Women On the Other Shore (7 page)

Seeing that Sayoko's attention was drifting, Junko leaned across the table and lowered her voice almost to a whisper.

52

"You wouldn't know this, but there's actually a lot more to Miss Narahashi t h a n meets the eye."

"More t h a n meets t h e eye? You mean like she's some kind of slick operator or something?"

"No, nothing like that. I'm talking about her history. They say she was in all the papers."

"Was she a child genius or something?" The tone her companion was taking irked Sayoko, but curiosity got the better of her.

"Oh, please. Does she look like a genius to you? Let's just say she's had an eventful life," she said, sounding smug. She paused to lick some ketchup from her finger. "When they say someone's been in the papers, they have to be talking about a major incident or scandal of some kind."

Sayoko was about to ask for further elaboration, but before she could open her m o u t h she noticed the clock on the wall.

"Looks like it's time we got back."

She stood and quickly began gathering cups and hamburger wrappers onto their tray. Junko let out a long, heavy sigh.

Back scrubbing grease and nicotine stains from the kitchen walls, Sayoko thought about how women like Junko Iwabuchi were the very reason she sometimes became convinced nothing was ever going to go right, and grew so depressed she could hardly bring herself to step outside. She'd encountered people like this before, in college as well as earlier, going all the way back to when she was a little girl—and, of course, at t h e film distributor where she worked before getting married, too. Coming up to you like they were your best friend and you shared all your confidences, they would start running people down right and left, expecting you to agree with everything they said. But then the next thing you knew you'd see them cozying up to somebody else and making
you
the target of their smears. As Sayoko thought of this, the doubts that had finally begun to subside reared up again: Was it really so important for her to work even when she had to waitlist her daughter for nursery school? As this questio began echoing louder and louder in her head, she tried to smother it by focusing her mind solely on the circular motions of her sponge The grease resisted the sponge, clinging stubbornly to the wall, and the more lather the cleanser produced, the heavier the sponge grew.

Every now and then she would hear Noriko impatiently correcting Junko in the main room.

"What did I tell you? You'll never get those fat fingers of yours in there. Use a chopstick. Got that? What do you say?"

Noriko dropped them off at Nakano Station and they took the train back to the office in Okubo. Junko straggled up the stairs after Sayoko, moaning repeatedly about her poor back and wanting to know why their building didn't have an elevator.

Sayoko glanced at her watch. It was half past four. She could probably get her report written and leave by around five, so she'd be picking Akari up at five-thirty. She was still preoccupied with these thoughts when she bumped into someone coming the other way on the third floor landing.

"I'm sorry," she said, raising her eyes. The young man looked familiar.

"Oh, hi, Takeshil" Junko called out from behind. Sayoko remembered that this was someone else she'd met on the day she came to accept the job. Aoi had introduced Takeshi Kihara not as a member of the staff but as someone who helped out when they were busy.

"Hi! You guys just getting back?" he said with a friendly smile, coming to a halt. "You must be pretty wiped out."

"That's an understatement if there ever was one. It was the absolute worst!" Junko shrilled. "How can she do this to us?"

Takeshi turned to Sayoko. "What kind of work is it exactly—this thing you're doing?" He settled himself against the cement banister.

Before Sayoko could open her mouth, Junko was answering for her. "Would you believe housecleaning? And let me tell you, it's heavy labor. I mean, totally." She sat down on the steps.

"So Mrs. Tamura's supposed to be heading up a new housekeeping team, is that it?"

"The boss went yesterday herself, so she knew exactly what I was in for, but she never said a word. And I have a bad back!"

Sayoko glanced between the two of them and her watch as their exchange continued back and forth. They appeared to be settling in for an extended chat.

"I'm sorry, I need to be going," she finally said in a low voice, moving on up the stairs. Takeshi called after her, and she paused to look back.

"You'll have to tell me more about this housekeeping thing sometime," he said with a smile and a wave.

For some reason this show of friendliness rubbed Sayoko the wrong way. She gave a perfunctory nod and hurried on.

"I can tell you
aaaall
about it," she heard Junko declare below.

Aoi was alone in the office when Sayoko came in, busy at the dining table. She looked up from what she was doing.

"Hey, there! How'd it go?" she said, sounding like one student greeting another.

"Um, is there a particular desk I should use?" Sayoko asked, standing uncertainly in the dining room.

Aoi motioned to the empty chair across from her. Piles of CDs and videotapes, magazines, postcards, and the like were strewn all over the table. Taking a seat, Sayoko pushed a few things aside to make some space, then reached into her bag for the notebook she'd broken in the day before as her work diary. She spread it open in front of her and started writing. Silence filled the room. Aoi put a cigarette between her lips and picked up her lighter as she watched Sayoko write.

"So, did Noriko play the same fearsome taskmaster today?"

"That's the word for it all right," Sayoko said with a laugh. "Fearsome

"Believe it or not, that scary lady used to be a meek little housewife. I originally met her when I was on a trip overseas. She somehow got separated from her tour group, and I happened by—I was traveling by myself—so she asked me for help. She was in a total panic."

Aoi paused to light her cigarette, and then continued.

"For years, she couldn't get pregnant, and she was so miserable, but finally she gave up on having kids and decided to start a housekeeping business with a friend. Then
boom,
the next thing she knew she had a baby on the way. When I first met her she was the typical self-effacing housewife, but once she started her business, or it may have been after she became a mother, somewhere along there she turned into a real ball of fire."

Sayoko looked up from her notebook. "Mrs. Nakazato has a child?"

"Two, actually. One in first grade and one in kindergarten. After the first one, the next came right away."

"That young?" Sayoko said in surprise.

"Uh-huh. Because she had them so late. She says to me, if you don't want kids, then fine, but if you do, have them while you're young, the sooner the better. You just don't have the same energy in your thirties as you do in your twenties, she says, and it gets even worse in your forties. Her kids were born when she was almost forty, and it was also right after she'd started up a new business, so for a while there she had a pretty rough time of it."

"I can imagine," Sayoko said. She'd stopped to listen, but looked at her watch and hastily resumed writing.

"You know, I've been meaning to ask. Once a month, our staff gets together with people from other companies to network over drinks. Could you come? We'll make it your welcome party, too. I just need to know when would be good for you."

Sayoko looked up. "I'll have to ask my husband," she said. It struck 56

her that in the three years since Akari was born, she had yet to leave her daughter in Shuji's care while she went out anywhere but the grocery store. Would she actually be able to do it?

"Right. Of course. Just let me know if you can come. A Saturday is fine too, if that works best for you."

Aoi started gathering up the CDs and videotapes piled on the table before putting them in a corrugated box.

Maybe if it was a Saturday, Shuji would say okay. Especially if she asked them to schedule it relatively early and didn't stay too long.

As her pen raced across the page, Sayoko realized with surprise that she was already calculating how she might make it work. There'd been a time when she would have promptly run the other way if invited to go drinking with people she didn't even know, but now she felt her heart quickening with anticipation. Aoi Narahashi was the same age as she was and ran her own company, Noriko Nakazato had reinvented herself as a fireball of a working mother, and Sayoko was eager to meet others like them both. She wanted chances to talk with women of every stripe. She wanted someone to reassure her once and for all that she'd made the right decision to go back to work.

"Oh, it's raining," Aoi said.

Sayoko turned to look through the doorway of the "President's Office." Aoi's tatami desk was as usual piled high with papers and books teetering on the verge of avalanche. Raindrops spattered against the large window above the desk and ran down the glass.

4

"Hot chocolate with cinnamon, and crepes filled with vanilla ice
cream," Nanako
said.

"Shakey's seafood
pizza," Aoi
countered.

"Sazaby handbags," Nanako
came right back.

"In
that case, dresses from Flandre."

"No, no, no! I said let's name our
favorite
things, not just things we might want," Nanako objected. She
tore off a
tuft
of
grass and threw it at Aoi lying on the ground.

"Ack! Stop!" Aoi screamed good-naturedly, rolling away.

"Okay, it's my turn," Nanako said. "Raw egg over steamed rice."

She was hugging her knees, with her underwear in full view.

"Urn, let me think J Aoi said from where she lay.
"The Little
Prince."

"You're such a baby," Nanako snorted, tearing off and tossing down long blades of grass one after the other. "I say David Bowie."

"Motoharu Sano."

"Ga-a-aag! Not even! You're hopeless, Aokins. That Niagara guy beats Motoharu any day." Nanako stretched her legs out flat and fell back onto the grass.

"But one thing you have to agree, the Southern All Stars totally rock."

"Yeah, sure. I like SAS."

"I wish they'd come to Tsumagoi. That's close from here, right?"

"As if," Nanako scoffed. "You don't know anything, do you? Tsumagoi's way far away. That's the trouble with you big-city folk. You 58

think anything in the same prefecture has to be close. Kusatsu, Minakami, Kita-Karuizawa—you just lump them all together."

She tore off another tuft of grass and threw it at Aoi. Aoi laughed as the slender blades of grass rained down on her face.

When they both fell silent, the sound of the river rose in her ears.

She'd never really thought of her old Isogo neighborhood as the big city, but she rather enjoyed the way Nanako said "the trouble with you big-city folk..." It made her feel like someone special, someone very important.

Lying there on her back, all she could see was sky. A bank of clouds was slowly starting across her field of vision, advancing with almost imperceptible deliberation.

Nanako let out a loud sigh. "It's not fair," she said.

Aoi rolled her head toward her. Prickly blades of grass tickled her ear.

"What?"

"Tsumagoi's a long way away, Kita-Karuizawa's a long way away, Maebashi and Takasaki are a long way away, and Tokyo's even farther away." It came out sounding almost like the chorus to some song.

"Not really," Aoi disagreed. "Once you get to Takasaki, it's just one quick hop to Tokyo."

Nanako turned to look at her, and for several moments they held each other's gaze through the overgrown grass.

"I'm hungry," Nanako finally said, looking away and starting to get up. "Want to get something to eat? Octopus balls? Or maybe ramen at Yasumaru's?"

She briskly brushed off her hiked-up skirt. Dust and bits of dead grass scattered into the air, flickering in the light of the sun.

"I've got a sweet tooth. How about cake and tea at Hasegawa's?"

Aoi said as she also rose to her feet.

Before them the river twisted gently down the middle of the wide riverbed. Blue sky reflected off the face of the flowing water.

"This
little girl doesn't have that
kind of cash, I'm afraid. Three-fifty's my limit."

"Wow, you're really hard up."

"Your
treat?"

"No wa-a-ay. Let's do octopus balls then. I'll at least spring for
alemon soda"

"Yippee!"

Nanako
skipped down the road along the levee, her yellow shoulder bag slung across her chest. Aoi followed close behind, listening to the constant rush of the water. Farmland spread out beyond the river, and in the distance a cluster of buildings rose against the horizon. None of the buildings was very tall—no more than four or five stories at most.

After school, they'd ridden a bus going the opposite way from Aoi's home for about ten minutes before getting off at a stop along the main highway. Walking on in the same direction, they soon came out on the Watarase River. There was a levee and a breadth of dry riverbed, and beyond that flowed the river, with large rocks jut-ting out of the water here and there.

To Aoi, it looked like any other river, but this was the spot Nanako called her secret hideout. Other schoolkids hardly ever came here, she'd explained the first time she brought Aoi, and almost no one else did either. If it rained, a bridge was only a three-minute dash away. And most importantly of all, she gushed, this was where you could see the biggest sky. But what Aoi found she liked best about the place—even more than the bridge or the big sky—were some old, abandoned railroad tracks that ran along the far side of the river, choked with weeds. Nanako declared the abandoned rails depressing, but walking the overgrown tracks made Aoi feel like she could go anywhere she wanted to go.

Aoi followed Nanako along the levee, eyes fixed on her back. A winged ant briefly buzzed her ear, then flew away before she could even wave it off. An old m a n walking his chestnut-colored dog came from the opposite direction and passed on by. She could faintly hear Nanako h u m m i n g a song under her breath.