The Electrical Field (12 page)

Gently, I hung up the receiver.

I slept dreamlessly that night, more deeply than I had in years. Perhaps it was the exhaustion that had built up inside me, all the changes that were happening so quickly and dramatically around me. Initially I’d let myself become caught up in the drama through Sachi, and upset myself needlessly, and suddenly I felt freed. As I crept down the hall in the morning, I noticed that Stum’s bed had not been slept in; he must have left after I’d gone to sleep. I tried to push away that thought, the thought of Stum spending the night with his new friend, the thought of a different Stum, his knowing body; I shoved it to the back of my mind.

The sky was smoky with clouds, and the Yano house seemed to rise out of it. The front yard squirmed with foamy weeds, fat and tangled and grown over into a jungle, exotic among the neighbouring shaved lawns. I imagined mould forming in corners everywhere inside: in the cupboards; in the refrigerator, furring old food; staining the rim of the bathtub; the thick, sour smell. Who would look after it? Chisako had no family, Yano had said. Yano had only one brother, in a Kamloops mental hospital. A man he hadn’t seen in twenty years because of the strange fits he’d fall into. “He can’t stand the sight of an Oriental,” Yano had told me one morning when he intercepted me on my walk; when
casually enough, I’d asked about his family. “Can you believe that?” he said. “It’s shameful. Chinese, Japanese, man, woman, doesn’t make a difference. Goes nuts.” He guffawed with disgust, pointed a finger to his temple, and made a little circle like a wind-up toy. He told me it had started in the camp.

I suppose I could understand the man’s illness, how easily it might begin. With the line-ups at the mess hall, the ofuro, the benjo, day after day, endless. Everybody too close. Those smells, those noises, those voices. Mountains all around. I too was sick of it, sick to death of them all, before it even began; I longed to get away, just Eiji and I, out to sea, to Japan.

Now here I was, not a mountain-wall in sight, and two housefuls of them across from me; and all I could do was watch them, day in and day out, their comings and goings. What else was there to do? Yano had kept cranking his little finger at his head, not willing to understand the craziness in his brother. “We got to stick together, see?” As if going crazy were a rational decision his brother had made. To be different. To shun the rest. Yano had looked to me with that awful eagerness, time and time again. The last time I’d seen him, I could have smacked him for that look, the same way he smacked his dog when it jumped on him.

As I headed for the north end of the electrical field, I passed the Nakamuras’ house, but the drapes were still drawn, later than usual. I faltered for a moment, then carried on, marvelling at the energy in my steps.

Even Papa was livelier this morning as I fed him his boiled rice and sour plum. His eyes darted out the window.

“Up-ee, up-ee,” he gurgled through the meal, pointing a
crooked finger at the window. I raised the blinds to reveal the woods leading to the ravine beneath a searing blue sky, the same view as from my window, though I rarely saw it.

“Yano-san?” His finger wavered in the air as his head strained off the pillow.

“What? Nani?” I went to the window.

“Don buro,” he said after a moment, still pointing. I looked again and laughed. Down below, he meant. I looked directly down to our yard, our little rectangle of mown green skirted by my peonies, coming up lush and full, leaning this way and that. My daffodils and tulips were still in bloom, but from up here they seemed to rise out of a dark pit. My yard could be a cemetery plot; our house a slab of grey stone. The thought struck me that Stum might be right: that after three days with no word, the children might no longer be alive.

“Nothing there, Papa.” I didn’t think twice about what he’d said, the nonsense. I wiped his mouth and helped him slide back under the covers. He’d become almost another kind of creature, it seemed to me, his skin thin and shiny. Whenever I birdbathed him, every few days I discovered new nooks and crevices, where flesh had shrunk and bones had shifted.

He was nothing now, less than an infant. Gave me no trouble at all. Not like Stum. My resentment slipped away on a day like this. On a day like this, I might even be grateful for his company. Not to have suffered a fate such as Chisako’s. To be living. Not to be alone. I would never again be that girl, helpless when Papa was suddenly no longer strong, no longer brutish, and could not rise from his bed.
Who sank to the floor outside her papa’s door in the dark, curled up under her nightgown, silently weeping to be let in, afraid she’d be left alone.

I passed most of the day by the window in spite of myself, of how anxious I felt over Sachi. Wondering about the night, about the drapes at her house that remained closed. Already I felt the exhaustion return to my body, felt that it had lost its memory of deep, untroubled sleep. By dark, staring across the field, I imagined a shadowy dot behind the drapes of the Nakamuras’ house to be her, waiting and watching too. It was possible that she might never forgive me for waiting there, dumb, at the end of the telephone line; in silence I had listened as she’d called for me the way she did when she was anxious for my attention, or angry with me. She’d called my name twice. Each time I remembered, it felt like the tip of a knife gouging my heart.

I
SEARCHED THE PAPER.
It was Thursday; exactly a week had passed since the news about Chisako, and nothing. The dot I had imagined to be Sachi at her window the night before had vanished in a flood of morning light. Keiko’s drapes were open wide, as was usual for this time of the morning. Wherever Sachi was, I knew she’d be twinned with me in this ritual, turning page after page, through to the obituaries. Terrified yet relieved to have found no trace.

It occurred to me that there might have been an obituary placed by Mr. Spears’ family on the Friday or Saturday, per-haps notice of a service of some kind, a burial, but I’d forgotten to check. Or hadn’t cared to.

I had even neglected my crossword. The word jumble provided its usual comfort: the straightening out of a mess that at first glance appears hopeless. “Given”, “pitied”, “whose”, and “knave” were the words for the day. On certain
days, years ago, really, I would scrutinize the words, wondering if they held some clue to my life, to my future. But of course, even unjumbled, they remained a puzzle.

I went out back to look at my yard. I stepped out of my slippers, unhooked my stockings, and planted my feet in the grass. The second time in a week I’d done such a thing. I was thinking of that little girl, being inside her slight, burgeoning body. All churned up like the mouth of a current, missing Tam.

The grass was warm and moist and flaccid instead of cool and crisp: a breeding ground. I felt everything withered and rotting. Eating itself up, though it was only late May. My daffodils and tulips, even my peonies were drooping; my irises no good for ikebana, I thought: each one a little ruined, a little imperfect. Even my shasta daisies were coming up with their crowns stunted. I clipped them back a bit, hoping to thicken their flowering. Along the garden’s rim, the trimmed stems and crowns and fallen brown petals I stooped to gather made me think of one of my visits with Chisako.

It came to me as I dropped the bits in a trash bag by the patio. It was those flowers, my daisies, stunted as they were. I’d planted them years ago because their white petals reminded me of chrysanthemums, the kind grown in Japan. Now, as I looked at them, they seemed a flimsy shadow of the thick, pristine blooms seen in traditional arrangements. They took me back to those early days, the winter when Yano first befriended me, not long after they moved into the neighbourhood. I was coming out of the house for my morning walk and found him standing in my front yard, scrutinizing the amateurish ikebana I’d foolishly placed in
my window. I’d used daisies from the local supermarket, the thin, cheap, spindly kind, and they poked out of the vase along with a broken pine branch Stum had brought me. I’d struggled with it, but even from a distance one could see that it was all wrong.

I was annoyed and mildly humiliated to find him there when I’d purposely timed my walk a half-hour earlier to avoid him. He’d been meeting up with me more frequently, and I did not care to make conversation at such an hour. For it was my hour. To hear the busy sweetness of birds, the roar of the planes departing early for who knows where; even that buzz of distant highway traffic, all uninterrupted by Papa’s impatient requests for this or that. In those days, confined to his wheelchair after his first stroke, he’d bang his wheels against my furniture. I savoured this brisk morning air. No one had yet breathed it, or so it seemed; after a night of snowfall, mine would be the first footprints in the blanketed field; my path, marked for me to see once I returned to my window. It was invigorating; not merely the physical exertion, but to be out of doors, not sheltered by my porch, or behind glass. I kept track of changes in the neighbourhood, however small: new drapes hung in a window; the carton from a washer or dryer discarded for pickup.

To be greeted by Yano, first thing out my door! What was most annoying was how he would follow me a few feet behind. Some days it took a while before I noticed him there. He enjoyed that advantage, watching me, undetected. There I’d be, muttering away to myself or counting my steps. I wondered if he eavesdropped on any of it; if on some occasion I’d said anything inappropriate.

On that morning I set off at a brisk pace and, sure enough, it was not long before he was lagging behind. I turned abruptly, about to air my mind to him. I worried, too, that he might one day follow unseen and suffer another of his respiratory attacks. I couldn’t be responsible, I told him, a little breathless myself at having to express my feelings so forthrightly.

“Worry? About me?” He smiled his crowded smile. “Why, Saito-san, I’m touched.”

I knew instantly what was going through that unruly head of his: that I was looking out for him, after all; sticking together as he’d suggested we all do. That pleased him no end. I did not detect sarcasm in his tone.

“Gomen, Saito-san. I’ll keep up,” he said, apologizing, and rushed up beside me. Not granting me so much as a second to shoo him off. He waved a hand back at my house and the window, his breath puffing like baby powder into the winter air. “Chisako’s good at that flower business. She can teach you,” he said, falling back and catching up with me again. I simply nodded, never knowing how seriously to take anything he said.

“She was saying last night,” Yano said, “wouldn’t it be nice to have Saito-san over?” He laughed a little. “Don’t worry.” He gave my elbow a knock. “It’ll just be you two girls. I’ll keep out of your hair.” His face was already slick from the vigorous walk and he unzipped his jacket partway. “Gotta stick together, right?” I winced at this refrain, but it no longer unnerved me. As if being nihonjin in the same neighbourhood could melt every disagreeable difference between us.

As we passed the Nakamura house, Keiko appeared in
the window. I stepped up my pace, anxious not to seem like a spy, and embarrassed, I suppose, to be seen with Yano.

“What’s your hurry?” Yano tugged at my coat sleeve. He stopped to watch Keiko as she stood with her muscular arms folded. She was looking out towards Mackenzie Hill. Who knew what was going through her mind? She turned away to carry on with her morning’s chores, too busy to see us. Yano was taken with her, I could see, but he shrugged it off.

“Snob,” he muttered.

“What do you mean?” I asked innocently. For I too had felt the brush of Keiko’s cold shoulders early on.

“She saw us just now, right?” he said, pointing, though I wasn’t certain she had. “What would it hurt? A little smile? A wave?” He shoved his ungloved hand through the air towards their window, pushing her away. “I went there yesterday. Talk a little, shoot the breeze. I even invited her to my redress meeting. She wouldn’t let me finish, practically pushed me out the door.” His voice grew wheezy telling me.

“There, there,” I said absently. I couldn’t help thinking of how I had shunned Yano when he first came knocking on my door. I was taken by the thought that Keiko had actually let him inside the house. I myself had never been invited in.

Yano fumed a little, and I tried to deafen myself to his muttered curses. I shuddered, wondering if I sounded anything like him with my mutterings: more than a little crazy. He stopped once he saw me watching, and gave that wheezing laugh. “Not to worry, Saito-san,” he said with cheerful determination. “I don’t give up so easy.” He kicked his boot into the dry, frozen earth.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night, won’t I, Saito-san?” He slipped a flyer into my hand and winked. “Your brother too?” I glanced down at it quickly, then folded it in half. It wasn’t the first such meeting he’d invited me to.

“Yano-san,” I said, lowering my voice to indicate the seriousness of what I was about to say. “These things,” I went on. I smiled pleasantly; I felt the steadiness of my own wisdom in the words poised on my tongue. “Our life is not so bad here. We’ve made our way.” I kept smiling. “These things that happened are behind us now. And they are … private, ne?” Eiji entered my mind just then, as he always did when these subjects came up.

Yano was silent for some moments. His jaw twitched, and as he inhaled he wheezed slightly, but his manner was easy. His ready smile, repellent as it could be, was absent from his face. “We? What do you mean, we?” He paused. He did not intend me to answer. “So, Saito-san. You do stick together when it’s good for you, right?”

I did not respond to that bitter remark either. I did not so much as alter my expression. I had no wish to share in his anger, or to make others share in mine; to blame the government, the camps, the war, the man they may or may not have named that hill after. For what life did or did not give to me. There would be no end to it.

My bitterness belonged to no one but myself. I did not share it with strangers; I did not hold them accountable. For these were private matters; family matters.