The Electrical Field (32 page)

The side gate creaked and the dog came bounding in, startling me out of my thoughts. Its tail was flickering, that white flame that had guided me through the forest. My impulse was to touch, though I never had; it resisted even Sachi’s embrace, time and time again. It was not a creature like others, to be cuddled, to know itself only in your eyes. “Yuki!” I called, and the dog paused to stare, and in the particular cock of its head I saw that it remembered me.

Keiko appeared then, neat and in order as always, not broken open, as on that night in the ravine. She looked to the ground, to my heap of weeds. “Thank you for telling us,” she said after a moment. “Asako. Gomen.”

Sorry for what, I wanted to ask. For one night? For the years of averted glances, cold shoulders? For Sachi? For herself? She took one more step. Carefully she embraced me as
I held out my soiled hands helplessly. She was a slight thing, feathery, not wiry as I’d thought all these years. Seconds later I was released.

She was weeping, dryly, quietly, to herself. I could only stand there. I wanted to console her, to leave her be, whatever would ease the moment. But abruptly she stopped.

“Gomen,” she repeated, in her frugal way. As if English would be too plain, too bald. The perfume of my roses over-powered me then, I don’t know why. On impulse, I went to the end of my garden, where they’d begun to bloom on the bush. I snipped a branch. “Nakamura-san … Keiko,” I started to say, for we were, it seemed, friends now. But as I turned, with a smile and my modest gift in hand, I heard the gate creak and found her gone. Myself alone. The embarrassment of the moment, her shame at what had happened, not to be overcome.

A sudden wave of fatigue overtook me, though it was early afternoon. I sat down in my lawn chair, roses in my lap. I was reminded of the dream of Eiji I’d had days ago, the dream that had seemed so much like life. But in the dream, the blossoms Eiji gave me became grotesque in my hand. My roses here were velvet up close; no ugliness in them at all. A word sprang to my lips. “Utsukushii,” I said aloud, forgetting that I was alone, that Sachi wasn’t with me. I must tell her, I said.

Of course, she’d already know. From Tam. She more than anyone would grasp that word, just from the sound of it. The prettiness of a thing that will soon die. As a child she had known by instinct, when she broke the baby blooms off my roses.

I had no wish to bring the cutting inside, to wake to its drooping petals in the morning. Instead I tossed it into the heap of weeds. As I did, I could not help but hear Yano behind me, the wheezing from his lips. I glanced down at the last bright, lovely thing at my feet.

Alone in my living-room at night, Stum and Papa fast asleep upstairs, I made a faint circle on the cold glass with my breath in the moonlight, as I’d done when I was a little girl. Circles and circles, big and small, that wouldn’t stay. Night after night I had seen the two beams of light meet and fade out there. I clearly recall my thoughts on one such night, my wistful thoughts. They are happy, I told myself. In love. They could die tomorrow, I even whispered; I did. Thought to myself that it would not be such a cruel thing. Believed it.

Inside the refrigerator, I found two foil-wrapped plates labelled “Papa” and “Asa” in Angel’s flowery handwriting. Such a waste, I thought, smoothing out the creases and tucking the foil back in my drawer. On another night it might have irked me, but tonight I was tired enough to be grateful. Papa was unusually quiet, meeting each spoonful with a dutifully open mouth. “Yano-san wa,” he muttered, pointing to the window, “don-buro.” As he had some days ago. Down below, his word for basement. I pondered that; a senile old man’s premonition, perhaps, but there was nothing in it. After he finished, instead of hurrying downstairs to sit by my window, I brought a hot washcloth to his face, wiping slowly and carefully, as in the old days. Back then, I could take an hour to clean him, top to bottom. Each day a fresh start. Each day some hope. Now I twisted my finger in the
cloth and gently picked at the corners of his eyes until he pushed me away. Bi-bi, I said with my ridiculous clown-smile, holding that bit of crust up to him, rewarding him with such nonsense. As Eiji had once said to me, and I to baby Stum. Bi-bi. If someone were to hear me.

When I sat down to my own dinner, the sky was still bright. I did not once go to the window, my chair there; I had no interest in gazing over the empty field, at the empty house across it, and the light inside that must have burned out by now, or finally been turned off by the police. I wondered what would be done with the house, with no one to claim it. I thought of Yano’s crazy brother out west, all alone in the world now, who could never stand the sight of his own.

By the time I finished, the room was half dark. Mazui, I clucked at Angel’s overboiled vegetables and tasteless bits of chicken that I’d downed. Stum would not like this, I thought; it would not do. Cleaning up, it struck me: the two identical plates wrapped in tinfoil, my name and Papa’s. The same sad mush for two old ojiisans. This, I sighed, this was how things were to be. Any other day, I told myself, I don’t know what I would have done.

I didn’t know what to do with myself—any more, I laughed bitterly, than Angel did. I went from this armchair to that, to the chesterfield. I was tired and listless, my body, my mind both a nuisance. I half rose to go to the butsudan, dusty and neglected in its corner for years now; I made out only a shape, the outline of Buddha with his hint of a smile. The prayers left unsaid, in spite of Buddha’s boundless compassion. I had known all along that it was too late; I’d had no hope, no faith. I sat back down. No solace in that corner.
Only this persistent fatigue that was, it occurred to me, like jetlag, though I’d never travelled far enough, never flown in a jet to know. Still I was sure it would feel like this: part of me here; part of me there, never catching up.

The next morning, after breakfast, they bundled me into the car, though I protested. Stum driving, with Angel beside him in front. Going so fast that it seemed the trees were hardly trees; I wanted him to slow down so I could see them, hear them whisk by. I had no wish to nag him, though; things had changed between us, ever so little; the way he exchanged a look with Angel only to cast a watchful glance over me in the rearview mirror when he thought I didn’t see. Their conspiracy, well meant as it was. Whenever I found my mouth open, about to say waga-mama, to complain, I shushed myself. Be grateful, I told myself. Over us, the clouds were still and heavy as ice floes, even as we raced on. A hint of my dream from the night before revisited me, but only the sounds, the swish, the giggling, the breath held and let go: it was Sachi, with Tam, by the ravine under the willow. Utsukushii. Not a cruel thing.

“It was Angel’s idea,” Stum was saying. “She thought you might want to come. You’ve never seen, all this time—”

“Asa, there are thousands of them. Busy, busy, cracking open, all day, all night in the hatch room.” She was hunched over the seat and reaching for me; planting a cluster of fingers in my palm. “Their fur tickles at first, it’s so soft,” she told me. “After, they’re like part of your hand.” She pinched me then, a little scratch for barely a second. “Just a little squeeze open, just to see, that does it. Stum’s been teaching
me.” She got on my nerves, telling it but all the while really keeping it to herself, this know-how meant only for them, her and Stum. The little squeeze open that does it, does what? What they did with their hands, what they saw that told them—it was not for me to know.

We pulled up to a white brick building, one storey high in the middle of an empty stretch of land, and Angel bounded out with such energy, reminding me how young she was, robust—how much younger than Stum, who lumbered behind, slow and steady. She doubled back to urge me out. I caught Stum’s worried look, even from a distance. “Go on, you two,” I said, “I’ll follow.” I shooed them away. They joined up happily enough, clasped hands, and disappeared into the building.

I thought of waiting in the car, but Stum had locked the doors. I couldn’t disappoint them, not Stum, proud for once, anxious to show off. Around the building the ground was muddy, from the recent rain, I suppose, and before I knew it my shoes were chunked with dirt. It was strangely quiet here. I waited but the quiet persisted, except for the few cars that passed on the road. There were no planes crossing the sky, that was what it was. I’d lived with it for so long that it was the quiet I noticed, not the noise. I remember how it was at first, when the airport came. Suddenly one day the planes coming and going. Rattling the house. Soon, I suppose, my mind ceased to hear them, but my heart took longer to; I felt it shudder inside my chest, rising and rising every single time.

“Asako.” I felt a hand shaking my shoulder. Too roughly. A touch that didn’t quite know its own strength, that could only be a man’s. The name rushed to my lips—Yano—but
I caught myself. I looked up and there was Mr. Fujioka, Stum’s boss.

“Fujioka—Kaz,” I exclaimed, trying to compose myself. “You shouldn’t sneak up on me like that.” No sooner had I scolded him than I realized I’d wandered quite far from the car, come around the length of the building to the back. He had hardly snuck up on me. All this added to my embarrassment at seeing Fujioka. Back in his bachelor days, he used to call at our home for tea. Papa wanted to impress him, since it was Fujioka who had taught Stum chick sexing when he arrived after the war, having been trained at some special school in Nagoya. Of course he’d been served tea in proper style countless times back there, but what did I know? Afterwards, Papa would scold me for the tea being too weak or too strong, not enough this or that.

“You were looking at my trees, ne?” he said with some pride.

“Yes, yes,” I responded, looking just at that moment. They were beautiful, unexpected, hiding there behind the building. The soft pink of their blossoms that became something else, less pretty when you came close. For a second they took my breath. Once again I recalled the time with Eiji, the branch in my hand. “They remind me—” I stopped myself. A silly thought.

Kaz stood patiently, waiting for me to finish. Kind enough. “Well,” I said, “they make me think of the orchard in the camp.” Pointless as it was to bring up such things, nothing else was in my mind at the moment.

“Those were apple trees, Asako,” he said, with a little snort. “These are sakura. I ordered them special from Japan.
Takai desu,” he said this in a confiding way. Of course, having to mention their costliness, to show me how well he’d done for himself. It seemed to me that over the years he’d become more like his wife, a home-grown nisei without tact; that he’d lost the grace of his bachelor days, when he first came here from Japan. In the past, I had to remind myself to call him Kaz, as he insisted, trying to be like another of the boys. Once he brought me a box of pretty pink and green sugar candies sent by his mother from Kyoto. I was such a naive thing, quite unaware of what it could mean, that box, I hardly thanked him. For Mama had taught me nothing, nothing at all.

“No, no,” I said, waving him away. “Besides,” I added, suddenly brazen, “you weren’t even there. How would you know, Kaz?” I tossed a little laugh at him.

“Asako,” he said, clearing his throat. “Sakura in the middle of the mountains? Not with all that snow.”

I shivered when he said this, surprising myself, for the afternoon was quite warm for a June day. It was Yano, his memory of cold, still in me.

“Apple blossoms, apple,” Kaz repeated stubbornly, going on admiring his trees. “Saw them last summer when we visited the in-laws.” He stood waiting for some reply, I suppose because he knew his wife and I had been in the same camp. Though she was some years older.

“I see” was all I said. I gave in, remembering how stubborn he could be, even back when he was still a gentleman. How he stopped me from pouring tea to turn and wipe the cup, making me feel oafish but all the same grateful. How odd to imagine Fujioka there in the mountains, sipping from
some chipped teacup, no doubt, in the dark of an old shack the family had stayed on in; I always pictured him in a teahouse in Japan, kneeling in kimono by an open shoji, looking out onto a rock garden. The same way I’d sometimes imagined Chisako, though I’d never seen either of them dressed so. I’d never seen a teahouse, never seen Japan.

I couldn’t care less what he claimed; I knew what I knew. I knew that orchard. Hadn’t I walked through it with Eiji a hundred, a thousand times, day after day, back and forth, to school, to the bath, to the youth club? Up and down the wide mud street after the first thaw, the boot uncovered. Then into the orchard. “Was it dark?” I asked.

“Ara?” Kaz looked puzzled. Lost in his thoughts too, I suppose. “Dark?”

“The sky, the clouds. It was always dark.” He had never lived there, how could he know? The mountains cluttering up the sky, the street wide and messy with mud, your feet sinking if you didn’t step quickly. The cold at night, so stark in summer. It was the cold that woke me each morning, the heat that leaked out once Eiji left. That one night I’d kept myself awake even though the breathing mound of him stayed warm beside me. When Eiji finally woke, it was because I had gone, my heat. I’d left our bed, run down the street, past the shacks, past the crooked doors like rotting teeth and their peeling burnt tar-paper skin. Everyone asleep row after row, sleeping as they should, staying put. In my nightgown I was white as a ghost running in the awful mud in the middle of the night. Through the orchard, out onto the road. Down to the river. The strange light that lit my legs pink, the moon.

“No, Asako,” Kaz insisted. “It was sunny. Like Natsuyo remembered.”

Yes, that was true. I’d forgotten; if it wasn’t dark it was bright, ice bright, so your eyes smarted, so it was hard to see sometimes. But the light seemed unnatural in a way; it could never warm the dry, dry air or shine for long. I didn’t remember things the way Kaz’s wife did; but who was she to say, she wasn’t so special, I had no memory of her. She was old, she must have gone with the older crowd to the dances and such; older even than Sumi. And all I could see of Sumi was her bucket, held at one side, and her bowed legs showing below her skirt, coming out of the woods with Eiji. Where her face should be was empty. There was only that older woman, Yamashiro-san, in the church, holding her finger under her eye, showing me where Eiji and I resembled each other. I touched myself there, that bit of skin.