The Electrical Field (19 page)

“What happened, Miss Saito?”

I must have looked a little sheepish. “Onara,” I whispered, embarrassed to tell it.

Sachi looked a little confused, then gave a loud guffaw. “Miss Saito!” she said, embarrassed herself.

“Eiji was furious with me. ‘They were coming,’ he yelled. ‘Now there’s not enough money!’ Like that.” I tried to imitate him. “He left on his bicycle without me,” I told her. “Who could blame him? I was disgusting,” I said, giggling again.

“Just for that? He left you for that?”

“I was bad,” I exclaimed. “Baka.” I remembered that sensation of being clamped between Eiji’s bony legs, eyes closed, safe and still in that suspended moment, and the small lumpy bundle inside his left leg, warming my thigh, pulsing through me with a tiny rhythm. Like the
eee ahh yoo de ya booeee booeee
from
Eiji’s jazz records throbbing through the wall in the Port Dover house late at night. Me swaying between his strong legs with muscles that could carry me anywhere. Then, inside the house, hakujin voices; the whoosh of the door starting to open. Eiji’s breath rising, his body poised to spring, and a burning low in my belly. I tried to hold back but I couldn’t. Onara. The sound I made! The smell of me, kusai! Eiji threw me down so the porch shook, and the door quietly shut. Eiji rode off. I was laughing now, harder than I’d laughed in a long while. I tried to cover my mouth but it seemed to stretch so wide, like a horse’s. My eyes were streaming. I felt a little out of control. Sachi was watching me uneasily, but not laughing; she didn’t find it quite so funny.

“Then what?”

“I screamed but he didn’t come back. Screamed and screamed.” I laughed again, dabbing my eyes with the crusty tissue. “Baka,” I said again, through my laughter. I needed a moment to calm down and collect myself. I laughed for another spurt, hiccupped a little, then forced myself to take several deep breaths. As if drunk on my own memory. Sachi had turned away now, staring across to the ravine. I could only guess what she was thinking of me. She stood up suddenly and whistled for the dog. It seemed almost rude in the middle of my story, but perhaps she found it a little too crude. Perhaps she had never imagined me as a girl; the story made me ludicrous in her eyes.

“I followed his tire marks in the snow,” I went on, “and walked back to the house. All morning I walked to get there.” Finally Sachi settled back down beside me.

“When I got there, Eiji was in trouble for leaving me
behind. He was bent over the kitchen table, with his pants down, tears coming. Papa had his belt out. I’ll never forget the look in Eiji’s eyes with his red face,” I said. “But he was not one bit sorry. Not one bit,” I told her.

“That’s it?” Sachi asked. “That’s the story?”

I nodded. It was true that I’d left out parts. Things I might tell her later, when she’d understand better. I might tell her that afterward, that night, I crept into Eiji’s room. I crouched beside him. “What?” he muttered. His voice was weak; Papa’s beating must have hurt him more than he let on. I inched my hand under his pyjama bottom to the welts. At first he pushed me away, but then he gave in. He shivered as I traced one welt after another with my finger. They were raised so high, wriggling on his skin with a life all their own. Worms. He grinned, lopsided, lazy-eyed, no longer disgusted with me. No longer annoyed. I stroked with my cool fingertips, soothing him until he slept, drooling into his pillow.

Sachi was standing again, waving at the dog, her back to me. She seemed to want to hide her face from me; her shoulders heaved. Laughing at me, not at my story, perhaps. It had meant nothing to her. Tam was on her mind. Tamio. Distorting everything. The clouds that had climbed up the sky in ridges had smoothed out into an even wall blocking the sun.

“I must get back now,” I called out hastily, already marching down the side of the hill. Sachi shouted to me, something about the dog going off towards the ravine, about wanting to follow it, but her voice had grown faint; I couldn’t quite hear. Papa would be wailing for me by now, I knew, and I had no more patience with her. I waved and descended
briskly. I was irritable now; frustrated at having been brought here, at wasting my morning. The same thing all over again, what I’d resolved not to let happen. I thought once more of my chores piling up, the dust on my window-ledge, the vacuuming, and so on. I felt small under the large sky; to distract myself, I studied it for patterns as I walked, marking my progress by little hooks and swirls among the clouds so I wouldn’t feel lost under it.

I thought of Chisako up there, floating serenely, I hoped, in her bright, rich colours. In the kimono I’d never actually seen her wear, yet imagined her in more than a hundred times. Watching me from above, going here, going there, pulled along by Sachi in search of Tam and his sister, and Yano.

Miraculously, Papa was still sleeping when I got back, and he was dry. I’d eaten nothing for breakfast but the nausea I’d felt earlier had worked its way to my bowels. I sat down on the toilet and emptied myself with the relief I’d withheld all morning, and scanned the newspaper thoroughly. Though Sachi had assured me that nothing was in today’s news, I wanted to see for myself. When I reached the obituaries, there was nothing under Yano, predictably enough. But every few days, the years going on as they did, there were smatterings of names I remembered from Port Dover or camp days. Today a name caught my eye: Yamashiro. It wasn’t a common name, but its familiarity came rushing at me despite the tiny type and the sameness of all the entries.
Beloved wife of the late Shigeru Yamashiro. Survived by daughter Sandra, son Robert, and brother Takemitsu Iwata.
Yamashiro, Yamashiro-san. I whispered it over and over to myself.
Passed away peacefully in her sleep.
Then, as if
he’d heard, Papa groaned and called for me:
Asako, Asako.
Jolting me just as Yamashiro-san’s face or voice seemed about to materialize in my head. I got up and went to Papa, and those thoughts left me; I had no time or room left in my jumbled head.

After I fed and changed him, I read the local news to Papa, sitting on the edge of his bed. I had not done so in a long while, it seemed. My reading, no matter what it was, calmed him, especially when he was fidgety, annoyed to be trapped in his decrepit body. I could be reading an article about the most violent and hideous crime, and it would soothe him—the sound of my voice, the monotonous rhythm of my speech. His mind was long gone. He never had comprehended English well, and his Japanese had dwindled years ago, belonging, as it did, to the bygone era before he’d left Japan. Yet he could be quite content, I knew, muttering away to himself.

As I read out the latest traffic accidents from drunk driving, the unemployment rate, and other such things, I glanced at Papa now and then, to find him resting quietly enough. Then my dream from the night before came back to me. I was on the beach again and I was carrying Papa, his legs curling around my torso, his knees hitched under my breasts as if grown into my flesh. He was shrivelled and small, smaller than in real life, shrunken to the size of a baby monkey, except that his arms were monstrously long. So long they dangled near my knees, stretched from simply hanging, from their own weight. He had no clothes on. I felt his chimpo, tiny as it was, against the small of my back. He barely weighed anything, and yet, as I went on, each foot
sank deeper into the sand, and finally I had to sit, dropping him to the ground, his stringy arms flopping back.

It was hard to believe that this dream could come from my own mind yet feel so eerily real. Even now, I could not resist peeking under Papa’s covers at his arms. I laughed at myself when I did, seeing the familiar mottled flesh of his arms, which were in reality short in proportion to the rest of him. The dream had ended abruptly, as many dreams do; I remembered nothing more. I stopped reading then; the air began to feel close in the room, and Papa’s odour, despite my having changed him a short while earlier, felt suffocating to me.

I went on through the day with more chores, summoning some energy, grateful to be left alone. I did not even let myself pause at the window to watch for Sachi’s return. She did enter my thoughts now and again, her desperation about Tam, but there was nothing more to be done at the moment. I thought of her wandering aimlessly, absurdly following that dog. It was not helpful to either of us to go sleuthing about, dog in tow. For the first time I felt some sympathy for Keiko, having to contend with Sachi, demanding child that she was. I did not envy her as a mother, not at all.

Stum arrived home at his usual hour for once, without his Angel. Not that I expected him to bring her; he knew better than that. I thought of enquiring after her, to show my concern, my willingness to try to accept her, but I could not bring myself to do so. We would have to wait until it came from my heart, freely and sincerely. In the meantime, as Stum himself said, who knew how things would progress between the two of them, if at all?

We sat in the living-room after dinner, both of us reading quietly, almost as it had been in the past. We were being careful with one another, trying to regain, in silence, the rhythm of things. I began to make out my shopping list, looking forward to some concrete task to take me away from the neighbourhood. For the electrical towers, the hill, the Yano house itself—all were constant reminders of Chisako’s absence; reminders that, as I’d told Sachi, I had lost my only friend.

There was an interruption to our calm as Stum paused over something in the newspaper. He rose all at once, crackling the paper, and came to where I sat to show me the Yamashiro obituary. He was jabbing at the item with his finger, open-mouthed, as if that motion alone could prod his memory, as I had tried to do myself earlier that day.

“Yamashiro, Yamashiro,” he repeated, just as I had, only aloud. “Yamashiro.” He looked out the window but by now it was dark. Beyond our reflection I thought I spied movement out in the field.

“Look.” I pointed. “Somebody’s out there.” I pressed close to the glass. It could be Sachi; it could be Tam or Kimi. Or Yano.

“Look,” I said again. “Maybe you better go out there.” I sounded a little hysterical, but I couldn’t help myself. I tried to snatch the newspaper from Stum’s hand and draw him to the door. He pulled away.

“What are you doing? There’s nothing out there.” He looked me up and down, as if I were crazy. “You’re trying to distract me, aren’t you? Something about this Yamashiro woman. I know you, ne-san. I know you.” He smiled smugly.

Perhaps he was right. I took one last look out the window, blinked at myself: nothing there. Briskly I drew the drapes and went into the kitchen to clean up the last of the day’s dishes. “What a day,” I said, clattering some plates. But Stum ignored me, simply sat there mouthing the name. Yamashiro. Yamashiro. Such a cumbersome, ungraceful name.

Later it came to me, unbidden. Yamashiro. I kept muttering it quietly to myself as I padded down the hall past Papa’s room, past Stum’s closed door. I paused by the door for a second, and was gratified to hear his low, thick breathing behind it, not quite rising to a snore. It was good to have him home where he belonged, I had to admit. I went downstairs to the cabinet where I kept our few photographs—not many, since we didn’t have our own camera, hadn’t had one since before the camps. I’d stored away the odd token too; nothing of any significance really. I found it there: an old leaflet from one of Eiji’s memorial services at the church downtown. I suppose Papa had kept it for the prayer written in it. Papa wanted the service held there since he had switched to that church many years earlier because of Reverend Ono.

It was an annual event then, every November 16: an extra donation for the church, a gift for the reverend, two bouquets of chrysanthemums for the altar. We were waiting for the rows to clear so Stum could bring out Papa’s wheelchair. I was tired. Weary from the drone of Japanese and English lagging in your ears, neither this nor that. It was several months later that Papa had his second stroke and could no longer go to church, and I was relieved of this duty. I had
little feeling for the church or the reverend, though he was kind and well-meaning enough. He could be irksome, carrying things on for years after the war in his wishy-washy manner. He had been no different in camp, always urging us to sing, sing, sing our troubles away. In the midst of that din, what chased my bad thoughts away was how the hymn-books fell open in my hands. The tiny precise letters
unto the hills
printed on old paper so fine it was the skin that slakes off after days in the sun. If only I could sing, I thought; that would make me happy. The voice in my head was sweet, but out of my mouth came a bitter squawk I let only myself hear. During the service, my fingers would curl tight into a ball at the sound of those silly voices starting and stopping in ten different places, on five different notes. As if I could hold a precious thing there where my fingers balled up, a pure, sweet note. I ran my fingertip all around the sharp pink rim of the page, faint as blood in water. I tucked the notes from my memorial speech that day into the book, a small slip of paper lost long ago. I was adjusting the lopsided spine of the book as a woman came near.

“My dear,” she said. “Such kind words you had for your brother. Kind, graceful words.” She was stooped a bit, well into middle age. A little older than I was now. There was something timid about her, crouched as she was, as if something might fall on her at any minute. She took my hand and cupped it between her own white-gloved ones, murmuring,
so, so, so.

“It was nothing,” I said, and stepped back. The tweak of nerves I’d felt standing before the congregation returned for a second or two.

“He was special, ne? Otoko-mae ne? Handsome, ne?” What everyone said about Eiji.

“Yes,” I replied.

“You wouldn’t remember me,” she said, smiling. “Yamashiro desu.” I nodded. “Of course,” she added, “that’s my married name.”

The woman stood staring up at me for the longest time with her small, clouded eyes. Fortunately Stum came rattling up the aisle on the opposite side of the pew with Papa’s wheelchair then, and motioned me over.