Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (8 page)

There was a hint of alarm in his eyes and I feared he would ask me the question
why?
but he did not. I waited for him to answer. The alarm receded like sunlight into the dark of his eyes. Later I would learn that he was seldom good at camouflage but when it came to the concealment of fear he was virtuosic. His look of fear was brief but I caught it and was unnerved by it. Perhaps because I was so frightened myself, I had not imagined I would frighten him. When finally he consented, I wasn’t sure if he had conceded as a minor to an adult’s request or if his answer had been driven by free will.

Having acquiesced, he stood erectly, moved his head back, his chin slightly down, his eyes to the carpet. He took a step back from the counter without taking the films. I pushed them toward him.

“Your movies are due in one week!” I said, now a pert Sybil, desperate to resume a more perfunctory mode.

His face looked drained of blood, a physical change which, though unsettling, did nothing to diminish his beauty. (On the contrary it gave him the look of an invalid, one who does nothing all day but lie in bed and desire.) I felt a double dart of guilt, one for having ambushed him in public (possibly within earshot of Nella, who, though she showed no signs of having overheard my proposition, had the ears of a bloodhound), another for wishing that he would now get out of my sight so that I might recover in solitude. He grabbed the DVDs and nodded goodbye, as if any further utterance might induce him (or me) to vomit.

His departure was a relief. I felt a stringent need to be counseled which became more stringent still when I realized that it would not be wise to speak of my foray with anyone. I glanced back at Nella who was making a flyer for the Saturday craft. I tried in vain to read her face. It was inscrutable. Her left hand delved noisily into the cavernous bag of puffs while her right hand clicked the mouse. She might have continued these actions for the duration of our encounter, absorbed by her task, or she might have used them as a cover while listening intently. I was no stranger to such tricks of the librarian’s trade.

Of course it mattered little whether Nella had heard me or not. Nella, with her ever scanning yet half-mast eyes, her perpetually cocked ears and her silence, her insistence on a slow pulse, a flat heart rate, her refusal to fret over any library matter, should have been the least of my worries. What my lobe-less brain failed to compute that afternoon (paradox being an inaccessible concept to one as denuded of reason as I had become) was that by reaching out to the young man, I had made myself an island. With each passing minute I drifted further from the main, further from the familiar shore upon which Nella’s hand was partaking once more of the flame-colored pile as she contemplated clip art and fonts for her flyer, upon which Siobhan in the next room, with her long, graceful fingers and their fine, tapered nails, was gently setting still more green cards into the wooden tray in service of those whose desires required additional research, upon which our director, in the basement below me, her energy unflagging as that of a hired horse, stayed late most nights, cataloging new acquisitions, writing grants, making phone calls, paying bills, reassessing the budget, signing off every two weeks on the time sheets that would pay me my due. The shore upon which I too had once occupied myself with the tools of my trade—bone folder, X-Acto knife, scissors, book tape, scotch tape, paper cutter, paper shredder, countless rolls of stickers, and plastic laminate—was swiftly disappearing. I had crossed one chasm only to discover another. Between the receding shore of my former existence and the tiny green earth of my new life rose a dark, watery gulf. But I had yet to discover it. I was stranded in my joy.

When at last my shift was over, I ran to the apartment brimming with happiness. As nonsensical as it may sound, I couldn’t wait to see Maria.

She was in the garden. As soon as I saw her red coat I ran toward it. “Ave Maria!” I cried out.

“Mama!” she shouted. I knelt down and held her. She wriggled away. “Mama! Did you bring me something?” It was my daily habit to bring her a book. In my trembling, lobotomized state, I had forgotten.

“Oh no! I’m sorry, love, I didn’t have time.” My first lie. (I didn’t count the lie I had invented in order to procure an extra fifteen minutes for myself each morning. That was an innocent lie, invented for innocent purposes.) I don’t know why I didn’t simply tell the truth and confess that I’d forgotten. It was the beginning of my use of treachery to establish the appearance of truth.

“But you’re supposed to bring me something!” she whined.

“I know, I know,” I said quickly, too happy to get bogged down. “I’ll bring you two things tomorrow, I promise!” Though as yet I had committed no wrong, my guilt had already ignited in me a need to make reparations.

I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to know why I was happy. It was a stupid and dangerous desire to be sure. I quelled it.

“Will you put me in the tree?” she asked, sensing that I would do virtually anything for her.

“Yes!” I ran with her to the other side of the garden and lifted her onto the lowest branch of her favorite oak tree. A translucent net of fog passed over us, barely visible against the silver sky. “It’s such a lovely afternoon,” I said, squinting up at her. She growled at me, the way she did whenever I spoke to her directly while in fact preoccupied with other thoughts. I growled back and held her ankles. “Maria,” I crooned.

“I’m not Maria. I’m a leaf monkey. That’s a monkey the size of a leaf!”

At the top of the tree, there were three orange leaves, fluttering page-like in the wind. This surprised me for in my unscientific, melancholy state I’d thought every last leaf had fallen to the ground. But these leaves were still alive, their colors vivid as pumpkins. I felt the way I had at age eleven upon walking out of the optometrist’s office for the first time, at last seeing the world as others saw it: a world so crisp and colorful it was cartoonlike, a world with the look of a dream.

I began to climb; my climbing always pleased her. She clapped her hands and then laughed as she lost her balance and then quickly clasped the branch once more. “You look so big!” she observed.

I hoisted myself up to the branch above her and sat astride it. “I’m a big mama.”

“It’s a little tree.”

“It’s not that little.”

“Yes it is,” she insisted. “You’re not that big. The tree is little.”

“Do you always see things as they truly are?” I asked playfully.

She looked off in the direction of the road. “Yes,” she answered gravely. “Yes I do.”

That night in the dark she asked, “Did your mother love you?” We were looking up at the glowing stars that the previous tenant had pasted pell-mell to the ceiling. It was not the first time she had posed this particular question and at bedtime which, in general, was the time that she reserved for her most pressing inquiries about mortality and love. Before I could answer her she said, “I want to be under your arm.” It was a phrase she uttered nightly and always as I slid my arm under her warm body, I felt the urge to correct her sentence—for my arm was under her and not the reverse—but then as I pulled her closer to me, my arm curled and wound its way around her until she was indeed “under my arm.” Nightly I realized her sentence was correct and so was silent. “Did your mother love you?” she asked again.

“When I was a little girl you mean?”

“Yes. When you were a little girl.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose.”

“But she must have loved you. You were her little girl.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably you’re right. Probably she did, but I don’t really know for sure.”

“I know she did.”

“Really?” I smiled. “How do you know?”

“Because you love me.”

“You’re right, I do.”

“Do you know why?”

“Why?”

“You love me because I’m here. If I weren’t here, you’d love another child. You love me because I’m here and I’m here because you love me.”

I was silent, not so much because I disagreed but because I had found the less I spoke, the more quickly she fell asleep. “Really!” she said loudly, as if I didn’t believe her.

“Okay,” I said softly and kissed her head, the smell of which after nearly five years still brought me to a new brink of pleasure. “How did you know that?” I asked sincerely.

“I was born knowing a lot of things.”

“Yes, you were.” I wished then, rather selfishly, that I could ask her for the answers to other questions, questions about right and wrong, devotion and happiness, questions about what, if anything, would happen tomorrow between the young man and me. But I said nothing. We lay there for a few minutes in silence, perhaps contemplating together all there was to know in the world, and then her breathing slowed and became more audible. I picked up one of her hands and let it fall.

Sedated by the mere prospect of pleasure, I slept heavily, my subconscious journeying nine hours to some never before seen glittering underworld, a place similar in location and intensity to hell and yet belonging visually and emotionally to heaven. When morning arrived, I swam directly to the surface of my dreams, bypassing countless sensual diversions en route, and burst like someone who has nearly drowned, panting and short of breath, into the bright bedroom air. Reality flooded my lungs like oxygen. I began at once to accomplish my morning duties. The sooner I accomplished them the sooner I would be released. After I had left Maria safely at the nursery, I prepared myself (as I had been taught by both my parents to do) for the worst: snow falling upon an empty street, no cars, no people, no birds, no one, not even a leaf waiting for me, and then I walked to our assigned meeting place.

* * *

It surprised me to find the young man standing on the very corner I had suggested. I could hardly believe that my words from the previous day had produced such an effect; I felt a touch of the conjurer’s power. He was wearing a dark blue hat marked by white snowflakes, the sort with earflaps that one puts on one’s child in winter. He looked heartbreakingly out of place, standing as he was so near to the school bus stop and yet frightfully far from that childhood destination. Part of me wanted to rush forward and warn him against people like myself, against the perils of meeting a stranger in broad daylight on a corner such as this, and part of me couldn’t be trusted.

As I drew near I saw that his eyes were sleepy slits, his upper cheeks puffy as peaches. He had the look of one who is not himself until noon. He smiled the family smile of happiness and pain. I smiled too, a smile that has taken some time to leave me, a smile that I can still retrieve in full.

“You came,” I said.

“I told you I would,” he sounded ever so slightly wounded. The words
power differential
returned to me and I quickly renewed my efforts at sensitivity.

“Oh, I didn’t doubt you or your word. I just meant I can hardly believe you’re here. It’s so good that you’re here. I can hardly believe it.” At this, he stepped behind the pole of the metal street sign, as if to hide himself, though it was far too slim to even begin to camouflage his new girth. “Shall we walk?” I asked a bit too brightly, sounding like an English biddy who is in her element early in the morning. (Though I was soon to discover that almost anything I said was liable to sound mature if not biddy-ish when uttered in his presence. It was part of the undeniable charm and awkwardness of our situation.)

I cast my eyes around quickly as we set off. Behind us, in the town hall lot: the clerk’s green pickup, the accountant’s blue hybrid, and the assessor’s black SUV. I glanced furtively at the windows on the second and third floors. The church lawn opposite us and the museum garden across the road were empty.

We walked down the left-hand side of Music Street in silence, the young man at my left kicking first at old chestnuts and then at acorns as we went. I wanted to reach for his ungloved hand, the fingertips of which hung miraculously down from his black coat sleeve like five tips of flesh in a confessional, yet I also felt vexed to watch for oncoming cars. I hadn’t anticipated the feeling of utter exposure our walking together on a road would produce. I’ve made a mistake, I thought. I’ve gone about this improperly. As if there were a proper way to go about it. I had neither the audacity to reach for his fingertips nor the strength to face onlookers. Instead, I looked down at the light dusting of snow that had fallen during the night. I was glad to be cold. I wanted to feel the rigors and harshness of the world. I wanted to feel the cold bite my skin with its sharp teeth, the way one wants a pinch when in need of a confirmation of reality.

I led him onto the small dirt road. It was a relief to be off the paved one. If my ears had not deceived me, not one car had passed. We paused for a moment on the land bridge, watched the still water on one side, the rushing water on the other. When finally we arrived at the waterfall I began to wonder, with a twitch of anxiety, what we would do. We continued up to the trailhead. As always, the NO TRESPASSING sign gave me a jolt. I hoped, with the fierceness of one who has been kept waiting a long while, that the kind owner of the fairyland would not appear. It was mildly distressing to walk her snowy trail accompanied by someone other than Maria, to hear the unfamiliar crunch of the young man’s boots behind me, and when I looked down and back, to see the two sets of prints—his large boots behind my smaller ones—in the light snow.

“Do you hear it?” I whispered, librarianlike. It was Maria’s line. I stopped in my tracks and he came very close to walking into me but he didn’t.

“Yeah,” he said, very near my ear now. I began walking again, more briskly this time, suddenly frightened by his proximity. Despite all my motherly concern about his safety, was I not also possibly in danger? However young he was, he was also, after all, larger than I, and perhaps capable of violence. When we reached the pond, I did not linger to look across it or down at the falls, for I was plagued by the fear that he might, in a moment of insanity, push me roughly into the frigid water. I wanted to get off the swaying wooden bridge and onto stable ground again.