by Kyoko Mori
Maya goes to the sink and holds the glass under the faucet. The ice cubes float slowly to the top, the air bubbles inside them like the faint scars that fossils leave inside rocks. Turning off the faucet, she takes the glass and sits down at the kitchen table. Jeff must be waiting for her. If she went up now and sat next to him on the bed, she might say something she’s never said before. I married you because you knew how to leave me alone. I trusted your silence, but I don’t know about love. If you want to stay with me, help me to change. But she imagines the awkward way they might kiss and say nothing, as if they could change the years of silence by one gesture. She lifts the glass to her lips and takes a sip. The ice cubes collide against each other like planets destined for extinction.
PART TWO
8
Several miles north of the city, Maya is caught in a long line of cars creeping along the freeway. The right lane is closed, with a policeman waving everyone to the left. Behind him, a helicopter is waiting, its propellers slicing the air. The red letters on its side spell out FLIGHT FOR LIFE. The air vibrates with a low-pitched winnowing noise.
Two paramedics climb out of the ditch with someone on an orange stretcher, covered under a green army blanket. Maya holds her wheel straight and closes her eyes. When she opens them, she has only advanced a few yards. Her front bumper grazes the back bumper of the car ahead of her, but the driver is looking sideways, his head turned toward the accident. Policemen and rescue workers are gathered around a red car turned over in the ditch. Maya closes her eyes again.
Ten minutes later, the traffic is back to normal. Everyone’s driving too fast, trying to make up for lost time. Inside her car, the air feels thick. Maya imagines the helicopter staggering up to the sky, the noise of the propellers drowning out anything the injured person might say.
Her father must have been alone in his last moments, surrounded only by strangers, unable to speak. Mr. Kubo, who has not answered Maya’s letter, could not have been a very close friend. “There’s no real friendship in Japan,” Kay used to complain. “People don’t talk about their feelings. Japan is the loneliest place on earth.” Kay has always been the kind of person who says the right things for the wrong reasons. With no friends or family to confide in, Minoru must have felt like that person carried up into the sky, unsteadily and noisily in an awkward machine. The people around him were of no more help than the onlookers driving by. Any thought he had about Maya would have been as fleeting as an image glimpsed behind a car window.
* * *
Jeff is waiting in the living room, dressed to play tennis.
“Sorry I’m late,” Maya apologizes. “There was a lot of traffic on the freeway.”
Right now, the helicopter might be approaching the rooftop of a hospital, its landing gear tilted precariously above the skyline. From its window, the buildings below would look oddly fragile. Maya has a feeling that she is looking at Jeff through a hazy screen that consists of all the things she hasn’t told him. The unspoken words multiply like cobwebs in the air.
In the park down the street, no one is on the tennis courts. Maya and Jeff take the farthest one from the street and hit the ball back and forth without keeping score. It hasn’t been warm enough to play since last October, but she is hitting better than usual. Even her backhand goes straight over the net. The ball makes a crisp sound on the sweet spot of her racket.
“Good job,” Jeff says, when she returns his serve. Her shot, picking up the force of his, goes hard and flat over the net and reaches the baseline. “You’re getting good. No surprise, of course.” He is smiling. She tries to picture the tennis balls hitting the cobwebs between them, breaking and scattering them.
Maya had never played tennis before they met. “Pretend you’re shaking hands with the racket,” Jeff told her on the first day. “Your arm should move like a gate. It should only swing back and forth, not sideways.” He pointed out two or three things she could improve rather than overwhelming her with a series of hopeless tasks. They had agreed to exchange lessons: he would teach her to play tennis and she would show him how to drive standard shift. They drove her Civic in a deserted parking lot late at night; he circled around in second gear, afraid to shift, while she laughed and laughed, giddy and a little scared. She didn’t let him drive alone until he could park halfway down the steepest hill by the lake, restart the car, and drive backward up the incline without stalling. “You’re a perfectionist,” he said with a grin.
She watches him covering his side of the court in smooth, gliding steps, swinging the racket hard. Her daily life with him obscures the good things about him. His high school is in the poorest section of town. Every morning, all the teachers and students walk through metal detectors to enter the school building. Kids drop out and get into trouble—several of his former students have been murdered and many are in jail. Almost all the teachers he started out with have transferred to safer schools, but Jeff is determined to stay. For the last two years, he hasn’t been sleeping well. He tosses and turns, pushing the pillows and the blankets aside as if they were something alive that is trying to suffocate him. When he is moving around the court, the gloom he carries with him is lifted. Maya wishes she could have given him more afternoons like this. They played tennis every week the first year of their marriage, but after that they only got out a few times each summer.
Jeff runs into the next court after the ball she hit out. He lobs it easily back to where she is standing. “People can’t play by the same rules when their abilities are different,” he often says about his students. “I can’t expect everyone in my class to write perfect English. For some of them, I have to change the rules and not think of it as lowering my standards.” He goes after her bad serves and accepts his students’ mistakes because he doesn’t distinguish between fairness and generosity; for him, the two are the same. “You have to forgive Dan,” he told her. “You can’t always explain why someone falls in love. It just happens. Dan and Meredith can’t help how they feel.” Maya is not sure if she can be so kind. Like Dan, her mother claimed to be in love for the first time when she met Nate. “When I’m with him,” she gushed, “I feel like we are the only people in the world. Nothing else matters.” A month after Kay left, Maya visited Bill, who looked ten years older, his eyes sunk in their sockets, his hair gone gray. If this is what love does to other people, Maya thought then, love should be outlawed. She felt the same outrage when she walked into Yuko’s house and saw the jagged line of black hair across her nape.
Standing behind the baseline, where Jeff has taught her to stand, Maya watches the ball come flying across the net to her left. She returns it with a good backhand. The trick is to anticipate every move by watching the ball all the way across the court. It’s a matter of concentration. If people paid attention, nothing should surprise them. No one should be at the mercy of their own feelings. Even if feelings blow across the horizon, as large and unpredictable as tornadoes, people should know when to take shelter and wait out the disaster.
* * *
Maya tosses the ball for her serve and lets it drop. A big white car is parked in front of the house across the street. Whoever is in the car starts beeping the horn.
“Come on,” Jeff yells, “hit the ball!”
There’s another beep. Maya serves the ball into the net. Jeff takes one from his pocket and serves. They continue playing, but the noise doesn’t stop. The car is to her left, beyond the other two courts and across the street. With the light shining on the window, she can’t tell whether it’s a man or a woman behind the wheel. No one comes out of the houses on the block. When Jeff drops a short backhand near the net, Maya lets it go and starts walking toward the car.
When she is halfway across the next court, the car door opens and the driver gets out—a woman with a mane of red hair down her back, cut in the layered style that was popular twenty years ago. She must be six feet tall. In her lacy white tank top and tight black jeans, she towers over the car as she sticks her hand in through the
open door and beeps the horn again. She isn’t here for the people across the street.
“Jeff!” she yells. “Jeff!”
Jeff doesn’t move. The woman’s car is on his forehand side. He must have seen it long before Maya did.
Maya walks back to their court and stands at the net. “Who is that? How does she know your name?”
“That’s Nancy,” he says, just as another beep resounds across the courts. He bounces the ball he’s been holding.
“Nancy who?”
“Nancy Schiller, my ex-wife.”
“But there is no Nancy Schiller. She’s married to someone else in Colorado. That’s what you told me.”
Jeff catches the ball. His face is red. “She got divorced. When she went to court, she changed her name back to what it was when we were married. Don’t ask me why.”
“Why is she here?” The woman is looking at them. What she sees is Maya at the net, with her former husband staying back two feet behind the baseline, where every player should position himself to play the whole court to his advantage.
“She’s living with her parents on the south side.”
“How do you know?”
“She came to see me last week at school.”
“You didn’t say.” The woman is shouting louder now. “But I guess it’s none of my business.”
Jeff says something Maya can’t hear.
“What?”
He lobs the ball at her. She remains standing.
“Come on. Step back from the net.”
“I can’t play like this.”
Taking another ball from his pocket, Jeff turns abruptly to the side and hits it against the practice board on the fence. Nancy is still screaming, but he doesn’t miss. He keeps hitting the ball for a long time. Finally, he reaches too late with a backhand; the ball bounces and rolls away. He stops, breathing hard.
“You’d better go talk to her.” Maya hasn’t moved from her place near the net. “You can’t let her go on like this.”
Walking toward the fence, Jeff retrieves a ball Maya hit earlier and turns back to the practice board. The ball thumps against the board and rattles the metal fence. These noises are punctuated by the beep of the car horn and Nancy’s voice, yelling out “Jeff!” The result is like a crazy rap song. Maybe marriage is a demented duet. Jeff and Nancy remind Maya of old married actors who make one final comeback together in made-for-TV movies and magazine ads. If Jeff were not her husband, she would put her arm around his shoulder and lead him to the street where Nancy is waiting. She would say, “Talk to your wife. She’s desperate for your attention.”
Only Nancy doesn’t need Maya’s help. She has reached into her car and dragged out one of the floor mats—a black rubber square that looks oddly like a flag. Holding it over her head with both her hands, she starts waving it back and forth, still calling Jeff’s name. She is like someone waving for help from a scene of disaster, using burnt clothing, seat cushions, whatever she has available. Maya imagines Nancy’s red hair going up in flames, turning into jagged tongues of fire. Nancy continues to scream. “Jeff! Get over here. Jeff! We need to talk!” Her voice is beginning to crack.
“Listen to her,” Maya shouts across the court. “Will you please go talk to her?”
Jeff keeps hitting the ball. He is just as grimly determined as Nancy is. He must have had years of practice at tuning her out: every time they fought, Nancy must have screamed and thrown things while Jeff stood silent, refusing to acknowledge her anger. Their bouts might have resembled the childhood game Maya used to play: rock, scissors, paper. Only, in this version, the rock will get scratched as it crushes the scissors; the paper can cover the rock but it will tear; in the middle of slicing the paper, the scissors will snap in two.
Leaving the park from the other gate, away from the street, Maya walks around the neighborhood, tracing a big square that ends at her back door. She runs upstairs to the spare bedroom, whose windows face the park. Through the blinds, she can see Nancy’s car on the street. Jeff comes trudging across the courts. While the two talk next to the car, Nancy lets the floor mat dangle from her hand, a flag at half mast. Jeff fidgets, moving the racket from one hand to the other. Finally, he goes around to the passenger side and gets in. Nancy puts the floor mat down and takes her seat behind the wheel. The car pulls away from the curb, passes the house, and disappears around the corner.
Going to the bedroom closet for her clothes and then to the shower, Maya is retracing Nancy’s footsteps from years ago, connecting the same invisible dots between the same rooms. In the shower, she is standing exactly where Nancy must have stood under the stream of hot water. Once, when Maya had just moved in, she found a long strand of reddish blond hair in the flour bin. Faded and brittle, it had been lying dormant, as moths do. The larvae of grain-eating moths are invisible as you scoop the flour into a bag at the grocery store; six months later, when you find them, the moths are already full grown and winged. A frenzy of tiny brown fans in a miniature whiteout, they demand to be set free.
* * *
The security door, which is broken, is open. Maya runs up the stairs and knocks. When Yuko opens the door, the music sounds louder. Yuko puts her hand on Maya’s shoulder and pulls her into the doorway. “Hey, how are you doing? Everything okay?”
“Not really.”
“I didn’t think so. You look upset. You want to talk about it?”
“Later.”
Yuko nods. “Let’s go to the kitchen. I was making dinner.” Over her old cutoffs and a T-shirt from the health food store, Yuko is wearing the tie-dyed apron Maya made her last summer. It has swirls of yellow, orange, and green on a deep blue background. “I was doing some serious cutting. You can help me with it.”
“All right.”
In the kitchen, Yuko has a cookbook open on the counter, its spine weighted down with a green coffee cup they had when they lived in the dorm together. The cup looks like the trunk of a bamboo tree. The cookbook is the kind that has cheerful pictures on every page. Humpty-Dumpty sits on top of the ingredients list, surrounded by green peppers, carrots, onions, celery, and garlic, all with spindly arms and legs. “Here, you can start with these.” Yuko hands Maya a knife and two green peppers. She opens the fridge and takes out a carton of eggs.
Maya slices the peppers in half. Yuko cracks four eggs into a white bowl and whistles. “Look at these.” She holds the bowl toward Maya. Eight yellow yolks stare back at them, connected two by two with almost invisible membranes. They look like small planets spinning in tandem. “Twins, each one of them,” Yuko says.
“Yeah, like all chickens don’t look exactly the same anyway.”
“But I never saw anything like this before. Did you?”
Maya shakes her head.
“Do you think it’s safe to eat them?”
“Of course.”
Yuko pokes the eggs with her fork and begins to stir them. “How can chickens tell their chicks apart?”
“I don’t know. Are you trying to tell me a joke?”
“No. I really want to know. You’re right. They all look the same.”
“Maybe not to themselves.”
Yuko laughs. “Yeah, for all we know, they go around wishing their beaks were as long as the next chicken’s or their necks were as plump.” She puts the bowl aside, takes a couple of garlic cloves, and whacks them with the flat of her knife. The skins fall away, curled like shed chrysalides.
Jeff and Nancy are driving somewhere in the city, but they seem so far away. Maya dices the peppers and then the onions. The music playing on the stereo drifts into the kitchen—a new compilation of old James Taylor songs. Back in high school, Maya and Yuko had a business: they baked and decorated cakes. They had an ad in the yellow pages and were written up in the Star-Tribune when the paper did a feature about young people. JUST DESSERTS: CAKES FOR SPECIAL OCCASIONS their business was called. The best cake they made was a large sheet cake for a garden party. Maya—who did all the detail work while Yuko
took charge of the mixing—photographed the woman’s flower beds so the cake could be a miniature of her garden. They worked in Yuko’s mother’s kitchen, laughing and talking, listening to the stereo. They must have cracked a thousand eggs in those years. Maya wishes she had painted two young girls in a sunny kitchen surrounded by eggshells broken perfectly in two, the matching halves turning into a pair of wings.
* * *
“Nancy sounds like a real piece of work,” Yuko says, when Maya tells her what happened. “You should be careful. She might be dangerous.”
“I’m sure she’s just eccentric. She had a big shag haircut, like the seventies.”
Yuko rolls her eyes. “Jeff should have warned you about her being in town. Then you wouldn’t have had to find out in such an awful, bizarre way. You’d have been less upset.”
“He must have thought she’d only see him that one time. I wouldn’t have to know about it then.”
“Oh, come on. He was married to this woman for a long time. He should have known how crazy she was. She’s not the type of person who gives up and goes away. She sounds like a stalker.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have left him with her and walked away.”
“Don’t say that. You have to look out for yourself. It’s stupid of Jeff to get into a car with someone who is screaming and carrying on, but there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Maya looks into her bamboo-shaped coffee mug. When they first met, she had liked Jeff for not sounding bitter about his first marriage. Though he admitted he and Nancy had been unhappy, he remained respectfully vague: he didn’t talk about her faults or dwell on self-pity. Maya assumed that his marriage had ended as well as a marriage could end, but all along, the opposite had been true: Jeff and Nancy had never stopped fighting. Even though she was clear across the street and he was pretending to ignore her, he was aware of every move she made, every inflection of her voice. Nancy knew she had his attention; otherwise she would have gotten back in the car and driven away alone. They were picking up where they left off six years ago. Twenty years from now, they’ll still be fighting, unable to leave each other alone. When Jeff said that love can’t be explained, he must have been speaking from experience. Maya calls home, but no one is there.
