If You Follow Me (11 page)

 

The next morning, I mistake the knocking at the door for the knocking in my skull. On the alarm clock, the red numerals swim into focus. 6:15. I groan and clutch my head, failing to muffle the rhythmic pounding. “Will you get that?” Carolyn asks, burrowing deeper under the covers. When I stand up, I realize that I am still wearing the Royal Hotel
yukata
. I tighten the sash and pull a sweater over my head. With every step down the stairs, scenes from the night before flash in my mind. The bath. The karaoke duet. The kiss. I open the door to find Mrs. Ogawa standing next to Haruki. The boy is wearing his blue gym suit and his head is bowed forward at an almost ninety-degree angle. I can see the buzzed hairs at the back of his head, which are already turning gray.

“Irashite kudasai
,” she says. Come with me. Her voice is as shaky as I feel.

“I'm. Sorry. About. The. Refrigerator.” I speak slowly, emphatically.

“Shitsureishimashita
,” Haruki whispers. “I am…I feel…I have…I can't…”

Carolyn appears by my side, looking groggy. Mrs. Ogawa takes her hand and pulls her out of the house. I follow them up the stairs and onto the riverbank, the frosty grass crunching under my feet. The senior citizens are standing in a semicircle around the fridge. “They probably need us to move it so they can do their calisthenics,” Carolyn says. Mrs. Ogawa marches up to the fridge and then calls Haruki's name. He walks forward, head still hanging as he opens the door. There is a collective gasp from the senior citizens. I stand on tiptoe to look over their heads.

Carolyn sees, before I do, the cold curl of the cat on the bottom shelf. She runs to the refrigerator, sinks onto her knees on the grass, reaches into the fridge, and then jerks her hand back. Mrs. Ogawa and Haruki also get down on their knees. Mrs. Ogawa says something in Japanese and the two of them lean forward until their foreheads touch the earth. They right themselves and bow again, apologizing in a chant.

“Shitsureishimashita.”

“Stop it!” Carolyn sobs. “Why did you do this?”

“Haruki wa mondaji
,” Mrs. Ogawa says. Haruki is a problem child.

I take off my sweater and make a little woolly bed for Amana, who is stiff and doesn't change position when I take her out of the fridge. Her chin is tucked between her front paws. Her fur feels silky and cold. She is cold and stiff but she still looks like herself. The boy is still apologizing. But I know that she was already sick. She must have been easy to catch, so easy to trap. Carolyn can't stop sobbing. She holds the cat's paws in one hand and strokes them with her other hand and I wrap an arm around her shoulders, holding her close, not caring what the neighbors see or think. We stay like that for a long time, a little tableau of grief. When I finally look up, the river
is cobalt blue and everyone—Mrs. Ogawa, Haruki, the other senior citizens—has left us alone for once.

“Amana died in the Amana,” Carolyn says.

It's not funny. Of course it's not funny. But still we both start laughing. Tears drip from Carolyn's chin onto the cat's fur, splotching it.

“What are we going to do?” she asks me.

“We have to bury her,” I say.

 

Mrs. Ogawa is outside as usual, pruning her bonsai trees. I point to her trowel, ask if I can borrow it, and when Haruki emerges from the house she thrusts the trowel in his hands and he follows me to the riverbank, where he crouches down and begins digging.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Carolyn says.

“I don't know,” I say. “He followed me.”

“Leave!” she yells at him. “Go away!” But he ignores her and just keeps digging. The earth is half-frozen. It glitters with ice crystals as he excavates a grave for the cat.

When the hole is deep enough he finally backs off. Carolyn lowers the cat's body down into it, and then she hands me the trowel, but I can't do it either. I can't drop dirt on Amana's face. She may be cold and dead but she still looks like herself. She still has her face. So I take off my sweater and place it on top of her and then Carolyn and I take turns filling in the hole, covering her with earth until she's gone.

We are still squatting by the little grave when the students file by on the path, a long line of girls wearing their pink gym uniforms trailed by a clump of boys in blue. It's Long Walking Day. I completely forgot. I'm supposed to be there. I'm not supposed to be
here. We duck lower in the reeds, but the students aren't looking in our direction. They are marching two at a time, their footfalls evenly matched. Leading the procession of future secretaries is Miyoshi-sensei, who walks backward, calling “
ganbatte!
” or “do your best for me,” tipping a large Evian bottle into the girls' cupped hands, encouraging the frail, the tired, and the cute.

WINTER

jikoshoukai:
(
N
.)
self-introduction

A
t Shika's elementary school, the children wear miniature versions of the same uniforms worn by the high school students. The boys wear tiny blue jackets, with stiff mandarin collars and big brass buttons, and shorts year-round. The girls wear double-breasted blazers over blue pleated skirts held up by suspenders. They are not allowed to wear tights or leggings, so their knees are as flushed as their cheeks when they enter the classroom on mornings frigid as this one. Nor are they allowed to wear scarves or knitted hats. Both boys and girls must wear a bright yellow cap with a long bill, to stand out against traffic. These hats are allowed to come off only once they pass through their homeroom doors, at which point they become their homeroom teacher's responsibility.

“Hurry up,” says Kobayashi-sensei as his second-grade students hang their caps from pegs on the wall. “Today we have a visitor from abroad.” The word he uses,
mukou
, translates to “overseas,” or “the other side.” Kobayashi-sensei doesn't seem to know where I'm from. He may not know my name, although I've been coming to this elementary school for the past six weeks now. The second grade teacher is a former sumo wrestler, an athlete turned soft, built like an overstuff ed sofa. He wears aloha shirts under a brown leather jacket so tight that it creaks when he moves.

He waves his arms, conducting the kids in a song to welcome me. It's “Silent Night” in Japanese. Their voices are high and sweetly off-key.
All is calm, all is bright
, I translate the lyrics in my head. But all is not calm, not with me. I've had a toothache for the past month, a pain that travels from tooth to tooth, coming in and out like a radio station with bad reception. This morning I'm getting a loud and clear signal. When the kids finish singing, I smile and clap and Kobayashi-sensei invites me to sing a song in return. I don't feel like soloing. Instead I boom out, “Hello!”

“Hello,” the group echoes faintly.

“Mo ichi do
,” Kobayashi-sensei prompts them. “One more time.”

“Hello!” they repeat with increased confidence.

“How's it going?” I ask them.

“Howsitgoing?” they ask me right back.

I draw a smiley face on the board and point to it as I say, “I'm great!” Then I draw a sad face and say, “I'm not so hot.” I no longer teach students to say, “How are you?” “I'm fine” is the only answer anyone ever gives, and I don't like questions with only one answer.

“Hot?” Kobayashi-sensei repeats dubiously. “
Samui desu ne
?” It's cold, isn't it? This is a standard winter greeting here, another question with only one possible answer. “It is cold,” I agree. In Japanese, I explain that “hot” means
atsui
, a hot temperature, while “not so hot” means not fine. “How's it going?” I ask the class once more. A little boy raises his hand. He's wearing a giant, padded ski glove held in place by an elastic band looped around his wrist. It looks like an oven mitt at the end of his scrawny arm. This boy is smaller than the rest of the kids, so pale that I can see the veins marbling the skin at his temples, with wide-set eyes that are gray rather than black and hypnotizing, utterly focused on me.

“Byouki
,” he says.

“You're sick,” I translate.

“You're sick,” Kobayashi-sensei says. “
Mo ichi do
.”

“Youresick,” the child mumbles.

“Actually,” I turn to the second-grade teacher, “he should say ‘
I'm
sick.'” Pronouns often get dropped in Japanese.
Watashi
means “I,” but only foreigners place themselves in front of everything they say.
Anata
, or “you,” is used so infrequently that it also means darling, beloved, always spoken by a woman to a man.

“I'm sick!” Kobayashi-sensei prompts the child. “
Mo ichi do.
”

But instead of repeating, the boy just closes his eyes, massaging the bridge of his nose in a parody of adult weariness. The teacher ruf
fles his hair, which is so fine that it immediately falls back into place, parting around his ears. “
Byouki jya nai
,” he chides the boy. You're not really sick. “Koji lying,” he tells me. “Koji not sick. Koji want to leave class to see his mama.” This is the second time I've heard this man speak English. The first time was when he said, “big size,” while looking at my feet. True, my heels stick out a good inch beyond the elementary school slippers—everything here is miniature—but he should talk.

We hand out my self-introduction worksheet and I explain to the kids that I'll be saying three things about myself in English, only one of which is true, that they should listen, look at the pictures, and raise their hand when they think they can guess the right answer.