If You Follow Me (6 page)

“Hallo pet,” he says to me. “I was hoping I'd get to see you today.”

“I've been sitting in the faculty room for an hour,” I inform him.

“Roight.” He chuckles. “I try to avoid that place. A bit toxic, innit? Spent so much time in there last year, I actually developed an allergy to my desk.”

“Are you teaching with us this week?” I ask.

“Moight be,” he says. “We'll see if Miyoshi-sensei wants to pay for one of me special visits. I just popped in for a chat with Norikokun.”

“Noriko-
chan
,” she corrects him. “
Kun
for little boy. I'm
girl
!”

“Are you sure?” he says. “Shall I check?” He flicks the hem of her T-shirt, she punches him in the shoulder, and he groans, doubling over in pretend pain. She eyes him with real concern before he laughs and straightens again, wrapping his arm around her shoulder and tickling her. She giggles and squirms closer to him.

“Is that ad for jewelry or soup?” I point to a picture thumbtacked to the library bulletin board. He's wearing an apron, serving a bowl of ramen to a pretty Japanese woman. Their matching gold wedding bands gleam like cartoon stars.

“Neither,” he says. “It's for life insurance.”

We both laugh and Noriko looks at us, trying to figure out what's funny. I should explain, but I don't really know how.

“Looks like you've had a lot of work lately,” I say.

“Nothing to brag about,” he shrugs. Joe dismisses his commercial work as a lark, pretending to be annoyed by his celebrity status here in Shika, but he's the one who brings copies of his ads whenever he returns for Noriko to hang on the Joe Pope wall of fame. “I did one commercial for a car dealership that was fun. I had to pretend to steal a mini-Jeep while the fuzz chased after me.”

“It figures they hired a foreigner to play the car thief,” I say, rolling my eyes.

“We're a bunch of shady characters,” he agrees. “I'm up for the part of an English teacher on a soap opera. If I get it, I'll have to move to Osaka.”

“Osaka?” Noriko echoes faintly. “
Toi desu
.”

“Not that far,” I say. “It's only four hours by train.”

“So what's new with you lot?” Joe asks. “How's Caro?”

“She's great,” I say. “We're great.”

“You two doing anything later on?”

“Not that I know of,” I say. “Want to come over for dinner?” Even though Joe drives us nuts with his endless preening and his procession of Japanese girlfriend-du-jour, he is also mildly entertaining. He doesn't mind being made fun of. He hardly seems to notice. Plus, he's the only person here who knows about our relationship, meaning we can relax for a change, be ourselves around him. Whenever he comes over, we inevitably make a vat of pasta, drink one bottle too many of cheap red wine, and then go for a walk on the beach, where we build a bonfire, sing cheesy folk songs in bad harmony, and make fun of Joe's questions, which grow progressively sillier and more obscene the drunker he gets. He has asked if we turn ourselves on when we look in the mirror. He has asked for pointers. He has even asked if he can watch, “just for educational purposes.” Rejection only seems to excite him, perhaps because it's so rare in his charmed life.

“I wish I could,” he says, making a sorry-looking face, “but I told Miyoshi that I'd go out with him. I'm taking him to a new hostess bar, if you care to come along. Should be right up your alley,” he whispers playfully.

“Nice,” I say, “but I think I'll pass.”

“I'm just taking the piss,” he says, laughing. I don't get this expression. Does he mean that he's not really going to a hostess bar,
or that we couldn't come along because we're women? The library door swings open and Miyoshi-sensei walks in. Joe tells him that he's looking forward to their lads' night out and then leaves without saying good-bye to Noriko, who watches him disappear down the hall, looking dejected.

“Mari-chan,” Miyoshi-sensei says, “I have something important to share with you. I'm too timid to say aloud. Please read this…” My chest constricts as he hands me another piece of paper covered in his oddly linked cursive.

 

“Ogawa-san called you again to complain about our trash?” I ask, and he nods. “Just because we didn't wash the label off one wine bottle?”

“No…” he says. “Not just for that. Maybe also because of…woman thing?”

“Gender?” I ask, mystified.

“Not gender.” He bites his lip and speaks quickly, without looking at me. “Woman thing happens every month…You threw evidence in recycling bin. But this can't be recycled, for obvious reason of sanitation. Next month, please throw on a Tuesday, together with another burnable
gomi
, so Ogawa-san won't have to handle your…personal waste.”

“Oh my god,” I say. “Mister Ogawa had to handle our…”

“Not Mister Ogawa,” he cuts me off. “Haruki.”

 

The door to our house is wide open. Carolyn is standing in front of the refrigerator, slam-dunking its contents into the garbage can.

“The fridge shut off again,” she says. “Everything went bad.”

Lately the Amana has been turning on and off at random intervals. The coils at the back of the ancient fridge are so hot that when it turns off it actually heats up, and the food inside spoils like groceries in a hot car, filling the entryway with a sour milk stench.

“I'm sorry,” I say, “but why are you mad at me?”

“Because you left the trashsicle in the bathtub this morning. I told you to take it out when it thawed, but you didn't listen. Now the whole house reeks. I'll bet the neighbors can smell it from across the street. No wonder they hate us.”

“Are you on your period?” I ask.

“Excuse me?” Her eyes narrow to slits.

“Ogawa-san found tampons in our recyclables. Used tampons. I don't have my period, so I figured they had to be yours. Miyoshi sensei told me that next time, we—I mean you—should throw them out with the burnables.”

Tears flood her eyes, and for a moment I regret telling her, but when I place my hand on her shoulder she shrugs it off and runs upstairs, slamming our bedroom door and yelling at me to leave her alone.

nami:
(
N
.)
a wave (ocean)

I
first met Carolyn in our university bereavement group, at the beginning of our senior year of college. Every meeting started the same way, all of us going around the circle like alcoholics, saying our names and explaining who we'd lost, for the benefit of newcomers and also to get used to saying the words, “living with the grief,” as our group leader liked to say. Carolyn had been in the group for four years. Unlike the rest of us, who stammered through our introductions, she spoke openly and eloquently about her loss and how it still affected her. Carolyn intimidated me.

At the end of my first meeting, the group leader—a twitchy, prematurely gray graduate student in clinical psychology—gave me a pamphlet listing the warning signs of depression: feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness; the inability to concentrate or experience pleasure; a decline in sexual appetite; rapid weight loss or gain, and insomnia. I viewed the list as a challenge, figured that without the symptoms I couldn't have the disease. I made myself attend every class and turn in every paper, I went to the movies and attempted to read novels and listen to music, and generally acted as if my life were on course, my father's suicide a detour, not a derailing. The only
symptom I couldn't shake was insomnia. The moment I lay down, my eyes would spring open, my spine would grow rigid with alertness, and the words,
your father killed himself
, would pass like closed captioning across the screen of my mind.

My father had been an insomniac too, especially after he left medicine to be an inventor. “A surgeon is just a highly skilled mechanic,” he justified his decision. He was burning with creative energy. He could hardly sit still, he had so many ideas. He told me that the best inventions were things that people needed without knowing it, things they wanted but couldn't name, holes they felt but didn't know how to fill. The key was to invent something so elemental that people would forget it hadn't always existed. But his designs were elaborate, intricate, and incomprehensible, at least to me, and he couldn't sell any of them. It wasn't long before he started spending most of his time lying on the living room couch, staring at the ceiling with eyes so bloodshot they looked shattered and glued back together.

Carolyn couldn't sleep either. Her room was next to the only TV lounge in our dorm and we often met there in the middle of the night, watching infomercials from either end of the same orange foam couch. Secretly I thought about things she'd admitted to in bereavement group. She wondered whether she slept with women out of real desire or because she craved maternal comfort. She wanted to be taken care of but felt suff ocated whenever anyone tried. She always left her lovers before they could leave her. In our late night collisions, she never alluded to the group or asked how I was doing. I guess the answer was obvious. But she started bringing an extra mug of cocoa, and offering me perfect triangles of cinnamon toast from a blue china plate.

At first I didn't recognize my attraction to Carolyn. I'd never slept with a girl before, and she was so tough and spiky, with a rod
in her tongue and buzzed hair that moved through a Kool-Aid spectrum. But if she was in the room, I couldn't focus on anything else. And I began not just noticing her but anticipating her, as if I had some sixth sense that picked up on her nearness alone. I'd anticipate her in the cafeteria and there she'd be, head bent over a yogurt and a book. Walking through one of the basement tunnels, my heart would start racing and I'd turn a corner to find her lifting weights in the underground gym.

One Sunday morning I opened the door to the TV lounge and felt my pulse accelerate before I spotted her, lying on the couch, her body pressed beneath that of a woman with short gray hair and hands that looked ruddy against her white breasts. Even after I recognized our bereavement group leader, I couldn't turn away. I stood there, transfixed, until Carolyn opened her eyes and looked right at me, and then I fled, afraid of what she'd seen on my face, lust or confusion or something else, something beginning to stretch out of a long crouch.

All week I avoided the lounge. When I closed my eyes at night, the image of her with her shirt pushed up returned to me, the way her pale skin seemed lit from within, the spatter of freckles pooled in her cleavage. I assumed she would never look twice at a girl like me, a big-boned blonde with a patina of wholesomeness that nothing—not smoking, not four years in New York, not even my father's death—had managed to tarnish. Still, it was a relief to have something new to think about in the dead hours. Also, “decline in sexual appetite” was one item on the list of depression warning signs, one more symptom I'd managed to beat.

The following Saturday, I almost skipped bereavement group but decided to go at the last minute. That morning, a new girl was present whose father had also died. “He had a heart attack,” she said, looking at me with watery eyes. “How about yours?” I hated every
answer to this question. “He committed suicide,” sounded so clinical, “he killed himself,” so violent, “he took his life,” so vague and euphemistic. Took it where exactly? I also hated the look of pity and regret that inevitably popped up on the face of whoever asked the question. And I didn't know what to do with my own face when I answered it. If I smiled to try and put the person at ease, I felt creepy and robotic. But I refused to break down in bereavement group. I had only joined it because my advisor insisted, as a condition of returning to college just a week after my father's death.

“Um,” I said to the new girl, “he put himself to sleep?” Immediately I regretted this phrasing. I'd heard my mom say something similar.
He was sick
, she always stressed,
he hadn't slept in almost a year and he refused to get help
.
He literally put himself to sleep.
“I mean he was depressed,” I backtracked, “and, well, you know…”

“How old are you?” Carolyn asked me, cutting off my stammering.

“Twenty-one,” I said. It was the first time she'd asked me a personal question.

“I thought so,” she said. “Your dad waited until you were an adult to kill himself.”

As her words sank in, I felt punched in the stomach. This coincidence, if it was one, hadn't occurred to me. How long had he been waiting, counting off days until he could stop counting off days? Until I was no longer his responsibility?

“My mom died when I was twelve,” she said.

“Are you saying I'm lucky?” I asked. “I should be grateful?”

“No,” she said. “But I do wish I'd had those extra years with her.”

“Your mom died of cancer,” I said.

“Brain cancer is a terrible way to die.”

“At least it's a normal way.”

“What does that mean?” she asked me.

“It means she didn't choose to leave you. She had to die.”

“Every loss is different,” the group leader intervened, “and everyone handles loss differently. There isn't one right way to grieve.”

“Then why do we all go through the same stages?” I asked, and I noticed that Carolyn smirked. According to our trusty leader, I was stuck on “denial,” the starting square on the game board of grief. I only seemed to prove her point by denying this, week after week. She liked to say that grief was like a wave. You could be minding your own business, riding the subway, say, when that wave would come out of nowhere and wash right over you. And when it did, you had no choice but to submit. You could no more resist the wave of grief than you could hold an ocean wave at bay. I'd developed an irrational fear of the subway. But I also wanted the wave to hit, so that I could move on to the next stage already. Also, I felt like I owed my dad that much. What was I doing, still standing?

“Everyone goes through the same stages,” the group leader explained yet again with obviously frayed patience, “but we all experience them in different ways. For you, denial might mean that you think you could have prevented your father's suicide, if you'd said or done the right thing.”

“Maybe I could have,” I said. “Why is that denial and not realism?”

“Because it's easier to feel guilty,” Carolyn answered.

“Easier than what?”

“Than feeling sad.”

 

I sought her out late that night. She was curled up on the couch, painting her toenails blue while she watched Dionne Warwick pretend to be a psychic on-screen. “I'm afraid of the wave,” I said, standing in
front of the TV. “I'm afraid it will wash me away. My dad drowned. I don't want the same thing to happen to me.” For a long time, Carolyn didn't speak. When she finally said, “I'm here,” I didn't know if she meant “here” as in she hadn't washed away, or “here” as in available to comfort me. I started to cry, shielding my face with my hands, and she stood up and wrapped her arms around me. She held me close. She held me without hesitation. She held me until I stopped crying, and then she took my hand and led me down the hall to her room.

“I'm sorry I broke down on you like that,” I said, shy to find myself alone with her.

“Don't apologize,” she said.

Her room was crowded with objects, but everything seemed to have its place, there were so many plants that it smelled like a greenhouse, and one wall was entirely covered in pencil drawings. “You barely know me,” I said. “You shouldn't have to take care of me.”

“I don't have to,” she said, sitting cross-legged on her bed.

“Of course not. I'm sorry.” I sat on the edge of the mattress. “I mean thank you.” I laughed nervously and looked around at the drawings, which were mostly portraits. When I complimented her skill as an artist, she brushed off my praise, telling me that she only drew to procrastinate, so she wouldn't have to figure out what to do after graduation. “Oh my god,” I said, suddenly recognizing one of the faces. “Is that…”

“Yeah,” she said, apparently unembarrassed. “I drew you this morning during group. I hope you don't mind. You just looked so…”

“Angry?” I guessed.

“Tough,” she said. “And beautiful.”

“What?” I said, because I'd never thought of myself as either one, and because I wanted to hear her say it again.

“You hold everything in so tightly,” she said. “You're always in
control. It's almost scary. I've never even seen you cry before.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I can't believe I did that to you.”

“Stop apologizing,” she said. “You shouldn't apologize for feeling things. And you didn't
do
anything to me. Yet.” Before I could ask what she meant or apologize for that too, she stroked my cheek with the back of her hand and I swear I felt a tiny shock from each of her knuckles. I turned to face her in the room, which suddenly seemed even smaller, barely big enough for the two of us, and we kissed for the first time. When I had imagined kissing her, I thought that it would be soft and gentle, a velvet brush of lips. But there was nothing gentle about the way she bit my lower lip and pulled it into her mouth, then pushed me backward onto the bed, wedged her knee between my legs and ripped off my tank top. I tore her clothes off too, desperate to get her naked, then sorry when there was nothing else to take off, nothing between us but skin. I wanted to keep stripping off layer after layer.

“Don't worry,” she said. “Just let yourself go for once.”

When I came against her hand, I started to cry again, harder this time, unable to stop even as I was afraid that she would stop what she was doing. But she knew not to stop and not to ask what was wrong, that the answer was everything and nothing. I felt like I was sprinting away from one place and toward another, a place I wanted already to have reached.

 

My dad killed himself in September, Carolyn and I started sleeping together in October, and in November a girl in our dorm overdosed. The girl lived on my floor but I didn't know her name, didn't even recognize her face when it was printed on the cover of the campus daily. Her body wasn't found for three days, while the smell seeped from room to room and students speculated about its source. Carolyn
even cleaned out her mini-fridge one night while I urged her to come back to bed. For three days no one reported the girl missing. On the morning they finally broke down her door, while an ambulance siren reverberated uselessly in front of the building, I already knew what must have happened. I ran to the bathroom and threw up in the sink, and the next thing I knew Carolyn was standing behind me, holding my hair and telling me to let go, just let it out.

“It's everywhere,” I gasped. “I can't get away from it. I can't even breathe.”

“I know,” she said. “Let's get out of here.”

Within an hour, we'd boarded a bus to southern New Jersey, to the small town where she grew up. The turnpike stench was almost welcome as it infiltrated our nostrils, scouring them out. Her father met us at the station. I could tell that she had told him everything—that we were girlfriends, and about my dad, and what had happened at school—because he was careful not to bring up the reason for our sudden visit, and his smile didn't falter when she held my hand. He brought our bags to his bedroom, dropped them on the king-sized bed with its blue and green quilt, and told us he'd be in the guest room, that we should help ourselves to whatever we needed.

“Your dad's amazing,” I said to Carolyn. “I can't believe how accepting he is.”

“Why wouldn't he be?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “a lot of dads might have a problem if their daughter…”

“Was a big dyke?” She laughed and accused me of not being able to say the word.

“My dad hates conflict more than anything,” she said, “including the fact that I like to have sex with women. When my mom died, he thought it was his job to make everything okay again, and I thought it was my job to pretend that he could.”