One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  * * *

  The telephone is ringing downstairs. My grandmother must be in the laundry room, washing my father’s shirts. I can hear the water running. She doesn’t seem to hear the phone ringing, so I go downstairs and pick up the receiver.

  “Hello,” a woman’s voice says, high and trembly. “Hello, this is Tomiko Hayashi from Hiroshima.” She sounds like she is on the verge of giggling.

  “Yes, I know,” I say, making my voice sound low and serious, not high in the cheap way hers is.

  The woman laughs though there is nothing funny. “Is your father home?”

  “No, he is not.”

  “He must be working late, I suppose.”

  “I don’t know whether he is working or not. But he is not here.” You know better than I do! I want to yell. My father came home late last night, unpacked his suitcase, and went right to bed. I didn’t even know that he was planning to come back here tonight.

  The woman laughs some more. “Will you tell him that I called then?”

  “Yes. I will tell him.”

  Tomiko hesitates. I imagine her lips close to the receiver. They would be painted bright pink or orange. In the only picture I have seen of her, Tomiko Hayashi was wearing a yellow kimono with designs of red fans, her face heavily made up. She was standing next to Father, her small, chubby hand on his shoulder. In spite of the makeup, she had beady eyes, a flat nose, and a huge, grinning mouth, and was not pretty in any way. Behind them, I could see the sign over a bar: TOMIKO’S INN. My father had left this picture on his desk in his study a few years ago—carelessly or on purpose, I’m not sure.

  Tomiko stays on the line, as if she meant to spy on my thoughts by listening to me breathe. “Good-bye.” I slam down the phone and hope that the sound will give her a terrible earache.

  Back in my room, I plop down on my bed and stare out the windows at the blue-purple sky. The water continues to run downstairs. My grandmother must still be washing the shirts, scrubbing the collars and the cuffs by hand as she always does. Does she consider the shirts to be extra dirty, poisoned even, because my father had brought them back from Tomiko’s? My mother never put my father’s clothes in the washing machine with any of ours. I wonder, now, if it was for that same reason. With my mother, I was always on her side: her clothes and mine together in the washer, my father’s in a different pile. My grandmother is different. She doesn’t want me on her side. Even without looking, I know the face she is making right now as she scrubs my father’s dirty clothes; her pinched look says that she is disappointed in everyone, especially in my father and me.

  * * *

  About an hour later, my father comes home. I hear the front door rattling as he opens it; then he is in the foyer taking off his shoes. I could run downstairs right away to tell him about the phone call, keeping it a secret between the two of us, but of course I don’t. I wait until he is sitting down in the kitchen with Grandmother, drinking the bitter green tea she has prepared for him. By then, he is dressed in baggy long underwear and a black kimono jacket he wears around the house. Every night when he comes home, Grandmother has his change of clothes and tea ready, just as my mother did. After he comes out of his room, his clothes changed, she goes in and puts away the suit, shirt, and tie he has left in a crumpled pile. I have not left dirty clothes on the floor since first grade, when my mother showed me how to hang up my skirts, fold my sweaters, and put the rest in the dirty-clothes hamper. My father has never done that for my mother or grandmother.

  I stand in the doorway outside the kitchen, watching him reading the evening paper and drinking tea. Grandmother is sitting across the table, waiting for him to talk to her. He doesn’t say anything. These are the times I feel sorry for Grandmother. Her face has a watchful and anxious look. She wants so much for him to talk, to tell her about his day.

  In the shadow of the newspaper, my father’s face looks gray. There are dark circles under his eyes. His clenched jaw and thin nose give him a grim and unhappy expression. “Your father is tired because he works so hard for us,” my mother used to tell me. “He can’t help feeling irritable.” That was her explanation for why he often snapped at her and made her cry. I suppose she wasn’t just pretending. My father does work hard. He is an important person at his insurance company; he makes good money. “We should appreciate all he does for us,” my mother used to say. She must have been trying to convince herself instead of really believing it, but she did have a point. If a genie from one of her old fairy tales came and asked me, “I can grant you one wish. You can have a father who is kind, who loves you and your mother and even your grandmother. But this father would be poor. Do you want him, or do you want the father you already have?” I would not know what to say. Being poor would be so very hard.

  Except for the people of my grandfather’s village, I only knew one person who was poor. All the girls at the Academy come from well-to-do families. Even in grade school, in my class, there was only one poor girl, Yoko Takemoto, who lived in the attic of another classmate’s house, where her mother worked as a live-in maid. At the beginning of third grade, when our teacher, Miss Sato, said we could sit with anyone we liked for the whole month of April, no one wanted to sit next to Yoko. After we had all sat down in the seats we had chosen and Yoko was left standing, Miss Sato asked for a volunteer. No one raised a hand for a long time. Finally, I offered to give up my seat next to Keiko Yamasaki to sit with Yoko, because I thought of the Bible stories about Jesus eating dinner with people no one else liked; my mother always told me that being a Christian meant being kind. If I had been proud of myself for being such a good Christian, my pride didn’t last very long. I hated sitting next to Yoko. In the last half-hour of every day, Miss Sato held a contest in which we wrote stories with our seatmates, each of us contributing a sentence in turn. Yoko and I always had the least written, because she would sit there saying nothing for five or ten minutes. When she finally came up with a sentence, it was something stupid like “The sky was blue,” “The princess was very pretty,” “The bird flew away.” I couldn’t believe how long a third-grader took to come up with those kindergarten sentences. While I was mad at Yoko for being so stupid, I was mad at Keiko and my other friends, too, because during recess, they would talk about how Yoko always wore the same brown dress, how her hair smelled funny, how stupid she was. I was mad at them, I realize now, because I looked down on Yoko as much as they did but was unwilling to admit it. What a hypocrite I was; I cringe to remember it.

  No one knew what had happened to Yoko’s father—whether he was dead, or her parents had been divorced or never been married. But Yoko was the person I thought about later, when my mother told me that growing up poor and fatherless means growing up in shame. When I think of being poor or fatherless, I imagine a big room where a crowd of people are sitting down. As the only person without a seat, I have to walk around, looking for a chair. But as soon as I find one, the person sitting next to that chair would glare at me; or else, two or three people would get up to leave, just to avoid sitting near me.

  I’m imagining that room again, when my grandmother snaps at me.

  “Don’t just stand there like that. Do you have something to say? Go upstairs to study if you don’t.”

  I wait a few more seconds, till my father, too, is staring at me, his paper half-lowered. Then I announce, “That woman from Hiroshima called.”

  The newspaper goes all the way down, making a rustling sound. My father continues to stare at me, his mouth open, while Grandmother glares at him.

  “She left no message,” I continue. “Just that she called.”

  My father cannot scold me for rudely referring to her as “that woman from Hiroshima.” He can’t insist that I call her “Miss Hayashi,” as though she were a respectable woman. My grandmother won’t scold me, either. Our dislike of Tomiko Hayashi is one of the few things we have in common, though of course we never talk about it. Much as she dislikes my mother, Grandmother must be relieved that my parents won’t
embarrass our family by getting an official divorce. Maybe she even wishes that my mother were still here, if only to save face. Ever since my mother’s departure, Tomiko has been calling our house at least once a week. Before that, she never called Father at home, except very late at night, sounding too drunk to care.

  “I’m going upstairs to study,” I say, and leave the two facing each other in silence.

  * * *

  Soon afterward, I hear my father’s footsteps downstairs and the noises he makes while packing his suitcase—one of the few things he will do for himself. A cab pulls up onto our driveway. As I watch from my bedroom window, he leaves without a good-bye. A door slams downstairs. My grandmother has retired into her bedroom.

  The blank paper is still on my desk, but I am in no mood to write. Behind me, on the oak dresser, the owl clock keeps moving its yellow eyes side to side. It’s a little after ten. Except for the dresser, the desk, the bookshelves, and the bed, my room is bare and dismal. I used to have two big posters on the wall—one showing the snow-covered Swiss Alps and the other, a meadow in Germany in front of an old castle. The posters were taller than I was and glossy with bright colors. My mother bought them for me a few years ago and tacked them up on the wall; she wanted me to take a break from studying every hour and imagine myself in one of the pictures. “No one should study nonstop,” she said. “It’s bad for your eyes, and your mind, too. Take a five-minute break every hour and think of something pleasant.” I made up stories about skiing down the snowy slope or having a big picnic with friends on that flowering meadow. It was just like my mother to give me two big posters when my room already had the best view in the house—of the backyard and the flowers she had planted. It used to make me smile, the way she worried about me. The week after she left, I ripped down the posters. They were just another example of her make-believe. I felt pathetic sitting alone in my room, daydreaming about places I would never in my whole life be able to visit.

  For half an hour I sit doing nothing, having one depressing thought after another, till my room feels small and suffocating. By then, everything is quiet. No noise comes from Grandmother’s bedroom. When I sneak downstairs, the crack of space underneath her door looks completely dark. Taking my shoes from the foyer, I slide down the hallway into the kitchen and then out the back door. I put on my shoes on the back porch and stand around for a while. If Grandmother wakes up and comes outside, I can pretend that I am out looking at the stars. She doesn’t come out. Quietly, I climb over the fence into the Yamasakis’ yard, walk across it, and scale the fence into the next yard. After a few more backyards and fences, I am on the street a block away from home. Nobody has seen me. I bolt down the hill.

  Back in February, I snuck out of the house three times to go to the Katos’, always on the nights when my father was away. It wasn’t because I was upset and needed to talk to someone right away. I was just lonely. I couldn’t bear to sit by myself in my little room, night after night. I had to go to the Katos’ to watch TV in their family room, drink hot chocolate that Mrs. Kato had made, or listen to Kiyoshi’s stereo while he did his homework. The Katos didn’t ask me what I had been doing out so late. They acted as though my stopping by was the most normal thing in the world. After midnight when I was ready to go, Mrs. Kato sent Kiyoshi to walk me home. He got quiet as soon as we were on my street. From half a block away, he stood and watched as I pulled out the key I had stuck into my pocket and opened the door. With the door a crack open, I looked back and waved at him before he turned and sprinted down the hill. My grandmother never heard me, as far as I know.

  Halfway down the hill, I realize I can’t very well go to the Katos’ house now. How can I sit in their living room like part of the family when I plan to stop going to their church? I keep walking, a little slower. I am a block away from the street in front of the commuter train station. “I’m glad to be here for you,” Toru had said, standing in our old schoolyard on Sunday. It’s a little past eleven. He might still be working at the bar. If he’s not, I will turn around and walk back up the hill, and maybe just that—the fresh air, the walk—will make me feel better. Better anyway than being stuck in the little room like a prisoner.

  In front of the jazz club, the neon signs are lit. The place is still open. I walk around to the parking lot in the back.

  Toru’s blue car is there, alongside a few others in the lot. I try the passsenger’s door. It’s open. I slide in. Closing the door behind me, I sit in the small sliver of space between the slanted windshield, the blue ceiling, and a darker blue seat. It is absolutely silent. I turn sideways with my back against the door, knees drawn up to my chest. Except for a faint smell of cigarettes, I am reminded of sitting in my mother’s closet a long time ago. I used to hide there, hoping to surprise her. I sat very quietly, her long dresses and skirts draped over my back, slippery and cool like big leaves of jungle trees after a rainstorm. Once, I fell asleep for a couple of hours, not knowing that my mother was looking for me, worried that I had gone outside on my own and gotten lost. Waiting for Toru now, I close my eyes and lean my head against the cool glass of the window.

  * * *

  I open my eyes just in time to see Toru’s long, thin face framed in the driver’s window. Brushing his hair away from his forehead, he is already beginning to smile. When he opens the door, the orange interior light goes on; it stays on for a few seconds before he sits down and pulls the door shut.

  “How are you, Megumi?” he asks.

  “All right.”

  “You don’t look all right. Are you upset about something?”

  I nod.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not right away.”

  “We’ll go for a drive, then. Let’s go down to the water, okay?” He starts the car.

  We head south, driving in silence past a park where we used to play. In my album, there is a picture of me with the Uchida boys and Kiyoshi, standing next to a pine tree that looks like a horse with a very long neck. My face in profile, I am blowing into an empty soda bottle, holding my fingers in position as though I were playing a Japanese flute or an oboe. All three boys are looking at me and laughing. It is too dark to see that tree now.

  We park near the breakwater in front of an old bait shop. The moment I open the car door, I can hear the waves crashing on the other side of the tall embankment. After climbing up and descending a steep stairway, we stand on the sand beach. The water booms as it comes in; it hits the beach and then drains back into the bay like a long sigh.

  “Let’s sit down.” Toru plops down on the sand.

  A few feet away from where we sit, a line of algae and black mussels marks where the tide last stopped. I once found a small dead crab tangled up in a rope of dried algae along the tideline. The crab was bleached white, no larger than my thumbnail. Because there was a tiny hole on its back, between the pincers, I added it to the necklace I was making with the pink and yellow oysters that also had little holes in them. I meant to give the necklace to my mother, but she thought the dead crab was creepy. So did Mrs. Kato. Toru’s mother, Mrs. Uchida, was different. “How beautiful,” she exclaimed, touching the crab’s back with the tip of her index finger. I can still see her walking on the beach wearing that necklace, her long hair blowing around her face.

  “Are you warm enough?” Toru asks me. He is lying on the sand, so I lean back and do the same. The sky is dark, with stars I cannot name, except for the Big Dipper.

  “I’m not cold.”

  We don’t speak for a long time. The white lamp behind us on the other side of the embankment makes the sand look lighter, except around Toru’s white shirt. There, in contrast, the sand looks brown. The waves continue to crash and sigh. It’s almost as if all the water in the bay was longing to come to us, to touch the shore just once. It makes me sad.

  “So, you want to talk?” Toru prompts me.

  Listening to the sad waves, I suddenly don’t know what to say. How can I sit on this beach, where we used to walk wi
th our mothers, collecting seashells and laughing, and talk about my father’s girlfriend? I feel too embarrassed even to say those words, my father’s girlfriend. It seems wrong to bring that up in the same place where Mrs. Uchida praised the necklace I had made, insisting that even the dead crab was beautiful. Grandmother Kurihara used to caution me not to make any disrespectful comments in the room where the Buddhist altar was kept. Even if I wasn’t speaking about them, Grandmother said, our ancestral spirits would be upset to hear bad words spoken in their presence. For the first time, I understand what she might have meant.

  “You don’t have to,” Toru says.

  But I do want to talk, to say something. So I mention the next thing that comes to mind, the second on my long list of grudges.

  “I tried to write to my mother,” I tell Toru. “I didn’t know what to say. I’m mad at her because she won’t let me call her on the phone.”

  “That must be hard. I’m sorry.”

  “My mother writes me chatty letters about Grandfather’s embroidery business and about flowers and the weather. I’m mad at her for writing letters like that. But I have no way of telling her without upsetting her. I know she worries about me.”

  “But how can you help being angry? You have every right to be.”

  I sit up to look into his face. He is still lying down, but he raises his head a little. “You don’t think I’m being unfair?” I ask. “Would you be upset if you were in my position?”

  Sitting up, he holds his knees against his chest. “Sure. Why shouldn’t your mother agree to talk to you on the phone? She shouldn’t write a superficial letter when you miss her so much.”

  “You really think so? Kiyoshi says I’m being selfish and impatient. He got mad at me for complaining.”

  Grimacing, Toru waves his hand. “What does Kiyoshi know about it? He has no idea what it’s like for us. He has his mother.” He stares straight ahead at the water in the dark.