by Kyoko Mori
* * *
In the backyard, the crinums she planted against the house are shooting up their long green leaves. Their first spring together, Jeff thought something was wrong with the plants. He only half believed her when she explained that crinums get their leaves in the spring and their flowers in late summer. In August, when the pale pink flowers appeared on their long stems, he said, “These are the same plants that had those scraggly leaves?” Some plants save the best for last. If crinums got their leaves and flowers at the same time, as daffodils do, the flowers wouldn’t seem to float in the air all on their own. When Maya first moved here, the area behind the house was covered with gravel and a planting of prickly low bushes—it was the kind of landscaping done around suburban gas stations. Dan and Yuko helped her pull out the bushes and replace the gravel with topsoil. Under the gravel, there was a layer of black plastic to prevent the weeds from growing. They had to tear the plastic out, inch by inch. Nothing could be planted until every piece was gone.
Maya turns on the lawn mower and starts from the west side of the house. She goes back and forth, making straight swaths. In Minneapolis, Kay hired a man from a landscaping company to cut the grass even though both Bill and Maya were willing to do it. Following Kay’s instructions, the man made diagonal passes with the mower, leaving barely visible diamond patterns on the cut grass. For a day or so after, the lawn looked like a mirage of a giant chess board.
She is half finished with the lawn when Jeff comes out of the house. He stands by the back door. Maya continues to work, toward the house, away from the house, then toward the house again. Finally, Jeff starts walking across the lawn. Maya turns off the mower.
“I think you care more for Nancy than you’ve told me. If you’re wondering whether to stay with me or go back to her,” she says, “you should talk to someone who’s not involved.”
He takes her hand. “What about you? What do you want?”
“What I want hasn’t changed. Some days, I’m glad we’re together. Other days, I wish I’d stayed alone. But that’s how I’ve felt all along.”
“Even at the beginning?” He peers into her eyes as he squeezes her hand.
“Yes, even at the beginning.” Maya swallows hard. “I’ve always liked being alone. You know that.”
“But you were happy with me.”
“I still am, sometimes. Nothing’s changed for me.” She pulls her hand away.
Jeff reaches and grabs her hand again. “Listen, I don’t want to be with Nancy. All the years we were together, she either took me for granted because she was feeling great or latched on to me because she was unhappy. I never learned to help her without being pulled along by her ups and downs. Now she’s back doing the same thing and I don’t know what to do. I can’t make her happy, but I can’t just leave her the way she is. I can only hope she’ll let me go once she gets to feeling better somehow. I have to be patient.”
“Then that’s what you should do.”
“But I don’t want to hurt you. You just said you were never that happy with me. Do you really mean it?”
“That’s not what I said. I always felt torn between being with you and being alone. But for the most part, it wasn’t a problem. You left me alone when I wanted you to. You respected my privacy. I’m willing to do the same for you. I’m sorry I interfered by changing the locks.”
“You don’t need to apologize. You were upset by the things Nancy wrote to me because you thought I must have given her encouragement—otherwise she wouldn’t say those things. You were jealous. That’s only natural.” He stops and looks into her eyes. She looks away. “I’m sorry,” Jeff continues. “But you have to believe me. I never told her that I wanted to be with her, or that she and her kid are my family, or anything like that. You have to trust me.” His hand clasping hers, he waits for her answer.
Maya pictures Nancy’s green eyes, filled with tears, looking into his. “I trust you to do the right thing,” she says, pulling her hand out of his and reaching for the lawn mower. “I’d better finish this.”
To her right is the cut grass. Behind the lawn mower, an almost invisible line stretches, separating the cut grass from the uncut. Jeff points to a patch of lawn to their left. “Look,” he says, “violets.”
“Yeah, it’s May.”
“Let’s pick them before you mow them down. I hate to see the first flowers go to waste.”
The violets are white with ink-blue streaks at their center. There’s a scattering of them all over the lawn, hugging the ground on their short stems. Maya stoops down and begins to pick them. Jeff is a few steps away, working on another patch. In a short while, they each have a small, leafless bouquet. Maya hands hers to Jeff and goes back to the lawn mower. She watches him walk back to the house, a bouquet in each hand. Several flowers have fallen out because their stems were too short. They dot the grass behind him, but he doesn’t notice. Maya turns on the mower and walks toward the house, then away. In the distance, the branches blur with new leaves.
12
On the side of the freeway, flocks of killdeer swoop over the fields, flashing their white underwings in the sun. Though her car windows are closed, Maya can imagine their sharp screeching calls. From year to year, the same birds return, flying and feeding in the ways she knows well: palm warblers flicking their tails as they feed on the ground, American redstarts fluttering butterflylike among the middle branches. Only one in eight young birds survives the fall and spring migrations to return to the place where it was born, but the individual deaths are insignificant—a few shed feathers weighing almost nothing, marking the places where the flock has stopped and moved on.
If she were to live on her own again, Maya might feel like a bird migrating back to a place far away and yet familiar. She would be with a multitude of women traveling in the same direction—Yuko, Lillian, many of her customers and some of the women who own businesses around town. She would join a great migration of women, from solitude to marriage and then back to solitude. The sequence of women’s lives may be as much a part of the natural order as the migration of birds. But Maya remembers the unbroken silence of her years alone. If she were to paint a picture of her life before Jeff, she would depict herself sitting in an empty room with a marble monument filling up the entire space.
* * *
When Eric comes to the store at noon, Maya is ringing up someone’s purchase. As he wanders over to the other side of the store to wait, she is conscious of exactly where he is. Sunlight is pouring through the windows, making the air feel like a fizzy drink. Once the customer leaves and he begins to approach her, she wants to look up and meet his eyes, but she can’t. Looking down at his brown hiking boots, she starts talking about the cattle egret she saw on the side of the highway last week. She’s telling him how a person can identify the three white herons and egrets commonly seen in Wisconsin by field marks and feeding habits—as though he cared about such things. When she finally looks up, he is standing across the counter from her. Suddenly, neither of them can talk. The morning after his last visit, Maya came to work and found a note under the door. I’m sorry if I offended you, it said. Forgive me. He’d signed only his first name.
“I meant to call when I read your note,” she says finally, “but I couldn’t.”
“Are you still angry with me?”
“No. I couldn’t call because I don’t know your last name. I couldn’t look you up in the phone book.”
“Oakley,” he says.
“Like Annie?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “I never shot a gun, though.”
“I thought everyone out in the country went hunting.”
“My father took me pheasant hunting once. When he and his friends started shooting, the noise freaked me out completely. I cried and wanted to go home. Then one of the men winged a bird and had to wring its neck. I got sick watching that. My father never took me again, which was fine with me.”
“My friend Yuko hates hunters. One year during deer season she b
orrowed a mannequin from Peg, dressed it in blaze orange, and drove around with it tied to the top of her Barracuda. Her husband—soon-to-be-ex-husband—made her take it down because he was afraid someone might slash her tires or shoot at the car.”
Eric laughs. “I want to show you what I’ve been working on. Do you have some time today?”
“Yes.” She nods. “We can go now.”
* * *
The parking space they find is only a block from the first house where Maya lived with Yuko, Scott, and Dan. She points it out as they walk by. The house has been painted a light yellow; the rotting porch steps have long been fixed. The neighborhood has changed, but the old warehouse building looks the same. Maya has not been inside since she graduated from college. The hallway is painted the same off-white, and Eric’s studio is on the third floor, where Ruth had hers before she retired and moved away. The stairway looks unchanged too: uncarpeted, rubberized, industrial gray.
Last fall, when Peg went back to her grade school for a reunion, she couldn’t get over how much smaller everything was. The drinking fountain in the gym was a standard-issue drinking fountain, not the big silver square box in the corner that made mysterious grunting noises all day long. She used to dream about her first-grade teacher, Sister Nana, who made kids kneel on kidney beans strewn over the hardwood floor to say their rosaries. In Peg’s dreams, Sister Nana flew around the classroom in her black habit, looking more like Dracula than a nun. Peg had to hide in the huge dark closet in the back of the room, and she always woke up just as she was closing the door behind her. After her visit, when she saw that the closet was an ordinary storage room, she never had that dream again. “I kind of miss my nightmare,” she said.
On rainy days in Wisconsin, Maya remembers the smell of the dark oiled floor at her grade school in Osaka. In the hallway by the door, there was an umbrella stand with wire rings—like the device that holds single-stemmed flowers in a large vase—in which each student placed his or her umbrella. Outside, dwarf palms were planted by the gate, and peacocks walked about inside their cage. She is not sure if her memories are accurate. She will never be able to revisit the past and see how much smaller everything really was. Eric can go back to his farming community every weekend to see that it has not changed. He must feel relieved when he drives past his old grade school and a scattering of stores, on to the freeway back to Milwaukee. Week after week, he is repeating his getaway. He can be free of his hometown because it’s still there.
Eric stops in front of a metal door and turns the key. Maya follows him into a large room with white walls, a gray floor, big windows on one side to admit natural light. Large industrial lamps hang from the ceiling.
On one white wall, Eric has tacked twenty rectangular panels in five rows, each panel the size of a windowpane. The black brush strokes on the panels look like calligraphy, full of dark paint and movement; the white strokes are feathery and delicate. The paint is layered over with cut paper, fabric, ink, and glue, which has left a semitransparent finish. All the panels taken together comprise a winter landscape, black and white with a gravel road; the bare trees in back seem to be receding. What Maya notices most is the texture of each panel—gritty and rough but oddly tender, with the many layers exposed as if under a skin.
“What do you think?” Eric asks.
If she had seen these panels when she was in college, she might have felt hope instead of despair. They would have shown her how a stark landscape can inspire tenderness instead of cold precision. No one’s work showed her that possibility back then. What she saw other people do was either unforgivingly harsh and sad or else playful and clever in a superficial manner. She remembers the luminous white light her father captured among swirls of lonely desert colors. With persistence, she too might have found that light in her brush strokes and paint. If she had seen these panels earlier, they might have led her back to the cocoon of canvas where her father told her stories of music that could melt the hearts in hell, of the long celestial dance given as a parting gesture, a kind of consolation for lost love. Even the king of hell was overcome by pity for Orpheus, and the tennyo who tricked the young fisherman lingered in the air and danced for him before she flew away. Maya might have sensed a stubborn hope instead of despair in those stories. No matter how sorrowful the ending, each story was sustained by beauty.
“I wish I’d found your work earlier, when I was young. I could have learned so much from it.”
“I want to show you how I did this.” He goes over to his worktable and returns with a photocopy of a black-and-white photograph. “This is a copy of one of the pictures my mother took when she was a young woman. I enlarged it with a copy machine. That seemed like the right way to open it up a little, to see between the lines.” The photocopy in his hand is roughly the same image as the total of the panels, though the similarity is like the family resemblance between father and son, mother and daughter, not like the one between a person’s face and his photograph. Eric shows her how he divided the photograph into grids by covering everything but one square inch at a time with white construction paper. “I worked grid by grid, trying to concentrate on each incomplete image. I wanted every panel to be something you can look at and be totally satisfied with.”
He moves the paper from one square inch to another, pausing now and then to glance back at her. Maya can see what he was seeing. Every square is a window where starkness and tenderness can come together—in the murky shadings of a pebble or a twig, the black line that cuts across the middle, the white feathering of reflected light. She looks back at the panels and understands how he has retrieved something out of his mother’s dreams. Next to the white brush strokes in one of the panels, a piece of gray linen, its edge fraying, is embedded. One single thread hangs loose, never to be tucked in or torn out, protected under layers of glue and paint.
“I thought I was doing this work for my mother, and I suppose I was. But I thought about you the whole time. Every day.”
They stand side by side in front of the wall, neither of them able to move. Maya keeps staring at the single thread caught in its unraveling. She turns to Eric and puts her arms around him. “Thank you for showing me your work.” He hugs her back hard, his breath warm against her cheek. When they step back, her face feels hot and his cheeks, too, are flushed.
“We should go,” Maya says.
They walk out of the room in silence. Halfway down the stairs, he takes her hand and holds it until they are at the door of the building. His hand is warmer than hers; his thumb presses against her palm.
Stepping outside, she feels dizzy. The cold, damp air of mid-spring makes her shiver. With her hand swinging loose again at her side, she is a balloon let go, floating away. When she closes her eyes momentarily, she sees something that takes her breath away. She is recalling the black-and-white photograph Mr. Kubo sent her, of her father in the last years of his life. The image fills her mind like a view from the sky. His face could have been a landscape she knew well, desolate but beautiful. If she could have sat by him in the last months of his life, she would have known every inch of his face, every passage of light and shadow across it, and memorized all the details. She would have learned the shades of meaning in his slightest smile or frown; she would have known him in his weakest and his strongest moments.
She keeps walking, but she is only half inhabiting her body. Back where they parked his car, Eric opens the door for her to get in. She smiles weakly at him, but she is no longer thinking about him or about this moment. Sitting down in the passenger seat, a block from where she used to live, she knows she should have kept writing to her father no matter how many times he returned her letters. She should have sent him photographs, drawings, her schoolwork, pressed flowers from her garden. The sheer volume and persistence of her need would have worn him down. And if that did not work, she could have telephoned him; years later, she could have gone to Osaka and found him in the same house where they once lived. She did not do any of these things because—li
ke him—she was quiet and sad, pure-minded and proud in the wrong way. She could picture the piles of returned mail, hear the silence on the other end of the line, feel the door slammed against her in that old house, and the things she imagined left her utterly hopeless. What was past was irretrievable, she had reasoned. But if she had not been so hopeless, stubbornly seeing all or nothing as her only choices, she might have been resourceful enough to manage a correspondence, even a visit. She would have been with him at the end. The short time they spent together would never have made up for the decades they lost, but it would have been better than the nothing they chose.
Eric is leaning toward her, his hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to say anything unless you want to.”
“I’ll tell you another time,” she says, looking straight ahead. “This has nothing to do with you.”
It would be so easy to let the tears come. In his sidelong glance, she can see how he wants to hold her, how he might teach her to take all her sorrow and turn it into a distant gray shade—always there but a source of tenderness more than grief. But it is too late. A long time ago, she decided to find comfort in solitude and peace; alone in a dark basement room, she slowed her heart and prepared herself not to love. When her marriage ends, she will go back to the quiet life she has known a long time.
She pulls back so Eric has no choice but to remove his hand. If they had met earlier, he would have salvaged some tenderness out of her past, as he did out of his mother’s aspirations. She would have loved him and told him everything. But now, loving him would only be an escape from the solitude that waits on the other side of her marriage. Her face turned away from him, Maya presses her fingertips into her eyes, and when that isn’t enough she rubs them hard with her hand clenched into a fist. As he starts the car and slowly pulls out, the gray concrete of the sidewalk dissolves into a gentle light. Maya remembers the last things she painted in college—stones that rose to the surface of farm fields year after year to be piled onto the hedgerow. Relics from a distant landscape and climate, many of them trapping seashells or fish bones in their layers of history, they were the meaning of the name she had inherited from her father. Maya wishes she had been courageous enough to stay with her painting and learn the discipline of seeing between the lines of landscape. If she could crack open even the smallest gray pebble, so much light would come pouring out.
