by Kyoko Mori
13
As the plane had climbed into the sky, Maya could see the blue water of Osaka Bay below. The land curved around it in the shape of a bow, just like in her geography book. I won’t ever see this water again, she had thought, and started to cry. By the time she arrived in Minneapolis, her eyes were red and her head felt foggy, as though she had spent hours underwater instead of up in the sky. She did not recognize the short-haired woman who stood at the gate in a navy blue pants suit. She hadn’t seen Kay for three years. Back home, her mother had worn pastel-colored dresses with sprigs of flowers printed on them, her hair trimmed shoulder-length. When the woman wrapped her arms around her and began to cry, Maya took a deep breath and held it as though she were diving into a deep well from which she might never come back up alive. Even though she understood everything Kay said to her, Maya did not speak for two days. She thought about the Chinese brother who could drink a whole lake. When he was holding the lake inside him, surely he was unable to utter a word.
Calling her mother from her kitchen on Mother’s Day twenty-five years later, Maya still has the underwater feeling.
“Hello, Muellers,” her mother says into the phone.
“Hi, it’s Maya.”
Kay’s voice changes from businesslike to impatient. “I can’t talk for long. We’re just going out the door for our morning walk.”
If someone else had called, Kay would never be so blunt. Maybe, for her, being a mother means a right to be rude. “I’m sorry to intrude. I was only calling because it’s Mother’s Day.”
They are quiet for a long time. This is the first time Maya has called since her visit.
Kay clears her throat. “Are you going out for Mother’s Day?” she asks.
“Why would I? I’m not a mother.”
“That’s true.”
“Well, have a nice walk. I’ll call again another time.” Kay doesn’t respond, so Maya hangs up.
* * *
Maya sits down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. In a while, Jeff comes downstairs in a button-down shirt and dress pants. This year he has not asked her to go to Mother’s Day brunch with him and his parents.
“Tell your parents I said hi,” Maya offers, while he is pouring coffee into his travel mug.
He looks back and blinks. When his mug is full, he wipes the counter even though it’s perfectly clean. “I’m not going to my parents’,” he says, as he comes toward the table. “Nancy asked me to go to church with her and Brittany. There’s a special Mother’s Day program for kids.”
“You don’t need to tell me.”
Jeff pulls out the chair and sits down. He puts his hands, folded together, on the table. It’s as though he were already praying. “I’m feeling more and more confused. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Only you can figure it out.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“What else can I possibly say?”
“If some guy tried to take you away from me, I would do everything I could to stop him. I would ask you not to leave me.”
Maya looks down at her own hand around the coffee mug and remembers Eric’s fingers laced with hers as they went down the stairs at the studio. “I don’t know what to think. Maybe we should spend some time apart.”
Jeff reaches across the table and grabs her wrist. “Don’t give up on me. I want to hold on. But I need a little encouragement.”
With her free hand on top of his, Maya gently pries his fingers off her wrist. “I can’t hold on for you. You wouldn’t feel any better if I were begging you not to leave me. You’d only feel more torn.” She gets up. “I promised to help Yuko clean her apartment. I have to go.”
“Are you coming back?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t leave without telling you.”
“Are you sure? We have to talk if you want to leave.”
She nods. “The same thing if you do.”
* * *
On the old paper lining they pull out of the cupboard, faint broken circles mark the places where former tenants must have put their coffee cups, turned upside down. Most of Yuko’s plates and cups date back to their years together at college. If she were still an artist, Maya would paint them. Precariously balanced on the counter, light reflecting on the smooth and chipped surfaces, each stack is a jumbled mile marker of where they have been. Yuko rolls up the old paper and pitches it into the trash. The new paper is plain white and spotless.
“I hope my mother won’t be upset,” Yuko says. “I already told her I didn’t keep anything she gave me and Dan, but when she actually sees this place, she’ll be worried. Here I’m thirty-five and I have to ask my parents to stay in a hotel because my apartment’s too small. I feel like I’m letting them down.”
“You were brave to leave everything behind and move on. Your parents will understand that.”
“My father will be okay. He takes everything in stride. It’s my mother I’m worried about. She really liked Dan. She’s going to miss him.”
When Yuko’s parents visited last Thanksgiving, her mother, Reiko, cooked the turkey. Dan, who was supposed to be helping, stuck the meat thermometer in the turkey’s thigh. Later, he laughed. “The bird was upside down. The oven was hot, and I felt disoriented. I couldn’t see where the breast was. I’d have been helpless without Reiko.” No one that afternoon could have known he was already seeing Meredith. When he insisted on driving across town to find a store that was open, to buy a few salad fixings they could easily have done without, he must have been looking for an excuse to get out of the house and visit Meredith on his way. After Yuko found out about their affair, she kept going over the things she and Dan did in the last three months. “Everything I remembered came back with a big mental asterisk. At the bottom of each page, there would be a footnote saying, ‘And he was already in love with her when you were doing this with him.’ The same damn footnote over and over.”
“Your mother won’t cry over Dan,” Maya tells Yuko. “She liked him before. But now is a different time.”
Yuko smooths the new lining with her fingers.
“You’re lucky she’s your mother. Imagine how mine is going to be if I leave Jeff. Even though she never warmed up to him, she’d start talking like he was the greatest person on earth. She’d make him sound like an important prize I lost.”
“Yeah, she probably would.”
“It’s the opposite of what you or Peg would do. I always knew you guys didn’t like Jeff but you tried to hide it till lately. Now, you both think I might leave him, so you’re not afraid to tell me.”
“Well, that’s how it should be, don’t you think? Your friends should always act like the guy you’re with is a prince and the guy you left—or the one who left you—is a total loser.”
“I agree.”
Yuko picks up one of the mugs and peers into it. “Clean enough.” She blows at it and shrugs. “So how are things, anyway. Have you decided what to do?”
“Not yet.”
“Is Jeff still seeing the psycho ex-wife?”
“Yeah, she stopped leaving him pictures and notes once I changed the locks. But I know she still wants him back. He went to church with her this morning.”
Yuko shakes her head but doesn’t say anything right away. In the silence that follows, Maya remembers the afternoon she’d gone with Eric to his studio. As they stood looking at his painting, their shoulders almost touching, she could believe that her whole life would have been different if they had met earlier. Yuko puts down the cup and peers into Maya’s face. She has no idea what Maya is thinking about. Those few minutes in the studio, Maya was in a sudden state of grace. Even though that didn’t last, she can’t share it with anyone except Eric. The memory of that afternoon floats past her like a vision, but its beauty gives her only a temporary reprieve. When Yuko reaches and touches Maya’s arm lightly, Maya feels as though a wall has sprung up between them, and only she can see it. She tries to throw her voice across the wall to the other side.
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“As he was getting ready to leave, Jeff told me he felt really confused. He asked me to help him hold on. I think he’s afraid of being pulled back into his first marriage.” Maya pictures Jeff standing in the path of a tornado. “I can’t help him.”
“If Jeff had so much baggage from his first marriage, he should have told you in the beginning. Then you wouldn’t have married him.” Yuko scowls. “When you were single, guys I knew from bands often asked to meet you. Those musicians—they weren’t exactly a happy lot. Remember, you never wanted to go out with them because they were so obviously troubled. That made sense. It’s hard enough to get along with people who are stable. So why choose guys with big problems? You might have dismissed Jeff for the same reason.”
“That’s possible.”
Yuko smiles teasingly. “All the guys I knew were neurotic when we were younger. Some have mellowed out and turned into decent people. Maybe if you’re alone again, I’ll introduce you to one of them.”
“Oh, I don’t think I’d want to be with anyone else if I got divorced.” Maya takes the cups from the counter and hands them over, two by two, for Yuko to put away. The stoneware makes a faint clicking noise. On the morning she had tea with Eric, Maya couldn’t look him in the eye without blushing. She couldn’t talk without getting nervous. She wanted to tell him everything she knew and thought about. Listen, she could say to Yuko now, there’s a man who comes to the store. I might be falling in love with him. She would sound just like her mother or Dan: a person who runs from one commitment to another, afraid to be alone.
* * *
At the restaurant downtown, the tables are crowded with people dressed in their Sunday best. Women wearing corsages sit accompanied by their husbands or grown children. The restaurant is too formal for young families. Jeff must be sitting down to lunch with Nancy and Brittany somewhere on the south side—a sunny, noisy room full of children coloring pictures on paper place mats.
A young waiter approaches the table, holding two long-stemmed red roses as well as the menus. He hands out the menus and lays the flowers on the table next to the silver. “Happy Mother’s Day.”
“But we’re not mothers,” Yuko protests, with a puzzled smile.
“We give flowers to all the ladies on Mother’s Day.”
Yuko cranes her neck to examine the other tables.
“Thank you.” Maya smiles at the waiter.
After he goes away, Yuko says, “That’s so stupid. I don’t want a flower on Mother’s Day. They should do away with Mother’s Day and have Daughter’s Day instead. Then every woman can celebrate.”
“I don’t know if I want to celebrate being my mother’s daughter.”
“Do you think we’ll regret not having had kids?” Yuko asks, after a while.
“I don’t think so.”
“I used to feel envious when I saw women in the park playing with their kids. If Dan hadn’t been so set against it, I might have become a mother. That might have been a good thing.”
“Maybe you’ll get married again and have kids.”
“No.” Yuko shakes her head. “Whatever feelings I had about wanting kids—they faded away. Now I notice the women whose kids are screaming and carrying on. I feel sorry for them. Things could go wrong even if your kids never act out. They could fall off the swing and hurt themselves. Someone could come and kidnap them. There wouldn’t be a moment of peace if you were a mother.”
Maya pictures a park full of children running around, riding the swings, climbing over the jungle gym. If she were a mother sitting on a bench, she wouldn’t be able to tell, from the pitter-patter of the feet and the high-pitched voices, whether the children were playing happily or fighting and crying. She would only hear a jumble of anxious noise. What would prevent her from getting up from the bench, walking to her car, and driving away alone? Last winter, a man left his infant son in his car parked outside his office in subzero weather. He had forgotten to drop off the baby at day care because it wasn’t part of his morning routine; his wife usually did it. By the time he remembered, it was too late. People can mean no harm and still hurt their children. Maya and Jeff used to argue almost every week about having children. “I’m not saying we absolutely have to have kids. I’m disturbed that you won’t at least consider the possibility. You’re so closed-minded,” Jeff said. “But I already know that I never want to be a mother. I’ve known that about myself for a long time. I told you before we were married,” Maya responded. “You shouldn’t take it personally, like I don’t want to have your kids. I like being alone during the day. I don’t want to give that up.” “That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard,” he spat out. After nearly a year of fighting with him, Maya scheduled a tubal ligation. She didn’t tell Jeff until she came back. They argued about it for a week and then dropped the subject because there was nothing more to say.
“I have no regrets about being childless,” she says to Yuko.
On the white tablecloth, their roses look like well-dressed dolls that children admire but never touch. Red is the color of motherhood. In Osaka, on Mother’s Day, children wore red carnations to honor their mothers. If you had lost your mother, you were supposed to wear white carnations in her memory, but Maya never saw anyone do that. One Mother’s Day after Kay was gone, Maya went to the museum with her father, and on their way on the train, they saw many children with red carnations pinned to their dresses and shirts. Her father took her hand and pulled her closer to him, but neither of them said anything. If she could paint a picture of herself and her father from that day, she would put white flowers on their lapels as they stood hand in hand on the crowded train platform.
14
From the wooden bench outside the store, Eric waves as Maya parks her car next to his and gets out.
“I was going to call if you didn’t show up in an hour,” he says, standing up.
“We’re not open on Mondays. I came to weave.”
“I know.”
She walks up to the bench.
“I’m going to my mother’s place. She’s in Oregon visiting my sister and her family. I promised to cut the grass and fill the bird feeders. I would love it if you could come with me.”
Maya has just started weaving a large piece of linen to sew some dresses and vests for the store. The color she chose is the blue of cathedral windows—of portals opening up to the sky. It’s a beautiful blue, but she’s suddenly unsure about spending the whole day looking at it.
“We can be back by three or four, whatever time you were planning to be home. There won’t be any trouble.”
“I’m not worried about the time.”
“Will you come then?”
“All right, but I have to check on my cat. Wait here.”
Casper is sitting by the door. As soon as Maya steps inside, he rolls over on his back and begins to purr. Next to him on the floor are two mice, smaller than usual. One has no ears, and the other has a gash across its back. She kneels down and rubs Casper’s smooth belly. “You’re a ruthless hunter,” she tells him. “Let’s make sure you have enough food upstairs so you don’t have to eat mice.”
He runs up the steps behind her, heeling like a dog. Maya refills his water and food bowls on the studio floor. Casper sticks his long white face into the food bowl and starts munching, but he isn’t so easily fooled. By the time she’s halfway down the stairs, he is right beside her, running with his tail up in the air.
“Sorry, I have to go.” She picks up the mice from the floor and puts them in a bag. As soon as she steps outside, Casper starts crying and scratching the door. She had to get him declawed to protect the clothes in the shop. He can only make a muffled noise, like the soft hiss of a broom across the floor.
Eric is waiting in his car. Maya puts the mice in the trash can and gets in.
“Casper’s not too happy about this,” she says.
“Too bad.” He grins. “I am.”
* * *
The trees along the freeway are bright g
reen with new leaves. The foliage has changed the landscape, drawing the eye to the masses of color instead of the intersecting lines and angles.
“When you left that note on the floor the other day,” Maya tells Eric, “it was in the same spot where my cat leaves the mice he catches. It gave me a start.”
“We’re both giving you peace offerings.”
“I suppose so.”
“I could have used your cat at the last house I rented in Vermont. The mice in the attic made such a racket I couldn’t sleep through the night. It was like rodent Olympics up there. Soon they started coming into the kitchen. The only thing I left on the counter overnight was ground coffee in a metal container with a plastic lid. The mice chewed through the lid, got into the can, and ate the coffee. At first, I set the humane traps you can take outside to release the catch, but the mice ate the bait without springing the trap. After weeks of feeding them peanut butter, I started having dreams about mice, so I knew it was time to act.”
“What did you do?”
“I set those traps that break their necks.” He glances sideways at her, as if to check her reaction.
“Before we had Casper, Peg set out poison. The traps are more humane. They die instantly. That’s not so bad.”
“The woman I was dating left me because I set those traps. She cried over dead mice.” He laughs. “But we weren’t getting along so great anyway. The mice were catalysts, nothing more.”
Maya laughs, even though it’s almost a sad story.
