by Kyoko Mori
* * *
Finally, at nine, he answers the phone.
“Hi, I’m at Yuko’s. I called earlier but you were gone.”
He doesn’t say where he has been. “How could you just walk away from me?” he asks instead.
Maya doesn’t answer.
“Imagine how you would feel if an old boyfriend of yours came looking for you, and I left you to face him alone—actually turned my back and walked away like I wasn’t even your husband.”
“I don’t have an old boyfriend who’d wave his floor mat around to get my attention. But if I did, I would expect to deal with him myself. It’s not your job to protect me.”
“You sure think it’s Yuko’s job to protect you from all kinds of things.”
“That’s different. I grew up with her.”
“Why don’t you stay with her then? Don’t even come back.”
“Fine. Good night.” Maya hangs up the phone and walks out of the living room.
* * *
Yuko is up on the roof, smoking a cigarette and looking at the comet.
“Jeff told me not to come home.”
“Are you kidding?” Yuko squashes her cigarette. “What an asshole.”
“I should have waited for him. He was upset that I walked away.”
“He has no right to be upset. He can’t expect you to wait and worry while he drives around with his psycho ex-wife. That’s totally unfair and selfish.”
To Maya, it isn’t so simple; not everyone wants to be alone at a bad time. Still, she is glad to have Yuko take her side so completely. Maya used to tell Jeff when she felt hurt by her mother, her customers, or a bunch of kids screaming at her out a car window, but Jeff always pointed out how she might have provoked their anger and listed the things she should have done or said to defend herself. He would speculate about how the other person might have been justified in lashing out at her. “I’m just trying to be fair,” he’d say. “You weren’t necessarily blameless.” Maya stopped telling him anything because she found herself changing parts of her story to avoid his criticism. Her own conduct had to be impeccable before she could win his sympathy. She can tell Yuko the whole truth about any situation because Yuko will be angry on her behalf no matter what. “That’s awful,” she will say. “People can be so mean. Are you all right?”
Yuko points to the sky. “The comet looks different,” she says. “It’s not as bright.”
“No, it’s not. We probably won’t be able to see it in a couple of days. It could be hundreds of years before another one comes along.”
“Great. I can tell everyone I got divorced in the year of the comet.”
“I might be saying that too.”
Yuko steps closer and hugs Maya. “It’ll be okay,” she says. “Jeff might be confused right now because everything happened so suddenly. If he doesn’t change, though, you’ll be all right without him. You don’t have to be with a guy who can’t stand up to his ex-wife. You deserve better than that. Jeff should get his act together real soon.”
“Maybe he’s doing his best.”
Yuko makes a faint hissing sound between her teeth. “That’s not good enough,” she says. “You don’t have to wait around. We left for college together. This is another version of the same thing. Moving on, being on our own.” Yuko tilts her head and smiles. “I’m not saying you have to leave, but if it happens, we’ll do some kind of a ritual. A ritual of moving on together.”
“That sounds good.”
The summer they left Minneapolis, Yuko drove the Barracuda with all of her and Maya’s belongings. With no room left for a passenger, Maya had to take the Greyhound bus the next day. When she arrived in Milwaukee, Yuko was waiting at the terminal. They ran screaming to each other, embraced, and cried. The waiting area was crowded with families with children whose clothes looked as if they hadn’t been changed in days. Outside, men and women were panhandling on the sidewalk. They were all floating through life, managing at least to get by. She and Yuko were free to do whatever they wanted to do for the first time.
Before that day, there were years when Maya thought she could never leave her mother’s house. Time moved so slowly when she and Yuko were children, every season or school year stretching almost forever. Now, each year adds only a fraction to the decades they’ve already lived. Climbing down the ladder to the back porch, Maya remembers the black ladder Georgia O’Keeffe painted in the middle of a desert landscape—a ladder to the sky. She pictures the women standing around the fire pit on summer solstice. Few if any of those women will now be with the men they cast their love spells for. Perhaps what counts is not the wish for love but the ritual itself—the coming together of women, the need for courage. As Yuko steps into the hallway and holds the door open, Maya imagines following her into a new life.
9
Yuko is sitting on her futon with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. The clothes she wears to work—jeans and a jean jacket, a green bandanna wrapped around her head—remind Maya of college. Maya crawls out of the sleeping bag on the floor. Her mother’s cypress-wood dresser is against the wall. The books Yuko had in the dorm seventeen years ago are on the shelves next to the dresser. Maya feels as though she and Yuko are trapped in some strange nightmare—the kind in which all the people from the different periods of their lives are mixed together in a crowded house and no one is happy.
“Did you sleep all right?” Yuko asks.
Maya nods.
Yuko places a key ring on the orange crate she’s been using as a coffee table. “This is for you. You know you can come here any time.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Yuko puts out her cigarette and walks over to Maya. They sit side by side on the sleeping bag without speaking.
“You don’t have to rush into anything,” Yuko says finally. “What I was saying last night about moving on together—I don’t want you to feel pressured by it. I’ve never been a big fan of Jeff’s, that’s true. But who you’re married to makes no difference to me. If you and Jeff work things out, you shouldn’t feel like you’ve let me down. I’m sorry if I came across like I wanted you to leave him.”
Maya puts her arms around Yuko. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t feel pressured.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I know. I’ll be all right.”
After Yuko leaves, Maya gets back inside the sleeping bag and closes her eyes. Down the street in every direction, cars are starting. Some of them start up smooth and easy; others sputter and cough. It’s been a long time since she heard so many people leaving for work all at once. Her neighborhood is mostly duplexes and single-family houses. The noise she is hearing now, in this neighborhood of old brownstones, is oddly communal: so many people—unrelated and unfamiliar to one another—doing the same thing at the same time. There are many ways she can be alone and not alone.
* * *
Maya heads home at nine, an hour after Jeff goes to work every day. He might have left her a note on the kitchen table. It’s impossible to work out our differences. Don’t come back. Or, I’m sorry, let’s talk. Perhaps tonight they will sit in the living room after work in their usual spots: Jeff in his armchair under the light, Maya in the straight-backed chair near the door. Once, Yuko’s brothers made flash cards with all the things their parents said to admonish them: THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE. EVERYONE MUST BE MORE CONSIDERATE. WE’RE TALKING ABOUT RESPONSIBILITY HERE. They laid the cards on the table before their father came home to give them a talking-to. Maya could boil down her talks with Jeff to three or four sentences too, but unlike George Nakashima, Jeff won’t laugh.
Turning the corner onto her street, Maya sees two cars in the driveway. The big white car from yesterday is parked behind Jeff’s station wagon. She drives past her house, trying not to slow down or look. At the end of the block, she takes a side street to the freeway.
Several boxes of Nancy’s clothes and books are still in the attic. She could have come to get
them, and Jeff might have stayed home from work to help her. But she could have been there all night, too. If Mrs. Nordstrom were still living next door, Maya could find out the truth. As they sat sipping tea under Mrs. Nordstrom’s wedding pictures and her silver spoons from around the world mounted on the wall, the old woman would whisper, “I know it’s none of my business, but I want to tell you something.” Mrs. Nordstrom had told Maya that Nancy had been gone almost every weekend for years before she finally moved out. On Friday afternoons, Mrs. Nordstrom would look out the window and see Nancy loading the station wagon with her canoe and mountain-climbing equipment; by five she was off, leaving Jeff alone and carless the entire weekend.
On the freeway, a blue pickup truck passes Maya’s car and pulls back only a few feet in front. When Maya taps her horn, the driver slows down deliberately. She steps on the gas, swerves around the truck, and gets back into the lane. In the rearview mirror, she can see the driver shaking his fist at her, a young man with a crew cut. He looks like he might be nineteen or twenty. Beeping his horn, he speeds up and passes her again. He sticks up his middle finger in the side window. As soon as he’s back in her lane, Maya speeds up and zooms into the left lane. For a while, they keep passing each other with less room between the bumpers each time. Finally, he pumps his brakes just as he pulls in front of her, forcing her to slam on hers. Her tires squeal and the seat belt tightens around her shoulder. She remembers the accident from yesterday. She’s lucky not to skid into the ditch and roll over like that red car. When she doesn’t pass him again, the driver leans on his horn and takes off, going ninety miles an hour.
Maya’s hands are shaking. She has never acted like this before. During cross-country races in high school, runners often made a move in order to pass each other in the last quarter mile. They went all out, breathing with their mouths open, sounding as though thousands of dying birds were beating their wings inside their chest. When someone was gaining on her, Maya could always tell because of that noise. She pictured her opponent falling down on the gravel path from exhaustion, clutching her chest in pain, strangled by her own breathing. Let her win, Maya thought then, already backing off. It was just a race. She never wanted to beat anyone that much. Easing off her pace, she would let the other runner pass, staying several steps behind her until they crossed the finish line. As she stood in the chute with the girl who beat her but was now doubled over in pain, Maya had enough breath left to extend her hand and say, “Good race. Nice finish.”
All through the season, Maya came in second or third. “You are a first-rate runner with a second-rate attitude,” her coach scolded. If she and Nancy were in the last leg of a five-kilometer race, Nancy would have the same determined grimace on her face that she had yesterday. She’d be the kind of runner who went all out in every race, breathing short, painful mouthfuls of air like knife-points stabbing her heart. Maya would have to back off and let her win. If she didn’t, they would both collapse before they got to the finish line. Only a crazy person thinks that winning is everything. Standing in the chute among runners bent over with pain, Maya used to enjoy the extra breath she had held back. It felt solid and good, like a perfect square of ice she could press against her face on a hot day.
* * *
The store is quiet all morning. When the door swings open at noon and Eric walks in, Casper is taken by surprise. He leaps from Maya’s lap onto the cash register and then to the highest shelf, where he hides inside a large grapevine basket.
“My cat doesn’t like anyone except me.”
“I’ll ignore him.” Eric turns his back to the shelf. His black T-shirt has tiny holes like pinpricks on the sleeves. Maya had shirts full of holes and paint splashes when she was an art student. His shirt makes her nostalgic for that time and also for junior high school. In eighth grade, Maya and Yuko made needle holes on an old black umbrella in the patterns of winter constellations. On nights when it was too cold to go outside, they held the umbrella under the light to see the stars. Their constellations weren’t placed in the right order; they got confused about which way to turn the umbrella while they pricked the holes, following the star chart in their science book. The result was their own unique galaxy, with constellations rearranged.
“How have you been?” Eric asks, leaning over the counter toward her. “That’s beautiful.” He points to the necklace of fans she has been making.
“Thanks.”
“I was away. My father was sick, so I stayed with my mother for a week.”
“Is he better?”
“I think so. He only had a cold, but he’s pretty sick to begin with. He has a bad heart and his arteries are clogged. It’s hard for my mother.”
“Yes, it must be.”
Eric looks into her eyes. “I called you from my mother’s house. I hung up when your husband answered. I don’t know why I did that.”
“Hanging up or calling?”
“Both.”
“You could have asked for me.”
“Your husband wouldn’t have been upset?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had a phone call from someone he doesn’t know.”
“If I were him, I’d be jealous if a strange man called you.” He pauses. “I dreamed about you last night.”
“What was I doing in your dream?”
He glances down for a moment. “We were on a dock. It looked like a combination of a few places I know—a dock near my hometown where you can take a ferry to Michigan, another place I know in Maine, and a dock in Door County near my ex-in-laws’ cottage. Anyway, this dock was deserted and the two of us were sitting alone on a bench. I knew we had missed the last ferry, but I didn’t want to tell you because I wanted to keep sitting there with you.”
Maya doesn’t speak for a long time. It’s as if she too were in that dream, sitting on the bench with him as the waves kept rolling in. The movement of the water around the earth is lonely and constant. The waves surge endlessly to touch the shore, though each touch is brief. If Eric were like her father, he would have sat at the kitchen table in the morning and drawn pictures of the water, the wind in the distance, two people sitting on the bench.
“Do you get off for lunch?” he asks. “I would love to sit down with you and talk some more.”
“I can close for an hour and leave a note on the door.”
* * *
At the coffee shop near the freeway, they are seated at the table by the window. In the parking lot across the street, suburban women are getting out of their vans and walking to the boutiques or the bookstores in a strip mall. Fifteen years ago, there was nothing but cornfields and farmhouses, a gas station, and a general store in the middle of nowhere. Eric stares out the window. He must hate being back here, two hours from his father in the nursing home, his mother living in a trailer like someone waiting in a temporary shelter for a rescue team.
“At least it’s beautiful out today,” Maya says. People who leave their past in a foreign country can choose any new life. Maya wonders how she ended up being the kind of person who is always ready with an insipid remark about the weather.
“Wisconsin is a beautiful place,” Eric agrees. “I wish I could be happier here. Every time my father gets sick, though, I can’t help wishing for the end. I can say I hate to see him suffer or it’ll be better for my mother, but the truth is, I want to be free.”
“Maybe you should just move back east. It’s no good being unhappy.”
He smiles. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“No.” She feels her face flush. “I think your parents wouldn’t want you to be unhappy.”
“My father is too far gone to know the difference. My mother would forgive me if I left. Last night as I was leaving, she told me she could manage alone. I was standing outside, putting my backpack in the trunk. That’s how we are in our family. We can’t tell each other anything important unless one of us is getting ready to leave. Otherwise, we’re too embarrassed to talk.”
“Whatever she told you
then, she must really mean it. People don’t tell you lies when you’re leaving.” On the day Maya left, her father didn’t pretend that they might meet again or hear from each other. “You’ll be better off with your mother,” he had said. “It’s all right if you have to forget about me. I want you to be happy.”
“It’s too late to do anything for this fall,” Eric says, “but I did start thinking about January, or next fall at the latest. I’ll probably go back by then, regardless of how things are with my father.”
“That’s good.”
“You won’t miss me?”
“We just met.”
“So?”
“It’s not a good question for you to ask me.” Three gulls have landed on the far side of the parking lot to pick at some scraps. Maya watches them. When she turns back, the waitress is approaching their table. She puts down the plates, reversed.
“The other way,” Maya tells her.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” Maya asks for more coffee so the waitress will come back. Something is happening here that calls for caution. Though the coffee shop is full of people, she and Eric are caught in a small space of silence as if they were on the edge of rapidly changing weather. The light feels too bright and the air is suddenly thin. Maya tries to talk, but then feels as though she were stranded in a rainstorm, struggling to start her car to drive out of danger. She keeps talking, trying to get somewhere. She tells him how she used to waitress at a coffee shop on the east side. He listens, his eyes narrowed in concentration even though she isn’t saying anything important.
“After I graduated, it was depressing not to have a real job. My mother expected me to move back home and work at an advertising agency. My boyfriend wanted to get married and move to northern Wisconsin, where he could teach in a one-room country school. I kept waitressing and making clothes because I didn’t know what else to do. Then in September I met Peg.”
