The Electrical Field (24 page)

I was about to repeat what Yano had said on one of our
walks. How he’d told me she was from Hiroshima, what he’d implied about her family. I could not have mistaken his meaning. For I had, I believe, in some way held it in my heart all this time, through the endless confiding, her stories about Mr. Spears. I’d held it there as she sat before me, eyes closed. I was on the verge of blurting how betrayed I felt, having my sympathies played upon, when her eyes flicked open again.

“Do you know what my secret wish is, Asako? You will be quite shocked.” The crystal of her voice coarsened to glass: a new sound, a different Chisako.

I shook my head. Her eyes were wide now, rounder and larger than ever, unwavering; for a moment she looked foreign, no longer nihonjin. “My wish is for the bomb to drop on the ones who did it.” She seemed shocked at herself, at her own cruelty. “Just because we’re nihonjin, they think they can do anything to us.” Her hands clenched and shook. She reminded me of Yano, the hands in fists, the anger.

“That is the reason for Yano’s meetings and letters, the petitions to government people. He isn’t crazy. He wants to change things. It’s important to try, ne?”

I nodded, if only to appease her. It was true that her anger, her venom shocked me. Yet I wanted to tell her how useless it was to dwell on the past, to waste her words. Words that were not even hers. It dawned on me then that Chisako was a woman who could never be without a man; who must believe in that man. The world was too frightening to be alone and on your own.

Her thoughts seemed to take another turn. “I am a plain woman, Asako. Not special at all. Only with hopes and
dreams for herself.” Her lips rested sullenly behind the carefully shaped red of her lipstick. She sat forward, brought herself close to me. “You and I are both lucky,” she said sombrely. “You may feel that life offers you little, but really, un no yoi, ne? You are one of the lucky ones.”

I pondered her remarks now, trying to decipher the meaning beneath the surface. How I could be lucky. Was Chisako telling me I’d made myself needlessly pitiable? Felt sorry for myself when I had no right? When others had greater cause? I chided myself for probing too deeply, stirring things up for myself. When in the end, Chisako thought only of herself, always, never of me.

“Perhaps, Asako,” she sighed resignedly, “perhaps Mr. Spears is not truly special to me either. Ne?”

Chisako paced a little back and forth, then sat down beside me. I felt the warmth of her legs alongside mine, both of us sinking into the soft cushions.

“Asako.” She said my name with some tenderness, and pressed my hand between the two of hers. “You haven’t, have you?”

I stiffened. “Haven’t what? What nonsense are you talking, Chisako?” I turned once more to the window.

“You have never been with a man, have you?”

Now I was stunned; I was—there were no words for the distress, the shame I felt at being asked such a thing. But she would not let me go, and her face hovered so close; I could not conceal myself. I strained for words, some small offhand comment, some adept change of subject, but could find nothing. My voice had drained away. I rasped, as if we sat before a crowded audience of strangers eager for my secrets:
“Please, Chisako. Please,” I pleaded, barely audible to myself. “Do not embarrass me.”

As I recalled the moment, my cheeks burned, but my body was cold as if without clothes. Stum’s padding steps now came up from behind and in a second he was patting my shoulder. I was oddly warmed by it, the intimacy of his touch here in my room. My brother’s face, in spite of our conflicts, was a solace to me during this moment in which I regained myself. The things we’d shared all these years. Our discomfort in the world. The consolation of one another’s company, which had sustained us within the walls of our home. I’d forgotten about him, lost in my reverie. Assumed he’d left to see his Angel once again.

“Tell me, ne-san,” he prodded. “What was going through your mind just now?” I shook my head. “I was daydreaming,” I answered. On any other occasion he’d assume I meant about Eiji.

“You were mumbling strange things,” he said. “What did you tell Chisako? What were your last words to her, ne-san?”

I shook my head, absolving myself. “I don’t remember just now,” I said, watching his searching, doubting eyes. “But soon it will come back to me.”

“Tell me. Tell me,” he repeated, unwilling to let it go. In my confused mind his voice became twinned with another’s, Yano’s; the two huddled conspiratorially all along, unbeknownst to me. The eyes of my brother, then of Yano, whitening with rage, hungry for me to tell him what he already knew. As I watched Stum’s back turn to me, that familiar back with its particular bent angle at the left shoulder, as I
watched him leave, I was compelled to call out to him, to stop him from leaving me alone, to tell him what I had in fact remembered of that night. But then it was Yano I saw too, Yano turning away from me in the electrical field, stooped to catch his snagging breath in the midst of his rage and jealousy.

My voice grew loud suddenly, boisterous in my ears. “I told her to tell him!” I was shouting, the blood coursing through me was thick and pulsing, vibrating with this news. “I did!” I declared baldly into Stum’s disbelieving eyes. “I demanded she tell Yano about her Mr. Spears. How she preferred him. I told her to. I insisted! I demanded she be honest!” I cried, on fire with shame and uncontainable excitement. A torrent of thoughts rushed into my head. All she had confided, every private detail that I had tried to cast aside was still stored inside of me. The painful intimacies that I had yearned to hear, that I was helpless to shun despite the envy they raised in me. The envy that now burst from me, victorious and vindicated. Stum knelt in front of me again. He clutched at my knees, hoping against hope that it was not true, that I had not made Chisako tell Yano such things, yet he did not dare ask. It was his pure good nature, I knew, his naive faith in me. “And now,” I sobbed, crying for my childish innocence that was spoiled long ago, the burden of it. How much a victim I’d made of myself and everyone in all of this! “Now she’s gotten what she deserved, hasn’t she?” I cried.

“Yes!” Stum shouted back, emphatic, equally vindicated. His anger, his envy now shockingly revealed to me. “Yes, ne-san! She has!”

I
FOUND MYSELF IN
my garden, poking about at my irises. One or two had begun to wilt in the sad way that irises did; soon enough they’d be shrinking into a gnarl of petals that reminded me of Papa’s arthritic fingers, curled under the covers. Flowers that Chisako might have found too Japanese, I thought. But now more than ever, the dashes of deep violet they brought to my yard gave me pleasure, with my tulips and daffodils fading, and my tired peonies starting to brown at the edges. I felt mysteriously renewed; I’d slept a deep, untroubled sleep. On a whim, I began snipping a few blooms to put in a vase in my living-room, and before long I found my hands clutching two thick bunches, and the garden suddenly bare.

I sailed into Papa’s room feeling the newness of the day. I drew back the drapes to let in the morning light and cracked open the window to air out the mustiness. It was then that I realized Eiji had been with me once again in a dream.

It was the kind of dream that does not deceive you at all, but simply lulls you into reliving a treasured time or sensation, and you know it is a dream of pure memory. I was a girl once more, and I was walking with Eiji through the orchard of the camp. It was spring, and the apple trees were in full bloom. Eiji clambered up the side of one tree and snapped off a small branch. “Utsukushii,” he said, handing it down to me. I remember it was a new word we’d just learned at the Japanese school in the camp. Up close, the blossoms were more like insects that wriggled with the breeze than flowers. The petals were skimpy and the stamens fine as nostril hairs. They made me go cold. I dropped the branch; Eiji picked it up and put it back in my hand. “Utsukushii,” he repeated, then pointed to where the blossoms were thick and pretty on the trees. He was showing me the kind of pretty glimpsed at a certain time, in a certain light—a special light. A pretty that can’t last; a pretty that can even turn ugly. As we walked, the blossoms on the trees curled up and blackened before my eyes, just as I remembered them doing in real life a week or two after blooming.

Papa groaned as I fed him his porridge, but he didn’t seem resentful towards me for forgetting him the day before. Everything that had happened last night, my conversation with Stum, wrenching as it was, seemed far away. I felt fortified by the sense that, whatever the circumstances, I could rise above them. I had my daily tasks, I thought, wiping the porridge from Papa’s chin; responsibilities that could only carry me forward: a tide. Life itself, I laughed. I was formidable. Besides, there was the chance, as Stum himself had said, that this situation with Angel would pass, and life
would resume as usual. But no, I vowed; not as usual. Things would change for the better. I would change. I would welcome life into this home, I thought, remembering the flowers I’d put in the living-room. I’d throw open the doors, encourage my brother to make more friends. I would make new friends myself. Perhaps invite that hakujin woman over for tea, the Yanos’ neighbour, to reminisce about Chisako, after more time had passed.

Come what might, whatever the outcome of these terrible happenings, I told myself, what I wanted was the happiness of my family. Of Sachi too. Once Yano and the children returned, that was what I would pour all my energy into.

For the first time in the years since he’d lost his wits lying in this bed, I searched Papa’s face for signs. I wiped his chin and waited, watched for some link between my touch and his sense of it, any at all. I sat on his bed beside him, listening to the sputter of his body’s eroded parts; outside the twitter and ping of birds and leaves on trees echoed in a comforting way. He perceived this too, I thought, for the marsh in his eyes seemed to clear with the light and sounds coming from the window.

Not knowing what possessed me, I lay down beside him on his bed. “Ara?” he exclaimed, wondering what was happening, what this quaking was I’d caused. I felt the coldness emanating from him even as I tucked the extra blanket under his chin; Dr. Honda had told me that it was common for the body temperature of old people confined to their beds to drop below normal. I ignored the sourness his body exuded, the old smell that could never be scrubbed away without peeling the very skin from him. Instead I lay there and
watched him close: the plastic-wrap skin around his head, the birdlike bones beneath; I felt the slow drip drip of blood through his veins. It was a marvel, really, to exist for nearly ninety years, the body still breathing, still alive. I wrapped my arm across the mound of him, pressed myself close to warm his body with my own, and felt the crushable bones beneath the layers of bedding. “Papa,” I whispered. “Papa, all right? Genki?” I wanted him to hear, to feel me close.

I often forgot it had been Papa who was tender with me after Eiji was gone. Mama blamed me, I know, for his death; but that did not embitter me, for I understood that she was grasping desperately for some peace of mind. Some consolation. When I stopped eating and sleeping, it was Papa who watched over me. There was nothing my body could take in. It was hateful to me, the thought of my body succumbing to sensation with any relief or pleasure when all I wanted was to be numb. To be closed over. Yet, however deadened, alive to my own misery. Though I wished for it as for nothing else before or since, I did not deserve to die with Eiji. Or to survive without him. Stum once told me that, in his infant memory, I was a skeleton that stalked his dreams. I remembered little of that time; only that Papa stuffed me with steamed napa grown in the mountain soil, and beans: beans pushed between my teeth with his brutish fingers as I lay there. Papa feared the same thing happening to me, the pneumonia, though it could not; would not. It was Eiji who had been weak, and not I.

Papa had been kind even when Eiji first turned from me. Eiji was fearful, I came to understand, of his little sister, his little ojosan with the soft lumps swelling on her chest and
the furry spots sprouting here and there. He was just a boy, after all. It was endearing, one might say, and, I came to understand, not the least bit unnatural; for perhaps a year ago I had noticed how Tam, in the smallest yet most telling ways, flinched from his sister’s touch. How she scurried to keep close when they crossed the field, and each time he strode ahead. Instead of clinging all the tighter, she drew back. Of course, that was only after Kimi had stumbled onto them down by the creek, just as I had. I had watched Sachi shoo her away with a glance, a mean, darting glance. To keep Tam to herself, as I had tried to keep Eiji. Kimi let go, seeing how her place had been taken. It was difficult for me to hold back, not go to that girl to explain, but wisely I did not. She would learn, I told myself, just as I had learned.

I could even laugh at myself over it now: the doubts I had harboured those many, many years ago; how panicked I was. As if Eiji could ever stop loving me, even with Sumi and the others flocking around him. But many things were changing then, and I was so young, and he not much older; it was understandable, this confusion. One day I was different for him, and he for me. It was Papa who kept me company then. He tolerated my meanness, because I’d earned it by enduring the burden of his drunkenness those Saturday nights in Port Dover. He had little to do in the camp, and began to mutter sayings, sayings meant in his rough way to soothe me; I could only guess at their meanings with my bits of schoolgirl Japanese. “Nan-to, ojiisan?” I lashed out, jeering at him as Mama did. Old fool, I called him, what are you saying? Baka, I even dared to call him. Him with his foolish sayings, telling me I’d live past this; as if my love for Eiji were a phase I’d outgrow.
I sat with Papa on many sullen, lonely days, waiting, waiting. Staring out across the muddy road at an ugly old boot stuck in front of our shack since the snow had melted.