Meeting Luciano

by Anna Esaki-Smith

  “Hurry, hurry,” my mother said again.

  Charlotte and I continued to eat. We didn’t make much of Pappa’s phone call. Relatives in Japan would occasionally ring us early in the morning, to tell us someone had had a stroke, or a baby had been born, or an earthquake had just missed them. After speaking for a minute or so, Pappa hung up, his hand lingering on the receiver.

  “Your grandmother is coming to live with us,” he said to the wall.

  He spoke matter-of-factly, his voice raspy, unexcited. He looked at us. My mother and sister were motionless.

  She had come to stay with us before, for a few weeks at a time, a foreign presence who put a blue toothbrush and a tiny tube of Japanese toothpaste beside our bathroom sink, set her ornate silver comb and mirror on a table next to her bed, and ground her cigarette stubs at the bottom of ashtrays we’d find everywhere. She didn’t speak any English, so her communication was limited to crooked smiles indicating “Do you like this?” when giving us presents, and frowning for “Should you be doing that?” when our parents were away. Charlotte and I would sit and observe her as she watched television or read a magazine, taking in her shiny, black patent-leather shoes, the mound of hair pinned in a messy bun on top of her head, the humplike shape of her upper spine. My mother hated her (for her aloofness, her closeness to Pappa, her disdain), and her dislike was strong enough to become my own.

  That evening, after Pappa returned home from work, he went to the kitchen and talked to my mother about renovating the house and adding a new bathroom. Neither Charlotte nor I were fluent enough to participate, and my father’s conversation, as usual, became part of the background noise as we sat in the living room, watching television.

  After we finished dinner, my father opened another bottle of red wine and poured himself a glassful. Pierre had retreated to his bedroom, and I heard his radio and the thuk, thuk, thuk of a basketball thrown against the wall.

  “What if we built a bathroom upstairs for you two?” Pappa asked, his fingers toying with the stem of his wine-glass. “Would that make you happy?”

  His eyes were watery and unfocused as he waited for our response. We squirmed, uncertain of what to say, while my mother remained silent, listening as she washed dishes in the sink, the china and glass clinking softly under soapy water. Pappa finished his wine and began to describe his mother’s house.

  It was a simple, wooden two-story box, squeezed in between two large buildings on a busy street in Kyoto, with loose slats on the outside and holes in the paper shoji screens inside. Termites had begun eating away at the walls, while weeds and grass flourished atop the tiled roof. The toilet was a deep hole in the ground. A precarious stairway led to the attic, where my grandmother kept Christmas tinsel hanging year-round. The attic steps were now too steep for her to climb, he said. Robbers had recently broken in the back door and taken my grandmother’s television and ten cartons of her cigarettes, he continued.

  “We were very lucky she was out when that happened,” Pappa said.

  My mother squeezed a sponge dry and wiped the rim of the sink, her lips pressed tightly together. Occasionally, she glanced at my father as he spoke, as if ready to interject.

  “It won’t be a problem,” Pappa continued. He leaned back in his chair and took a puff of his cigar.

  “Maybe not for you,” my mother replied. She was standing facing us now, the sink sparklingly clean, her arms folded across her chest.

  My father looked up, irritation dancing over his normally calm features.

  “She’s my mother,” he said, his cigar now hanging from his fingers, unlit.

  He pushed open a box of matches and picked out a matchstick. The thuk, thuk, thuk from Pierre’s room continued, and my father’s smoke was soon feeling its way around the room. Pappa’s mother never came to live with us, and we never heard Pappa speak of it again.

  THE YARD WE used to rake every fall was now covered with the brown leaves of several seasons. Alex and my mother were standing on top of the hill, as they often did when discussing the house.

  Alex turned and smiled as I headed in their direction. “It’s the beautiful daughter,” he said, and my mother laughed.

  “No, my older one, Charlotte, is beautiful. This daughter is the charming one.”

  Alex was wearing a faded purple workshirt and black jeans. He chewed gum like a duty.

  “Very charming,” he said.

  SOMETIMES, FOR A brief moment, I felt happy living at home. These moments would come in the morning, when I’d wake in my brother’s bedroom to the smell of breakfast cooking downstairs, the early sun filtering through a tree near the window, filling the room with soft, airy light. My mother would be in the middle of an operatic aria, the clanging of pans occasionally subsiding while she worked through a particularly difficult series of notes.

  But that feeling would quickly pass. Our family had long ago dissolved. All the rituals my mother performed—setting the table, getting the newspaper—were just for us two. I began to wonder what would happen to her if this remaining bit of family were to disappear.

  I feared people could smell the vulnerability in our home: the man checking the gas meter, the UPS driver whistling up the front steps, the salesmen pestering on the phone. I felt unprotected from the sharp edges of the world. Late at night, I imagined that I could hear the tumult of families around me, the muffled sound of couples arguing, children crying, dogs howling, a subway’s distant rumbling. I wondered what it would be like were my father still there, if he could shield me from my fears, or if he would be as apprehensive as myself.

  MY MOTHER WAS the only person I knew who bathed in the middle of the day. Her need to bathe would come suddenly, not necessarily corresponding with sweat or dirt, and she’d prepare for it as if performing an ancient ritual. Window and door were closed to keep the steam from escaping. The water had to be scalding to the touch. A clean hand towel, white, folded in thirds, was placed as a headrest on the bathtub rim. After reclining in the tub, my mother would let a trickle from the faucet dribble down to keep the water hot. From downstairs, I pictured the tiny rivulet, its purposeful burble echoing hazily against the tile.

  My mother began singing scales in the bath. She always practiced scales while bathing, never singing songs. I imagined her in the tub, blithely spreading the washcloth over her chest, her knees occasionally breaking the water’s surface.

  Meanwhile, Alex and I were in the kitchen deciding the fate of the Formica table and leatherette chairs.

  “Throw all of this away,” Alex said.

  “Just because it’s old doesn’t necessarily mean we should throw it away,” I replied. By destroying the vestiges of our former life, we were letting something else in the house quickly evaporate.

  “There’s good old, and there’s bad old, and this is very bad old,” he said.

  But I suddenly missed the dried spaghetti sauce that seemed forever to encrust the old stovetop; I even missed the matching splatters against the wall that looked as if my mother had flung her wooden spoon about like a conductor’s baton. Gone were the unplumbed depths of a twenty-year-old Frigidaire that offered up wet, rotting vegetables and furry slices of bread. The cabinet drawers had been emptied of pens from vacation motels and keys to forgotten cars and doors. The new cupboards bore clear, unblemished complexions, and lined our kitchen like blank faces. The refrigerator’s freezer heaved fresh ice at specific intervals. Alex had replaced the worn linoleum floor with even brown tiles, and the dishwasher was now obedient and ploddingly predictable. While open surfaces and shiny modern appliances were easily pleasing, like the clean decor of a new hotel, the soul of the kitchen was gone.

  Alex picked up one of the chairs and turned it over. My parents had purchased the set after my father made his first big sale of subway cars to New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. They had decided to buy something colorful and big, something that would have been impossible to own in Japan. I liked the kitchen set, particularly the chairs, ea
ch shaped like an egg, with a quarter cut out to make a seat. The table was a huge white oval mounted on a scuffed mushroom stem.

  “The swivel of this chair is all worn away,” Alex continued. I could hear my mother as she launched into arpeggios. After pausing a moment, she switched to a minor key. She sounded good, her pitch accurate, though the magnifying acoustics of the bathroom made her high notes sound like shrieks.

  “I can take these to the dump this afternoon,” Alex added. “I have a friend in the kitchen-supply business. He can get you another set, with modern, plastic chairs, great quality, at a good price.”

  Before, there had been so much of our decaying house I hated, but it was difficult for me now to be specific about what it was that had been so bad. Certainly, there were parts of the house that desperately needed to be cleaned or fixed. But replacing the objects that had accrued through the years was too blatant an attempt at erasing the past. No matter the pain of what had gone before, memories filled things with meaning.

  LIGHT POURED INTO my mother’s kitchen. The new floor-to-ceiling windows captured every bit of light outside, from the gray white of the overcast sky to an overturned wheelbarrow’s metal bottom in the backyard. Alex had painted the window frames white. I sat by them, suspicious, having argued earlier that such a big expanse of glass would make the kitchen drafty. But the windows were solid, like walls.

  “I’m making this perfect,” my mother said, scraping away bits of dried paint from the window with a razor blade.

  “I think Alex should be doing that,” I told her.

  “Have you seen the new sink? It’s truly something. Here, watch.”

  She abandoned the paint-flecked window and walked briskly to the sink—cream-colored and huge, as big as a baby bathtub. A sturdy nozzle was hooked up to one side, and at the press of a button, the steady stream of water turned into a spray. My mother switched the nozzle from steady stream to spray a few times.

  Everything in the kitchen had changed. The walls were a pale green, a pinkish sheen rose from the pickled-wood cabinets, and the floor tiles, like saddle leather, were hard and soft at the same time. The stainless steel stove shone like a platinum altar.

  My mother darted about the kitchen on her small feet, moving from the stove to the window, not sure which needed cleaning more. I heard Alex’s truck pulling into the driveway, its tires spitting loose gravel. My mother smoothed her hair with her hands. “Oh, I have to talk to Alex,” she said.

  She untied the strings of her stained apron as she rushed out of the kitchen. Soon, I could hear her voice, becoming high and girlish, and a moment later she was laughing at one of his silly jokes.

  THREE

  Pappa had always been interested in our development, but even as a child I suspected his attention was rooted more in scientific curiosity than anything particularly paternal. When we got colds, he’d prod our mouths with tongue depressors, examining our throats and tonsils. He plotted our changing shoe size on graph paper and once even weighed us before and after urinating. We participated obediently in this research, although never quite certain what the results were used for, or what they might mean. “You’re the children of a very intelligent man,” my mother would tell us by means of explanation, but the dismissive tone of her voice meant that she didn’t really understand what Pappa was doing either.

  One of my father’s pet projects was the height wall. He had picked a spot in the dining room where we were measured next to a glass cabinet filled with rows of tiny Japanese dolls. We stood against the wall, and my father would put an empty cigar box on our heads, holding it in place after we moved so he could draw a line. Each horizontal stroke was followed by dates and names written in precise, capital letters, clear enough for us to read. The dates Pappa picked to measure us seemed arbitrary, but eventually a pattern emerged. CHARLOTTE 5/30/67 hovered near the bottom (my sister’s height when she was two years old), just above the one for our dog Giuseppe (put to sleep 1/13/88). The intense concentration of lines at the bottom loosened near the middle and suddenly jumped when we hit our teens.

  Like a tourist, my mother stood in front of the wall peering through a camera my father had left behind. While her left hand was still turning the lens to focus, the shutter snapped.

  “Heavens,” she said, surprised. “Go ahead, Alex,” she added, cocking back the film.

  The three of us stood motionless in the empty living room, and then Alex slowly began to stir his brush in the open can of thick white paint.

  “Maybe you should take another one,” he advised, “just to be sure.”

  My mother snapped again at the wall and stepped back. Alex started at the top, painting over the highest line, PIERRE 9/23/89, the date my brother surpassed my father and the year we stopped measuring. He approached the part that was mine, the tallest female in the family. Below that, the wall was smudged from all of us sidling up against it, the cigar box balanced on our heads. Even my mother’s height was recorded. She would come in from the kitchen to watch us, an apron wound tightly around her waist, and my father would grab her awkwardly, both of them laughing.

  After a few quick strokes, the lines chronicling nearly twenty-five years of growth vanished, and the wall was once again blank.

  “Well, that’s that,” my mother said. She remained cheery although Alex had been quiet while performing his task. She walked back to the kitchen wearing the camera on a strap around her wrist.

  Alex touched up the paint where pencil marks peeped through the first coat. “Short family,” he said. Suddenly, the family ritual seemed faintly ridiculous to me. Our private battle to the top, wide open until Pierre had his growth spurt, would have been easily won by Alex or just about any outsider who walked in the door.

  “Where’s she?” Alex was pointing to a stubborn spot where my sister seemed to have peaked, hitting the same spot year after year as the black pencil mark thickened.

  “She’s a banker in Chicago.”

  “Ah. The Windy City.”

  I began wrapping three wooden wise men with newspaper. My mother had put them out on the mantelpiece one Christmas many years ago and liked them so much she decided to leave them out all year round. I started with the one bearing gifts that looked like tiny golf balls.

  “Married?” Alex asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe I should marry her,” he said.

  I threw him a nasty look, not sure whether or not he was joking, but he remained engrossed in thought. “She’s very picky,” I told him.

  “And you?” Alex asked.

  I looked at him. “What about me?”

  “Boyfriend?” Alex smiled while he continued to paint peacefully, his eyes focused on the wall.

  “Actually, I’m married.”

  Alex stopped painting for a moment. “Really? Where’s your husband?”

  “You know how men are. In love with you one minute, dump you the next.”

  Alex’s smile disappeared. “You’re kidding.”

  “And for another woman, too. I was crushed,” I said flatly.

  “That’s terrible. But you mustn’t let one bad apple make you sour on men in general. No sir. There are plenty of good ones out there.”

  “I’m just kidding around, Alex,” I said.

  “Oh.” Alex raised his eyebrows and closed his lips tightly. “Well, I guess that’s a good thing.”

  I flushed. “I just don’t like talking about my personal life.”

  “It’s not like I’m about to ask you out on a date or anything,” Alex said and wiggled his bushy eyebrows until they looked like bouncing white hamsters.

  “What about your brother?” he continued. “Is he around?”

  “He lives in Milan.”

  “I see.” The contractor pursed his lips just as he did when deciding how much to charge for lugging our garbage to the dump. “Excuse me for saying this, but Pierre’s a pretty weird name for a Japanese kid.”

  I sighed. “He was born during my mother’s F
rench period. My sister and I were born before that, during her English period. We were named after the Brontës.”

  Alex looked blankly at me.

  “Have you ever heard of the Brontës?” I asked.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Never mind,” I replied.

  Alex cleared his throat and continued with his questions. “So, why’s Pierre in Milan? Shouldn’t he be in Paris or something?”

  “Although Pierre was born during my mother’s French period, he was more influenced by her most recent Italian period. He’s studying art there.”

  “Oh,” Alex said, after a while.

  My mother began to sing in the kitchen. Her voice shimmered into the living room like a choirboy’s, soft but surprisingly clear.

  “So, what do you do?” Alex asked me, cocking his head to one side as he repainted a spot on the wall.

  “I’m a waitress,” I said in a high-pitched voice that wasn’t my own. “I’m still looking for other work though.”

  Charlotte and I both took tests in high school to see what career paths each of us should follow. My sister’s results suggested she should become an advertising executive. Mine said I should become a florist. I could understand how a test might point someone toward advertising, but I couldn’t see how a test could conclude that someone should work with cut flowers.

  “Waitressing’s a good job. Nothing to be ashamed of,” Alex said. “What kind of place?”

  “A Japanese steakhouse. They cook on a grill in front of the customers—like Benihana.”

  Alex brightened and flung his arms around, as if playing the drums, flicking drops of paint onto the floor. “I’ve seen them, with those knives. Do they have to go to school for that?”

  I looked at a large drop of white paint, the size of a dime, which had landed on a corner of the carpet uncovered by a tarp. As if bidden by my stare, Alex bent over and dabbed at the paint with a rag.