My Year of Meats (8 page)

I got the chiggers in Texas, in a field outside Lubbock, but it was worth it. We’d been standing there for a good part of an afternoon, shooting a very small child playing with his piglet. In the background was a white farmhouse. The boy, whose name was Bobby, lived there with his parents, Alberto and Catalina Martinez. Alberto, or Bert, as he now preferred to be called, was a farmworker. He’d lost his left hand to a hay baler in Abilene seven years earlier, a few months after he and Catalina (Cathy) had emigrated from Mexico, just in time for Bobby to be born an American citizen. That had been Cathy’s dream, to have an American son, and Bert had paid for her dream with his hand. Since then he had worked hard in the fields to support the family, and Cathy had worked too, in factory jobs, and finally their efforts had paid off. They had scraped up the money to buy the little white farmhouse and a few acres of surrounding land, and the way I figured it, Alberto, Catalina, and little Bobby were on their way to becoming a real American success story. The problem was getting the chance to tell it. After four months, the BEEF-EX injunction on the demographics of our wives was still in effect, and we continued to shoot primarily middle-class white American women with two or three children. The Martinez family would obviously break this mold.

To make matters worse, the director for the shoot was the bonehead Oda, back for his second round.

“Takagi, don’t be stupid,” he told me. “The program is not called
My Mexican Wife!,
you know....” I had given up trying to sell him on the idea.

But then the oddest thing happened. We had been filming in Oklahoma, the “Sooner State,” just across the border in a town at the tip of the Panhandle. Oda had this great idea that the entire meal should be cooked in frying pans with handles, and our wife, a Mrs. Klinck, agreed. She made German Fried Potatoes and Succotash and Griddle Biscuits, and her meat was a delicate Sooner Schnitzel, made with thin cutlets of veal, dredged in crushed Kellogg’s Krispies and paprika, then pan-fried in drippings with sautéed onions and sour cream. Mrs. Klinck insisted we try a cutlet or two, and to my surprise, Oda dug in with gusto. He had a fondness for German food, it seemed, but after the first few bites, he dropped his fork and clutched his neck as though he were choking.

“Oda-san! Dame da yo!
Stop it immediately!” I hissed at him, furious that he should make such cruel fun of Mrs. Klinck’s cooking. I mean, she was sitting at the table, facing us and watching to see how we liked her Schnitzel.

But he didn’t stop. Instead, the strangling noises he was making intensified, and as Mrs. Klinck watched him, her eyes grew wide and round. She stood up, knocking her chair over, and ran from the room.

“Call nine-one-one!” I heard her cry, and that’s when I realized something else was happening.

Oda’s entire body had suddenly grown rigid and was starting to swell. Within minutes his windpipe had closed, and by the time the local paramedics arrived he could barely breathe. They gave him a shot of adrenaline and we airlifted him in a crop duster to the nearest hospital.

“Anaphylactic shock,” the emergency room doctor said. “What was he eating when it started?”

I described the menu in detail.

The doctor shrugged. “Sounds a bit heavy,” he said, “but basically okay.”

After the seizure had passed and I was helping Oda fill out the medical history forms, he answered yes to the question about antibiotic allergies. When the doctor saw this, he nodded.

“That’s it,” he said grimly. He was a young man just out of medical school and had come to Oklahoma from San Francisco. He was cute and really tall, so we’d been flirting a little.

“What’s it?” I asked.

“Antibiotics,” he said. He looked at me. “You’re a city girl. You’ve probably never been to a feedlot, have you.”

“What, you mean for cows?”

He rolled his eyes. “No, cattle. Meat.”

“No, but it’s funny you should bring it up. What do feedlots have to do with anaphylactic shock?”

“Well, if you’d been to one, you’d know what I was talking about. They’re filthy and overcrowded—breeding grounds for all sorts of disease—so cattle are given antibiotics as a preventive measure, which builds up and collects in the meat.”

“But this was veal....”

He looked at me. “Are you kidding? Especially in veal. Whew! Those calves live in boxes and never learn to walk, even—and the farmers keep them alive with these massive doses of drugs just long enough to kill them. What sent your director into shock was the residue of the antibiotics in the Sooner Schnitzel.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. What’s his name ... Oda? He must be the sensitive type.”

“Oh, please ...” If he only knew.

The young doctor’s smile faded. “You know, it scares me. I mean, allergies are one thing. But all these surplus antibiotics are raising people’s tolerances, and it won’t be long before the stuff just doesn’t work anymore. There’s all sorts of virulent bacteria that are already resistant.... It’s like back to the future—we’re headed backward in time, toward a pre-antibiotic age.”

I remembered this conversation much later on, but at the moment all I could think was damage control. I phoned Kato in Tokyo to let him know what had happened, and to my immense surprise, he turned the shoot over to me. To direct.

This was it. Without bothering to ask for anyone’s permission, I rerouted us south into Texas and straight into the Martinezes’ kitchen.

 

 

Bert wore a mean-looking hook in place of his missing hand, and during lunch he had taught me how to two-step, resting its point in the middle of my spine, while Cathy took a turn around the kitchen table with Suzuki. They were excellent dancers. Bert used to play the guitar beautifully, Cathy told me, when they were still in Mexico, before the accident.

“So now”—she shrugged—“in America we have not so much music. But we can still dance.”

We filmed them stepping out on Saturday night, and on Sunday afternoon after church, Cathy prepared Texas-style Beefy Burritos, made with lean, tender slices of Texas-bred sirloin tips. The burritos were the symbol of their hard-earned American lifestyle, something to remind them of their roots but also of their new fortune. Afterward, Bobby wanted to show us his 4-H project piglet. So there we were, in the chigger-filled field, filming little Bobby in a sea of golden grass that rippled in the wind. Bert and Cathy stood arm in arm, watching. The piglet, whose name was Supper, was so big and heavy that Bobby could barely hold it up in front of him. Bobby was wearing his Sunday suit, a hand-me-down from a neighbor, which was still a bit big for him and the trousers flapped against his bony shins. His head was dwarfed by an old felt hat of his father’s. He had given the piglet a bath and the animal was still wet, sending glistening droplets into the sunlight as it squirmed in his arms. Bobby smiled at the camera, a little Mexican boy shyly offering his American Supper to the nation of Japan. Everything was in slow motion. It was a surreal and exquisite moment.

The alarm clock rang at seven-fifteen on Saturday morning. Akiko woke in panic, which subsided into gentle dread when she realized she was alone. She lay in her futon, staring up at the acoustic ceiling tiles and fluorescent light fixture. Out on the balcony, she could hear the dull rhythmic thump of someone’s wife beating the bedding hung over the balcony rail. Children were awake too. Their voices drifted up from the playground. When Akiko went to market, she always took great care to avoid the playground and the young mothers who congregated around its periphery, just inside the gate. Akiko found it difficult to walk by them along the path outside.

Akiko found it difficult to do many things: to go to bed at a reasonable hour, for example, when “John” stayed overnight in the city or was out of town on business. The air in the small apartment smelled damp and sweet. Sweet poofy exhalations all the night through. She turned over on her side and spotted the squat little whiskey bottle that she’d emptied last night in her exaltation. It had felt so good to be alone. Unmolested. She felt the hard lump of Shōnagon under her pillow. Then she spotted her pillow book diary, its pages scrawled with her own pickled lists.

 

 

Soused, she’d had this dumb idea that lists could become poetry. She ripped out the pages from the diary and crumpled them in her fist, then made up another.

She got up slowly, head pounding, and carefully folded the top quilt and the sheets. Then she folded the bottom futon and the thin foam mattress into accordion sections of three. She piled the covers on top of the mattress, laid the buckwheat pillows on top, picked up the entire heap of bedding, and staggered to the closet. She shoved it all inside, onto the shelf, and slid the door shut quickly to keep it from tumbling out. Then she boiled water for tea. By eight o’clock she was dressed and sitting at the low
kotatsu
table in front of the television. Toes tucked neatly beneath her, she watched the screen, where a young Mexican child stood in the middle of a waving field of wheat, smiling shyly up at her and offering her an enormous pig. It was squirming in his arms, so heavy he could barely hold it. He teetered back and forth on the tips of his toes. Then, in slow motion, the wind caught his big felt hat and blew it up into the air, the pig gave a wriggle and flew from his arms, and the little boy broke into peals of laughter as he chased them both in circles. Akiko felt the tears well up in her eyes as, pen in hand, she smoothed out the sheet of paper, ready to take down the day’s recipe, for Texas-style Beefy Burritos, on the back side of her crumpled poem. The haunting a cappella strains of “Amazing Grace” drowned out the noise of the Tokyo suburb.