The Electrical Field (10 page)

I could almost bear the rain’s quiet pitter-patter now, sitting in this room. A room that I normally came to in complete darkness at the end of the day.

Sachi stirred but she did not waken. She turned her head from side to side and knitted her brow. I went to touch her, to soothe her, but thought better of it.

“No, no,” she seemed to murmur, her breathing laboured. I listened closely, laying my head close. “That’s not it! Get
away!” and her arms fretted under the covers, fending off something, someone. “You’re wrong, no touching.” Her tongue lolled, then she fell back into slumber, her mouth clamping thinly to let nothing escape.

I’d seen her like this before, when she’d uttered such things fully awake, prickly, alive with them. I’d watched her sitting cross-legged with him, the tips of their skinny knees a smidgen apart. I’d seen the pulsing in her start, I knew when the warm lick from down there was going up through her middle to her heart and back again, and all the time their eyes stayed locked; giddy, she grew giddy waiting for the words, for his hands, until, exhausted from the waiting, the anticipation, they both dropped into light sleep in the clearing by the willow, that private room in the woods. The curl of their slight bodies there; it was Tam she was saying no to in her dream. No and yes.

“You can’t touch, can’t,” she was murmuring now, over and over, arms folding and unfolding across her front. In my bed. “Chi-chi, chi-chi,” she giggled, squeezing her little breast, taunting him with it.

But that wasn’t the word he needed, he’d got that one before. He shook his head at her in his placid way, telling her it wasn’t over, not yet. I saw his two fingers on his knee a half-inch from hers, and his thumb twitching and tapping, and so did she. Nipple. That was what he wanted, that was the word he needed. That was the game. Something like spin-the-bottle, with no spinning and kissing, only words and touches.

I knew the secret words and so did Chisako. I’d learned them long ago, from the schoolyard at Japanese school in
Port Dover, from behind the ofuro in camp, the boys and girls coming out of the bath wrapped in their towels, tittering. Eiji even told me some. As a girl I stored them up, whispered them to myself under the covers at night. Sometimes, as I watched Sachi and Tam, I had to quell my lips with the words on them when they got some wrong.

“I don’t believe you, that’s wrong,” Sachi said after Tam said the word, but she was pulsing. She wanted it to be right.

“I don’t cheat,” Tam told her. “That’s the word.”

“You cheat, you cheat,” she cried, but she was laughing. It took me a moment to see that. She knew the word, knew he was right. Because she’d sat on my porch one day and pinched her nipple through her top, looking at me. Asking, waiting. Shamelessly I whispered the word in her ear, felt the tickle on my lip.

It wasn’t that I’d planned it, to stay and watch. The first time I’d been walking as usual, a little out of the way of my normal route around the electrical towers, a little later in the day. The woods by the creek had seemed inviting that afternoon, everything soft. The sunlight veiled by clouds, my skin protected from any harshness as I crouched. I could go dizzy watching them watch each other, waiting with them, holding my breath, not giving myself away. I could lose myself.

Tam’s two fingers and thumb had trembled in the air, dangling there.

“Chikubi,” Sachi erupted, with such force that she woke me from my reverie, brought me back to the present. I thought she must be awake too, but she wasn’t. I thought I saw her hand rustling under the covers, a small movement back and forth. But she slept on. Back in the woods, giggling
with Tam, she’d taken his two fingers and thumb in hers, led them where they ached to go.

Downstairs the front door opened and closed. Heavy footsteps, Stum’s slow rhythm up. I tucked the sheets under Sachi’s chin, but her one arm lay flung across the pillow, the flesh of her hairless armpit exposed. When I came out to the hall, I found him looking tired, a little stooped, by the door to the room that had been his since he was a boy.

“Ara?” A little cry of Mama’s, barely a word. He came closer to look in, thinking it odd, no doubt, to find me in my room at this hour, with no cooking sounds or smells coming from the kitchen. When he saw Sachi lying in my bed, the nest of her hair, her thin velvet arm sprawled out, he took an involuntary step back, but couldn’t take his eyes from her.

“What’s she doing here?”

I shushed him before he could say another word; shooed him back to his own room. He left his door open a crack, wide enough for his one eye and ear. I sat back down at the edge of my bed, my bed that now seemed less dreary and not my own; her hair was spread miraculously across my pillow, long and thick and black as pitch, as mine used to be. Her face was sealed tight in sleep.

Chikubi. I couldn’t help thinking of my own, shrivelled and dark. The stray hairs that had sprouted there years ago. Who would touch them now, after all this time? I shuddered, remembering the press of Stum’s ear against me days earlier. His longing for something so ugly. He didn’t know any better.

I went downstairs to make dinner, busied myself with the rice cooker, measuring out the rice. I saw my hand disappear
into the milky water as I washed the rice, then reappear. The water circling down the drain. This moment, then the next, each one bloodless. There was no death, no Chisako, no Yano, no Tam or Kimi to worry over. Papa upstairs drowsing as usual. Stum in his room. And now, Sachi in mine.

The creak of the floorboards upstairs startled me. The sound of a door opening and closing. I waited for the flush of water through the bathroom pipes but it didn’t come. I rushed up to my room and found Stum there, standing stupidly at the foot of the bed where Sachi continued to sleep.

“Get out of here,” I hissed. When I tried to grab his arm, he slipped away easily.

“I wanted to see, that’s all,” he said. He stood there dumb in my room of faded florals. I glared at him until he came out to the hall.

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” he whispered, suddenly sad-eyed.

I made him come down with me to the kitchen, where he padded back and forth glumly, picking at bits of raw food I was preparing. I tapped his hand. “We won’t have enough.”

“She staying?”

I shrugged. Stum paced around again. He picked up a chopstick, started tapping surfaces here and there, lightly at first, then louder, on pots and pans. That was the engine in him revving, all the energy kept back, coiled in his fingers hour after hour, making his movements tiny as those chicks.

He wheeled around to face me: “She’s sick because she knows her boyfriend’s dead.”

This was his revenge, I knew, for me calling him stupid, for me wishing he was Eiji. He was torturing me with that. Wanting to spoil what he could for me, whatever way.

“The kamikaze did it.” He banged the chopstick one last time on my big pot, then dropped it to the floor.

“You’ll wake up Papa,” I said evenly, “and her.” I wasn’t going to get upset the way I had the night before. What happened to the calm I’d known before all this? My nights where I stared out at the electrical field and my giants, and the asphalt of the concession road paved smooth and dark? This childishness. I no longer dreaded him leaving us, leaving me. Not one bit. Not one bit.

“What was that?” Stum was looking at me, waiting.

“Nothing.”

“I saw you,” and he fiddled his fingers over his lips. This was how I’d given myself away ever since I was a girl: talking to myself, trying to keep my secrets; it wasn’t old age. “What did you say?” His voice was rising, waiting.

I merely shook my head, got on with the vegetables, the meat, going from here to there, not looking back.

“Did you talk to your pictures today, ne-san?” He said it with a cruel smirk.

I ignored him; I began to hum. I concentrated on my hands swishing in and out of the water, then draining the rice. The way Mama had taught me years ago, without losing a single grain. Washing it because, Mama said, of all the dirty hands that touched these millions of grains, the hands of men and women who dropped their sweat, their grime, even their nose pickings into the bags. I remembered that and saw a dozen filthy, swarthy hands reaching into my water.
Suddenly my water was dark. I looked up to find Stum close to me. I pushed him back, picked up the chopstick from the floor, from beside his broad feet that stretched every pair of shoes until they ripped at the seams. I stayed silent.

“Ne-san, do they answer you back?” he jeered. “Your pictures?” It was easy for me to ignore the fool, the baka-tare-bozu. I almost called him that aloud, the very thing he said he would never again be to me, but I stopped myself, remembering the bitterness of our feud the night before; I caged my lips with my fingers.

“Get out,” I said, pointing to the back door. He slunk out, unhurried.

He did not upset me so much. For they did answer me back sometimes, my pictures. In their way. In fact, his jeers made me remember that I did not have a photograph of Chisako; only the picture from the newspaper, where the other Chisako, the plain one, stared out of the grainy, smudged print like a homely stranger. Not the one I had known, who had shared some of her secrets with me.

When I finished washing the rice, the water ran clear. If I could simply be like this, I thought, dipping my hand once more into the cool liquid, touching the polished grains: stripped clean; everything done step by careful step.

Just then the doorbell rang. I ran to the front hall, glancing at Stum through the back screen door. It struck a pitter of panic in my heart, the thought of coming face to face with her, his new friend. But he shrugged his shoulders, gave a dumb look. He came in, went to the window, and peeked through the drapes just as I opened the door.

It was Keiko. She stood there, a neat, solid block lit by
the porch light. It startled me seeing her up close for the first time in some years. She’d aged; her skin had darkened even more, and coarsened like sand. Her lids drooped over her eyes, giving her a sad but impervious look, as if nothing touched her. These days, her hair was cut short to the chin. I touched a hand to my unkempt hair.

“Nakamura-san.” I never knew what to call her. “How nice—”

“Is she here?”

“Yes, she is,” I said. “But—”

“I’ll take my daughter home now, Miss Saito.” She rested her hand on the doorknob, waiting. The other hand gripped a flashlight; a circle flickered from the wall to the floor, big, then small.

“She’s sleeping,” I announced, more bluntly than I’d intended.

“Wake her up then, please,” Keiko replied coldly. “I’m sorry she’s been such a bother.” Not sorry at all, I thought. Furious. That she should have to come to me for her daughter; that I’d indulged the girl, shown her some care. Keiko’s eyes flitted up behind me. I turned to find Sachi at the top of the stairs, her damp clothes back on.

“I’m coming,” she said, in a timid little-girl voice, and bounced down the steps without so much as a glance at me. Keiko swiftly pushed her out the door and picked up the soaked sneakers left on the mat.

“Thank you, Miss Saito.” Keiko held the door. “Please don’t bother yourself again like this,” she said—a warning, I thought. She dropped the shoes on the porch for Sachi to slide into. The lonely chirp of crickets filtered in.

“Good-night, Miss Saito.” Keiko nodded, then let go of the door.

“Good-night, Miss Saito,” mimicked Stum, dragging himself lazily into the kitchen.

Petty woman, I said to myself. Cold and petty. Reminding me, the old schoolmarm, of my lonely status, so different from hers. Through my parted curtains, I watched them cross the field, Keiko’s flashlight pointing a long lit finger in front of them. For a moment I imagined Sachi turning to look back at me. But then she was prancing in circles around her mother among the grasses, tugging at her as she strode forward. I knew what was in Sachi’s heart. I’d caught the look that had passed between them the instant they saw one another. Sachi’s eyes had flared with yearning. It wasn’t just about Tam. It was about Keiko. In an instant she’d forgotten all about me. Everything I’d done for her. Just as Stum would.

Once they were home, everything would settle into place, back to normal, I told myself. To the routine of it all, one thing after another, no cracks for Sachi to fall into. Keiko would not let that happen. Keiko with her strong, muscular calves flexing, going here, going there. Expecting Sachi to follow, equally efficient. Bewildered by the girl’s brooding sprawl across her bed and the record she played over and over with its squealing high notes descending at the end. Thinking too much, feeling too much, as if the thoughts and feelings were special somehow. The cuts Sachi never tried to hide, from tiptoeing out to the kitchen in the dead of night. The knife slid from its block, left there on the counter. In the morning washed and wiped clean, put back
in its place by Keiko without a word. Sachi would return to me as she always did, all that yearning, that faith in another, wasted.

Eiji did not console me that night. I could not bring myself to be comforted by one of my stories murmured to myself with his picture cradled in my hands, resting on my lap. I had, in fact, felt a little estranged from Eiji since I learned of Chisako’s death. He seemed to have turned carelessly away from me. I took out the notebook I had begun, pressed its rippling pages to my breast, then opened it to the photo of Chisako with her family. Already it had changed: her features grown smudgy; her eyes inked in black. Already she had grown dead to me, even as I looked her in the face; my lips remained still. I tried to conjure her up, I tried to summon the peculiar light in her black eyes, that voice of tinkling crystal, but she remained a blank. All I saw was the carpet in her little room, and the spreading stain that my spilt green tea had left on its ivory surface from our very last visit. My clumsiness. For she had flustered me, after all. But beside that stain her slim legs gracefully leaning to one side like stems, her feet lifting daintily.

I sat down, trying to collect my thoughts. My thoughts that wandered, stumbled down into the night. I tried to line them up into my usual practical concerns. I thought about koden money; how much would I send? From the family or myself alone? A ridiculous thought, I realized, the old tradition of sending money, under the circumstances. Who was there to send it to? I bristled at the idea of those church ladies downtown taking charge as they sometimes did when there
was no family. But Yano would return. Any day, any moment now. He would take care of things.