The Electrical Field (11 page)

Stum had left the door open, and in came air through the screen, sticky and warm like exhaled breath. I stepped onto my porch. Out in the field, I could perfectly imagine her, Chisako as she was when I first met her, those years ago. She was wearing a navy uniform-like overcoat. Despite her protests, Yano was pulling her towards me through the field muddy with late-melting snows. Her hair had been severely cut, too short to twist up into a bun. It made her look younger, like a rebellious teenager or a naive schoolgirl tugging away from Yano as he pulled her along. From a distance, he could have been her father. I was walking at my usual brisk pace, counting my steps to each end of the field, when Yano called to me, waving with one hand, holding onto Chisako with the other. “Saito-san!”

I slowed down slightly, holding my count. Normally I would have kept on, but I was curious to meet her.

“Saito-san, this is Chisako, my wife,” a breathless Yano announced, pushing her in front. She seemed to dangle there, as if relinquishing herself. Something told me she’d cut her hair herself, out of spite and unhappiness, for it was unevenly trimmed, in jagged clumps, hiding much of her face the way too thick, too massive Japanese hair stubbornly does unless it is kept long. We stood in silence for some moments until she finally glanced up. When she did, her spine seemed to straighten and stiffen, and she instantly appeared more robust and wilful. It was difficult to tell what she actually looked like, but I could make out her features: a fine nose, and deep black eyes that caught the light, a rare
thing. She pulled her hand from Yano’s with almost a childish grimace, and held it out to me.

“Hajime mashite. Dozo yoroshiku,” I said haltingly, mustering the proper greeting learned in my girlhood classes in Port Dover. Not like my peasant bits of Japanese from Papa and Mama.

“Nice to meet you, Saito-san,” she replied. Coolly, as if unimpressed by my addressing her in Japanese, insulted even.

“Wanted to show her the hill,” Yano said, waving at it. We three paused to look into the distance. There it was, rising past my lone rooftop, lumpy and dull. “First time she’s seeing it from out here,” Yano said, taking her hand again. Suddenly she erupted in rapid Japanese to him, so rapid I couldn’t follow. She snatched her hand back, bowed slightly to me, and walked away, taking her dainty steps. It was then I noticed she was wearing only house slippers, now muddied and chunked with snow.

She wasn’t beautiful as I’d imagined, and for that I was relieved, glancing down at my own shabby coat. I suppose I’d felt intimidated, knowing she was from Japan. It was much later that she became beautiful, like a frozen bloom that would thaw. She was simply plain at the time, pursed shut. I was about to mutter something about getting back to my walk, but Yano had more thoughts on his mind.

“Married her over there,” he said. “In a temple, even.” He laughed. I had to hold back my own smile; I could not imagine Yano in such a place, such a serene and sacred place. But it was unmistakeable what he was conveying: pride that he’d got himself a Japanese girl from Japan. Not like the rest of us homegrown nisei; not like him and me, neither
here-nor-there stock. I looked at Yano differently then, swayed by the moment, by his pride. “She didn’t have any family left.”

We both watched her as she made her way up the driveway to the house, avoiding deep patches of snow in her slipper-clad feet. Yano was suddenly embarrassed. “Silly woman, coming out without the proper shoe.” He seemed worried about what I might think.

“See,” he said, as if he were telling me a story I wanted to hear, a story I didn’t already know. “I went there after the war, after the camps shut down. That’s how it was, they shipped you back to where you’d never been.” He laughed bitterly.

I couldn’t resist saying something. Something to remind him, as he would remind me. “They gave you a choice,” I told him, “even if you couldn’t go home. You could have come east like the rest of us.” As I said those words, it crossed my mind that he might have been like Eiji, yearning for the ocean.

He gave a snort, disgusted with me, my comment, I suppose. Then why return to here of all places, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I had no wish to start anything with Yano, any involved discussion.

“This is paradise for her,” he went on, looking up at the hill, then down at me. “Paradise.” He was scrutinizing me so closely, I wondered if something showed on my face. “But she’s still Japanese,” he assured me, reminding me of the difference between us. “On her passport it says she’s still Japanese.” His finger poked the air. After a moment he added: “Hiroshima-ken.”

“I see,” I said, wondering if from that I was to understand
what Chisako had left behind. Wondering if I’d imagined a change in his tone, a slight hush. But the moment passed.

“Anyway, thought I’d introduce you,” Yano said. “Because”—he looked me deep in the eye, gauging whether he should say what was in his head—“because we have to stick together. Don’t we?” He stared so intently that it unnerved me. He sighed, then pointed from me to him in a continuous loop, implying some sort of connection that was beyond words.

“She doesn’t understand,” he said. He pushed back his greasy, tangled hair. It resembled a black nest against the bruised sky, and his eyes were holes pecked out of his large face. “She’s gone through a lot, but she doesn’t know.” He kicked his worn shoe into a chunk of snow, and sighed again. “She doesn’t know what it feels like to be ashamed, you see.” He looked to me to help fill in the words he groped for; he raised his hands as if he might grab me by the collar and shake the words out of me. As if he could claim something that was not mine to give. But of course he didn’t, he didn’t touch me.

“Not like you and me,” he finally said, his eyes drilling into mine. “She doesn’t know what it’s like to get herded up. She doesn’t know what it feels like to be ashamed to be nihonjin.”

“But surely she knows—” My words dropped to the ground, unheeded. I had no wish to involve myself, no wish to engage his anger. I turned abruptly, awkwardly, to walk away, holding my breath as the distance between us grew. I stole a glance back as I hurried towards the south tower; he remained where I’d left him, watching the hill, that lump planted on the flattest stretch of land, frozen in his thoughts.

Once I reached the tower, I gripped the steel beams with both hands; I suppose I felt wary of Yano, though he still made no move to follow me. Through the cross of beams I watched him turn for home. I felt sheepish and sorry. We were bound together, that was true. The way Yano stood so close when he spoke with me; the way he pushed Chisako and me together as intimate family. He wanted more, much more, between us.

Now, before I knew it, I was crossing the field, my feet in house slippers as Chisako’s had been that winter day long ago, sinking down to where I couldn’t see. I couldn’t stop myself, but I couldn’t say what was driving me into the night. I plodded on, and found myself in front of the Yano house. The living-room still lit up, every detail of shabby furniture to be seen, every dusty, littered surface as I remembered it. I clucked my tongue; it echoed out to the field. Even now I was judging her, in my desperation; assuring myself that I kept my home better than she ever could have. What did it matter, now or ever? I wanted to put up some drapes, to give Chisako some dignity, some privacy, perhaps from my own petty self.

Then a light shone on me, an explosion of white in blackness in my eyes; I almost screamed from fright. A voice came from behind the glare.

“Who’s there? Who’s there?” The light flickered around me. “What are you doing?”

“I just wanted to see,” I said, and I tried to step into the light, but it eluded me. I felt my fingers at my mouth, nervous and climbing. “I meant no harm,” I called into the
blackness, and heard my voice come back at me, forlorn and sorry, for what I couldn’t say. The light shifted finally, shrank to a small moon on the grass. A woman stepped forward. It took me a few seconds to recognize her in the shadowy light as the next-door neighbour. Someone I’d seen in a window, around the yard, passing in the street.

“There’s nothing to see.”

“I’m a friend of the family.”

“Really?” The voice sounded disbelieving. “The police came by.” The woman sighed. “He won’t turn up here.” She clicked off the flashlight. “No word about the children.”

I nodded my head in sympathy, forgetting she could not see me. I cleared my throat, then murmured something; the darkness, with its unseen rustlings and scents, swallowed it up.

“That Yano is a strange one. You know him?”

Stupidly I nodded once again. “Only a little,” I added.

“Poor Chisako. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” The woman clucked her tongue even louder than I had moments earlier. “Wouldn’t surprise me if …” She paused for a long moment, then clicked the light back on, sliding it across my face. I could make out only her one eye wide open, staring alone and knowing out into the field, in the direction of my house. Perhaps Chisako had confided in this woman. Suddenly I felt a cold wet slither around my fingers; I gave a cry, a little too shrill, and jumped back.

“Hey, hey.” The woman flapped her arm down beside her, patting her thigh. “Don’t mind it,” she said. “I’ve been feeding it, poor thing. Starving in the backyard.” I saw the outline of Yano’s dog, that cold white flame of a tail in the
night, but I couldn’t see its eyes. I caught the tinkle of the chain at its neck.

“You live over there, don’t you?” The woman swung the flashlight towards the towers. “In the old farmhouse.”

I was taken aback, hearing my home referred to in that way. I looked across the field, wondering how I would find my way back.

I’d left the porch light on, after all, and that solitary light guided me home. Each step falling a little deeper or shallower than I judged. That stain on Chisako’s carpet preoccupied me, inexplicably. My stain, my clumsy presence, marked there for ever.
Don’t fuss, Saito-san
, she’d said, forcing me up off my knees.
It’s nothing. Yano doesn’t care. He doesn’t come in here.
If only I’d been allowed to finish. That day she was jittery; it was so unlike her. She expected Yano home at any time, but was brimming with news as always. She wanted to tell me every detail about her Mr. Spears. She had even begun to imitate the way he talked, the way he said her name, which she found funny and charming.

“Cheeesuko, Cheesuko,” she laughed, holding her side. The memory of her voice was startling as I crossed the deserted field. But that was on another visit, I realized. A time weeks before, a happier time, when she’d showed me his walk, holding her narrow shoulders high and square. I tried to laugh out loud at this memory, be carried away as I had been that afternoon. Yet all I could think of was the stain I hadn’t cleaned up. The clumsy bump of my elbow. My arm twitched with the memory, how I could have prevented it.

When I got in, Papa was groaning, and I cursed Stum for not settling him for the night. “Nani?” he muttered. As I leaned over him in bed, his eyes seemed strangely lucid. A trick of moonlight, I thought, once they began darting here and there.

I heard Stum’s heavy footsteps outside in the hall.

I called out, “Why didn’t you—” and he was there behind me as I tucked the covers in tightly.

“What’s the matter?” Stum tugged at my arm. “Ne-san, what is it?” The two of them were staring at me all of a sudden, both of them helpless, helpless children I must look after every moment. Looking dumb in the face of every detail, every chore of living, when it all meant nothing.

“Nothing,” I said. My breath was quietly seizing up into a ball. I felt a familiar sensation, a release; my face was wet.

Slowly, oafishly, Stum touched his thumb to my cheek and wiped it firmly, like dirt. He did it again and again, almost digging into my flesh. I pushed his hand away and felt the drops on my cheeks, on my hands.

“Stop, stop!” he finally cried, turning his face away in shame. As if he were the one weeping.

Later I lay in bed, my broad back overflowing the imprint Sachi’s slight body had left on my sheets. I was tired, my skin felt parched; it had been too much for me, I suppose, the day’s events, the ponderings. I blamed my weeping spell on this state of not knowing. But I knew my exhaustion came from within, from a sense of my own responsibility in all that had happened. Yet I felt helpless. I gave in to this feeling in my weak moments; knowing that I must not surrender to it, this
sense I’d carried for as long as I could remember, that I must look after everyone, as I had all my life.

The house was utterly still. The towel I’d wrapped Sachi in lay abandoned in the middle of the floor.

My room had grown stifling and musty from the damp. When I opened the window, sounds from the creek rose up, faint animal sounds dotted the air. Beside me the telephone rang, shrill in the dark.

“Moshi, moshi.” It was my instinct to answer in Japanese at this hour. There was a long pause, breath let out. An ear listening, a mouth pressed like mine, waiting with me in the dark. I nearly hung up.

“What about the dog, Yano’s dog?” Sachi’s words mist in my ear. “Miss Saito?”

I eased myself back onto my bed. My mouth was open but nothing came out, just a hole catching the blackness in my room. Through the window I could imagine a wild dog howling in the night, Yano’s dog. I was a fool to let that girl drag me about, in a downpour even, unsettling me in the midst of losing Chisako. I saw myself, the trudge of my feet in Mama’s shoes, cold and soaked, sinking into the mud by the creek. Desperately holding onto Sachi’s hand. The hideous sight of my hair drying like an unruly wig. Sachi’s capricious, steel-clad smile; Stum’s jeering smirk. And Keiko’s humiliating appearance at my door. Her refusal to even sit down in my home; the pride she wielded over me, the arrogance. For Sachi was her child, not mine.

Let Keiko take her, let them look after her. She belonged to no one but them.

Miss Saito, Miss Saito. Are you there?
I heard the desperation
in that reedy voice, the loneliness, because Keiko had disappointed her once again. It didn’t take very much. I sank back into my pillow, my head the anchor to my body;
Miss Saito, Miss Saito
—her voice became bodiless, nameless, a cricket’s chirp rising from somewhere in the electrical field.