Then one morning it all changed. I woke up early to finish some homework; Charlotte, back for spring break, was showering, and Pierre was in his room. Pappa, who had just returned the day before from a business trip, was still sleeping.
“What’s for breakfast?” I asked.
“I’m still thinking about what to make,” my mother replied, tying an apron around her waist.
“Why are you wearing an apron? You never wear aprons in the morning.”
My mother looked up at me, her hands pausing at the small of her back. “I don’t want to get my clothes dirty,” she said.
It took a few moments for her to tie the strings together, but when she finished, she leaned back against the kitchen sink again.
“Do you like the wallpaper?” my mother asked. She crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her head, as if looking at our yellow-flowered paper for the first time.
“I wouldn’t pick it myself, but it’s O.K.,” I answered. I turned in my chair and looked at the paper behind me to see if anything had changed, to see if, perhaps, my mother had wallpapered a wall in the kitchen overnight as a lark. But the old paper, with its yellow flowers outlined in black, was there as always.
We were both silent, my mother with her arms crossed, the apron tightly wound around her waist, while I sat at the empty table. Upstairs, I heard the water stop and the plastic rings of the shower curtain rattling across the metal railing.
“She leaves things in his luggage,” my mother said quietly. She began examining the skin on her fair arms, her eyes inspecting the white surface, and then rubbed a patch of rough skin at her elbow with two fingers.
I didn’t say anything at first, although I knew whose luggage we were talking about. My father’s suitcase, brown leather with a dial lock at the top, was always packed and unpacked by my mother. Her eyes traveled below her arms and now inspected the linoleum.
“A hair clip. Sterling silver.”
“Could it have gotten in there accidentally?” I asked.
My mother laughed loudly, the sound erupting from her mouth in short, unnatural bursts. “Between his undershirts? No, I don’t believe so. She wanted me to find it.”
“Hey Mom!” Charlotte called from her room. “Do you know where my blue button-up shirt is?”
“I ironed it and put it in your closet,” my mother shouted back, her voice even and sure, as if sturdied by Charlotte’s question.
“I don’t see it,” Charlotte yelled. Then her voice trailed off, saying, “Oh, wait a minute. Oh, yeah, sorry. I found it.”
My mother began cracking eggs on the side of a frying pan, Charlotte having kick-started her efficient morning routine. I thought about what she had said. It seemed impossible that something so dramatic and corrupt could occur in our house. I couldn’t imagine my father, in his early fifties, acting in a manner that was inviting, enticing to a woman. I tried to picture such a woman talking to my father, laughing, flirting, touching him.
Pappa came down the stairs, showered and shaved, dressed in a starched shirt and ash gray suit. I watched him as he sat down and sipped his coffee. While he drank, his eyes met mine. I continued to stare, trying to detect a flicker of guilt or uncertainty. But he stared firmly back, his head barely moving as he lowered the cup onto its saucer. With his eyes still on me, his face began to lower as well, nearing the plate of fried eggs my mother had put in front of him. Suddenly, he dipped his face toward the eggs and sucked up one of the runny yolks, leaving behind a hollow in the white. Laughing, he looked back to me, pleased at his joke, waiting for my response.
IN THE BEGINNING, Alex was like all the other occasional men who roamed through our house, fixing the washing machine when it didn’t spin or tinkering with a dead microwave. His jeans were slick at the seat and the knees, and his workboots made him sound bigger and heavier than he really was.
Only his truck, painted the color of overcooked peas, was peculiar. That faint green, an elegantly tired green, was the color of my mother’s wedding kimono. My grandmother had picked the fabric. “She might not have been the best mother, but she was very good with color,” my mother said once, when looking at her wedding album years ago. She said the color of the truck convinced her Alex was reliable. Her reasons for coming to conclusions about people were bewildering. Once she told me she married my father because he was the only man in Tokyo she knew who wore a green felt hat.
At first my mother tried treating Alex like an employee, asking him what time he could be expected the next morning or how much materials would cost. He displayed the appropriate courtesy, nodding gravely at her comments, explaining in detail the types of nails he was using or the brand of cement. But these formalities were soon dropped. Before long, it was as if Alex had always been with us, a curious observer of our lives.
I watched Alex’s truck pause at the bottom of our driveway as he downshifted before roaring up the hill to where I was standing. He turned off the engine and burst out of the truck, stamping the driveway with his heavy boots. A smile inched up one side of his face.
“I’ve got a surprise,” he said, wagging a calloused finger at me. The back of his truck was covered with canvas, which he grabbed and tugged off with a flourish. A door, painted a glossy red, lay in the bed like a slab of hard candy.
“Some door, huh?” he said, his right hand gripping his bony hip. “I thought your mother might want something to brighten up the house.” Alex reached into the truck’s bed and tried out the large brass knocker, which sounded surprisingly solid. “Hey, listen to that.” He knocked again. “Sounds like the door to an important house.”
“The red’s too loud,” I said, folding my arms in front of my chest, then unfolding them. I felt uncomfortable enough with our house the way it was, slumped on the side of the street like an old man. There was no need to draw more attention to it.
Alex looked at me and laughed. “Your family could use a little loud.”
He grasped the door with his hands and, with startling strength, lifted it out of the truck in one slow, graceful movement, his fingertips pressed white against the lacquered wood. Holding the door to one side like a sign, he headed toward the front of the house. He whistled to a bird that sprang into the overgrown bushes along the path.
“Oops. Got to keep quiet,” he whispered over his shoulder.
He climbed to the top of the porch stairs and set the door against the front railing, careful not to scrape the paint. In the extended silence that followed, I examined the gritty stubble on Alex’s chin, the wrinkled patches around his eyes, his mouth that drooped to the left.
“I don’t like you,” I said.
Alex exhaled and patted around his tool belt, searching for a screwdriver. “I know,” he answered.
“You’re taking advantage of my mother,” I added.
He checked the size of the screwdriver he had pulled out from his belt. “I’m not trying to be your father,” he said, kneeling by the front door. He looked up at me. “You want to help me out here?” he asked, squinting in the sunlight.
DESPITE MY RESERVATIONS, the door dressed up the house like a slick of bright lipstick on a pale woman’s face.
“Why, it’s lovely,” my mother said, backing down the porch stairs onto the slate walkway. Then she backed up further until she was in the middle of the front yard. Over her blue sweatpants she was wearing a robe I had never seen before, printed with pink and white poppies.
“Simply wonderful!” she exclaimed.
Alex beamed, looking down at his hands as they brushed off his jeans. “Well,” my mother said, slowly walking back up the yard, “I certainly hope that our house will match such a door.”
“Don’t worry, Hanako,” Alex said, reaching his arm out to my mother. She hesitated before resting her fingers on his shirtsleeve. “We’re going to make your house beautiful,” he said, patting her hand.
They walked up the steps and into the house, passing under a cluster of dead moths and spiderwebs that clung to the
porch light. I could hear my mother talking about bathroom tile.
MY FATHER’S MOTHER died at my uncle’s house in Yokohama when she was eighty-five. The news came suddenly, one morning, from a voice over the phone. Nobody cried. My father made plane reservations to Japan and then the Sunday went on like any other. But the feeling inside our home changed. A weariness descended on my parents; my mother slowly hand-washing her slips in the bathroom sink while Pappa climbed the stairs to his den as if his slippers were heavy as stone. It was as though my grandmother’s cigarette smoke had seeped in through the receiver and crept through the house, settling on us like a layer of ash. My parents flew to Japan the next day for the funeral and returned a week later with the same vacant expressions they had worn when they left.
“What did she die of?” I asked my mother the day after she returned. She was hemming a skirt, her needle deftly dipping in and out of the wool, like a jumping fish.
“It’s difficult to say,” my mother replied, measuring a piece of thread against the length of her arm. “She had cancer and a few other things.”
“Like what?”
“Alzheimer’s disease.”
“She went senile?”
My mother paused, looping a knot in the thread with her fingertips and snipping the tail. “Yes. In the end her senility was very bad.”
She resumed hemming, pushing the needle in and out, then pulling the thread through the fabric. “She nearly burnt down your uncle’s house with her cigarettes.”
“Why didn’t they put her in a nursing home?”
“Neither your father nor your uncle would allow that,” she said.
My mother turned the skirt right side out and held it up in front of her, examining her stitching. “She was never kind to me, you know,” she said. “Whenever I was with her, she made me uncomfortable.”
She flipped the skirt inside out again, and rethreaded a needle. My uncle had two children, both slightly younger than me, and their home in Yokohama was much smaller than ours, without a yard or garage. I tried to imagine how they could have all fit with my grandmother but could only picture them crowded together in one room. My mother breathed evenly and continued to sew. Her needle skimmed across the skirt, and I couldn’t help but feel her relief in the choices we had made.
WHEN I WENT downstairs to the kitchen the morning after he installed the new door, I found Alex in one of my mother’s aprons, flipping pancakes at the new stove. My mother was sitting at the table, facing into the room, the sun from the window throwing light over her shoulders. She sipped coffee from a chipped cup she had bought with my father on a trip to Vienna. A pancake, cut into tiny pieces, sat untouched in front of her.
“Carreras is to be admired, of course, considering his fight against leukemia,” my mother said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Uh-huh,” Alex replied, pouring circles of batter onto the pan. He motioned for me to sit down. “I’m making a fresh batch,” he said.
“But his voice, like his health, is fragile,” my mother continued. She looked at me as I slipped into the seat across from her. “What do you think about José Carreras?” she asked.
“He seems like a nice guy, at least on TV,” I said.
“No, no, musically. What do you think of him musically? Alex?”
Alex pulled out a plate warming in the oven and heaped it with pancakes. He paused for a minute, the plate in one hand and a metal spatula in the other. His head was cocked, as if expecting to hear a note.
“Carreras’s voice is light, not big enough to fill a large concert hall,” he answered. “The quality is tender, which is appealing, but tenderness is not enough to sustain leading parts. For example, Carreras is not ideal as Gustavus III in Verdi’s A Mask Ball.”
I looked at him. “What?”
My mother clapped her hands; Alex threw back his head and laughed. He brought the pancakes to the table.
“Did I sound like an expert, or what?” he asked, wiping his hands on his apron.
“That was very good, Alex, but it’s Verdi’s A Masked Ball, not A Mask Ball,” my mother said.
“Oh right, A Masked Ball.” He frowned, setting a plate of steaming pancakes in front of me. “Your mother’s teaching me a thing or two,” he told me, and returned to the stove, where he poured streams of batter high above the pan.
“Although she never tells me anything about herself,” he added.
My mother paused. “What would you want to know?” she asked.
Alex shrugged. “How about something about that island you’re from?”
“Oh, heavens. What could you find interesting about that little place?” My mother dumped a spoonful of sugar into her cold coffee, but she smiled as she stirred. “Actually, the history is quite interesting. There were many famous people who were exiled to Sado. Emperors and poets.”
“Is that right?” Alex said, turning to face us.
My mother nodded. “So from an outsider’s point of view, it’s a melancholy place, in many ways. The people on the mainland sing that ‘even the birds shun Sado.’ To them, the island is dark and forbidding.
“But on the island itself, the perception is much different. The islanders sing, ‘The trees and grasses wave toward Sado; isn’t Sado a wonderful place?’”
“So nobody can really know what someone else’s home is like. Right?” said Alex.
My mother nodded, and smiled. “Yes. A poet named Bashō said a ‘Heaven’s River’ in the sky connected Sado with the mainland. But to be honest, I don’t know which end of the river he meant was heaven.”
“Heaven’s River,” Alex repeated. “I like that.”
“Amanogawa,” my mother said. “It’s Japanese for the Milky Way.”
Alex leaned his sinewy frame against the stove, crossing one leg over the other. “Amanogawa. You know, since I came here from Athens, what is that, forty-five years now, I’ve never traveled out of the country. I’ve barely been out of New York State.”
He turned, prompted by a burning smell, and quickly tossed five small pancakes from the pan into a wobbly stack on a plate. “Heaven’s River,” he said again, turning off the burner. He brought the plate to the table and set it in front of my mother. “I want to go and see it someday,” he told her.
FIVE
When I called Charlotte, she was in the middle of an exercise video. “Can I call you back?” she asked, her voice tight with exertion. “I’m just starting to feel the burn.”
After hanging up, I waited at the kitchen table, looking out the window at my mother and Alex in the backyard. They were dismantling an old swing my brother had hung from the branches of a tree. Alex was perched precariously atop a ladder, fiddling among the leaves. My mother stood beneath him, a few loosened leaves falling down around her, her lips pursed with concern. Alex continued to tug at the chains, the movement jiggling the ladder. The phone rang.
“So what’s up?” Charlotte asked.
“It’s about Mom. And the house.”
“What about Mom?”
“I’m worried about the contractor she’s hired. His work is completely shoddy.”
“He’s ripping her off?”
“She won’t tell me anything about finances. But even I can see he’s made mistakes. He completely messed up the living room. He splattered paint all over the carpet, so now Mom says she’s going to refinish the floor. He installed a new front door without our asking, and I don’t know who’s paying for it.”
“Did you call the Better Business Bureau?”
“Yes, and they’ve had no complaints. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s any good.”
“Why don’t you call another contractor? Ask him what he thinks about the house. Have the guy talk to Mom. Maybe she’ll listen to a third party.”
I glanced out the window just in time to see Alex tug especially hard at the chain, lose his balance on the ladder, and drop a few rungs before catching himself.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“What?”
“He just nearly killed himself. I don’t understand why Mom doesn’t see him for what he is.”
LIKE OUR BRONTË namesakes, Charlotte and I lived in a world within a world. Though separated by seven years, we were in many ways as close as twins. Together we had a sensitivity toward our parents and their moods that bordered on instinct; we could communicate potential tension or conflict by exchanging a simple glance.
I wondered whether that firsthand knowledge of the complexities of marriage was the reason we were both alone. Charlotte was smart and attractive; there was no reason for her to be single other than by choice. And while I dreaded loneliness, my sister was exhilarated by being by herself. I suspected that now, for the first time in her life, she felt unfettered by the burden of others.
DAVID HAVERMEYER WAS in his early forties, short but well built, with the cool, neatly confident demeanor of an airline pilot. His shirtsleeves were rolled to just below his elbows, baring forearms bristling with golden hair. Mrs. O’Brien down the street had gushed about him when I called her for a recommendation. He stood in the middle of our kitchen, having finished inspecting the other rooms in the house. He folded his arms across his chest as his eyes made their way around the room, taking in the stovetop and the crooked tiles behind it, the cupboard doors that didn’t quite close, the paint-choked sockets. He turned to me, his eyes observing me in much the same way, as if assessing the way the features fit together on my face.
“May I speak my mind?” David asked.
I nodded, now wishing he hadn’t come.
“The man who did this,” he said, “shouldn’t be in this business. Are you sure he’s got a license?”
I nodded vaguely. “I think my mother’s looked into that,” I replied.
Downstairs, the garage door rumbled open, and I heard a faint thud as my mother shut the car door. A moment later, she trudged slowly up the stairs, loaded with bags of groceries. She paused at the kitchen door when she saw us.
“Hi Mom,” I said, waving my hand. David quickly retrieved the bags from my mother as I stood uneasily between them.
Meeting Luciano Page 9
