Smiling, she closed her eyes and nodded without looking at me. “Sure. Everything’s just fine.”
Through the kitchen window, I saw the flash of a hammer as Alex banged at the wall. The house’s pink shingles were tinged with brown. Moss crawled over the slate walkway. My mother stood on top of the hill, resting her hand on the stick, and surveyed her overgrown yard like a kingdom.
THE RENOVATION WILL proceed as follows, my mother explained: (A) Get the kitchen done: It is the engine of our house and must be repaired first; (B) Fix everything else.
“This might take some time,” I said.
Later that afternoon, Alex took down the kitchen door while my mother cleaned the refrigerator. She pulled out a container of yogurt, checked the bottom for an expiration date, and threw it in the garbage. Alex hummed like a bee. “Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz,” he droned as his screwdriver skipped over a stubborn hinge. His hair was very white, weighted with dust and slightly yellowed at the ends as if dipped in honey.
“If you don’t mind me saying, this house is not in good shape,” Alex said, shaking his head.
My mother examined a carton of milk. “I haven’t lived in this house for many years,” she murmured.
Alex raised his bushy eyebrows. “You’ve been away?”
“No, no, no. I mean spiritually. I haven’t lived here in my mind.”
Alex was silent a moment, and then resumed working away at the hinge.
SADO WAS AN island not worth bombing during the war. It floats just west of mainland Japan, a tiny rivet of red earth and trees, surrounded by fishing boats bobbing in a steely sea. Even my mother, born and raised there, needs a few moments to find it on the map.
Life on Sado during the war wasn’t much different from life there at any other time. The sugar, from Taiwan, and the toilet paper, from Manchuria, were rationed, and families ate ground eggshells for calcium, but other than that, things stayed pretty much the same. The sea held plenty of squid and snapper, vegetables grew in everyone’s backyard, and the fields were thick with rice. Nobody outside Sado wanted anything the island had to offer. The war, just a three-hour ferry ride away, was part of another world.
This disappointed me. In the war I imagined, shells exploded around my parents as they clung to one another—two young people escaping to the protective solitude of a temple tended by a quiet monk, falling in love. But Sado remained as still then, my mother said, as it had been a thousand years before. “And as much as I wanted to kill myself when he left me,” she said once, “your father and I were never in love.”
My mother was the youngest daughter of the richest family on the island. They managed most of the rice fields, ran a sake brewery, lived in two large wooden houses, and owned a mountain inhabited by monkeys. When she was little, she’d stand on a table and sing and dance while her friends stood gathered around her on the floor. In photos taken at that time, her wide face looks confident and bored, nearly sullen, an indulged girl. Some of these pictures were stored in a cardboard shoebox on a bookshelf in our living room. It was a modest collection of sepia-toned images peopled with small, thin figures, their sharp, angular features as precisely drawn and delicate as the faces on dolls. And like dried bits of paper that bloomed into flowers when submerged in water, my mother would unfold these concentrated pieces of the past into elaborate stories.
“Mio dio!” my mother said, sitting by the bookcase. With the entire house a mess, she had decided to sort pictures. This was how she did things: Facing a huge task, she always focused on the minute, as if the rest of her life were already in perfect working order.
Turning a photo toward me, she pointed a finger to a young girl’s face.
“This looks like you,” she told me.
“You think I look like that? Charlotte resembles you more,” I replied.
My mother examined the photo closely, holding it near her face to deflect the light from the window. “This was taken during a particularly wonderful time. My mother invited sumo wrestlers to the house for the entire summer.”
I sat on the floor beside her, ungainly and inelegant by comparison, my legs unable to lie flat in any direction. My mother sat in a neat, tight package, her legs tucked beneath her. In the photo, she is about ten years old and stands between two bulky men, both dressed in light cotton yukata and wooden sandals, their oiled hair folded into topknots on their heads.
“What did they do all summer?” I asked.
“Sleep. And eat, of course. They were actually quite charming. Luckily, we had a bathtub big enough for them to fit into. That was truly a luxury for them. And, much to my surprise, they bathed quite cleanly.”
I laughed. “You mean often?”
My mother shook her head, inserting the photo back into the shoebox. “No, not at all. I mean cleanly. Our servants would draw up only one bath a day, then they would heat the water by setting a wood fire under the tub, and keep it going by blowing through a long bamboo tube. It was a difficult task.” She flicked through a few more pictures: a school photo, family portrait, wedding. “Then we’d take turns bathing, sometimes five people or more would use the water in one day. So it was important that you washed all the dirt on your body before you entered the tub. And after you soaked, it was polite to make sure nothing was floating in the water, like a piece of hair. Anyway, we were concerned about the wrestlers, but they were very clean bathers.”
“Sounds disgusting,” I said. I found it difficult to believe that huge, fleshy men, encumbered by massive rolls of fat and skin, could be so meticulous.
“Really? I always thought it gave bathing a nice family feeling. Anyway, since I was the littlest, I always went last. I could be as dirty as I wanted.”
She sighed, brushing a speck of dust from the photo with her finger. “It’s strange to think how little you know about life at any time. If someone were to have told me when I was ten that I’d end up alone in America, it would have seemed crazy. But here I am.”
She began slipping the pictures into a photo album, her moves swift and efficient, and then brought the album upstairs to her room. Gentleness had surrounded her in those early years, not only through the kindness of her nanny and the villagers, but from Sado itself: the rolling slopes of its lush, green hills, the tender white fish eaten every day, the lazy curl of smoke rising from her nightly mosquito coil. Life had been a safe, sleepy journey for my mother, and there was no reason then for her not to expect that it would continue to be so.
HOMES ARE LIKE masks. My mother thought that people who lived in big houses had different lives, that, because of the beautiful decor, somehow the fabric of their lives was more richly embroidered. I think she imagined faint music playing all the time in these homes, like a soundtrack in a movie, even while people sat in them alone. When the leaves dropped in late autumn, she’d pile us in the car with a basket of panini sandwiches and cruise the back roads of Greenwich or Bedford, slowing down when passing a particularly stately home. She’d peer into windows, even creep down private roads, to our collective horror, turning around on raked gravel driveways, the crunching of our tires threatening to give us away. There were a few spectacular houses that we’d pass regularly, even though we could only snatch glimpses of stone or brick beyond gates and strategically placed evergreens. My mother knew the names of many of the families in these homes. “The Firestones live there,” she’d tell us, or, “That’s the DuPont house.”
She’d hold these rich families up as models for us, and I thought for a while that she had some actual knowledge about the personal lives of these families. Then, on my first summer back from college, I was invited by a friend into one of these homes. My mother was more excited than I and dropped me off at the front door. But, inside, I found a window-wrapped family room filled with a television’s flickering blue and orange light. My friend’s parents were watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The elegant features of the room made its human occupants seem pathetic in their ordinariness, the house somehow dishonest.
My mother gave Alex careful instructions not to touch the light. He was still busy with the kitchen, but she wanted him to know. It was as if for her, too, the light had some special meaning. I had never asked her about it, and never told her what it had meant to me.
My mother stood on a stepladder with a rag in her hand, delicately dusting between the plastic candles and wiping the bulbs. Even when balanced on the top step, she could barely reach the light.
“You hungry?” she asked. I was sitting in the living room between dishes stacked on the couch. The coffee table and love seat were loaded with bottles of soy sauce and extra-virgin olive oil, containers of instant fish broth, packages of dried rice noodles, packets of whole wheat, egg, and spinach pasta, dried seaweed, sun-dried tomatoes, dried shiitake and porcini mushrooms. It was as if my mother had been stocking up for a nuclear war. In the kitchen, the sink was gone. The stove and refrigerator were disconnected.
“We can’t make anything,” I said.
“We can always make something,” my mother said in her folkloric way.
• • •
A FISH LAY in the garage. Still whole, its bruised eye peeking out from behind newspaper, it was firm and cool. Before lighting the hibachi in the backyard, my mother briskly rubbed her hands together. She was good with coals. She used a paper fan, coaxing them to orange, and put the fish on the grill when ash appeared.
Back inside the living room, she plugged in the rice cooker next to the stereo. Meanwhile, Alex stripped the wallpaper in the kitchen. Bright yellow flowers had covered the kitchen walls ever since I was six. Now, even after the paper was removed, the pattern’s ghost remained, as if burned onto the plaster by a photographic flash. Alex tore down the paper panels with relish, crumpling each into a ball, which he tossed in a corner.
He watched me bring the blackened, crusty fish to the table as my mother sliced cucumbers that had been packed overnight in vinegar and salt. The three of us ate in the torn-up kitchen, my mother and I at the Formica table, Alex with his sandwich, leaning against the far wall.
“You always eat like that?” he asked, his mouth full of salami.
“Oh no,” my mother replied. “This is just simple food.”
The fish was perfectly cleaned and had been soaked in soy sauce, wine, and ginger. The cucumbers tasted salty and sweet at the same time. I was intimately familiar with this food, and although I couldn’t imagine my life without it, I felt as if I could never make it properly myself.
Alex shook his head. “That doesn’t look so simple to me.”
My mother laughed. “You have no idea! You should have seen the complicated food I have made in this kitchen. Let’s see, what might have been the most fantastic—”
“The supplì al telefono,” I offered. “That was pretty complicated.”
“Oh, yes. Supplì al telefono. You deep-fry rice balls in each of which a cube of mozzarella cheese has been inserted. When you pull the cooked supplì apart, the mozzarella has melted and is stretched into strings, like telephone wires. Delicious.
“This,” my mother said, almost apologetically, gesturing to the fish, “is food I was brought up on. I find that as I get older, I go back to my childhood.”
“I agree, I agree,” said Alex, becoming animated as he wiped a hand on his thigh. “When I was growing up, my mother knew how to make spanakopita and stuffed grape leaves better than anyone. Trouble is that now no one in my family knows how to make food anymore. Real food. What I would give to eat something of my mother’s now instead of this.” He looked at his sandwich as if expecting it to speak.
“You should learn from your mother,” Alex told me, taking another bite.
I thought of her rinsing vegetables in ice-cold water, cutting tofu into cubes on her palm, flattening meat with her fist—simple things I had never done. My mother was also adept at the uncommon: packing salmon in the fermented rice mash left over from brewing sake; cooking ceremonial sticky rice dotted with red beans; stewing squid with boiled, grated radish. Learning her cooking was always something I had thought would come easier the closer I got to being an adult. Now, I realized, it would require becoming a different person.
“There is no reason to teach her,” my mother said, retrieving a stray grain of rice from her lip with a finger. “You’re not going to marry people who eat this food. I don’t want you living with one foot here and the other in Japan.”
She spoke evenly, picking hair-thin bones out of the fish with her chopsticks.
MY MOTHER HAD had plans for Charlotte and me: We would go to college and meet and marry well-bred men with good teeth who would connect us to America’s gleaming mainstream. But none of those men ever asked me out. During my freshman year, I had dates with a Chinese exchange student who approached me because he thought I was also Chinese; then a handsome alcoholic senior who beerily professed love of all things Oriental on our second, and last, date; and finally an electrical engineering major who twitched as if being taunted with a cattle prod. Things didn’t get much better my sophomore year. “This is all your father’s fault,” my mother would say over the phone. “He has damaged something in your mind.” I didn’t take her comment that seriously. But women all around me seemed to find boyfriends effortlessly and I started feeling very alone among the airy Frisbee-playing sylphs on the arts quad. At night, I walked home through campus quickly, avoiding big pockets of darkness.
Friday nights often cornered me in the library, where I would retreat from my dormitory’s raucous anticipation of the weekend. Or I would sit for hours at my drawing table in the studio, but do little more than stare out the window. Laughter and the occasional whoop echoed from the street below.
On Saturday nights, I did my laundry. Laundry became an obsession. I’d divide my clothes not only into darks and lights, but into nuanced subdivisions of the two. I mixed complex concoctions of detergents to get just the right scent. I knew exactly when to pour in the softener or color-safe bleach. I spray-starched my sheets, pillowcases, and the collars of all my shirts; I folded my clean underwear and bras into little rosettes.
One night, as I descended into the familiar basement, a boy was there, sitting on top of a washer, reading a book. His tangled blond hair hung to his shoulders like an overgrown plant. He had one load going through the rinse cycle, another tumbling in the dryer.
I was slightly annoyed. It had taken a long time to get accustomed to spending Saturday nights alone, and I had grown to enjoy my solitary routine.
When I deposited my red plastic laundry basket on a washer with a little thump, the boy’s head flew up. He turned to me, his dilated eyes like ink.
I began grouping my clothes into their many categories and was relieved to hear his washer whine into what I hoped was its final spin. A few minutes later the machine clicked off and the boy slipped down from his perch. I looked up to see him pulling a long, dark vine of clothes out of the washer. If I actually liked it down here with all my soaps and softeners, I thought, maybe my mother was right. Maybe there was something wrong with me.
“It’s nice doing laundry at night, isn’t it?” the boy said suddenly.
“Huh?” I responded as I pulled from my basket a long, black sock.
“The way the air smells, the way clothes feel when they’re wet. It’s nice.”
He spoke clearly and directly, as if he were addressing a class while facing a blackboard. Then he turned to me, expectant.
“I never really thought about it,” I re
plied, but laughed because, in fact, I agreed.
“I’ve seen you on campus before,” the boy said. He stuffed his wet clothes into another dryer and slammed the lid closed.
“You were with an architecture class, sitting on the grass, sketching one of the buildings,” the boy said, walking toward me. He stopped three Whirlpools away from where I stood. As he leaned up against the machine, I noted he was short, his waist not quite meeting the lid. “I saw your drawing, which I thought was quite good.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We were both quiet, the rhythmic tumbling of clothes in the dryer keeping time like a metronome. The rivets on a pair of his jeans pinged irregularly. The dryer is me, I thought, regular, predictable. He’s freer, spontaneous, like the pinging.
“I’m Ben,” the boy said.
“Hi,” I said. I raised my eyebrows as if I had something bright to say, but could think of nothing.
I resumed picking out my dark clothes, listlessly depositing them into a pile on the folding table. The jeans kept going around the dryer; ping, pingping.
“Want to go for coffee?” Ben asked.
MY PARENTS CAME to America in 1964, first spending a week in Honolulu. I have seen photos of them with thick leis around their necks, always standing apart as if making room for someone in between. Their next stop was New York. My mother ate a plate of cottage cheese at the Kennedy airport cafeteria, thinking it was chopped tofu. “So sour,” she would later say, making a puckered face.
When they moved to Pleasant Springs, the neighbors thought they were Mexican. “Olé, olé!” kids would yell as they rode by on bikes. Japan was on the other side of the earth, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for people to travel so far.
And then my father left. His decision to leave us came suddenly when I was nineteen. He didn’t announce his intention to me directly, but my mother kept me up late one night to tell me he would be gone at any moment. She knew many of his reasons.
“Mom says you’re having an affair with someone,” I told my father the next day. He was sitting in his smoky den, the white walls long turned to gray. I stood by the door. “That’s why you want a divorce.”
Meeting Luciano Page 2
