Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (27 page)

Mercifully, the boat did not give three desolate Durasian blasts but one proud bellow. I survived it. There were no tug-boats of course, it was a new ferry complete with modern conveniences and the best of engines. Its withdrawal from the dock looked effortless, smooth as that of a toy’s pulling away from the edge of a bathtub. I watched the dark-haired figure until I couldn’t see it anymore and then I watched the moonish crescent of the boat move across the blue sky of the water until the crescent became a sliver and then the blue was all.

“There!” Maria clawed roughly at my silk blouse and beamed. I turned very slowly toward her to observe her handiwork, trying as best I could, for the duration of that inevitable gesture, to restore myself. She had lined the moat with tiny orange shells and placed a white pebble at the top of each tower. In my highly susceptible state, I was nearly moved to tears by the care with which she had executed her project.

“Bravo, darling! You’ve done a lovely job of building your castle,” I said, trembling from the effort it took to dismiss all thoughts of him in favor of Maria.

“I know!” she shrieked. And then, with chubby energetic fists, she smashed the towers down. I looked at her lips pursed with triumph, at her exultant, imperious eyes, and felt acutely that our days of symbiosis, of shared happiness over milk well drunk and a nap well slept, were gone.

With that, I had had enough. I dragged her, kicking and slapping in a fit of rage, to the bus stop. She had wanted to build a replacement castle (if not thousands of replacement castles) but I could no longer withstand the beach charade. The perplexing truth was, despite my tendency to inhabit islands, I loathed beaches. The continuous motion of the sea nauseated me and I had an aversion to the many grains of sand that always found their way into our food, our bed, my books. I preferred the shelter of the woods, now more than ever.

* * *

The next day, quite miserably, was my birthday. There was nothing to celebrate. Of course I had brought such desolation upon myself by idiotically requesting from the young man the “gift of some other day” which, I realize now, did nothing but prevent me from seeing him on my actual birthday. Seeing him, even from a distance, would have been a gift, albeit a tortuous one. It was another unfathomable miscalculation on my part.

Maria woke early and immediately began kicking me. “I want you on your back! Put your glasses on!!!” I had grown accustomed to such commands and was at a loss as to how to curb her tyrannical impulses. My primary concern was keeping her quiet so that Var would not wake. Hauntingly, overnight, I had been rematronized. How quickly the terms came back to me. When one marries one arrives with another on an island whose size, shape, flora, fauna, climate etc., one’s marriage defines. One may abandon the island, though in many cases this is quite difficult. Often there is no boat, nor materials with which to fashion one. Often there is a boat but no paddles, or paddles but no boat. More often still, both boat and paddles await at the shore but one has no life jacket, swimming ability, or provisions. My only respite was to be the hours during which my husband slept.

When at last Var woke, he went to the restroom directly and I heard his torrential stream of urine spilling into the bowl. He came out, put his well-washed hands (he always washed well, one could always smell the soap) on my cheeks and kissed me. “Happy Birthday!” he said and smiled. I’m fairly certain he hadn’t smiled at me since my last birthday. Birthdays brought out some tender strain in him. This too I had forgotten. I was an amnesiac with no interest in being cured whose memory was all too quickly returning. Before Maria was born Var had pampered me like a child on my birthday. After she took her rightful place on the little girl throne, he maintained his yearly expression of tenderness though now it was more like that of a son towards his mother, the sort of tenderness one has for any old person on her birthday. Our slight difference in age seemed to grow more pronounced over time. Now when he smiled I felt him pitying me; when he held my cheeks I imagined he palpated my aging skin out of curiosity, my body always one year closer to death than his own.

That evening he made his customary announcement. “I want to take you out to dinner.”

“But how will you pay for it?” I asked as gently as I could. He had not worked in months (unless one counted his Etsy site and I, perhaps heartless, perhaps unforgiving, did not), there was no possibility of there being any money in his account.

“Credit card,” he said emphatically, sounding sure of himself as always, my cautious question an insult to his intelligence.

“Great!” I assented at once to increasing our credit card debt.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked and our debate, annual and tedious, ensued. Var disliked my favorite restaurant (freshly baked muffins and cakes, locally grown produce and meat just down the road) and I was averse to his (BBQ joint down-island) and so, despite it being my birthday and not Maria’s, we settled on her favorite (Brazilian cafeteria near the post office) which Var and I both felt tepid toward but not opposed to.

There was no menu to inspect so we were at least spared the tedium of that ritual.
What are you getting? What should we get for her? She won’t eat that. She never eats that. Yes, she does. Yes, she will. She ate it with me last time
,
 
et cetera, et cetera. We stood speechless in a line with our sickly, yellow trays and shoveled food onto our own plates and onto the plate of our child with the public spoons. I took the rice and beans and some pickled cucumbers. There was no cooked vegetable that evening. It was not, I was reminded, my lucky day. The food was tasty enough, not fresh but tasty. I quite like Brazilian food but could do without cafeterias on my birthday.

As fate would have it, in the rear of the restaurant, there was a little girl in a red dress having a birthday party. From where I sat I could see a bouquet of balloons and her impressive heap of presents. Our meal was accompanied by children’s shrieks of laughter and adults praising the children and clapping. At the end of the meal a yellow frosted cake ablaze with hot pink candles was brought out and the whole restaurant, even Var, sang “Happy Birthday.” Maria was thrilled by the coincidence and kept saying, “Mama! When are they going to bring your cake?!”

The happy scene reminded me of the young man’s impending birthday. What would he look like on the 4th of November? Would he have cut his hair or would he have let it grow? Would he be tan? Would he have facial hair? If so, would he have shaved? And what of his voice? Would it have grown deeper still? And what about today? Where on this earth was my seventeen-year-old lover on the day that I turned forty-two?

I did not know how long I could endure the sensation of being once more married to Var. Certainly nothing had changed with regard to his schedule; he was in the apartment day and night as he had always been. But my eyes, which had been turned elsewhere, swiveled back to our life in the apartment and were sharply in focus. I saw bits of his moustache caught in the bathroom faucet fixtures, his bottle of dandruff shampoo in the shower stall bubbling over with blue shampoo, coffee grounds on the counter, used filters in the sink, dribbles of the black liquid in a trail from the sink to the garbage pail, a snowlike dusting of dandruff on the black hills of the sofa, wood shavings upon the floor, knives lying about like toys on the coffee table within Maria’s reach. Everywhere I looked I saw Var.

And then, like the view through the enormous metal machine at the optometrist’s office, what I saw changed. Not quickly of course; alas, there was no kindly man in a white coat to press the lever that would make the view immediately more pleasant for me, but soon enough, quite magically really, Var’s presence receded once more to a tolerable level. Indeed I found ways to occupy myself.

* * *

Once I had faced squarely the fact that the young man had crossed the sea and would not, even if I were to plead, turn back, I resorted to following his course on the large noncirculating maps kept in thin wooden drawers in the Reading Room. For the first week of our separation I spent my lunch breaks poring over various physical, political, and road maps which I took the liberty of spreading out on one end of the long table despite the continual presence of patrons working quietly at their laptops. The maps crackled loudly when I set them down and I had to take my glasses off to read them but I didn’t care. It became a compulsion, something I both looked anxiously forward to and deeply dreaded. Always, when the maps cracked like lightning I was filled with anticipation, as if, when I put my index finger on the place where he now was, rain would fall from the ceiling, thunder would sound, and, like a god, the young man would materialize. And always, after I had placed the maps in their proper drawers and shut them, I felt a sharp sense of disappointment at my own failure to conjure him. Each of these sessions was marked by a vague sense of idiocy and hopelessness for I knew how very old the maps were and had to wonder if the many streets and highways I studied so closely even existed any longer.

What saved me from complete cartographic insanity was that the young man arrived in California and called as promised. We were eating dinner when the phone rang. I leapt to answer it and brought the receiver like a lover to my bedroom. It was, not surprisingly, a bad connection; the new mobile phone had poor reception there where he was on the river. His voice came and went the way songs do on car radios when one is driving (or in my case being driven) in a remote area.

“Hey,” he said. Then the connection seemed to die. After a few moments, I heard him say, “I made it.” I thought I heard the sound of the river (or was it interference?) which was a comfort to me. He was there. Somewhere.

“Good. I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Thanks,” he said and somehow this time, his politeness wounded me. He said he was standing next to the river, he said it was beautiful. His voice sounded deeper. I didn’t know if this was due to the poor connection or whether during the time it had taken him to travel from coast to coast, he had matured a great deal. It was certainly possible. If a child could change overnight, I hardly dared to think what ten consecutive days and nights could accomplish. He sounded older, twenty at least. I was afraid if we spoke again he would sound older still, that by month’s end he would have surpassed me, his voice in early August that of an old man. I did not receive the comfort of hearing “his voice” for his voice had changed, it was no longer the voice I had known.

“I miss you,” I said, feeling trite, craving convention.

“Me too.” We stayed in silence for a few minutes. I lay on the bed pressing the phone to my ear. I heard the sound of the river again, sure this time that it was not static but something beyond it. It sounded like he was walking, crunching on gravel or rocks. “I have to go,” he said.

“Okay,” the word was mine now. “Thank you for calling.”

“Of course,” he said, the words his utterly. “I’ll think about you later,” he mumbled.

“Me too,” I said, having no idea how very true this would be, how very deep into the future this
later
would extend.

When I went to the kitchen to replace the phone Var asked, “Who was it?”

“No one,” I answered and felt I was being truthful. For all practical purposes the young man was no one now; I was certain of this. Perhaps Var sensed my certainty because he did not press further. He returned to carving his
kokeshi
,
 
which I, being a sentimentalist at heart, could not help but wish he was making for me and which he later gave to Maria.

* * *

My first foray into a Violet-style emancipation—unexpected, overdue—began the next day. Helmetless, in a red sundress, I rode my bicycle to P.I.P. under the auspices of buying a pie. It seemed a shame to deprive myself of such a luxury in the absence of any reason not to. There was no crime in shopping there, no longer any need to hide myself from view. How deliciously ordinary I felt! Never mind that the small parking lot was swarming with expensive cars, the tiny aisles jammed with respectable people. Any one of them could see I was doing absolutely nothing wrong. I was a middle-aged woman come to buy a pie from a friend.

A bell tinkled as I opened the door, an elderly man on my left was carefully weighing white peaches, two girls laughed together at something on a can, the telephone rang and Violet—cordoned off behind the counter in the way of a celebrity—picked it up and said in a cheery public voice, “Plum Island Provisions!” The narrow produce corner was packed tightly as a pint of figs, the glass door of the cheese case fogged from being opened so often. There was no way to access the foreign section due to the line that now curved in front of it. It felt more like a Manhattan deli than a country farm stand, an island within an island.

I joined the line and waited. I watched Violet. I studied the lines in the wood floor. When I reached the display of foreign goods I bypassed the South American chocolate infused with Valencia orange in favor of a Scharffen Berger milk. This was not the time or place in which to experience uncontrollable fits of desire. As it was, I was out of my element, there was not one book on the shelves.

Slowly, I neared the front counter. Violet wore a white apron with the bodice folded down, its straps wound back and tied in front. Through the bakery glass I could see her retrieving a familiar-looking biscuit. She didn’t see me.

She stood up again, her face flushing a bit, and asked, “May I help you?” and then she saw who I was and we laughed. “May! What are you doing here?” she asked, as if her establishment were one of ill repute.

“I’ve come to buy a pie.”

“Really?! Which one?”

“Strawberry rhubarb, please, if you have that.”

“Yes, one left. We saved it for you.”

“Oh, good. I’ve been wanting to buy this pie for about ten years.” I fumbled with my money, feeling not unlike her son, awkwardly and with trembling hands, paying overdue fines, as if it were she, the one invisibly connected to him, that I’d been destined for.