by Ellis Avery
“And we are not Moses,” said Miss Parmalee, finishing Miss Starkweather’s speech.
“And there have never been so many graven idols waiting for those girls as now,” said Miss Starkweather somberly, refusing to be derailed. She pointed to the stack of imperial photographs, untouched since their arrival in July. “Look at them. Urako, where were we? I wonder if we need to hang these for the fire inspection.”
I did as I was told, but it was difficult, remembering when I came in search of Aki, what Miss Starkweather had said: We’re not running that kind of school. That girl in Yokohama, what about her?
AT THE SHIN HOUSE, we did take a holiday for Obon. After students and servants alike went home to their native towns and villages, the remaining few of us rattled around in the empty house without them. Those who slept upstairs moved to their verandas to catch a breath of wind: Tai and Tsuko, Yukako in the sewing house attic, two girls from Tokyo who stayed on due to an outbreak of cholera at home. Kenji maintained his nights in the Bent-Tree Annex, his daily vigil at the convent. Kuga remained in the little cottage that had once been Chio’s. But everyone else was gone, the room by the kitchen enormous without Jewel and Jade.
I had not been aware of how much their presence muffled the night sounds of the house: when Kuga came in to use the privy at night, she sounded so loud padding past my room, just a sliding paper door away. I remembered, when Nao was with us, how the girls would stop their gossip whenever they heard the outside grille slide open. Is it him? Is it him? they’d whisper. No, it’s Miss Aki. No, it’s o-Kuga. Are you sure? How can you tell? When the nocturnal visitor had been to the toilet and left, the girls would collapse in giggles before beginning another round of He likes you, No, he likes you! But I’d really had to work to hear anyone pass by, those nights; now, in this hollow-gourd house, the shuffle of Kuga’s feet rasped like loud wind in bamboo.
The first night of the Obon holiday, the room felt so empty I couldn’t sleep, so I went to Baishian to read, the hot night air moving slowly through the empty window frames. It had been this hot in the city now called Kyoto for hundreds of summers, Shonagon assured me. This time, by my flickering lamp, I read not to tease out her passion for an Empress but to slip into a cooler, petaled world: of snapping banners and twelve-layered robes, of cloudy Chinese mirrors and faces drawn on melons, of women wooed with poems tied to branches, of lovers gliding in at night to trade caresses and vanish with the fresh cold dew. In that room frail as gauze, I felt like a court lady myself, elegant and indolent, prized for my learning and cultivation. Slow down, I laughed at myself: translating a notice from the fire inspector requires neither witty repartee nor a vast knowledge of the Chinese classics. All the same, I wafted back to bed more lightly than I’d left.
The next morning I was surprised from sleep by a tap on the doorframe. “Miss Ura!” It was Kuga, with a rarely heard note of sweetness in her voice.
“I didn’t hear you making breakfast; I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I apologized.
“It’s not even breakfast time yet,” she said. “Look.” We’d been summoned to Tai’s favorite teahouse, a seven-mat room called Sparrow Hut, for a dawn tea. Kuga gave me a slip of paper from Tai and Tsuko that served as both invitation and assignment: “Young Mistress said I’m third guest, you’re fourth.” Still bleary as I sat on the waiting-bench, I looked around to realize that everyone left in the house had been invited: Kuga, me, the two girls from Tokyo, and, playing first and second guest respectively, Kenji and Yukako.
I found it charming that on no notice at all, they had decided to hold a tea event for the whole household just as we were, the Tokyo girls still in their sleeping kimono, Kuga still wearing her sleeves tied back with work-strings. Yukako, surprised, looked girlishly happy, and even Kenji seemed quietly touched. I was flattered to realize that we were seated, not by rank, but according to how long we had been with the house: family first, servants second, students last. According to this scheme, it was clear Tai was singling his brother out by placing him before his mother. Perhaps by naming Kenji as main guest, he was trying to draw his brother back to the world of the living: I like to think he was announcing his love. And by forcing them to sit side by side, I saw that Tai was trying to add one more thread to the fragile web of peace forming between his mother and his brother. I looked down at my lap, made shy by his goodness.
When we walked down the path to the waiting-bench, a handful of candles lit the way: they guttered out just as the sky went pearly and we entered the tearoom. The paper shoji doors had been taken out and replaced with walls made of reeds, allowing air and light to pass through effortlessly. As the night ebbed, the room actually seemed cooler: the contrast between dark reed and bright air increased; the garden visible through the reeds grew more deeply green. Behind us, the moss looked like slatted jade, while in the alcove, also behind us, no flowers hung. Instead, a square window had been slid open completely and hung with mosquito gauze. The window framed a standing stone in the garden whose top formed a rough bowl for water, in which floated one lotus bud. I felt a stab of longing, remembering Inko years before: perhaps this was the morning I’d hear it blossom with a soft clear pop.
As our eyes adjusted, Yukako and Kenji murmured together, and then the girls from Tokyo did too. In place of the charcoal brazier and kettle was something I’d never seen before: on a square wooden board, in a deep diamond-shaped iron tray, sat a squat ceramic water jar. I blinked; the tray was full of ice.
Tai appeared and set down a bowl of sweets, then began a simple temae for thin tea. Then Tsuko appeared in the doorway to play the role of hanto: an assistant to the host who ferries bowls of tea to guests and offers explanation. “The night before last it was too hot to sleep,” she said, “so we sat up talking about cold things. We had an idea: what would happen if you made matcha tea with cold water?” Tai nodded, beaming in such a way that suggested that the idea was in fact Tsuko’s.
He looked up and added, “We tried warm water and cool water, and it just tasted terrible, but then we discovered that if the water’s cold enough, you could get as much foam as if it were boiling.”
“We don’t know if you’ll like it, so this isn’t really a proper event, just thin tea and sweets. We don’t want you sitting on your feet all morning. But just among ourselves, you know, it’s so hot out…” Tsuko trailed off nervously.
“It sounds delicious,” said Kenji, rising to the occasion with simplicity and grace.
When had I ever heard a man and a woman conspiring together to give joy to anyone else? I savored the sight of them as much as I savored the sweets: dabs of white bean paste flavored with citron, each wrapped in a translucent case of kanten, a seaweed-based gelatin that made them look as if they were suspended in ice. What’s more, in the growing heat of morning, the sweets were cold, as if they’d been kept all night in a well. They were delightful, and my bowl of matcha, frothy and flecked with little splinters of ice, left me refreshed and stirred.
When the temae was finished and Tai offered his last bow in the doorway, Yukako, who had been quietly glowing all morning, bowed deeply to her son. “I only wish your grandfather were alive,” she said. We all bowed in gratitude and Tai humbly closed the door.
As each guest sat in line to wriggle out of the square doorway, I took a last look back, to see if the lotus had bloomed. I was not expecting to see a man at the alcove window, and my surprise was shared by Yukako as she rounded the teahouse to look at him, at the flat wooden case leaning against his leg the very size and shape of a stack of panes of glass.
“Well,” she said, waving the two girls from Tokyo off to change out of their sleeping robes.
Tai, alerted by the sound of us lingering, emerged in surprise, and as Yukako composed her anger, he bowed in genuine pleasure and disappointment. “You didn’t have to stand out there watching like that. I wish you had come in and tried some tea.”
Nao folded his arms and bowed ruefully at the young man. In his
leggings and workman’s apron, he seemed leaner and more weary. “Oh, no,” he said. “Standing here watching you, I felt like I had really come back to my native village just in time for Obon. I wouldn’t trade that feeling for the world.”
Tai shrank a little at Nao’s tone of voice, devoid of nostalgia. “Well, it’s good to see you again,” he said.
“I had work to finish,” Nao said, bowing.
“OF COURSE HE GAVE his permission about Aki,” Yukako told her daughter-in-law as they sat in the bath on the night of Nao’s return. “I didn’t think he’d mind, especially considering who paid the dowry to the nuns.”
“But why did he disappear like that?” said Tsuko. “And just when a girl would need her father most.” It was a question designed to invite Okusama to vent her evident spleen.
Yukako’s reply was surprisingly diffident. “He said the proper thing for a father to do would be to punish Aki and set her back on the right path. But if the right path made her want to die, then maybe it was the wrong path. He didn’t want to punish her, so he left.” I heard her hesitation and distrust, and at first, it seemed, she was judging him for dressing up his cowardice as fatherly concern. But it was not the voice of a judge I heard. It was the voice of a neglected child who hesitantly, distrustfully, accepts a gift.
I hated him all over again. I hated his pretty cheekbones, his long body, his small sturdy hands. And I wanted to hurt Yukako for the tightness in her voice when she talked about him. For replacing me with Tsuko. For thinking of Kenji’s happiness so slowly; for paying the nuns to take Aki so fast. For not being who she’d once been to me; for receding from me even as we sat together in the bath.
After dressing for bed, I paced the windowless three-mat room where the servants slept: in the end, I walked out again to Baishian. My face felt hot and I barely saw the stepping-stones, the moss, the bamboo. In my restless haste, I almost didn’t see the light in the teahouse, and when I did, instead of scuttling off to find another place to read, I set down my lantern, stepped out of my shoes, and walked forward.
Yukako faced Nao in the small house. I could see the back of her head, their bodies partitioned into floating squares by the window frames: new split-toed socks and the indigo hem of a gauze robe; rough leggings and squared-off bare feet. A gauze sleeve and a glimpse of thick apron. A woman’s coil of black hair and a man’s lowered eyes. “It’s unacceptable,” she was saying.
“Whatever Master Teacher prefers,” I heard him reply, his voice bland and amenable. The floor was covered with coarse cloth and glass panes were stacked neatly in the corner. It wasn’t what they were saying, it was the fact of them alone at night, breathing together in that room of newly planed wood. When he took a step back, she took a step toward him. When she turned to go, his eyes anticipated her path.
But in the moment before she looked back at him to say good night, he noticed me outside; his eyes met mine; he saw the raw hostility in my face. And smiled.
Blushing, I picked up my lamp and shoes and ran all the way back to the house, my heart thudding as I sat on my futon in the servants’ room. I heard Yukako clip back to the sewing house; she hadn’t spotted me. But he had: I hugged my legs close to me, feeling flayed and skinless, seen. At the same time I felt so angry. I remembered that smile when he saw me, smug and greedy. Yukako would be so upset if I did this, I thought savagely, and when I heard Nao’s footsteps trace the way back from Baishian, I reached for the sliding door. My fingers felt fat and raw; they sweated into the thick paper. When he came closest to the house I loudly slid the door wide, and waited. I heard the footsteps pause, then approach. “Jealous?” said the voice in the dark. He stepped in and slid the door shut.
33
1891
OUR COUPLING WAS BRIEF and matter-of-fact. I rose up away from myself and looked back, saw the apron and leggings askew on the straw-pale floor, the dark robe pulled open around the woman’s fleshy thighs, the bodies struggling below me in the lamplight. Slowly I began to feel my body again, a sense of weight and heaving, began to feel the back of my head grind, grind, grind into the tatami. So this is what women wait for, I thought. It was neither better nor worse than I had imagined.
When he was finished, he began to lick my lips and the inside of my mouth. “What are you doing?” I said.
“Are you sure you’re a foreigner? You’ve never heard of kissing?”
Of course I remembered kisses from my childhood, butterfly poufs of lips on skin, but they were nothing like this, all thick tongue and hard teeth. And who was he to say what foreigners did? “You’ve lived abroad?” I asked.
He laughed. “Oh, I learned to kiss near Gojo Bridge,” he said, naming a rough Kyoto red-light district. “But my friends in Yokohama tell me foreigners do it all the time, even husbands and wives.”
I tried it. I reached forward for his upper lip and tongued the inside of it, a single line with a wet brush tip, the character one. “Sweet,” he said. He cupped my breasts with both hands, as if weighing them. “You are a foreigner,” he chuckled. “No doubt about it.”
Just as I was about to tell him to leave, he began to draw his hand across my skin very lightly and I surprised myself, smiling. It made me feel clean and precious, like lacquer. As if I were the lacquer hearth-frame in the tearoom and his fingers were the bundle of feathers used to brush it clean. What was it called? “Haboki,” I whispered. Never had the word seemed so startling, so tender. “Haboki.” His hand was the wing of a swan.
Then, the way a man who had finished eating might tap his stomach, he tapped my hip gently and repetitively, his hand contentedly flexing and relaxing. I found it annoying. I held his hand. “You know, they rip the feathers out while the bird’s alive,” he said.
“What?”
“For the haboki. So it’ll last longer. When I was a kid the old man made us do it.”
“You and o-Kuga?” I felt cold again. Why was he telling me this?
“Me and Hiro,” he said. Yukako’s brother. “We had to shoot the cranes down without killing them, and then I’d hold the bird while Hiro pulled out the feathers. The poor thing screamed like a girl,” he said.
He was showing off, a little boy brandishing a toad in a jar. I would not give him the satisfaction of seeing me recoil. I felt glad, then, that when we’d done it I had made no sound at all. “Is that so?”
“Sure looks pretty in the tearoom, doesn’t it?” he said harshly.
He was trying to bully me, but into what? “And then Mr. Hiroshi died,” I said, trying to gain the upper hand.
“Yes.” Nao backed down a little, but it seemed he still had something to prove. “But not before Akio came along and the haboki job went to him. Took them twice as long without me.” He was sneering, but I heard envy in his voice.
“And then?” I pushed back.
“Hiro died, Akio went to the Shogun’s court, and I left before anyone could make me shoot another crane. I stowed away to Fushimi. Loaded casks for a sake brewer who didn’t ask any questions. Went to Edo. Yokohama. Asaka. I wasn’t coming back.” He tapped my hip again as he told his story, one tap for each short sentence. I kissed him to make him stop. “You’re a quick study,” he said. “Must be in your blood.”
We kissed until I got dizzy and he went inside me again. Again I watched from the ceiling. Hovering up in the mosquito netting, I thought I could hear the other sounds of night: the water in the gutter, the watchman with his clappers, the snoring sleepers. Yukako, I suddenly knew, was wide awake behind her screen, thinking of just one thing, and when I imagined her, flushed and aching, her long itchy fingers, I flooded down into my body and forced the man harder into me. I shook, I sweated, I grunted, I rolled aside, panting. I felt triumph. “I didn’t know you felt this way,” said Nao, sated and drowsy.
“What way?” I said.
I WALKED TO SCHOOL in my hakama the next day, drugged and sparkly, alert. I remembered how I felt as a girl, after my night with Inko, a private hour in a cloakroom wh
ile Yukako taught music, breathing the neriko incense Inko gave me, startled with delight. I felt the same way now, but more quietly, with less dreaminess and more self-satisfaction, my mouth and thighs pleasantly sore. The night before, I had felt nothing in bed with Nao until I could imagine Yukako thwarted. But this morning, now that my body and my loneliness had remembered their hungers, I wanted him again so much. Sweet, he’d said. He’d liked my breasts. I didn’t know you felt this way. He wasn’t going to tell me what it meant to him, to torture a beautiful living thing for his master’s pleasure, but at the same time he had told me: it was enough to make him leave home.
That day, as feared, a number of girls did not come to school. Among the notes of apology I read for Miss Starkweather, one girl’s parents sent a gift in a large box: a single melon, lovingly wrapped. “In Sei Shonagon’s day they would have drawn a child’s face on it,” I said. I never chatted gaily like this at work, but for once my life was not so different from Shonagon’s world; though my lover had vanished, not on a wave of ineffable sadness at dawn, but instead in a hurry to the bathhouse before closing time—though no pretty page boy had appeared that morning with a poem tied to a stalk of bamboo—I felt like a heroine in a twelve-layered robe: seen, imagined, longed for.
Heathenish. I heard the word, and looked up. “Pardon?”
“It’s one of our greatest challenges here. They won’t distinguish between the wanton and the pure. They just treasure things because they’re old, like those Heian poetesses.” he way Miss Starkweather pronounced the word, as if it were a disease, made me want to laugh. I felt brazen and worldly all day, acutely conscious of my body as I slid my door open that night.
