by Kyoko Mori
“After we broke up, I was killing a dozen mice every night in my great mice massacre. By this time, it was the end of May—a year ago now. I put the dead mice near the hedge in the backyard, where I saw a lot of ants. I thought the ants might strip the carcasses clean and leave me the bones. Maybe I was going crazy, but I wanted to sketch the mouse skeletons. The humane traps that didn’t work came with instructions in French, don’t ask me why. I’d saved the instruction sheet. I was going to cut up the sheet and layer them over the sketches. I even thought of using the actual bones somehow. You probably think I’m sick in the head.”
“No. I think bones are kind of pretty.” Her father used to strip thin flakes of white meat from the small steamed fish he made for their lunch in Osaka. With his chopsticks, he peeled the mottled brown skin in one piece, then picked the meat off the bones to put on her plate. They sat under the yellow light of the kitchen lamp and ate the soft, salty morsels with rice. At the end, there was a perfect fish skeleton, a clean shape of a leaf, and the skin rolled up, like a tiny garment. Some mornings in his journal, he drew fish skeletons, bird feathers, a butterfly dropped on the doorstep by the cold. “I don’t think anything is automatically ugly or grotesque,” Maya says.
“You’re a woman after my own heart. Why didn’t I meet you earlier?”
Outside the window, next to a farmhouse, the sun is shining on a clothesline full of towels and sheets. The sheets flap in the wind, absorbing the warmth of the sun, the movement of the air, the sound of traffic. A person sleeping on those sheets might dream of cars coming and going on the freeway, of different lives far away. A mother or a father might smooth a pillowcase, fresh from the line, over a plumped pillow and make a wish that the children would hear the distant call and strike out on their own. Maybe that’s what Eric’s mother used to do. Surely, Kay was wrong. It isn’t pathetic to say that Minoru let Maya go because he loved her, because he wanted her to be happy elsewhere. Any woman living on a farm along this freeway might wish the same for her son or daughter. Love isn’t always about holding on. Letting go can be the ultimate act of love and mercy. “So what happened in Vermont?” she asks Eric. “Did the ants give you the bones you wanted?”
“No. An hour or so later, I looked out the window. My yard was a sea of black wings. There must have been fifteen crows pecking at those mice. When they were gone, there was nothing left. The crows ate everything.”
“You didn’t think it was a bad omen, did you?”
“I loved seeing those birds. So I kept putting out the mice every morning.”
The crows in his yard would have resembled a black tide flowing in, then ebbing back into the sky. In another life, she and Eric might have lived together like the humble good characters in the fairy tales her father told—those the ants helped by collecting scattered grains of millet or the ravens rewarded with golden apples. They would have been content even with the smallest gifts of beauty from the birds and the fish: white bones, black feathers, insatiable hunger.
* * *
“I might go back to Vermont,” Eric says abruptly, when they have been driving for half an hour.
“For the summer or for good?”
“I don’t know. A friend of mine called yesterday. He was an alternate for a one-year teaching job in Indiana, and the other guy backed out at the last minute. He heard that I was looking to come back, so he asked me if I would house-sit for him while he’s in Indiana. All I have to do is pay the utilities and do some repairs he’d been planning to get done—some carpentry work I can do on my own. It’s a way I can get back there and start over.”
“That sounds good.”
“Does it?”
“Of course.”
“Will you come and visit me?”
“I don’t think so. You can’t ask me that.” Her voice catches in her throat and wavers. She takes a deep breath and doesn’t say anything more.
Eric puts his hand over hers, which is clenched into a fist on her lap. “I’m sorry. This has been on my mind all morning. If I decide to go, I have to be there by the last week of June. That’s only a month from now. When my friend called, I almost wished he hadn’t. I told him I’d call him back tonight. I hesitated because I was thinking of you.”
“Promise you’ll go. Don’t stay here and be unhappy.”
“But I’ll be unhappy there now,” he says.
“Not for long,” she insists. “You’ll feel better once you’re away.”
“I don’t think so. But you can believe that if you want to.”
“I do.” She opens her hand and lets her fingers intertwine with his. By the time he is settled in Vermont, she might be alone. If she told him the truth now, changing the course of her life might be as easy as following the road as it curves first to the right, then the left. But Maya pictures Nancy waving her floor mat beside her car. Love is a burning wreck smoldering on the side of the road. Maya wills herself to close her eyes and swerve around it.
* * *
Off the freeway, past a small town, they follow a narrow two-lane highway into the countryside. The trailer house is set back from the road. It’s a solid structure with a white roof and brown siding, much bigger than the trailers and campers Maya has seen pulled behind trucks. A gravel driveway leads up to a garage built next to the trailer. A rusted metal windmill has been put up behind the house. Its weathervanes make a moaning sound, like the lowing of cattle.
From the back door, a hallway leads past two closed doors into the kitchen and the living room. The house is not the desolate place Maya imagined. The plaid couch in the living room is covered with two hand-crocheted afghans; even the top of the TV set has framed pictures, and the coffee table is scattered with magazines. From the ceiling in the kitchen hangs a mobile made of seashells and feathers—a child must have made it at school. Wallet-sized school portraits are taped on the fridge.
Maya steps closer for a better look. “These must be your nieces.”
Eric points to the pictures. “They’re all my sister’s kids—Ashley, Sarah, and Jessica.” Though there are a dozen pictures on the door, they show the same girls at various ages. From picture to picture, their hair and clothes change, but the eyes and the smiles remain the same.
“My sister is the only one with kids. I wasn’t married long enough to have them and my brother is gay. My mother gave up on me having kids, but Kevin never came out to my parents because he was afraid of my father’s reaction. Now that Dad’s too far gone to understand anything, Kevin could just tell Mom, but he feels weird about it. He’s kept his secret for so long. He can’t tell the truth now without making her feel bad. He has no choice but to go on pretending that he’s straight.”
“I understand. The longer you say nothing, the harder it is to break the silence. There’s always that moment when you should have told the truth. If you miss it, you may never get another chance. Only you don’t always know when you’re at that now-or-never time.” Maya recalls standing in Yuko’s kitchen last week and handing her the cups in silence. Perhaps that was the now-or-never moment to tell her about Eric. I’m falling in love with someone and I’m scared, she should have said.
“Families,” Eric says. “They can really screw you up. Compared to most, mine is pretty benign. Even my brother is fortunate.”
On the shelf above the couch in the living room, three high school pictures stand side by side. The girl, in the center, has long straight hair parted in the middle; she’s wearing a pale pink formal with a corsage of white lilies. The two boys have the kind of long hair that clean-cut boys could have in the late seventies—down to their ears but parted neatly on the side. Eric is wearing a powder blue jacket over a white ruffled shirt. His face is clean-shaven, as it is now, and he is smiling at the camera. Maya picks up the frame.
“I should have hidden that thing.” Eric covers his eyes with his hand.
“You don’t look so bad. You must have been going to the prom.”
“I look like a lounge lizard.”
She laughs, but it’s the same kind of picture Jeff had taken at his mother’s insistence. The only difference is that Eric’s suit is more overdone because he lived in a rural area and he is more obviously handsome.
“Even my husband has pictures like this at his parents’ house.”
“Your husband,” Eric says, “is a lucky guy.”
The house is quiet except for the sound of the windmill in the back. Eric places his hand on the other corner of the picture frame. The moment for truth must resemble the big wave that surfers wait for. Riding its crest, a person could cross a tunnel of blue water to the other side. I want to tell you something, Maya might begin; Jeff and I have been unhappy for a long time. But she is thinking of her mother knocking on her door at midnight, her car packed with boxes. “I’ve left him.” She giggled. “I’m on my way to be with the man I really love.” Letting go of the picture frame, Maya steps away. “I’ll help you with your chores,” she says.
Walking down the hallway, Maya notices pictures everywhere: on the wall, on the stand outside the bathroom door, on the bulletin board by the telephone. Many of them are of Eric, his sister, and his brother from long ago. No matter how old the three of them get, they are always children splashing in the lake or eating ice-cream cones at a drive-in, along with the children who came twenty years later. Wherever he lives, he will always be one of the children in this laughing multitude. For a few months in Vermont, he will miss Maya, and then gradually he will forget her. Being alone is easier when you know that your mother’s love is as unchanging as the pictures she keeps on the walls.
* * *
Around the trailer, feeders hang from hooks outside every window. Maya holds the tube and wire containers Eric takes down and tilts them for him to fill with black sunflower and thistle seeds, millet, corn. By the time they are halfway around the house, sparrows and finches are eating from the feeders they have just filled. Maya imagines herself as a small bird that a young man has saved from a trap and set free. Transforming herself into a woman, she would follow him all the rest of her life to pay back her debt. Nothing would stand in the way of her devotion. In this life, she is a woman Eric might recall with vague regret several years from now when he remembers the year he spent back home. “I thought I was in love with her,” he would say, “but she was married.”
Behind the trailer, the lawn ends after about twenty yards and a swath of tall weeds separates the property from the neighbor’s cornfield. Where the lawn ends and the weeds start seems completely arbitrary. It doesn’t follow a tree line and there is no marker.
“I’d better cut the grass,” Eric says, when they are done with the feeders.
“I can go inside and vacuum. People like to come home to a freshly cleaned house.”
“But I didn’t bring you here to work.”
“That’s okay. I don’t mind.”
The vacuum cleaner is in the tiny hallway closet, half hidden behind the coats and a few pairs of winter slacks. There are only three coats: a long maroon dress coat, a powder-blue down parka, and a denim jacket with a pink flannel lining. Eric’s father’s coats must have been moved to the nursing home or given away; he is never expected to return. Maya takes out the vacuum cleaner and starts cleaning the kitchen. Living alone in this trailer, married to a man who does not remember the past they shared, Eric’s mother must feel the worst kind of loneliness: she is all by herself and yet she is not free. Perhaps that was the way her father felt too. Being a father across the ocean would be the same as living in this trailer, bound to someone who will never return. He sent back Maya’s letters because to read them was to hold on to false hope.
At the end of the hallway, Maya pushes open one of the closed doors and enters a room with a large double bed covered with a white hand-stitched quilt. On the nightstand is a photograph of an older couple standing together. The man is wearing a navy-blue suit; the woman is in a pale yellow dress. They both have white hair and rosy cheeks. The woman’s eyes are the same shade between brown and green as Eric’s.
Three plain frames hang on the wall opposite the bed. The pencil sketches are of bare trees, with the sky above them full of dark clouds. Every detail is decisive and strong, but the shading looks murky and emotional. Maya notices Eric standing in the doorway behind her.
“Those are the things my mother likes the best of all my work. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re straightforward and uncomplicated or because she knows they’re about her.”
“The sketches are good. They have a lot of feeling.”
Eric steps into the room and stands next to her. “Four years ago, when my parents were still living on the farm, I spent Christmas with them. My father was forgetful and impatient. He snapped at my mother for the most insignificant things. I should have had some compassion, but I couldn’t stand to be with him. I was mad at my mother, too, for taking his verbal abuse and saying nothing. Many afternoons, I had to get out of the house and drive to an apple orchard several miles away. I stayed out until I couldn’t see anything. I was sketching just to get away, but later I thought, Maybe these are about my mother being alone.”
The trees are in the foreground, their black branches darker than the shades falling fast behind them. Instead of melting away into darkness, the branches stand out as if they had grown more solid with the diminishing light.
“At least that’s how I wanted to imagine her life without my father.”
“I’m sure your mother understands.” Maya pictures darkness rising from the trees and filling the room. “Come on,” she says, taking his hand. “You must be thirsty.”
Inside the refrigerator in the kitchen, there is nothing except a glass pitcher of clear liquid—water, it must be—on the top shelf. She pulls open the freezer and finds a dozen round disks wrapped in aluminum. They’re deep-dish pie tins, the kind restaurants use to wrap up leftovers.
“What are these?”
“Meals-on-wheels. Someone from Manitowoc delivers them three times a week, but my mother seldom eats them. She’s too polite to say anything, so she just sticks them in the freezer.”
Maya closes the freezer. Inside the fridge, a pure, cold light from the bulb illuminates the clear water, the only thing his mother wants to be nourished by.
Eric lets go of her hand. “I’m ashamed of myself. I want to romanticize my mother’s life with sketches of trees, when actually she’s an old woman living alone in a trailer. She won’t eat because she wishes her life were over.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“I can’t do a thing for her, and I’m running away.”
“You’re not running away. She wants you to go. She’s letting go of you because she loves you.”
When Eric looks down, his eyes are red. Maya puts her arms around him and kisses his cheek. His skin is warm with a faint taste of salt. She remembers a story her father told her about a warrior who sent a handful of sea salt to his enemy, who had exhausted his own supply and was dying. The two men were supposed to meet in battle the following day. The warrior wanted to save the other man’s life, even though he was willing to kill him the next day with his sword. People long ago must have been so much more capable of finding their way through a maze of emotions—pity, generosity, a desire for justice and fairness, love.
Eric holds her tight, one arm wrapped around her waist and the other gently cupping her face. She closes her eyes and feels his fingers smoothing her hair. Slowly, he begins to kiss her cheek and then her eyebrows. She hears a sigh but she can’t decide which one of them has made it. Outside, the windmill is creaking. Turning her face aside, she kisses the palm of his hand and looks up at him.
His eyelashes remind her of something fragile under glass—a shed flower, the torn wing of a dragonfly. Everything about his face seems utterly familiar. In the instant it takes her to memorize all the small shadows that fall across his closed eyelids, she has made up her mind. When he leans down toward her, she stands on her tiptoes to meet his kiss
. She is falling through layers of air and water toward him. She clings to him as he touches her face and presses his lips against hers. When they stop, she knows they are coming up only for a short breath. She doesn’t say anything. She kisses him again.
Holding tightly to each other, they enter the narrow hallway and keep walking. When he opens the door to the spare room, Maya remembers the afternoon she walked down the corridor that curved toward her plane in Osaka. There is no way she can turn back, now as then. She steps into the room and lies down with him on the blue quilt on the bed by the window. As he unbuttons her blouse, each twist of his fingers draws a little circle and an X that might mean kisses, hugs. Outside the window, a bird feeder hangs from the hook; behind it, she can see the cloudless sky so far away. Across that blank stretch of blue, house sparrows are darting back and forth. Just before they land on the feeder, they stop in midair and flutter their wings, as if to right their aim. Each sparrow eats hungrily, spilling the empty sunflower hulls like tiny black wings. Under their chins, the males have thumb-sized imprints of black, shaped like mysterious continents on a map. She will always remember this place, this patch of the sky, though she will never be here again.
She shrugs out of her blouse and holds on tight while they kiss. Under his T-shirt, her fingers trace the warm skin of his chest and slide smoothly down his stomach. They continue to kiss while she tries the belt buckle, unbuckling it easily with one hand. In the warm place where their lips come together, she doesn’t have to say anything. Each kiss is a word they speak in silence, the slow movements of their tongues like calligraphy known only to them. Soon, they’ve shed what was left of their clothing. With his hand on the small of her back, he pulls her hard toward him, cradling her with the other arm as though she were both fragile and strong. She keeps on kissing him as their bodies come together, her silent words saying, Don’t stop, don’t be afraid. They lie still for a few seconds, their mouths and legs locked tight, his hand gently stroking her long hair, before they begin to move together. In those few seconds, Maya imagines the future. When she comes out of this room, her life will never be the same. She will be as alone as she was when she watched the sky tilt blue outside the window of her plane all those years ago. Only this time she won’t cry or feel regret.
