A Woman's Nails (22 page)

At the bottom of the steps drowning in a muddy puddle on the ground was the
teru-teru bôzu
doll I’
d seen the boys downstairs hanging outside the door of their apartment yesterday. The paper doll and the prayers that accompanied it were supposed to coax a recluse sun out from hiding. Lesson learned: you should never underestimate the power of prayer to disappoint.

Outside, while the morning traffic lumbered along the black, wet asphalt like a funeral procession, children covered in hooded parkas stomped through and splashed about the giant puddles as they hurried off to school. One small boy, stepping off the curb into the growing pond where an intersection once was, sank up to his bare knees, cool water flowing over the tops of his yellow galoshes. He couldn't have looked happier, but I’m sure his mother would chew him out for it when he returned home with muddy socks. That’s what mothers do the world round.

I had to zigzag all the way to work, creeping along the eaves of houses, circumnavigating puddles, ducking under shop awnings and staying close to foot of buildings, just to keep from getting drenched. But, halfway there my pants were already soaked to the knees, shirt sleeves wet to the shoulders, and the hole in my flimsy convenience store umbrella did a bang-up job of directing a steady dribble of cold rain w
ater down my back.

Though our small corner of the world was thoroughly inundated, I found Yumi predictably dry when I got to work. As dry as dust. After toweling myself off, I decided to take a stab at some small talk and proclaimed myself to be
bisho-bisho
, sopping wet, as I walked into the office.

No response. Yumi just continued her morning routine of organizing flash cards into neat little piles, labeled with color-coded slips of paper.

“How do you do it, Yumi?”

“Do what?”
she asked, head still down and fingers busily walking through the cards.

“
How
do you manage not getting wet?”

“I'm Japanese,”
she replied flatly, implying, I suppose, that I was an American boob.

I was about to try to pry another answer out of her, but she stood up and flitted off to her classroom where she started banging around.

It was just as well. I wasn't very keen on talking to her either. Still, I knew that after Tuesday evening, I had to put in at least a token effort at trying to return to her good graces, because there was no telling what she would do if allowed to stew. That was what worried me most. I knew her quiet stoicism was nothing but the calm before storm; that she would eventually unload the burden of her heartache onto the nearest warm body in the office, and
it has kept me on tenterhooks.

Would she tell the boss? Or would it be Reina? Either way, I'd be in the fucking doghouse.

2

After my Friday morning lesson, the students, my boss Abazuré and I crammed ourselves and our dripping umbrellas into two small taxis and drove off to of the student's home a few minutes away in an exclusive and surprisingly ostentatious neighborhood in the hills southeast of Ôhori Park. There's a saying in Japanese seemingly lost on my student which goes
minoru hodo kôbe no tareru, inaho kana
. The more a rice plant grows the more it bends, meaning that the greater a person becomes, the more humble and modest he should be.

Once inside, the women made a big show of lavishing praise upon their host. One woman let out such a squeal of excitement upon entering the living room that brought the other women scrambling in after
her and gushing just as loudly.

It
was an impressive spread
, but to tell the truth, the woman had gone and ruined it by decorating the room with the same kind of heavily ornate Italian furniture and rococo finishing you'd expect to find in the home of a
nari-kin
, that is to say, a
nouveau-riche
.

When asked what I thought, I kept a civil tongue in my head and made appropriately courteous noises.
Urayamashii
, I said.
I so envy you, Yoko
-san. I was no ingrate, especially now that I was feeling
peko-peko
, or hungry.

After ooh-ing and ah-ing, the women got down to what this chauvinistic society believes women do best: donning aprons and disappearing with their small, s
lippered feet into the kitchen.

Another polite smattering of compliments emanated from the kitchen. From where I was in the living room it sounded like the cooin
g of sexually agitated pigeons.

I'm no mooch, mind you. Had I been told it was a
mochiyori
party I'd been invited to, I would have gladly brought a culinary treat myself instead of milling about, hands dug into my pockets, and feeling as useless as the husbands the women lived to complain about.

Thirty deliciously fragrant minutes later, the bustle and commotion dies down and the dishes are brought out to the dinning room which is, thank God, considerably more modest and homey than Yoko's garish living room.

She's done a nice job setting the table. Where I expected to see a gaudy hodgepodge Royal Copenhagen china, silverware, and Venetian wine glasses, I am surprised to find the table has been tastefully set with Japanese ceramics and bamboo baskets. The placemats are also made of birch and bamboo. And, at the center of the table is an elegan
t arrangement of violet irises.

The women have gone all out in the presentation. There's an array of
sashimi
served on a bed of crushed ice in a dish carved from a bamboo stalk and garnished with green Japanese maple leaves, filets of sole
meunière
, laid out in an elongated Arita porcelain dish with a delicate pattern of mauve hydrangeas,
tempura
in a bamboo craftwork tray,
katsuo tataki
on
a Koishiwara earthenware plate,
piis gohan
(rice cooked with peas) sit at the end of the table in a lidded tub known as a
ohitsu
made from Japanese cypress, and firefly
hashi oki
to rest our chopsticks on, and so on.

They have also prepared a stir-fried pork and ginger dish known as
shôgayaki
, spicy, crisply fried chicken wings, a bean salad, another stir-fried dish I've been told is an Okinawan specialty called
goya chamburu
which is made with
tofu
, bean sprouts, carrot, egg and, I kid you not, Spam.

“Spam?”

“
Yes, Spam
. It's very popular in Okinawa,”
I'm told.

“
Well, I guess it
was bound to popular somewhere.”

“Don't you have Spam in America?”
one of the women asks.

“
Yes, of course. Spam is the very pride of America. Why, it is every pig’s ambition to e
nd up as a can of Spam one day.”

“
Oh? I didn't know that. So, I take it,
Spam’s popular in America, too?”

“
Popular
?”
I say, laughing. “Popular isn'
t quite the way I would put it.”

“Peador, please try some of it,”
Yoko says, taking my plate and giving me a healthy serving.

“Oh, Yoko, you needn't . . .”

“
Oh, you needn't be so
polite, Peador. Please, eat up.”

With all eyes on me, I am overcome with a spell of cataplexy, chopsticks twittering slightly above the . . . what the hell was it called . . . the
goya chamburu
.

“I'm curious,” I stall. “
Wh
at is this green, um, whatever?”

“
That's
goya
.”

“
Ah, yes, of course
it is. But, what exactly is it.”

“
Nigauri
,” my boss explains unhelpfully. “
Niga
,”
my boss says quickly tracing a Chinese character in the a
ir with her crooked finger, “
means bitter. And
uri
,”
she adds with another meaning
less wiggle of her finger, “means gourd.”

“Bitter gourd?”
I place my chopsticks down on the firefly
hashi oki
and shrug.
It's a long way to Tipperary
.

Yoko snaps her fingers; she's got an idea. She turns around and draws the curtain open to show me a leafy vine growing up the wall outside. Mammoth, bumpy cucumbers that look like monstrously studded gr
een dildos hang from the vine. “That,” Yoko tells me, “
is a
goya
.”

I overcome my initial trepidation and take the plunge, and I must admit for studded dildo and Spam,
it ain't bad, ain't bad at all.

As we are eating, a miracle of sorts happens. After four days of endless rain, the sun breaks through the clouds, the rain stops. The dining room is filled with a long missed brightness and a few moments later chirping of small birds can be heard outside. Yoko opens the sliding glass door behind her. A refreshing breeze has picked up, a glass wind chime hanging outside clanks away like ice in a glass of chilled water.

3

After a dessert of chilled
amanatsu
, jelly served in the half peel of the summer orange it was made from, Abazuré says she has to return to the office. Several others take the opening my boss has given them to say they, too, have to hurry home before their children came back from elementary school. So, I'm left alone with Shizuko and our hostess, Yoko. As Shizuko fills my
choko
with
reishu
saké
, Yoko brings in a basket of cherries she says arrived from Yamagata just this morning.

“
Did you try the
sashimi
, Peador?”
Yoko asks placing a handful of cherries on my plate.

“Uh, no, I didn't.”

“
It's out of this
world,” she says. “Very fresh.”

“I'm sure it is,”
I say.

“Where did you buy it, Shizuko?”

“
I didn't. It was a gift fro
m one of my husband's patients.”

“You really must try it, Peador,”
Yoko insists, reaching for a fresh plate behind her.

“
Please, I'm fine. I . . . I've really
had quite a lot to eat already.”

“
Mottainai
. What
a waste. C'mon, just a little.”

“
It's, um . .
. It's just that . . .”
Should I tell her I'm allergic? That I am a vegetarian? No, that won't work; I've been eating meat all afternoon. On a Friday, no less. Religion? Nah, the only religious bone I have in my body is the
asadachi
I stroke reverently every morning.
“
I'm afraid I'm not that crazy about
sashimi
.”

Yoko wags her finger at me. “
Tsk, tsk. You'll never be able to
marry a Japanese woman, Peador.”

“Oh? And why's that?”

She takes a long sip from her wine glass leaving a dark red smudge on the rim
before speaking. “
I don't think two people can be truly happy together unless they grow up eating the same food. I know a couple. Oh, you know him, Shizuko, what'
s his name? The Canadian . . .,”
she says snapping her fingers as if to conjure him up.

“
John,
” Shizuko says. “
John Willia
ms. Works at Kyûshû University.”

“
Yes, well
, John married a Japanese girl,” Yoko continues. “
When he met the family for the first time, they served him
sashimi
. They asked, ‘John-san, can you eat sashimi?’
And of course he says, he loves
sashimi
, but actually he couldn'
t stand fish. Like you, Peador.”

“I didn't say I . . .”

“
So,
the poor girl's parents think ‘
Yokatta
, he's just like a Japanese!’
After the marriage, though, this John won't eat a bite of fish and,
yappari
, now the
y're getting divorced.”
Keiko takes another long drink, leaving another red s
mudge on the rim of the glass. “
No, if y
ou don't eat the same food, you’
ll have
all kinds of problems. And that’
s why foreigners and Japanese don't get along well. I mean, if they
can’
t eat the same food, how do they expect to be able to do anything together,
desho
?”