The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  “Was that creepy?” she asked.

  “No, it felt deep.”

  Later, after the party broke up, I walked her to the train station, and in the shadows by the entrance where I was going to ask for her phone number she unexpectedly reached up and brushed my bangs from my face. “It does feel a little different,” she said. “Softer than Japanese hair.”

  We went to her place, a six-mat tatami room with a little kitchen she never used and a single window that looked out on the courtyard in back. We stood in the middle of the tiny space and kissed, bodies slowly softening like candles. Her mouth tasted like shōchū and smoke. She pulled off her shirt and her breasts were in my palms, the nipples long and thick, the color of chocolate. And then she was melting to the tatami, pulling me down on top of her. With each touch of her hand I felt like I was being sewn back together.

  Afterward, we bathed in her tub, which was square and deep, the water so hot that her hand on my thigh felt like a bruise. Then we stretched out naked on top of her futon, and I watched the steam rise from her body into the air. She had a mole in the hollow at the base of her neck, a small half-moon scar on her calf, and silver polish on her toes. “Do you ever get homesick?” she asked.

  “Never,” I said, though of course I did. A part of my mind was stuck roaming the big Victorian my parents had so painstakingly restored and now left only when they had to, for the pharmacy or the liquor store.

  “I don’t think I could live in a foreign country,” said Sumiko. “I get lonely too easily, and then I end up doing things like this.”

  Resting her head on my chest, she read me a story she’d written about a group of children who live in a colony on another planet and are taken care of by parents who are nothing but computer-generated holograms. The story wasn’t science fiction at all, or not what I thought of as science fiction; it felt honest and emotional, full of the yearning to touch and the sadness of not being real. “That’s just so beautiful,” I said, thinking of the letters I wrote to my parents, packed with fabrications about my life in Tokyo: how I had discovered an ancient scroll with the work of a lost poet; how I had an audience with the emperor and he handed me a silver tray of bonbons with his own hands, scandalizing the officials around us … I never actually mailed those letters, just collected them in a box in the closet.

  “The secret is to pretend you’re someone else,” said Sumiko, taking my fingers from her hair and holding them in her hand, kissing them one by one. “You can’t be the person who worries what other people think.”

  “Who’s left then?”

  “The imaginary person who tells the truth.”

  The next day, I left the library early, went to the market, and carried the groceries to her place, where I made dinner using the one pan that she owned. While I cooked she read me a story about an alien race that is being destroyed by a plague of dreams so beautiful that the sleeper refuses to wake. The cure for this plague can only be made from the hearts of human children who have never known love, so a scientist is sent to Earth to collect as many sad orphan hearts as she can. Wearing the body of a teenage girl like a space suit, she goes from orphanage to orphanage, killing children and extracting their hearts, even as spring comes to Tokyo, the cherry trees bloom, people get drunk in the park, and the last signal from her planet dies away forever.

  Sumiko didn’t have a table, so we ate at the lovely Japanese-style desk where she did her writing—sitting side by side and looking out the window at the evening light bluing the courtyard. “Do you ever feel like the alien in your story?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  I thought of the children in Shikoku, how they had touched my hair and run off, leaving me at a bus stop that was nothing but a patch of grass by the roadside. “I never realized Japanese people got lonely in that way.”

  “You speak the language, but you don’t know anything about real Japanese.”

  “You’re a real Japanese, and I know you.”

  “That’s what I like about you, that you need me so badly. You’re a being from another planet, and I’m your human guide, like in a sci-fi movie.” She rested her hand on my knee, very lightly. “I want to be the only one on Earth who understands you,” she said.

  “It’s not like there’s a lot of competition.” But I could feel something happening inside me, a slowing down, like when the kids touched my hair.

  “And I want you to be the only one who understands me,” she said.

  “I would like that.”

  She gave a little laugh. “No, you wouldn’t, not really. If you did, you’d realize this is all just playacting.”

  “What is?”

  “All of this—dinner, my stories, you and me. In less than a year I’ll graduate from school and get a job teaching kindergarten in some suburb or other while looking for an eligible man to marry.”

  “You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing.”

  “Resistance is futile in a country like this, because the thing you reject isn’t just out there, it’s in here.” She tapped her head. “Obedience is encoded in us through two thousand years of inbreeding.”

  “Are you saying that you are genetically unable to stop yourself from becoming a kindergarten teacher?”

  “Can a sunflower refuse to follow the sun? Can a girl refuse to grow breasts?” She got up and placed the notebook with her story back in the bookcase: four shelves of cheap notebooks dating back to grade school, their covers imprinted with red hearts or Hello Kitty cartoons. “You’ll never understand,” she said, running her finger over the spines. “You don’t want to.”

  Sumiko wasn’t completely wrong; deep down I couldn’t understand. That made her furious and she broke up with me often, usually late at night, when the trains had stopped running and I had to walk two hours back to my place. I’d call and leave messages, and we’d meet the next day, or the day after that, to argue and then kiss so that we could see how exactly we fit together, her body pressed to mine.

  But one night in February I looked up from my book and found her observing me with a hard, clinical expression, as if I were a beetle and she were going to pin me to a board. “I know what the problem is,” she said.

  “What problem?” I asked.

  “You think I’m ugly.”

  Sumiko looked like she’d come off a scroll from the Heian period, the era of aristocratic women in flowing robes and long hair: a pale round face, full lips, and eyebrows so elegant I would sometimes trace them with my finger. “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  “I’ve been teased all my life about my fat face.”

  I had no idea that her looks weren’t the general ideal anymore, that they hadn’t been the ideal for about a thousand years. “I think you’re beautiful,” I told her.

  I could see that she knew I meant it, and that she despised me for it. “That’s because you’re a foreigner and don’t really know what Japanese women are supposed to look like.”

  “So you think you’re ugly too?”

  “Obviously.”

  “And what does that make me?” I asked, not sure I had a right to be hurt when the subject was her looks.

  “Blind.”

  The walk home was so cold that it felt like ice crystals were forming inside my heart. I couldn’t erase the look of contempt Sumiko had given me. Back in my tiny four-mat room, I lay shivering under the quilts, unable to sleep, and then in the empty space before dawn I began thinking about my sister, Daisy, remembering how I’d stood in our backyard in New Jersey and watched her climb out of her bedroom window onto the roof of the house to scream at her boyfriend. That’s right, you better run, she yelled down at him as he jogged across the grass toward the gate. You better fucking run. She stood at the very edge of the roof, giving him the finger with both hands, and when he was gone she lay down on the black shingles, her arms and legs spread as if claiming space.

  “Hey,” I yelled up.

  “Leave me alone.”

  She was
vice president of the drama club at school, and still bitter about losing the presidency. She wrapped scarves around her neck and played dress-up and made faces in the mirror: her Marilyn Monroe face, her Jean-Paul Belmondo face, with a cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth. She had a maddening way of narrowing her eyes at me, as if she knew something about adulthood that she wasn’t telling. She wrote messages to herself in felt-tip pen on her arms—Only 10 miles to Broadway, you can walk if you have to. She was seventeen, and I was fourteen, and we’d just found out that she would need another round of chemo.

  I got up and called Sumiko and left a long, rambling message—left messages every day for a week till she finally picked up the phone. “I’m angry at you because you left,” she said to me.

  “You told me to leave.”

  “If you really loved me, you would have found a way to convince me to let you stay.”

  I was sitting with my legs in my kotatsu, a little table with an electric heat lamp on the bottom, surrounded by a quilted skirt to hold in the warmth. A half-finished letter was spread on the Formica tabletop, destined, like all the others, for the pile in the box. I’d taken Sumiko’s advice and pretended someone else was writing it, one of my professors, an elderly man with a vague manner and white chalk dust on his baggy suit. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Nussbaum, it ran, I regret to inform you that your son, Benjamin, seems to have fallen ill. He sits in the library with a book in front of him, but he never turns the page …

  I’d picked that professor because he always seemed so serene, sipping tea in his little office, which was lined with novels in three languages. But I’d clearly made some kind of mistake. He could tell you the plot of every story by Balzac or Chekhov or Tanizaki, but he couldn’t explain why I’d suddenly begun remembering my sister, particularly the last few months of her illness. I’d tried to make him write to my parents about her, about the way she looked sitting in the big armchair in her hospital room, her head tilted to the side, her eyes closed, resting in the sun coming through the window. Her face was all eyes by then. I got up to go for a walk—anything to get out of that room. “Stay,” she said, and I sat back down.

  I’d wanted the professor to tell my parents all of that, everything, but each time he lifted his pen, the words disappeared.

  “Remember what you said to me about an imaginary person writing your stories?” I asked Sumiko.

  “Why are you asking me this when we have serious things to discuss about you and me and this relationship?”

  “How do you know it’s the right imaginary person?”

  I heard her light a cigarette, as if considering the question, but what she finally said was, “My parents want to meet you.”

  She’d told me once that if she ever brought a foreigner home her father would probably force her to leave school and move back to Kamakura. “Do you think meeting them is a good idea?” I asked.

  “Don’t you think it’s time?”

  I’d heard her talk to them over the phone at night: conversations about relatives and school and her internship at the kindergarten. I’d stop whatever I was doing and watch her press the receiver to her ear with her shoulder. She’d be in nothing but a towel, shaving her legs or rubbing in moisturizer or brushing her hair as she talked, her face slowly changing back to some earlier version of herself: placid and contented, the face of a girl.

  “Your parents aren’t going to like me,” I said.

  “They need to know who I like.”

  We took the train out to Kamakura that Saturday afternoon, carrying overnight bags. I’d cut myself shaving—a long, stinging cut too big for a Band-Aid. It had occurred to me that meeting the parents must mean something more than it did in New Jersey, but I didn’t want to think about that. Instead, as the endless suburbs rolled by the window, I practiced with the flash cards I’d made, each one containing a polite phrase I’d found in an old grammar book, the sort of phrase so arcane, so excessively, self-abasingly polite that it was almost never used anymore, even by the most punctilious of native speakers.

  “You don’t have to worry,” said Sumiko. “Just be yourself and everything will be fine.” She was dressed in a prim outfit I’d never seen before: wool tights, a gray flannel skirt and cashmere sweater, a string of pearls, a headband. She lit the end of one cigarette with another all the way to Kamakura, and then threw out the remainder of the pack as we pulled into the station. “Just don’t say anything about me smoking or drinking or you staying over at my place,” she told me.

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  “And don’t say anything about my writing, either.”

  “They don’t know about that?”

  “Of course not.”

  Sumiko’s parents were bigger, bulkier versions of her, with the same round faces and elegant eyebrows. They ushered us into the family car and took us to an ancient Buddhist monastery, where we walked the grounds, pretending to sightsee, our breath making steam in the air. Gravel paths, delicate wooden temples that seemed to sit weightlessly, like birds ready to take flight: the place was so beautiful that it felt otherworldly, and that aura transferred to Sumiko’s parents, who looked as if it all belonged to them, as surely as their camel-hair coats and kid-leather gloves. I walked beside them with a mixture of anxiety and hunger, waiting for a chance to use one of the phrases from my flash cards, waiting for the chance to be loved. Sumiko kept close, pitching in with the small talk, but after a while she drifted off with her mother, the two of them talking together in low, conspiratorial voices. Her father turned to me, smiling. “They’ve left us alone for a man-to-man talk, haven’t they?” His tone was bemused, but I could see that it was put on for my sake, a form of delicacy.

  “You are far too kind to an undeserving wretch like myself,” I said, finally using one of the flash-card phrases.

  “What marvelous Japanese,” he said, giving an embarrassed little laugh. “I understand you plan to become a professor?”

  “Yes, that’s my intention.” But as soon as I heard the words out loud I knew that I wouldn’t, that I would never be able to follow through. I didn’t want to do anything but watch the late movie with Sumiko, and listen to her stories, and run out and buy roast potatoes from the cart pushed by the old man with the plaintive call.

  “And will you seek a post here, or in America?”

  “Here, definitely.”

  He fell silent, and I listened to the gravel crunch underfoot as we walked, waiting for him to tell me that I was full of shit and he knew it. But he just kept smiling his troubled smile, and a moment later we had rejoined the women. They were examining a line of stone Buddhas, heartbreakingly beautiful things worn smooth by the years, stippled with yellow lichen. “Lovely, aren’t they?” said Sumiko’s mother.

  “So peaceful,” I said, looking at their bald heads and serene baby faces, their eyes closed against the world. They were images of the Buddha called Jizō, guardian of children and travelers. I’d seen smaller versions of them now and then at the side of the road, marking the spot of a traffic fatality, or in temple cemeteries, pinwheels and plastic toys left by their feet as offerings.

  “It’s getting late,” said Sumiko’s father, looking at his watch.

  “We should probably head home for dinner,” said Sumiko’s mother, and the four of us started up the path, walking slowly in the falling light. After a little ways, I veered off to examine a stone marker, pretending to read the characters running down the side but really watching the others as they continued on: Sumiko between her mother and father, her father with his hands behind his back, her mother gripping her pocketbook. They had that aura families have, of existing in a self-enclosed world, tucked inside this one but separate. At the big front gate, they turned back to view the grounds, looking as if they’d momentarily forgotten my presence.

  Sumiko’s parents fussed over me during dinner, her mother picking out the best things and putting them on my plate, her father filling and refilling my glass with beer, both of them as
king questions about my family back home. I had no choice but to tell them about my father, the math professor; my mother, the cruciverbalist, meaning a designer of crossword puzzles. But I didn’t tell them that my sister had died when I was sixteen, and that the remainder of the Nussbaums had never quite recovered the ability to speak to each other. I didn’t mention the antidepressants and the antianxiety meds and the sleeping pills and the time my mother took too many by accident and we had to call an ambulance.

  “And do you have any brothers or sisters?” asked Sumiko’s father, finally, smiling his patient smile.

  “No, I’m an only child.”

  “It must be hard for your parents, having you so far away,” said Sumiko’s mother, choosing yet more things for me with the long chopsticks used for serving.

  “I write to them all the time.”

  Her face was like Sumiko’s, but with deep creases around the eyes, which were humorous and kind and disappointed all at once. “I don’t think we could stand Sumiko being so far. I’d worry too much.”

  “Even Tokyo’s too far,” said Sumiko’s father, pouring me more beer. “But then a girl’s different from a boy.”

  I glanced over at Sumiko to see how she was taking this. She sat by her mother, a glass of tea cupped in her hands, nothing showing on her face.

  I excused myself to go to the bathroom, but really just wandered the house, trying to breathe. Down a long polished hall, I came across Sumiko’s old bedroom, a Japanese version of my sister’s: anime posters on the walls, shelves with dolls and stuffed animals, a shoe box full of mix tapes.

  That night, Sumiko slept in her old bedroom, seemingly a world away. I slept in the guest room, which, like the rest of the house, expensive and elegant, smelled of new tatami and varnished wood. But I couldn’t really sleep, and I kept imagining that I heard Sumiko’s footsteps coming down the hall, forbidden and dangerous. Eventually I got up and went to the window to look at the moon, which was just a cold sliver.

  In the last year of her life, my sister and I used to sneak out onto the roof of our house at night to smoke weed. This was in Leonia, New Jersey, right across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, in a neighborhood of big oaks and old Victorians restored by a generation in search of cheap real estate—our parents and their friends. Daisy and I made a big show of turning up our noses at their hand-painted Italian kitchen tile, their charcoal water filters and basement radon detectors, their inexpensive but highly drinkable wines—everything they used to convince themselves that they were exempt from the dangers outside. We would climb out the bay window and sit on the rough black shingles, looking up at the spray of stars above our heads, feeling the rush of the river beyond the black silhouettes of the trees, and beyond that the dense presence of the city, where life really happened. We never talked much; we had already picked up the habit of silence. We would pass the joint between us, a little star traveling from her hand to mine and back, and the house would seem to float beneath our weight like a ship on the water, traveling with the current, faster and faster into the darkness.