Fortune Smiles: Stories

by Adam Johnson

  That’s how people would later treat me; it’s exactly the way I’m treated today when I come home to find my husband sitting on the couch with Megumi, a mom from the girls’ grade school. My husband and Megumi are talking in the fog-dampened bay-window light. On the coffee table is chicken katsu in a Pyrex dish. Megumi wears a top that’s trampoline-tight. She has a hand on my husband’s shoulder. Even though she’s a mother of two, her breasts are positively teenybopper. They pop. Her tits do everything but chew bubble gum and make Hello Kitty hearts.

  “Just what’s going on here?” I ask them.

  They brazenly, brazenly ignore me.

  I got to know Megumi on playground benches, where we struck up conversations while watching our daughters swing. I loved her Shinjuku style, and she loved all things American vintage. We bonded over Tokidoki and Patsy Cline.

  “I love your dress” is the first thing she said to me.

  It was a rose-patterned myrtle with a halter neck.

  “Interesting fact,” I told her. “I’m from Florida, and Florida is ground zero for vintage wardrobe. Rich women retire there from New York and New Jersey. They bring along a lifetime of fabulous dresses, and then they die.”

  “This is something I like,” she said in that slightly formal way she spoke. “No one in Tokyo would wear a dead woman’s dress.” Then she apologized, worried that she might have accidentally insulted me. “I have been saying the strangest things since moving to America,” she admitted.

  Our family was actually headed to Tokyo for the launch of my husband’s book in Japanese. Over the weeks, Megumi used sticks in the sandbox to teach me kanji that would help me navigate the Narita airport, the Shinkansen and Marunouchi subway lines. She asked about my husband and his book. “Writers are quite revered in Japan,” she told me.

  “I’m a writer, too,” I said.

  She turned from the kanji to regard me anew.

  “But no one will publish my books,” I added.

  Perhaps because of this admission, she later confided something in me. It was a cold and foggy afternoon. We were watching a father push his daughter high on a swing, admiring how he savored her delighted squeals in that weightless moment at the top of the arc.

  “If my life was a novel,” Megumi suddenly said, “I would have to leave my husband. This is a rule in literature, isn’t it? That you must act on your heart. My husband is distant and unemotional,” she declared. “I didn’t know that until I came here. America has taught me this.”

  I was supposed to reassure her. I was supposed to remind her that her husband was logging long hours and that things would get better.

  Instead, I asked, “But what about your kids?”

  Megumi said nothing.

  And now here I find her, sitting on my couch, hand on my husband’s shoulder!

  I’m the one who introduced them. Can you believe that? I’m the one who got her a copy of his novel in Japanese. I watch Megumi open her large dark eyes to take him in. And I know when my husband gives someone his full attention.

  I can’t make out what they are saying, but they are discussing more than fiction, I can tell you that.

  Something else catches my eye—arrows. There are quivers of arrows everywhere—red feathers, yellow feathers, white.

  In the kitchen is a casserole dish wrapped in aluminum foil. No, two casserole dishes.

  I discover a hospital band on my wrist. Have I left it on as a badge of honor? Or a darkly ironic accessory? Is the bracelet some kind of message to myself?

  Interesting fact: The kanji for irrational, I learned, is a combination of the elements woman and death.

  —

  There was an episode not long ago that must be placed in the waking-and-sleeping-reversed column. I was in the hospital. Nothing unusual there. The beautiful thing was the presence of my family—they were all around me as we stood beside some patient’s bed. The room was filled with Starbucks cups, and there were my brother, my sisters and my parents, and so on, all of us chatting away like old times. The topic was war stories. My great-uncle talked about playing football in the dunes of North Africa after a tank battle with Rommel. My father told a sad story about trying to deliver a Vietcong baby near Cu Chi.

  Then my brother looked stricken. He said, “I think it’s happening.”

  We all turned toward the bed, and that’s when I saw the dying woman. There was a wheeze as her breathing slowed. She seemed to get lighter before our eyes. I’ll admit I bore a resemblance to her. But only a little—that woman was all emaciated and droop-eyed and bald.

  My sister asked, “Should we call the nurse?”

  I pictured the crash cart bursting in, with its needles and paddles and intubation sleeve. It was none of my business, but: Leave the poor woman be, I thought. Just let her go.

  We all looked to my father, a doctor who has seen death many times.

  He is from Georgia. His eyes are old and wet, permanently pearlescent.

  He turned to my mother, who was weeping. She shook her head.

  Maybe you’ve heard of an out-of-body experience. Well, standing in that hospital room, I had an in-the-body experience, a profound sensation that I was leaving the real world and entering that strange woman, just as her eyes lost focus and her lips went slack. Right away, I felt the morphine inside her, the way it traced everything with halos of neon-tetra light. I entered the dark tunnel of morphine time, where the past, the present and the future became simultaneously visible. I was a girl again, riding a yellow bicycle. I will soon be in Golden Gate Park, watching archers shoot arrows through the fog. I see that all week long, my parents have been visiting this woman and reading her my favorite Nancy Drew books. Their yellow covers fill my vision. The Hidden Staircase. The Whispering Statue. The Clue in the Diary.

  You know that between-pulse pause when, for a fraction, your heart is stopped? I feel the resonating bass note of this nothingness. Vision is just a black vibration, and your mind is only that bottom-of-the-pool feeling when your air is spent. I suddenly see the insides of this woman’s body, something cancer teaches you to do. Here is a lumpy chain of dye-blue lymph nodes, there are the endometrial tendrils of a thirsty tumor. Everywhere are the calcified Pop Rocks of scatter-growth. Your best friend, Kitty, silently appears. She took leave of this world from cancer twelve years earlier. She lifts a finger to her lips. Shh, she says. Then it really hits you that you’re trapped inside a dying woman. You’re being buried alive. Will be turns to is turns to was. You can no longer make out the Republican red of your mother’s St. John jacket. You can no longer hear the tremors of your sister’s breathing. Then there’s nothing but the still, the gathering, surrounding still of this woman you’re in.

  Then pop!—somehow, luckily, you make it out. You’re free again, back in the land of Starbucks cups and pay-by-the-hour parking.

  It was some serious brain-bending business, the illusion of being in that dead woman. But that’s how powerful cancer is, that’s how bad it can mess with your head. Even now you cannot shake that sense of time—how will you ever know again the difference between what’s past and what’s to come, let alone what is?

  My husband and kids missed the entire nightmare. They are downstairs eating soup.

  Interesting facts: The Geary Street Kaiser Permanente Hospital is where breasts are removed. The egg noodle wonton soup in their cafeteria is divine. The wontons are handmade, filled with steamed cabbage and white pepper. The Kaiser on Turk Street is chemo central. This basement cafeteria specializes in huge bowls of Vietnamese pho, made with beef ankles and topped with purple basil. Don’t forget Sriracha. The Kaiser on Divisadero is for when the end is near. Their shio ramen with pork cheeks is simply heaven. Open all night.

  —

  My Vulcan mind-meld with death has strange effects on our family. Strangest of all is how I find it hard to look at my children. The thought of them moving forward in life without me, the person whose sole mission is to guide them—it’s not tolerable. My a
rms tremble at how close they came to having their little spirits snuffed out. The idea of them making their way alone in this world makes me want to turn things into sticks, to wield a hatchet and make kindling of everything I see. I’ve never chopped a thing in my life, I’m not a competent person in general, so I would lift the blade in full knowledge that my aim would stray, that the evil and the innocent will fall together.

  Interesting fact: My best friend, Kitty, died of cancer. Over the years, the doctors took her left leg, her breasts, her throat and her ovaries. In return, they gave her two free helpings of bone marrow. As the end came, I became afraid to go see her. What would I say? What does goodbye even mean? Finally, when she had only a few days left, I mustered the courage for a visit. To save money, I flew to Atlanta and then took a bus. But I got on the wrong one! I didn’t realize this until I got to North Carolina. Kitty died in Florida.

  —

  My husband soldiers up. He gives me space and starts getting up early to make the kids’ lunches and trek them off to school. The kids are rattled, too. They take to sleeping with their father in the big bed. With all those arms and legs, there’s no room for yours truly. They’re a pretty glum bunch, but I understand: it’s not easy to almost lose someone.

  I spend a lot of time in Golden Gate Park, where my senses are newly heightened. I can see a gull soaring past and know exactly where it will land. I develop an uncanny sense of what the weather will be. Just by gazing at a plant, I can tell its effects upon the human body.

  Interesting fact: The blue cohosh plant grows in the botanical gardens just a short stroll into the park. Its berries are easily ground into a poultice, and from this can be extracted a violet oil that causes the uterus to contract. Coastal Miwok tribes used it to induce abortions.

  —

  All this is hard on my husband, but he does not start drinking again. I’m proud of him for that, though I would understand if he did. It would be a sign of how wounding it was to nearly lose me. If he hit the bourbon, I’d know how much he needed me. What he does instead is buy a set of kettle bells. When the kids are asleep, he descends into the basement and swings these things around for hours, listening to podcasts about bow hunting, Brazilian jiujitsu and Native American folklore.

  He sheds some weight, which troubles me. The pounds really start to fall off.

  He gets the kids to music lessons, martial arts, dental appointments. The problem is school, where a cavalcade of chatty moms loiter away their mornings. There’s the Thursday-morning coffee klatsch, the post-drop-off beignets at Café Reverie, the book club at Zazie’s. These moms are single, or single enough. Meet Liddi, mother of twins, famous in Cole Valley for inventing and marketing the dual-mat yoga backpack. She’s without an ounce of fat, but placed upon her A-cup chest is a pair of perfectly pronounced, fully articulated nipples. There’s rocker mom Sabina, heavy into ink and steampunk chic. Octopus tentacles beckon from Sabina’s cleavage. And don’t forget Salima, a UCSF prof who’s fooling nobody by cloaking her D’s under layers of fabric. Salima will not speak of the husband—alive or dead—whom she left in Lahore.

  How are you getting by? they ask my husband.

  Let us know if you need anything, they offer.

  They give our kids lifts to birthday parties and away games. Their ovens are on perpetual preheat. But it’s Megumi who’s always knocking. It’s Megumi who gets inside the door.

  —

  Interesting facts: Chuck Norris tackles seventeen bad guys at once in Missing in Action III. Clint Eastwood takes up the gun again in Unforgiven. George Clooney is hauntingly vulnerable in The Descendants. Do you know why? Dead wives.

  Interesting fact: One wife who didn’t die was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. My MFA thesis was a collection of linked stories on Lady Montagu’s struggles to succeed as a writer despite her demanding children, famous husband and painful illness. I didn’t have much to say about the subject. I just thought she was pretty amazing. Not a single person bothered to read my thesis, not even the female professor who directed it. “Write what you know,” that’s what my professor kept telling me. I never listened.

  —

  One afternoon, I wander deep into Golden Gate Park, beyond the pot dealers on Hippie Hill and the rust-colored conning tower of the de Young Museum. I pass even the buffalo pens. In the wide meadows near the Pacific Ocean, I discover, by chance, my husband and children at the archery range. What are they doing here? How long have they been coming? They have bows drawn and, without speaking, are solemnly shooting arrows, one after another, downrange into heavy bales. The Horse-child draws a recurve, while my daughter shoots Olympic and my son pulls a longbow with his lean and beautiful arms. My husband strains behind a compound, its pulleys and cams creaking under the weight. He has purchased hundreds of arrows, so they rarely pause to retrieve. When the sunset fog rolls in, they fire on faith into a blanket of white. When darkness falls, they place balloons on the targets so they can hear the pop of a well-placed arrow. I have acquired a keen sense of dark trajectory. I stand beside my husband, the power of a full draw bound in his shoulders. I whisper release when his aim is perfect. He obeys. I don’t need to walk through the dark with him to see the arrows stacked up yellow in the bull’s-eye.

  Later, he doesn’t read books to the children before bed. Instead, on our California king, they gather to hear him repeat a story he has heard podcast by Lakota Sioux storytellers. My husband never speaks of his Sioux blood. He has never even visited the reservation. All the people who would have connected him to that place were long ago taken by liquor, accidents, time-released mayhem and self-imposed exile.

  The story he tells is of a ghost horse that was prized by braves riding into battle because the pony, already being dead, could not be shot from under them. This pony, afraid of nothing, reared high and counted its own coup. Only at the end of the clashes do the braves realize a ghost warrior had been riding bareback with them, guiding the horse’s every move. In this way the braves learn the gallop of death without having to leave this life.

  The Horse-child asks, “Why didn’t the ghost horse just go to heaven?”

  I realize it’s the first time I’ve heard the Horse-child speak in—how long?

  My daughter answers her. “The story’s really about the ghost warrior.”

  The Horse-child asks, “Why doesn’t the ghost warrior go to heaven, then?”

  My daughter says, “Because ghosts have unfinished business. Everybody knows that.”

  My son asks, “Did Mom leave unfinished business?”

  My husband tells them, “A mom’s work is never done.”

  A health issue can be hard on a family. And it breaks my heart to hear them talk like I no longer exist. If I’m so dead, where’s my grave, why isn’t there an urn full of ashes on the mantel? No, this is just a sign that I’ve drifted too far from my family, that I need to pull my act together. If I want them to stop treating me like a ghost, I need to stop acting like one.

  Interesting fact: In the TV movies, a ghost mom’s job is to help her husband find a suitable replacement. It’s an ancient trope—see Herodotus, Euripides and Virgil. For recent examples, consult CBS’s A Gifted Man, NBC’s Awake, and Safe Haven, now in heavy rotation on TCM. The TV ghost mom can see through the gold diggers and wicked stepmoms to find that heart-of-gold gal who can help those kiddos heal, who will clap at the piano recitals, provide much-needed cupcake pick-me-ups and say things like “Your mom would be proud.”

  I assure you that no such confectionary female exists. No new wife cares about the old wife’s kids. They’re just an unavoidable complication to the new wife’s own family-to-be. That’s what vasectomy reversals and Swiss boarding schools are for. If I were a ghost mom, my job would be to stab these rivals in the eyes, to dagger them all. Dagger, dagger, dagger.

  —

  The truth is, though, that you don’t need to die to know what it’s like to be a ghost. On the day my doctor called and gave me the diagnosis, we were at
a party in New York. Our mission was to meet a young producer for The Daily Show who was considering a segment on my husband. She was tall and willowy in a too-tight black dress, and while her breasts may once have been perfect, she had dieted them down to nothing. Right away she greeted my husband with euro kisses, laughed at nothing, then showed him her throat. I was standing right there! Talk about invisible. Then my phone rang—Kaiser Permanente with the biopsy results. I tried to talk, but words didn’t come out. I walked through things. I found myself in a bathroom, washing my face. Then I was twenty floors below, on Fifty-seventh Street. I swear I didn’t take the elevator. I just appeared. Then I was on a bus in North Carolina, letting a hard-drinking preacher massage my shoulders while my friend was dying in Florida. Then it was my turn. I saw my own memorial: My parents’ lawn is covered with cars. They must buy a freezer to store all the HoneyBaked hams that arrive. My family and friends gather next to the river that slowly makes its way past my parents’ home. Here, people take turns telling stories.

  My great-uncle tells a story about me as a little girl and my decision to wed the boy next door. My folks got a cake and flowers and had the judge down the street preside in robes over the ceremony. The whole neighborhood turned up, and everyone got a kick out of it. The next day brought the sobering moment when my folks had to tell me the marriage wasn’t real.

  My brother tells a story about my first Christmas home from college and how I brought a stack of canvases to show everyone the nudes I’d been letting the art-major boys paint of me.

  My mother tries to tell a story. I can tell it will be the one about the Christmas poodle. But she is overcome. It scares the children, the way she slow-motion folds up, dropping to the ground like a garment bag. To distract them, my father decides on a canoe ride—that always was a treat for the kids. Tears run from their eyes as they don orange vests and shove off. Right away, the Horse-child screams that she is afraid of the water. She strikes notes of terror we didn’t know existed. My son, in the bow, tries to hide his clutched breathing, and then I see the shuddering shoulders of my daughter. She swivels her head, looking everywhere, desperately, and I know she is looking for me. My father, stunned and bereft, is too inconsolable to lift the paddle. My father who performed more than fifteen hundred field surgeries near Da Nang, my father who didn’t flinch when the power went out at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, my father—he slowly closes his pearl-grey eyes. They float there, not twenty feet from us, the boat too unsteady for them to comfort one another, and we onshore can only wrench at the impossibility of reaching them.