaintance at shopping malls. It was three, four minutes before he’d notice she was no longer at his side. Yuko thought Dan was absentminded; now, watching him with Meredith, Maya saw the truth. “It wasn’t my idea to go out with them,” she told Jeff. “I acted like that because I was hurt.” When she started crying, Jeff shook his head and left the room. He was reading the paper in the living room this morning. She walked past hi
s chair on her way out of the house and didn’t even say good-bye.
“I’d better go,” Jennifer says. “Sylvia is coming to the party with a date. She’s sending me back here at eight to clean up.” Sylvia, the caterer, runs her business out of a farmhouse down the road.
“You can come back earlier and be a guest too.”
“I’ll try, but I have to study for a test. I’m still in school.” Before Maya can ask her where she goes to school, Jennifer is gone.
* * *
Peg drives over in her blue vest-and-skirt outfit with crazy-quilt designs. On the rare occasions when Maya sees Peg and Kay at the same place, she can’t help noticing that the two women are complete opposites. Kay wears the most conservative styles and colors—meticulously tailored suits in beige, taupe, ecru—and claims to be shocked by Peg’s clothes. “How can that woman wear artsy-fartsy clothes like that?” she once said. “She’s only a few years younger than I am.” But Kay’s stuffy old lady clothes didn’t prevent her from getting a divorce at fifty-five to marry a younger man. Maya wishes she had grown up with a mother who dressed wildly but acted with solid good sense.
“The display looks excellent.” Peg nods at the handwoven jackets and vests Maya has hung from the ceiling.
“Cheers for Baba and Molly.” Maya pours the punch into two glasses and holds hers in the general direction of the sheep barn. The sheep are ten years old this spring. Maya has celebrated their birthday with Peg every year.
“Let me see that necklace,” Peg says, as they sit down at the table. Maya takes off the necklace she is wearing with her black dress and hands it to Peg. Made as a collage of flower forms assembled from glass beads, it feels solid and heavy.
“You are so talented,” Peg says, as she examines the necklace and hands it back. The beads make a faint clinking noise between their two palms.
“Sylvia sent her new help. She was a little leery of Wilbur.”
“Good ol’ Wilbur. He doesn’t mean any harm.” Peg pats the doll’s fat stuffed hand.
