by Ann Beattie
I came to like the girls so much that I made a mistake. I began to mythologize my own life, though I didn’t realize at first that that was what I was doing because I was never the heroine of my stories; instead, like my students, I was a stranger in a strange land (suburbia), expected to play a confusing new role (stepmother; I eventually had to confess my real relationship to Jason, while still fudging about my marital status); soul mate to someone who thought of himself as charismatic—a word I had success in defining by conjuring up Mick Jagger, who seemed to be an excellent cross-cultural reference point for many things—but who was actually quite conservative and demanding. I gave them an example: Carl would manipulate me into going on family outings I wouldn’t like by thanking me in advance for being such a trooper. I let Carl remain a little ambiguous to them by making him seem romantic and likable as well as the source of many of my problems, but Jason I simply demonized. I described the dishes sliding off Estelle’s table with the fervor of someone who had viewed the devastation at Hiroshima; I made Jason’s eating habits interchangeable with those of starving cannibals; I explained his clumsiness in serious psychological terms (disguised aggression), after conjuring up Wile E. Coyote going over a cliff. I told them that if Jason were Superman, he would fly into buildings.
They listened, spellbound. They wanted more and more. Without exactly intending it, I had created a fictional character for them to confront in their imaginations, distracting them from the teenage boys who were their real tormentors. Manic, clumsy Jason was someone they could feel superior to. They liked it that all his adventures were misadventures. They liked it that we had a common bond, that by rejecting Jason, I accepted them; they all became Teacher’s Pet, like Cerberus sprouting extra heads.
I miscalculated, though, because I trusted that they would understand, on some level, that I was inventing a larger-than-life Jason. I assumed that my grudging affection for Jason would shine through. I probably even thought that they would intuit that I was in over my head. Moriko Watanabe, however, became all too enthralled with Jason. She begged me to take him shopping somewhere where she could see him; she offered to smuggle me her father’s expensive camcorder so I could record him in mid-dash from some calamity. She had a bright-eyed I-Believe-in-Santa expression of such incredulity that it bordered on being obscene; it was really a leer.
One day Moriko, bright-eyed, caught up with me when I was walking to my car. Her friend Miharu was with her.
“Mrs. Woodruff,” Moriko said, “Jason reminds me of the story of Susanowo. Have you heard it? He was a god, but the story is really about his sister.”
“I don’t know that story,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “it’s about a boy just like your son. He messes everything up! He never does what he is supposed to do. He’s the storm god, and he’s supposed to watch over the sea, but instead, he ruins the land. He destroys everything, and his sister, Ameterasu, becomes frightened of him and goes into a cave. She is gone, and there is no light for anyone.” Moriko pauses for effect. “And then there is a huge celebration that some people have, because perhaps if there is a party outside the cave, she will come out.”
As she spoke, I noticed how fine her fingers were; how slender her wrists. She waved one hand elegantly, as if she were waving politely to a crowd that admired her. “Then,” she said, “when she cannot stand the suspense, she comes all the way out, and a mirror—like the mirror in your compass—”
“Compact,” I said.
“Yes. It’s held out to her, and she sees her own reflection and is brought all the way out and everyone rejoices because there is light again, and the sun god is among them.”
“She was kunitokotachi,” Miharu broke in to tell me, as I opened my car door. She pronounced the word with reverence. “This means what is unseen. The spirit of the universe.”
They both nodded, smiling.
“Good,” I said. “She presided again, and everything was okay.”
“A rope is stretched across the cave. It stops her, so she cannot go back in even if she wants to,” Miharu said.
Moriko nodded. In equal measure, there seemed to be simultaneous confusion and acceptance of what Miharu had just told me.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I told the girls.
Then they became girls again, whispering and giggling together.
—
Several days later, Moriko began phoning the house. She set a fire in a trash can, probably hoping Jason would run out to smother it.
I knew who the silent caller was because, after many hang-ups, I heard someone call Moriko’s name while she was holding the silent phone. It was the neighbor who saw her set the fire and called the police. We were trekking in the Blue Ridge Mountains, several hours away from Carl’s house in suburban Washington—an outing made miserable by Jason’s having switched the Evian in my bottle for salt water.
Our neighbor, Anthony Diaz, gave chase to Moriko and caught her a few houses away, then dragged her back to his house and called the police when she wouldn’t tell him her name. She was taken to the police station, where her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tomoo Watanabe, were called. There, apparently, a chilling though garbled account was given of our mutual persecution—Moriko’s and mine—by a name-calling, xenophobic monster (she remembered the term I had taught her well). I was called by an outraged Tomoo Watanabe at ten o’clock at night (not that he hadn’t left plenty of messages earlier). I was guilty of ruining Moriko’s life, and of causing her to disgrace the family. In his own fictionalization, my son, Jason, was a person with a mental handicap whom I was badly mistreating. I had tried to throw the boy over a cliff, he informed me. After a lengthy talk with his daughter at the police station, she had informed the police of the same thing. Tomoo Watanabe, Spin Doctor: the wrongly maligned Moriko had set the fire to rescue Jason.
Let it be known that when all this first began to unfold I had been home alone with Jason because message 1 of our filled-up message tape had been from Estelle, saying that Nonette’s son had threatened her and that she had left her house and gone to a Holiday Inn and didn’t know what to do next.
Jason hid under his bed when the police came, late at night, to the house, and when I tried to drag him out to corroborate that I had never tried to throw him over a cliff, he kicked and screamed (he was angry that his father had spanked him on the trail when the salt-water switch was discovered) and told them I wasn’t his mother. Fortunately, he was too out of control to be believed, and I have the open, honest face of any woman who has not been totally steamrollered by life. When Jason provided no further specifics, the police officers became more sympathetic and even relaxed enough to accept a cup of tea. They sat at the kitchen table. I tried to be very calm and slightly world-weary (no problem there) as I communicated that I was bemused by what one of my silly young students had done. Both of the police officers had children. They seemed to sympathize and hurried through their written report. One took lavender honey with her tea. Fortunately, they left before I had to explain Carl’s absence in any detail (he was “visiting a friend who was having something of a crisis”), but I didn’t get off the hook as easily with “my husband” when he arrived home. With him, too, I tried to act bemused about Moriko’s folly. I could not very well explain that I had created a cartoon demon in Moriko’s mind by caricaturing his son, though, so Moriko’s actions ended up seeming random and bizarre, and the more I tried to insist that a fire in a trash can was nothing, the more Carl presented it as our neighbor had to the police: the little bitch was dangerous, and furthermore, he had advised against my taking a permanent teaching job to begin with, and here was an example of how kids that age would do anything for a teacher’s attention—by implication, Helter Skelter was next—and what he really needed was a mother for his son (snoring on top of the bed, by the time Dad returned; if someone could be smug in sleep, Jason was) and a mother for the daughter he so dearly desired.
—
Carl and I stand looking into h
is sleeping son’s room. A poster of King Kong, holding tiny Jessica Lange, is taped to the wall above his bed. Legos are scattered on the floor like rice in a church driveway. Carl is taking the opportunity to conjure up for me his wedding: the four-months-pregnant Beatrice in her white velvet dress, with “something blue” the half-slip she wore, embroidered by her with a small depiction of a tiny, big-headed embryo of the child she was carrying—a sort of latter-day Hester (if Hester had worn her A on the inside), a little personal reminder, a little symbolic nod toward the future, no more likely to be seen—or, if seen, recognized—than the clean underwear so many people’s mothers urge them to wear when taking a trip. The sleeping Jason has provoked a trip down memory lane for Carl that even has him describing his former wife’s undergarments, as well as the amount, the sheer amount, of rice that was once thrown in a church driveway in his behalf. Do I, or do I not, want a daughter? he demands.
“What would you do if it turned out to be another son?” I ask, trying to be reasonable, not shitty, but it sets him off.
He asked a serious and logical question, okay. But consider it from my perspective: I had been looking for romance, not family life, when I responded to his misleading ad. It could not be said that Jason and I have become soul mates. It could also not be said that Carl and I are a match made in heaven, because he is old-fashioned in thinking that women should not work, except to take care of the home and the family. Does he seriously, really and truly, think that I should hang around the house, sweeping up dust, sweeping problems under the rug, growing a baby belly just so he can pursue his relentless desire to be normal, average, and in that way somehow cosmically make up for the fact that his parents were thrill-seeking adventurers who left him orphaned?
We climb into bed—my favorite moment of the day—and he tells me the story of Estelle, hiding from Nonette’s son, Tyrone Jr., but not so nervous she didn’t make an appointment for a hair styling and facial at the Holiday Inn’s new spa. It seems Tyrone Jr. did not actually threaten her, but used language not fit for a lady to hear. He insisted that his mother had taken no money, and that furthermore, their minister would attest to her honesty. The minister was apparently in a bar with Tyrone Jr. when he called, and Estelle obviously panicked as much to think they might pay a late-night call and expect her to pray with them—Estelle is not a religious woman—as that Tyrone Jr. might come to the house and deck her. It was Nonette’s dishonesty that offended Estelle, not the missing money. As Carl talked, I could almost hear her simpering.
Carl resumes the discussion of Moriko Watanabe, and, sleepy, I find myself doing the same thing to Carl that I did to Moriko. I begin to think aloud—the way so many bedtime stories come into being—and to create a story in which Moriko is acting out her hostility because too much is expected of her.
How exactly did this cause her to set a fire in our trash can?
I sidestep this. “It wasn’t exactly the Feds storming Ruby Ridge.” What Moriko did was more analogous to Brownies gathered around the campfire, roasting marshmallows: just a little fire; just a little danger. “She’s my favorite student,” I say to Carl, having just decided that. “Her real problem is with her parents.”
“She can be the flower girl at our wedding,” Carl says, sliding a hand under my nightgown.
“She’s too old to be a flower girl.”
“Matron of honor,” he says, sliding his hand higher.
“Stop pretending to be sex crazed and insensitive.”
He sits up and reaches below the bed and comes up with my bedroom slipper. It is blue terry cloth: the stretchy kind, with a small blue bow. “You are not my true love if this shoe doesn’t fit,” he says. He cradles it in his hand, drawing out the moment when he will slip it on my foot.
“Oh, Carl, give it a break,” I say.
“You’re not going to find anybody better than me, because you’re not perfect yourself,” he says.
“When did I say I was? I’m sulky and I don’t respect myself for being too easily manipulated, and I have no idea what I’d really like to work at, but I do know that I have to refuse to be an incubator for you and a stepmother to a boy who doesn’t like me very much.”
“He’s jealous,” Carl says. “He used to have my undivided attention.”
We jump when the phone rings. It is Tomoo Watanabe, even more incensed after receiving whatever call he has by now received from the police. This man wanted body parts to be found, I am certain.
“Listen, buddy boy,” Carl says, grabbing the phone. “It’s bedtime. You have some respect for our customs. You’ve got the juvenile delinquent daughter. She could have burned our house down.”
“Not my daughter!” Tomoo Watanabe shouts.
Carl hangs up on him and turns off the ringer. He also makes it downstairs in time to hear only one ring from Mr. Watanabe’s next call before he turns off that ringer, too.
“Marry me,” he says, coming back into the bedroom and thudding onto the bed. “It’s the only way. What are you going to do, keep auditioning guys? They’ll all tell you a good story and then turn out to be just as disappointing as me.”
“You haven’t been disappointing. I just don’t agree with many of your ideas.”
“I don’t agree with all of them myself,” he says. “It was once my idea to marry a woman who kept a half-pint of Jack Daniel’s floating in the toilet tank and jars of candied cherries hidden in her underwear drawer.”
“You were young,” I say.
“Tins of anchovies hidden in the umbrella stand,” he says.
“Stop punishing yourself.”
“Anchovies,” he repeats, after a pause.
I turn off the clip-on light on my side of the headboard.
“I realize there isn’t much of anywhere for this conversation to go after bringing up my bulimic former wife,” Carl says glumly.
Beatrice advertised for a new companion while still married to Carl. When a new relationship worked out, she left the man’s ad taped to the bathroom mirror, with a big lipsticked check mark beside it. To begin immediately: Carl’s further dependency on Estelle + a cycle of nannies. Then—inspired by Beatrice’s boldness and determined to prove that some good always comes of adversity—Carl’s own ad, so transparently downbeat that his best friend rewrote it. Then: me. A conventional girl from a conventional family, a nice Canadian with a red maple leaf pin on her lapel and a charm bracelet that advertised her conflict: it dangled a miniature typewriter, an artist’s palette, a baby shoe, a Scottie dog, and a shovel, which a former boyfriend maintained was actually a coke spoon. Back in my days at Humber College, I had had exactly eight dates: five with a boy who left school to go to England to study acting (I lived with him the summer before he left, so I stopped counting the days as “dates”), one with a boy from Hamilton, New York, who wanted to participate in the space program, and two with my English-lit professor, who made me read his whole 1,200-page novel before he admitted he was married. I was twenty-four when I met Carl, who is the one true love of my life: thirty-four, six feet tall, handsome, with a Roman nose that often has an eternal adolescent pimple on one side. He is exactly the age his father was when the plane he was piloting smashed into trees in Anchorage. It was a dark, well-kept secret, until her obituary ran, that his wife, Carl’s mother, was seven years older than her husband. Even Estelle didn’t know.
