by Kyoko Mori
It will have to do, though there was a lot more I wanted to say. I put the letter back in the envelope, seal it, and prop it against the vase. I am wiping off the water I spilled on the counter when a door swooshes open down the hallway and someone comes padding down the carpet with bare feet. It’s too late for me to leave. By the time I get to the door, whoever it is will be in the kitchen, just in time to see me running away like a burglar. I have no choice but to stay.
Coming into the kitchen in his blue pajamas, Kiyoshi squints into the gray light. His small eyes disappear in the folds of sleepy eyelids. His hair is puffed up on one side and completely flat on the other. I want to laugh, almost forgetting everything that has happened in the last month. He looks surprised, then glad, before his jaw freezes into a square outline, pulling his lips straight and tight. Just for a second he must have forgotten, too, and been glad to see me.
“What are you doing here?” he whispers, not taking another step toward me.
“Leaving your mother a note,” I whisper back. We are about ten paces away from each other. I stop whispering and speak in a soft voice instead. “I was just leaving. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Though we have nothing more to say, Kiyoshi and I stand staring at each other in the kitchen where we used to play and bicker and make peace. The memory makes me lonely. I will never come here again, except on brief visits to say hello to Mrs. Kato. Those first few nights after my mother left, sitting in this kitchen with the Katos—watching Kiyoshi do his homework, Pastor Kato reading the evening paper while Mrs. Kato made tea—gave me the only comfort I had. I wish we could go back to a time when Kiyoshi and I could be friends. I almost wish I hadn’t decided to give up my faith. But I cannot apologize for my decision, so I offer what I hope would be the next best thing. “I’m sorry that I hadn’t been more honest all along. I should have told you a long time ago. I haven’t believed in God for the last few years—maybe even the last five, ever since Mrs. Uchida’s death.” I stop, my eyes on the vase. When Mrs. Uchida gave the vase to Mrs. Kato, I thought it was ugly because of its rust color, its texture, its squat shape. Back then, I didn’t consider anything pretty unless it was a soft pastel color like pink or lavender and its surface was smooth and shiny. That was a long time ago. I knew nothing. Even in the near dark, the vase is vibrant with color, the rusty glaze burning with the yellow of the irises. Kiyoshi is looking at me, waiting for me to go on. “I’m very sorry,” I repeat, wishing I could say more.
He shrugs his shoulders. “You’ve made your decision,” he mumbles. “It’s up to you whether you want to believe or not.” When he closes his mouth, his neck tightens as if he were clenching his teeth. He doesn’t mean what he said—at least not in a forgiving way.
I should turn my back and leave, but I can’t. Kiyoshi’s blue pajamas remind me of the Nativity play we put on in second grade, when there were more kids at the church. We were all dressed in pajamas and bedsheets our mothers had tried to alter into the robes of shepherds, wise men, Joseph, and Mary. Even the girl who played the angel wore a white nightgown with paper wings taped to her back. Kiyoshi, Takashi, and I were the three wise men. There were only two girls’ parts—Mary and the angel—and three girls, so one of us had to play a boy’s part. My head covered with a brown sheet, I looked no different from the two boys, my voice only a little higher than theirs. “We come bearing gifts,” we were supposed to say in chorus, but one of us always missed the cue. I am sad that Kiyoshi and I will not be remembering the silly play together in the years to come. When we grow up, we will not be like our mothers, who were always bringing up some funny event from the time before we were born. Driving in a car or drinking tea in the kitchen, one of them would mention something, and suddenly, both women would burst into uncontrollable laughter and they would bend over almost choking—floored by their funny memories.
“I’m going,” I announce. My voice sounds choked up.
Maybe I am imagining it, but he looks sad. His mouth droops down a little at the corners.
“I’m going to spend the summer with Mother,” I tell him. “Maybe we’ll see each other when I come back in the fall.”
He says nothing. I don’t expect him to. Even if we were to see each other in the fall, we will never again be close friends, and we both know it. Walking quickly to the door, I go out and run down the steps into the empty churchyard. A few tears fall from my eyes as I pass the sandbox and the swings, but I take a deep breath and keep moving.
* * *
During lunch at school, Noriko and Mieko have to eat in the cafeteria with me because I didn’t bring my bag lunch. After going to the Katos’ and then to Dr. Mizutani’s to feed the birds, I didn’t feel like stopping at home again. My grandmother must be mad. She will scold me when I get home about wasting the lunch she had made for me. What she really wants to scold me for but won’t is yesterday’s visit to Mother.
I didn’t get back to Ashiya until eleven last night. My grandfather and Dr. Mizutani took a walk in the afternoon to see more birds while my mother and I stayed home talking and cooking in the kitchen. The afternoon flew by. We were just beginning to really talk—about my decision not to go to church, about Kiyoshi and Keiko and Toru—when the sun set and it got dark. All of us ate supper together. Both my mother and grandfather liked Dr. Mizutani, I could tell. They kept urging her to eat more, commenting on how skinny she is; when we were ready to leave, my grandfather gave her a small framed embroidery he had done of a sparrow perched on a bamboo branch.
When I finally got home, Grandmother came to the door in her brown kimono; she hadn’t yet changed into her pajamas even though she usually goes to bed around ten. I knew that she had stayed up, not just to scold me, but because she was worried about me. For a second when she opened the door, her frown went away, her lips loosened, and I could hear the small sigh she made. But before I could say anything, she frowned again and gritted her teeth. “How can you be out all Sunday? You have school tomorrow.” She didn’t say anything about my mother or Dr. Mizutani or where we had been. She was pretending that I had broken my curfew out of carelessness. I suppose that’s the only way she and my father can save face to me and even to themselves. Until the day I leave, they will both pretend that I am not really going to my mother’s for the summer, that I have not gotten my way. They may be hoping, even yet, to make me change my mind by being silent and unfriendly. But they must know, down deep, that it will never work. I love my mother too much to grow up without seeing her. They have no choice except to let me go, but they would never admit that to me. In the fall when I come back, my father and grandmother will pretend that I have not been gone all summer long. And if they had worried about me during my absence, they would never show it.
Getting some soup and a hard-roll, I carry my tray and sit down at one of the long cafeteria tables across from my two friends. Noriko and Mieko have both brought sandwiches. Their mothers cut off the crust, the way my mother does when she makes sandwiches. My grandmother leaves the crust because it’s wasteful not to eat all of the bread. “During the war,” she often lectures, her face in a scowl, “we had nothing to eat but watered-down rice. You don’t know what it’s like to go hungry. You waste food because you don’t know how lucky you are.” Though my mother must have gone hungry during the War, too, she isn’t mean about wasting food. She used to bake bread and cut the loaf in half so I could eat all the soft part, leaving a brown boat of crust on the table. My grandmother would have lost her temper if she had seen that. I smile, thinking about the face Grandmother might have made.
“What is it, Megumi? What’s so funny?” Noriko asks, always eager for a joke.
“Just a private joke.” It’s not worth explaining. I haven’t told my friends about spending the summer with my mother. I know they will be happy for me, but the subject seems too serious to bring up now, while the two are chattering about Reiko’s first date with the boy from the train.
“Reiko just raves about him,” Mieko says.
“They went to an amusement park in Nara and rode the roller coaster all day long.”
“Reiko did?” Noriko asks. “I thought she was afraid of heights. She couldn’t even stand on the balance beam in gym last semester. She kept complaining and whimpering. She’s such a chicken.”
“I know. But the boy told her that he loves high speeds. He wants to drive a racecar when he turns eighteen.”
“I guess Reiko thought she’d better get used to it. Can you imagine her in a racecar? She’s afraid to go downhill on a bicycle,” Noriko says, and the two of them laugh.
I don’t think it’s all that funny—a girl who hates heights spending the whole day on a roller coaster. Reiko must have been desperate to impress him. I almost feel sorry for her, but I smile at Mieko and Noriko anyway and drift in and out of their conversation.
I won’t see them—or any of our school friends—all summer, every summer. Maybe I will feel out of place in the fall, more than I already do. I feel queasy thinking about all the things that have happened to me since January. If I spend every summer with my mother and every school year with Father and Grandmother, will I feel as though I have two homes, or no home at all? Long ago, when I first heard about astronauts, I had nightmares about being locked up in a spaceship that went around and around the earth, never to come down. That is how I feel now, watching my friends across the table.
They keep talking. Noriko is shaking her fork at Mieko, to make some point. When they laugh again, a little too loudly, several twelfth-grade girls glance in our direction. We are the only tenth graders here. Almost all the girls who eat in the cafeteria are twelfth graders, most of whom think it’s childish to bring bag lunches to school. I’ve heard that from the girls in my class who have older sisters; they describe the arguments their older sisters have with their mothers about lunch, about clothes and makeup.
Girls in twelfth grade dress nothing like girls in tenth grade. Anyone looking around this cafeteria can tell that Mieko, Noriko, and I are tenth graders, all three of us dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts. The twelfth-grade girls are wearing dresses or skirts and silk blouses. We are not supposed to wear makeup to school, but every one of them has very light lipstick, a little mascara, a dab of rouge.
There are several girls in our class, too—usually the ones with older sisters—who are beginning to dress more like the girls in the cafeteria. When I pass these girls in the hallway, I can smell a faint whiff of perfume. Their spring coats, if they got new ones this year, are a little longer and slimmer-looking than ours. The colors are purple, pale pink, or slate blue, instead of the red, yellow, and sky blue the rest of us still wear. One by one, I suppose, we are all changing. Maybe in two years, Mieko, Noriko, and I, too, will look like the girls who are now in this cafeteria.
I don’t want to. I don’t like the way the older girls laugh in thin, choking voices, their hands fluttering up to cover their mouths. They sit at the long tables picking at their food, brushing their hair back from their faces, sighing now and then. When I don’t like my food, I just don’t eat it. I see no point in stirring the food around with a fork, eating a tiny little mouthful and leaning forward to sigh as if exhausted from the effort.
“Is something wrong, Megumi?” Mieko asks, a slight frown between her arched eyebrows.
“Oh, nothing,” I reply, putting down the hard-roll I have been crushing in my hand. Because all the hard-rolls look the same, with their dark, almost-burnt crusts, I have taken the pumpernickel, which I hate, instead of the sourdough. I put the uneaten roll down on my empty soup bowl and push away my tray.
Suddenly, the P.A. system comes on. Someone’s scratchy breathing comes through the microphone. Down the table from us, two older girls scowl and squirm, pretending to be horrified. It’s just someone—one of our teachers, no doubt—getting ready to speak.
“We have an announcement,” Mrs. Fukushima’s voice says.
There is complete silence in the room. Everyone puts down her silverware, trying to listen politely; only a few of the girls are rolling their eyes.
“Professor Goto from Kobe University has just phoned us with the results of the time capsule contest. As you know, we sent him the essays of the ten finalists.”
Mrs. Fukushima proceeds to read the ten names, stretching out the announcement and building up the suspense. Across the table, Noriko looks kind of pale—nervous, I realize, on my account. Mieko, too, has a very serious expression—her eyes narrowed, her lips pouted a little. Forget it, I want to tell them. I’m not going to win anyway. My essay was too personal. It would be nice, all the same, to get at least an honorable mention.
“Of these ten finalists, Mr. Goto has decided to give two honorable mentions: Eiko Sakamoto and Sumire Kuroda,” Mrs. Fukushima announces.
I should be proud, I tell myself, just to have been a finalist.
“The second place,” Mrs. Fukushima continues, “goes to Hideko Shibata.”
From the way everyone’s head turns in the cafeteria, I can see exactly where Hideko is sitting. She is at a table on the other side of the cafeteria from us. At first, her face is blank, then a funny expression comes over her; she can’t decide whether to be happy or sad. I suppose I would look like that, too, if I came in second. It would be almost better not to know that you were close to winning, but didn’t. Maybe they should give us a choice when we enter contests. “If you come in second but don’t win, do you wish to know? Yes or no: Check the appropriate box.”
“The first-place essay, of course, will be put into the time capsule, along with the best essays from the other high schools in Kobe, Osaka, Ashiya, Nishinomiya, and Amagasaki. This writing, then, is our message to the people in the future, in the year 2000.” Mrs. Fukushima pauses. I look away from Hideko Shibata to Mieko and Noriko, who are sitting with their hands clenched into fists. “I am pleased,” Mrs. Fukushima says, “to announce that this honor will be given to a young writer, the only tenth-grade finalist.”
My heart almost stops.
The next moment, Mrs. Fukushima is saying my name over the P.A., and Noriko is springing up from her chair and giving a shrill yelp.
“Congratulations,” Mrs. Fukushima finishes. “All of you wrote fine essays.” The P.A. is turned off, leaving a brief moment of silence.
By the time the buzz of conversation starts up again, Noriko and Mieko are leaning over the table to hug me. I’m still sitting down, stunned. I get up in a daze, hug my friends, and then plop back down on the chair.
“I’m so happy,” Mieko says, her eyes shining. She looks like she might start crying.
“Good job,” Noriko says. “I knew you’d win.”
The two twelfth-grade girls who were sitting a few chairs away from us are getting up and extending their hands to me. “Well done,” they say, shaking my hand. “Congratulations.”
Because lunch hour is almost over, girls are bringing their trays back to the window and leaving. Those who pass by our group stop for a moment to murmur, “Congratulations, Megumi” or “Good job.” They remind me of Keiko’s older sisters, who used to roll their eyes at Keiko and me but were more than kind if one of us cried or got hurt. I am sorry to have thought mean, critical things about the twelfth-grade girls, though I know I will think these same things again.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Hideko, the second-place winner, getting up from her table. She is walking straight toward me. When she is about ten steps away, she smiles and holds out her hand, letting me know that she has come to wish me well.
I take her hand, which is slender and smaller than mine. As we shake, I try to imagine my words in the year 2000. By then I might have changed my mind about many things that I think are now true. My handwriting might look different, the way my mother’s looks different from the handwriting in her old books and letters. Maybe I will be embarrassed by what I had written while sitting in my room soon after I thought I had lost my mother.
“You should be proud of yourself,” Hideko whispers before she w
alks away.
Her back straight, Hideko steps lightly between the chairs and then out the door. She should be proud of herself, too—for having written a good essay, for being able to wish me well instead of acting like a poor loser, as I often did as a kid and maybe still do sometimes.
Though the bell will ring soon, I sit for another minute, thinking about my essay. After describing my mother’s departure and my grandmother’s arrival, I talked about how I was always different from my friends.
“‘Look at the positive side,’ people often tell me,” I wrote near the end. “There is nothing positive about my mother’s leaving. There is, however, a small relief. I know that the worst is over. Nothing else can happen to hurt me in the same way, and more than that, I know I can never be like everyone else even if I were to try.
“Ever since seventh grade, I have felt split between two feelings. On one hand, I was proud of the ways in which I was different from my friends—spending the afternoon reading a good book instead of watching television, not acting silly in front of boys. But in another way I wanted to be like everyone else. Even though I liked the blouses and jumper skirts my mother had sewn for me, I insisted on wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, because that’s what everyone wore to school. Hearing my friends sigh and complain every time our teachers asked us to write an essay, I didn’t want to let on that I actually enjoyed writing, looked forward to it, even. I often felt irritated with my friends or envious of them—I wanted to be just like them and different from them at the same time.
“After my mother left, I realized that I could never be like my friends no matter how much I tried. My family was nothing like theirs; my friends didn’t understand what I was talking about when I told them about things that happened at my house. I realized, at the same time, that my friends like me and worry about me even if they don’t understand. It hurts me not to be able to explain things to them, but I know that they love me all the same. That realization has given me at least a little comfort.
