by Kyoko Mori
“No, the sandals look fine.”
“I didn’t know how to dress for this. I didn’t want to look stupid, but I haven’t worn nylons for ten years. I didn’t want to put them on.”
“You don’t look stupid at all.”
“Not even Emily Post can tell you how to dress for your divorce.” Yuko stares down at her sandals again as Maya pulls back into traffic. “I wish I were more like you.”
“Like me, how?”
“You’re always poised. You’re good at being alone.”
The traffic is heavy enough so Maya doesn’t have to look Yuko in the eye. During the month she spent with Eric, she only saw Yuko twice. Maya pictures Eric’s hand reaching toward hers across the table, the sunlight on the white ceiling above their bed, the warblers flying in and out of the maple trees in the park where they spent their Sunday mornings. Perhaps she wouldn’t have told Yuko very much even if the circumstances had been different. Everything she and Eric saw together was meant only for them. There’s a portion of her mind that’s sectioned off, a place where there is no room for Yuko. That’s the greatest betrayal of all.
* * *
Dan is on the steps of the courthouse, dressed in a navy-blue suit and a red checkered tie. Maya has not seen him in a suit since her own wedding four years ago. He must have been spending a lot of time in the sun. His hair is bleached white; his eyebrows have almost disappeared.
When Yuko hugs him, the folder she’s holding gets scrunched between them. They have been meeting once a week at a coffee shop on the south side—a place neither of them has ever been or is likely to go back to—to file the papers on their own. Yuko’s mother talked her into accepting Dan’s offer to refinance the mortgage and give her half the equity. “My mother says it’s unkind to reject his offer,” Yuko explained. “By taking nothing, I’d be leaving him with a bigger debt to me, a heavier burden of feeling bad. She’s absolutely right. That’s exactly why I wanted nothing. I’m still tempted to stick him with a mega-debt of guilt so he won’t be able to sleep at night. It’s like emotional voodoo to make him waste away. Some part of me would be satisfied with that. But like they say, what goes around comes around. No one gets over their unhappiness by making other people miserable. If I help Dan feel better, I can lighten the baggage between us and make it easier for both of us to move on. My mother made me see that.”
Kay would never give any advice worth listening to. Maya has called her mother since she moved out but hasn’t told her anything. If she can stall for another month, Kay will be gone to Nagoya. By the time she comes back, Maya can have everything settled with Jeff. “It’s all done,” she can say then, “no use discussing the details.” But in the meantime, Maya has been avoiding Jeff too. The whole thing is like a crazy game where she keeps landing on the same square that makes her lose her turn. She can’t tell her mother anything until she’s settled things with Jeff, but then again, talking to Jeff is more difficult because, if she did, she’d have to tell her mother sooner.
Dan turns to Maya. “Hey, how are you doing?” he asks. As she steps up to hug him, she remembers the day he dropped out of college with only eight weeks left in his last semester. Maya was sitting on the porch when he came back, so she was the first person he told. “I sat down to my philosophy exam, stared at the questions for five minutes, and walked out without writing anything. Then I went to the registrar’s office and withdrew from all my courses,” he said. “I don’t need a college diploma to boost my confidence, like so many people do.” Maya hugged him that time without saying anything. Now she has nothing to say again, and she keeps patting his back just like before. “It’s good to see you,” Dan offers. “Yes, likewise,” Maya answers. Dan means well, no matter how thoughtless he sounds from time to time. He’s like someone who’s tone-deaf or dyslexic: his mistakes are caused by faulty wiring in his brain or a bone in his ear that vibrates to the wrong pitch—he wants so much to be forthright and honest.
Inside the courthouse, a woman in a black suit shows them to the courtroom, where the doors are open and four people are seated at two separate tables before the judge. All four stand up, gather the papers on the tables, and come walking out, two by two.
“Where’s the other attorney?” the clerk asks Yuko.
“There is no attorney. I’m the one getting divorced.” She lays her hand lightly on Maya’s shoulder and says, “This is my best friend. She’s here for moral support. Can she come in with us?”
“Your friend can sit there.” The clerk points to the chairs in the back of the room. Maya takes her seat.
Yuko proceeds down the aisle toward the two tables where the previous couple sat, each with an attorney. Halfway there, she stops and asks, “Can my husband and I sit together? We don’t want to sit at separate tables.” Dan is behind Yuko and the clerk, walking with his head hung low.
“Sure,” the clerk says. “Go ahead.”
Yuko gives the folder to the clerk, who takes it to the judge. Then she waits for Dan to catch up. He’s trudging along, his face completely drained of color. Yuko tilts her head a little, smiles, and takes his hand. Together, they walk to one of the tables and sit down. The judge examines the folder and then introduces himself. For the fifteen minutes it takes to complete the hearing, Yuko and Dan sit stiff-backed in the chairs, answering the questions, still holding hands.
“Do you agree that the marriage is irrevocably broken?” the judge asks Yuko.
“Yes,” she replies in a clear voice.
The judge asks Dan, who swallows hard before saying “Yes,” almost choking on the word.
Maya looks down at the floor and takes a deep breath, thinking of all the people who have come through this room, answered the same question, and marched out together for the last time. If she could record what went on here every hour and then play the tape at a faster speed, it would be an endless procession of misery.
The judge stamps the papers. “A copy will be sent to each of you in a few weeks,” he concludes.
Yuko and Dan come walking toward Maya. She follows them out the door, where four people are waiting, two and two, apart. No one’s talking. A little farther on, Yuko and Dan stop, let go of each other’s hand, and wait for Maya. Their faces are wet, and Maya’s too. Standing in the dimly lit hallway, in front of some stone busts, the three of them hug. It’s the last huddle to prepare them for what is to come—the rest of their lives. Maya holds on tight to her friends.
Yuko is the first to let go. She wipes at her eyes and sniffles. “Well, I’m glad that’s over.”
They head for the exit, the three of them walking abreast. As they push open the heavy doors, a blast of warm air hits them. The next moment, they are standing on top of the steps outside, dizzy with the sudden warmth and light.
“It was freezing in there,” Yuko says.
Dan stares at her and blinks. “I’m so sorry,” he mumbles. “I really am.”
Maya is afraid that he will start telling her, once more, how sad he is, but Yuko doesn’t give him a chance. “Don’t be,” she cuts in. “I want to stop being angry at you. I want you to be happy.”
“Can we be friends?” Dan asks.
“Always,” she replies.
“Good.” He nods. “I’ll call.”
“You do that.” Yuko doesn’t say, I’ll call too. She will never be able to call his house, where he lives with Meredith now.
“And you.” Dan nods toward Maya. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” she answers. “I’m living at the store; Jeff must have told you. Pretty soon, I’ll be back here.” Maya points to the courthouse and shrugs.
Dan sighs. “Hard as it seems, we have to believe that everything happens for the best. A new beginning for all of us.” He squints into the sun, his jaw square and tight. The next moment he is running down the steps, then down the sidewalk toward wherever he’s parked his car. He doesn’t look back. He keeps running. Come back, Maya wants to say; stay with us. But her throat won’t open up to
let the words out.
Yuko is staring after him, narrowing her eyes as though the sight pained her.
“Come on.” Maya puts her arm around Yuko. “Let’s go home.”
They start walking together, Maya’s arm around Yuko’s shoulder. You are the greatest person in the world, she wants to tell her. Taking Dan’s hand in the courtroom, Yuko guided him to the place where he longed to go but was afraid to.
“What you told Dan,” she manages to say, “encouraging him to be happy, saying that you didn’t want to be angry—that took a lot. You should be proud of yourself.”
“And it was so hard to do.” Yuko begins to sob.
They’re halfway down the steps. Maya stops and strokes Yuko’s back with her hand. “I know,” she murmurs into Yuko’s hair. “I know how hard it was.”
Yuko’s tears are warm on Maya’s blouse. There is no one she has known and loved for as long. “Yuko,” she says, “you know I’ll always love you.”
“I know,” Yuko replies, but she continues to cry.
As they walk down the steps, Maya is thinking again of the afternoon Eric held her and kissed her at that gas station. Every second, the man behind the counter seemed farther away. Eric’s fingers, touching her hair, were stirring up the apple scent of their shampoo and weaving it around them like a net of protection no one could break. Maya was completely at rest in that moment; until then, she thought, she had never been perfectly happy. It was as though a small noise she’d been hearing all along had suddenly stopped and she could finally hear a silence that was also a pure sound. She could never give Yuko that same feeling, in consolation or love. Surely, a friendship like theirs is better than most marriages, more solid and lasting, and yet, in all the years they will spend together, she will never make Yuko as happy as she was in that brief moment at the gas station in the middle of nowhere. She and Yuko will not come to each other’s door at a day’s end, their voices intertwining as they say, “I missed you. I thought about you all day long.” Yuko is crying because she too knows that Maya’s love can never replace what she has lost. Maya tightens her arms around her and whispers, “I’m so sorry.” One step at a time, they climb down, making sure their feet are touching solid stone.
19
The interior of the gas station is completely dark and the doors are locked. Maya walks back past her car to the phone booth. The phone book—the size of the National Geographic—is tied to the booth with cotton twine. The map inside shows the surrounding area: the freeway, the county highway, the road she is on. She hesitates only a second before grasping the page and tearing it. It comes out with a fine-toothed edge, as even and straight as a zigzag seam from her sewing machine. With the map on the dashboard, she drives down the county highway.
As she parks her car down the road from the trailer, the sun is rising over the flat stretch of land. Already, large flocks of house finches and house sparrows are at the feeders outside every window. A pair of cardinals moves in and out of the low bushes, making their chipping calls. In the cornfield to her left, song sparrows are announcing their territories. Their song—two long notes followed by a series of fast, buzzy beeps—is supposed to be a quaint invitation: Maids, maids, put on your teakettles. Eric laughed when she told him. “They’re saying what?” “Listen,” she insisted. “Pretty soon you won’t be able to hear it any other way.” Maya raises her new binoculars to her eyes and pans the field, spotting one male perched on a fence, his tail bobbing, his mouth open with the song. All around, mourning doves are flying up, their wingbeats making a keening sound.
Maya writes down the names of the birds on a notepad. County Highway NN, between Lyons and Cooper, she scribbles above the list. Trailer house with feeders. The old brown car on the driveway must be Eric’s mother’s. Perhaps she is sitting in her bed, listening to the lilting song of the finches outside her window as she gazes at his sketches from the apple orchard. In a while, she will get up and go to the kitchen, where she will stand surrounded by the pictures of her three grandchildren and of Eric, his brother, and his sister, as children and as high school students going to the prom. Last week at Peg’s house, Maya came across the snapshots Larry took at the sheep’s birthday party. She went through the entire stack, but Eric was not in any of them. Larry offered her the pictures in which she stood talking to her customers or holding a glass of punch and smiling with Peg, but it was no consolation. On their last Sunday together, Eric took photographs of her. They sat on the bed in the early morning sunlight, close enough for him to lean toward her between the shots and touch her hair or kiss her. “Now, look at me,” he would say or “Look down at my right knee for a second.” She wanted to ask him to hand the camera to her so she could take pictures of him. But she would not have the copies unless he were to send them to her from Vermont. So she said nothing and let her own image disappear, shot after shot, behind the lens.
Maya picks up the map from the dashboard and examines it. She drives past the trailer toward a road named Oakley, which intersects the county highway and veers right. After a mile, where the road dead-ends on a ravine, she finds the farmhouse, with a barn and a couple of silos. Out in the country, roads are named after families whose farms are nearby. Eric’s family has not been gone long enough for this road to get renamed. Sitting in her car twenty yards from where he grew up, Maya pictures three children holding their sparklers near the ravine, splashing naked in the inflatable pool in the yard. Rolling down the window, she catches the whistling of goldfinches. A small flock comes undulating over the alfalfa field like a handful of musical notes. Seven gold finches, she jots down on her notepad. Alfalfa field across the road from the family farm, on Oakley.
Maya drives past the fields and stands of trees, writing down every bird she can see: red-tailed hawks circling over cornfields, a pair of sandhill cranes foraging in the distance, kestrels perched on telephone wires. It’s something she learned to do when she and Peg volunteered for the Christmas bird counts and breeding bird surveys of the Audubon Society. Only this time she is surveying an area chosen for an entirely different reason than the changing ecology. When she woke up in the dark at four, she planned to drive to one of the state parks immediately north of the city. On the freeway, she passed one exit after another and kept going north. Thirty minutes out of the city, she knew she needed to come back to this countryside. Eric once said he wanted to get in a time machine and visit the places of her past. What she is doing now is the closest thing. With her binoculars and her stolen map, she is learning her way through the countryside of his childhood. When she knows this place by heart, she will be able to say good-bye to the history she has made up in birdsong and field marks, his past and hers intertwined in her mind like the hair Yuko once wanted to cast into the fire. Instead of a love ritual, hers will be a ritual of letting go. Every ritual is a paradox. To possess someone, you had to burn their hair. To forget someone, then, you would have to possess their image so completely that you can finally let go. If she had found his photograph, she would have held it in her hand and memorized every detail. She would have studied the image until it was imprinted so clearly in her mind that she could burn the picture and walk away.
On the telephone wire near the crest of a hill, five tree swallows are perched, their slate-blue wings folded like tiny mantles. In a month, they will begin to congregate for their journey south. They are among the first birds to go. Maya watches them scatter and dip over the field, the arc of their flight like countless lines cast into water.
* * *
At ten-thirty, there is no one in the store. If she wanted to, she could call Jeff. She’ll have to start meeting him soon to file the papers. Maya pictures herself and Jeff sitting at a George Webb’s on the south side. Their discussions will be simple; she wants nothing that’s his. Maybe they will only have to meet once or twice. Still, she can’t make herself dial his number. Always, for her, there is a gulf between thinking about things and doing them. The longer she waits, the more clearly she can ima
gine how things will be as if they had already happened, and that keeps her from wanting actually to do them—it’s like having to go through the same thing twice.
The day after she and Yuko moved her clothes out of Jeff’s house, Maya realized she had forgotten the hand-knit sweaters and hats she had taken out of her mother’s dresser and put inside the linen closet. That’s where her old things are, too: the red hooded jacket she was wearing on the day she left Osaka, the first sampler she wove under Ruth’s instruction, Yuko’s love charm, some boxes of photographs. She meant to call Jeff and arrange to retrieve them, but now she’s waited too long to be able to justify calling today as opposed to tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. She could go on waiting forever and wishing she had done something earlier. In old Buddhist texts, lost souls are portrayed as slouched figures floating a few feet above the earth without their feet. That’s how Maya pictures herself: unable to rise up to heaven or come back to the world of the living, she could spend an eternity in a dismal in-between place.
* * *
After lunch, there is a steady stream of customers. At two, Maya is helping a woman who can’t decide between a couple of hand-painted silk scarves she has looked at for half an hour. Another woman is in the dressing room with ten dresses she has tried on and not liked, though there was something redeeming about each. When Maya comes back after taking yet another dress to her—one similar to but different from all the others—the first woman is standing in front of the mirror, one shoulder draped with a purple scarf and the other with a yellow scarf. Both have orchids painted on them.
“I’m going to buy them both,” she says. “When I get home, I’ll decide which one to keep. I can always give the other one to my sister. Her birthday is in September.” Every morning between now and September, this woman will stand in front of her mirror, unable to decide which scarf to keep.
