by Kyoko Mori
“Will you be all right?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” He looks down at his feet as though he has never seen the shoes he’s wearing.
“Maybe you should sit down.”
She takes him by the hand. He lets go, only to reach and put his arm around her shoulder. He has to struggle to keep standing. “You’re very kind,” he says. Even drunk, he has a gentle, soft voice.
As they begin to walk unsteadily together, Maya remembers the weekends in college. Every Friday or Saturday night, she helped Yuko, Dan, Scott, and various other friends—coaxing them to stop drinking and leave the bar or the party, walking them home, getting them to sit down and drink some water. Always the designated sober person, she thought of herself as boring and timid, but it’s oddly comforting to help this stranger. When they get to the couch, she lets go and he sinks down on the seat. He leans forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands pressed against his temples.
“I’m going to look for some aspirin.”
She returns with a glass of water from the kitchen and the aspirin she found in the medicine cabinet. Sitting down next to him, she holds out the two pills. “Here, take these.”
“Thanks.” He swallows them with a mouthful of water.
“You should drink all of it.” She sets the glass on the coffee table and stands up.
He looks up at her and smiles weakly. “I knew you’d save me,” he says. “Thank you.” He reaches up and takes her hand. She steps back until he lets go. Looking down at his own hand, he shakes his head. “Good-bye,” she says. “I hope you won’t feel too bad in the morning.” He is still sitting on the couch when she leaves.
* * *
Driving on a residential street near her home, Maya pictures Jeff sleeping in their bed under his mother’s quilt, the neighbor’s aquarium shining through the blinds. It’s almost two o’clock in the morning. The satisfaction she felt about helping Eric is gone. Instead, she’s thinking about the years in high school when she was afraid to go home. At ten or eleven, she would be riding with a carload of girls, all of them laughing and talking. As the car rounded the corner onto her street, she knew her mother would be waiting up at the kitchen table, claiming to have been worried to death. Kay would tell her to sit down across the table and recount everything she’d done that night, and even after Maya did, she would accuse her of lying. When the car stopped in front of her house, Maya said good night to her friends without letting on how she felt, but it was as though they were abandoning her. Their car was a ship dropping her off on a desert island. Until the last semester of her senior year, Kay expected her to go on to a private college in the Twin Cities and live at home. Maya had to almost flunk out of school and run away from home before Kay gave up in disgust and allowed her to go to Milwaukee with Yuko. Now, the old feeling of despair has found her again. All night, she and Jeff will lie back to back in the same bed like two swimmers lost at sea. If two people were drowning, it wouldn’t help them to be only a few inches apart.
Maya stares ahead into the arc of her headlights, trying to chase away the image that keeps coming back to her. Her father is standing alone in a dark, desolate place, his right arm extended in a wave. The brown kimono he is wearing makes him look like a tree, his arm a bare branch in winter. Though he keeps waving, Maya can only guess what he is trying to tell her. Good-bye, he must be saying. I’ll never see you again.
7
From the path that winds through the bluff above Lake Michigan, Maya watches the sun weaving its way up and around the low clouds on the horizon. White-throated sparrows dart over the brown grass, their black-and-white striped heads like tiny race helmets. A few begin to sing their tremulous four-note phrase from the trees. The binoculars intensify the definition of their white throat patches, the bright yellow dot between the eye and the bill.
All along the path, Maya sees nothing surprising: the robins and the redwing blackbirds who have been back since March, the mourning doves and the starlings who have never left, a flock of blue jays with their wings like thunderbolts of black and blue. Far over the water, herring gulls are circling. The older birds are pure white except for the pale gray mantle of their wings, tipped in black, while last year’s young wear their sooty costumes of brown-black. It will take them two winters to slough off this dingy color, first from the head and the underparts, then from the tail. Maya’s father once drew a picture of a white bird encased in a block of ice and told her the story of the ugly duckling. In winter, when all the birds flew south, the ugly duckling was alone on a frozen pond. Maya pitied the young bird trapped inside solid ice, but when spring came he turned into a swan and was reunited with the other swans. Most people’s lives are like a gull’s—struggling year after year to slough off the sooty marks of childhood.
Maya trains her binoculars over the water. Ready for something or nothing, she examines the pure transparent air between shore and sky. The gulls wheel in and out of her field of vision—suddenly, one plunges headfirst into the water. She follows the steep angle of the bird’s descent. He crashes into the waves and soars up with something in his beak. He is not a gull but a tern with a bright orange bill, a black cap marking his head. Transformed back into himself by the dip into the cold water, he flies away as the gulls form a tight squadron to give chase. Too late, they congregate to dive-bomb this stranger among them, their anxious cries spreading over the water.
* * *
Jeff is reading the Sunday paper at the kitchen table. In his clean long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, he looks ready to start the day. He doesn’t say anything when she comes in.
When they were first married, he tiptoed out of bed and made coffee before waking her up to read the Sunday paper with him. They took their second cups and went back upstairs just as the sun was coming through the large windows, turning the bed into an island of light. Sitting on the bed, he talked about his students; she described her eccentric customers to make him laugh. When their cups were empty, they made love, dozing off for a few minutes afterward. By the time they got up again, it was past noon.
One Sunday a year after they were married, Maya woke up before dawn and did not go back to sleep. She dressed in the dark and rode off on her bicycle, the wind zinging around her. In the deserted park, she stood alone in the near dark before sunrise. The silence was broken only by the sparrows beginning to chirp in the bushes, a single robin trilling among the high branches. She had been away for so long: for a whole year, she had slept through the gray hours of the morning and gotten up to a routine of coffee and small talk. She felt like a person who had woken up from a dream—a dream that was an endless repetition of everyday actions that made no sense.
When birds leave their wintering grounds to fly north, they are not following the trail of food or better weather. There is plenty of food where they are, and the weather is more clement. No one knows what makes them flock up and start their journey or how they navigate the thousands of miles back to the place where they were born. Maya never spent another Sunday morning with Jeff while flocks of grosbeaks and warblers traveled through the sky above her, each bird bearing a mark that distinguished it from all the others. Week after week, she returned to the park alone.
That was more than two years ago. If Jeff minded her going off without him, he hasn’t said anything. He has seemed as content as she with the space between them, with lives that resemble parallel lines moving in the same direction. The happily married couples Maya knows—Peg and Larry, Yuko’s parents, or Yuko and Dan, she used to think—can keep a steady small distance between them. More like old friends than lovers, they don’t cling to each other. Maya hoped she and Jeff would be like them—not like her mother and Bill before Kay found Nate and moved away. At least once a week when Maya lived with them, Kay had screamed at Bill and stormed out, only to come back in a couple of hours to kiss him in tears; every fight ended with them staggering upstairs with their arms around each other.
As she stands in the kitchen, looking at Jeff
hunched over the paper, she has a sinking feeling that they made a mistake in marrying each other, that the end is as inevitable as the approach of spring. The temperature fluctuates wildly this time of the year, one day like spring, the next like winter, but after March and April everyone knows where the weather is headed. Change is predestined.
Maya pours herself some coffee and sits down across the table from him, careful not to scrape the chair legs against the tiled floor. Maybe he feels the same doomed way about them that she does. In silence, he hands her the sections of the paper he has finished. After half an hour, she pushes back her chair quietly, gets up, and walks to the counter. “More coffee?” she asks. It’s the first thing she’s said to him since the phone call last night.
“No, thanks. You should get ready.”
Maya glances at her wristwatch. It’s nine-thirty. “I was wondering if I could meet you somewhere a little later, instead of going to Meredith’s apartment.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have to do something first. I’ll be done in an hour.”
Jeff puts down the paper and takes off his reading glasses. “Last night you promised you’d come with me.”
“I know, but something came up. You don’t need my help moving things. I can meet you afterward.”
“That’s not the point. You made a promise. Why do you always do exactly what you want without any consideration for me? If that’s how it’s going to be, I don’t want any part of this anymore. You should just go and be by yourself.”
“What do you mean by that? You sound like you’re telling me to move out.”
“I don’t know,” he says darkly. “Maybe we need to talk about it.”
Maya walks back to the table, but just as she reaches for her chair, Jeff pushes back his and stands up. They face each other across the table. She puts her hand on the back of the chair even though she doesn’t sit down. She imagines a long cord stretched thin. On one side is this house, on the other the tiny efficiency where she used to live. The two begin to spin, but it’s the house at the center, flinging the efficiency about, trying to pitch it off.
“So when are we going to talk?” she asks.
“Not now.” He steps back from the table. “Don’t bother to meet us anywhere. Do whatever you want all day long.”
“Fine.” Her voice comes out flat and cold. “I could easily have come over later, but that’s your choice. You’d as soon make a big deal out of nothing.” Slowly but deliberately, she walks out of the kitchen and up the stairs before he has a chance to leave first. While she is in the closet getting her clothes, he goes out to the driveway, moves her car to the street, and gets into his. Then he starts the engine and drives away.
* * *
Eric comes to the door in jeans and a sweatshirt, his eyes red and his cheeks pale. His hair, just washed and combed, sticks to his forehead. Maya can almost picture how he might have looked as a young boy.
“I stopped by to see how you were,” Maya says.
Smiling, he steps back to let her in. “It’s nice to see you. Come in.”
“I was on my way up to the store,” she explains. “I can give you a ride back to Peg’s.”
“That’ll be great. Thanks.”
The living room has only a couch and a coffee table. Just like Yuko, he doesn’t have pictures, a TV, or bookcases.
“Come into the kitchen.” He leads the way. The kitchen is as bare but at least sunny. “Please have a seat.” He points to a round table and two chairs. “Can I make you some tea? I don’t have any coffee. I gave it up a year ago because it made me nervous.”
“You don’t have to make me anything,” she says, sitting down.
“Why? Are you in a hurry?”
“No, not at all.”
He turns on the burner before filling the kettle and putting it on. “Herb tea or black tea?”
“Black. Are you feeling all right?”
“Never better.” He smiles, showing his crooked teeth. “I know I don’t look it.”
“I didn’t say you looked bad.”
“You don’t have to tell me. You’re thinking it.” When the kettle whistles, he pours the hot water into two cups with tea bags and brings them to the table with a bowl of sugar. “I don’t have any cream,” he says.
“That’s all right.”
They let the tea steep for a while before they begin to drink. Maya feels awkward; it’s odd to be having tea in the kitchen with someone she doesn’t know.
“You haven’t lived here very long.”
He puts down his cup and arches his eyebrows. “You would hope not, right? Otherwise, I’d be an idiot to direct you to the wrong house.”
“That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t trying to remind you about last night.” The cup clatters when she puts it down.
“It’s all right. I’m the one who should be embarrassed.”
“No, you shouldn’t. Everyone gets drunk sometimes,” she says. “It’s just that I helped my best friend move a week ago. She doesn’t have a lot of furniture because she’s starting her life over, and her place looks a little unsettled—”
“And it’s the same thing here,” he finishes for her.
“Yes. Did that sound rude?”
He reaches across the table and touches her wrist. His fingertips are warm from the teacup. “No, not at all. I can’t imagine you ever being rude.”
Maya looks away from his eyes, her heart beating so hard she is sure he can hear it from across the table. She is blabbing like an idiot, making a stupid comment and then calling attention to it. She shouldn’t have stopped here in the first place; he must have plenty of friends he can call to get a ride.
Eric withdraws his hand. “I moved back to Wisconsin last September from Vermont. My parents live in the countryside near Manitowoc, about an hour north of here. I came back because they’re getting old, but I don’t know how long I’ll be staying.” By the way he picks up his cup and looks into his tea, Maya knows his move was motivated by a sense of obligation—if he had his wish, he would be far away from here and much happier.
“Your parents must appreciate your being near them.”
He shrugs. “My mother lives alone in a trailer, a few miles from the farm where I grew up. My parents sold the farm to a neighbor some years ago. My father is in a nursing home in Green Bay.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“How about you?” he asks. “Do you have family nearby?”
“Not really. My mother lives near Chicago with her third husband, but I don’t see her often. We don’t get along. The last time I saw her, I left her at a restaurant on the north side of Chicago and drove away. She didn’t even have a car there.”
“Oh, no.” He laughs. “It must have been pretty bad.”
“It was the same old thing, my mother nagging me and me getting defensive, but I just snapped this time. She and I have talked on the phone since, but neither of us has mentioned getting together again. I think we’re both afraid of having another blowup. She’s the only family I have. My father—her first husband—lived in Japan, but he died recently, and I don’t have any brothers or sisters.” Maya tries to laugh as if to say her life isn’t as sad as it sounds.
“You’ve been through a lot.”
The kindness in his voice almost brings tears to her eyes. Closing her eyes, she pictures her father from twenty-five years ago, standing at the airport in his black coat. He would have been thirty-five, her age now. How could he say good-bye to her, knowing they would never meet again? When she opens her eyes, Eric is looking into her face. His brown eyes have a faint tint of green around the pupils. “It’s nothing,” she says, picking up her cup to finish her tea.
Because she was too nervous to stir the tea, all the sugar has stayed near the bottom of the cup. Each sip she takes is sweeter than the one before, and toward the end, the sweetness is overpowering. The summer Kay left for California, Maya and her father fed sugar water to the butterflies t
hey caught. Inside a cage made of green netting, the butterflies drank sugar from white cotton balls; their delicate legs looked like embroidery thread. It was only a few hours before her father told her it was time to let them go.
* * *
The sky is overcast and flurries are coming down. It’s still early enough for one last snowstorm.
“When we were at the store yesterday,” Maya says to Eric on the freeway, “you said you taught at the university.”
“Yes. I started looking for jobs in this area two years ago when my father went into the nursing home. Finally, the university offered me a couple of drawing courses, and it looked like I could supplement my income by doing some odd jobs, so I came back. It’s basically what I was doing in Vermont—piecing together a living with teaching, carpentry work, all kinds of odd jobs in order to be able to paint.”
“My father was a painter.” Maya takes her eyes off the road and glances at Eric, who is sitting sideways in the passenger seat. He nods as if to say, Go on, tell me more. With the wind blowing and the flurries coming down, the road ahead of them looks like the tunnel in the drawing her father sent—except, in the drawing, all the bad things were behind her in the hell she was leaving. Now she seems to be heading into them. “My father died in October. I left him twenty-five years ago to live with my mother in Minneapolis and never saw him again.” She shouldn’t have brought up the subject. “I became an art major in college because I wanted to be like him. I ended up not pursuing it, but I went to the university and took classes with some of the people you must work with.” She mentions the professors she had back then.
“So you’re a weaver now, right?” He is looking at the rose-colored shawl she’s wearing. “You made that, and some of the jackets at the store.”
“Yes.”
“I wanted you to show me which ones were yours, but we got interrupted by your customers. I was sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk more.”
