Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (21 page)

I beat Var and Maria to the shack. I entered it the way one enters a screened confessional, not wanting to see a face, not wanting to confess but seeking absolution. I stood trembling before the sink washing dishes, praying they would not break. Like a child who has pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom at the wrong moment and cannot erase what she’s seen, my former way of seeing things had been altered; I tried but could not retrieve it. Within minutes I heard the door downstairs unlatch, creak open, I heard the stampede of their feet upon the stairs.

Quickly, I slipped into the bedroom and went online. I typed the four words I had been avoiding for months:
Massachusetts statutory rape laws.
I was like a murderer vexed to read the ten commandments. I needed to be told by some higher power that what I was doing was wrong. I needed to know my punishment. Child rapist. Prison term. I was ready to hear it.

One cannot adequately convey the chilling depth of one’s surprise at learning, just as Maria began pounding on the door, that the age of consent in Massachusetts is sixteen.

“Mama!! Open the door!!!” More pounding.

“Just a minute, darling!” How could that be? One could be punished for consensual sex with someone sixteen and older if and only if the prosecution could prove that the young person in question had been chaste until that point, and that, most experts agreed, was virtually impossible. On the other hand, the crime of adultery was punishable by three years in prison. (This I could hardly take seriously, it must have been an archaic law that no one ever adhered to. If such a law were truly in practice, a large portion of the population would be in prison.) My eyes lit upon the phrase
carnal knowledge.
Maria screamed again. I closed the window, cleared history, then opened the door.

Maria whirled through the room in her usual dervish-like fashion, a little goddess with multiple limbs, and I allowed her—the real child—to supplant my own childlike despair and confusion (Why didn’t I feel better? Why didn’t I feel reprieved?) for the remainder of the day and night until the following morning.

* * *

She woke before me. I was not eager to greet the day. “Mama!” she bellowed.

I turned onto my side to face her. The room was terribly bright. I had not slept well.

“Maria my love,” I cooed cloudily. She kicked me forcefully in the stomach with both feet. “Right then,” I got up.

“I want you!” she screamed.

“You have a very odd way of showing it!”

“I! Want! You!” she growled with feeling. This call and response was recurring. Every morning she kicked me away then commanded me to come back when I got up from the bed. Sometimes the back and forth ended when she managed to pull me back into the bed using her legs as pincers. Very rarely, she submitted a revised, more polite version of her request and sometimes I crept away to forage for a bit of food that like magic when placed into her mouth would change her back into the lovely Maria. This morning I crept away as quickly as I could. It was Sunday. The juvenile room with its stencils and crayons, reading rocket and chrysalises, was waiting.

* * *

When I sat down at the children’s librarian’s desk, I winced at the row of Harry Potter books opposite. The previous evening’s research had done little to alleviate my guilt. Indeed the pot party had somehow annulled my findings. I argued with myself.
Shikata ga nai. It can’t be helped
. I muttered the phrase in both languages for emphasis.
But what if it
can
be helped?!
It had been far from reassuring for me to see him with his friends, sloppily overtaking the gray house as if it were a fraternity or a jungle gym. Their adolescent bellows and smoke rings had chastened me. I could not forget his boyish voice intoning the ridiculous sentence:
I told you not to smoke in here, dog!
This was not the young man I knew. This was an ill-mannered, vulgar adolescent. I felt both repelled and sorry. It
can
be helped!

I sat trying to argue it out. Indeed I must have been very involved in sorting my arguments for I did not notice anyone had entered the room until I heard the clearing of a throat. The sound was the mother of the other sound I knew so well. It was she. Her hair was loose, a bit turbulent, worn precisely the way Siobhan had correctly imagined would suit her.

“Mayumi! The woman at the desk sent me. When she said
you
would know where the Bradbury books were I didn’t know she meant
you.
” I felt like a Mexican burro upon whose back an entire family’s belongings had been heaped. If one more item was added to my load, I would not make the journey.

“Bradbury?” I brayed and thought with bleak terror of my last recommendation.

“
Fahrenheit 451
, it’s for my son. He’s reading it at school.”

“Oh yes, of course. We have multiple copies.” I wobbled on the step stool, my low heels disgustingly hooflike. I reached up to the top shelf and felt faint.

“How have you been?” she asked. She looked at me closely. Had she seen the vulgar throb in my neck?

“Very well, thanks. And you? You must be busy with the shop now that spring is upon us.”

“Yes. I wish I weren’t so busy.” She glanced out the window. “I’m ashamed to say I haven’t even started
Lolita.
” Ashamed indeed.

“Oh, you’ll get to it eventually,” I said. I was in no hurry to begin our discussion of Nabokov.

“I hope so, I really do want to read it.”

“You must be proud of your son.” I stamped his book eagerly. “My daughter is just learning to read.”

“I am proud. It’s like a miracle when it happens. You’re lucky you have that to look forward to.” She wore the distracted expression of one following a long to-do list. “Well, thanks for the book, I’m sorry I have to run!”

“No apology necessary!” None indeed! By all means feel free to exit the building! By all means leave me to brood!

She turned to go and then turned impulsively back again.

“Hey! Do you want to go for a walk sometime?” The burro in me balked but she pressed on, apparently unperturbed by my beastly withholding. “I go walking every morning around 8 if you want to join me. The trailhead’s right behind P.I.P.”

“Sure, thanks. I love to walk in the morning, especially in the woods.” The sentence sounded vile when I said it.

She picked up a summer reading brochure and tucked it into the book. “I hope you’ll come.”

I was like a student with too many subjects to study, a slew of examinations pending, and the wretched fact was I could only concentrate on one subject at a time.

Summer reading.
Such dreaded words! They were yet another reminder that in all likelihood my youthful fountain would soon stop playing its music. Then again, summer as end date was a compelling argument. What difference did it make if one quit now or very soon? (I tended to use the language of addiction with regard to the young man.) Couldn’t I indulge in one or two months more of pleasure? Couldn’t I simply vow to quit when summer began?

I stood up (as I often do when at the end of my tether) and resolved to shelve the red cart. A sixth grade science class had checked out over fifty books for various special projects and had just returned them. Thank God. I was not daunted in the least by the three solid rows of 500’s. I shelved ruthlessly, like a mercenary being paid to make each book disappear. My deliberations had exhausted me. All too quickly the cart was empty. I reseated myself—always a mistake at moments such as these—and immediately began to cast about for something reassuring to do.

Unthinkingly, my hand clasped the mouse the way one might clasp a handrail for support and before I had time to fully ascertain my own movements I had entered the young man’s hyphenated name into Athena. I refrained from opening his account—I knew precisely what it contained. Instead I ventured to type in the second half of his surname, curious what it might yield. Perhaps he had paternal relations on the island. If so, it couldn’t hurt to learn what sort of books they read. Insatiably, maniacally curious, I would have settled for the borrowing history of a fifth cousin.

What I found, contrary to his earlier claim, was that he had two accounts. The one I had generated was his second, the first, generated when he was a child in the company of his mother (the word CHILD in all-black caps shone after his name), long since forgotten, the first card long since misplaced. I sat looking at his first account as if at a holy text, the careful study of which would reveal forbidden truths and long-held secrets. First I clicked on Patron Status then Info, which informed me that his address was the same then as it was now. But of course I knew that fairly well, I knew he had been born in that house, the house of the Liberty orchard and the voluminous library. I paused before clicking on History. I was not wholly convinced that unearthing such a thing would be reassuring. But indeed I did click. I was hopelessly in thrall to the possibilities.

It was a history befitting a child. There were only three items, all of them films:

-
Snow Day

-
Pocahontas

-
Swiss Family Robinson

At the sight of the list, my heart closed the way it had in the woods. Black box shut. I stared at the three items. A few tears fell from the corners of my eyes and onto the keyboard. I clicked on the x in the uppermost right corner of the screen.
Do you really want to exit Athena?
she asked. I clicked Cancel. It didn’t matter that I then closed his account and didn’t open it again. The titles had been placed in my inner card catalog; they had become part of my permanent collection.

For the rest of the day, I said the six words silently to myself. I said them while I was waiting for the computer to perform a function and later, while washing my hair in the shower, and later still, while reading aloud to Maria. (I confess I had mastered the art of reading aloud while engaged in my own thoughts. Had it been an official Olympic event I would have won a gold medal.) I too had watched films such as these (I too had read Ray Bradbury) but decades earlier—his close proximity to them was undeniable.
My God
, I thought to myself at last.
He’s a child.

* * *

I had the week to contemplate his short history. For the first time I felt some hesitation about seeing him the approaching Friday. As a nun who contemplates a simple prayer that both uplifts and agonizes, my best self (Was it my best self?) understood the six words as a plea and wanted to grant it. The rest of me (Or was that the best of me?) found the words, the boy, the man, whatever he was, quite fetching and wanted to bargain. Bargain I did with myself, the toughest, most compliant of customers. We came to a cheerful agreement: I would quit him when summer began whether he stayed or went. My instincts told me he would go and if he did, well, then nothing would be lost in the bargain.

The next question was, could I, with those six guileless words fluttering like kites in the sky of my mind, still make love to him? I thought it likely, but perhaps I was overestimating myself. If the boys in the woods had chastened me, the six words were belt-like, each one an iron barrier to my fulfillment. To add to the growing body of evidence against me, there was the unfortunate eavesdropping contretemps to consider and, of course, the precarious matter of Violet.

When at last Friday arrived, I brought a small bucket of cleaning supplies to the gray house. Ever the child of a housekeeper, I turned to spring cleaning as a diversion. The young man was sitting on the porch. We had plenty of wood, it would have been silly to chop more, every day was now warmer than the last. In light of my recent discovery, his habit of waiting for me before entering the house seemed slightly ridiculous, if not a bit foxy.

“You don’t have to wait for me, you know,” I called out.

“I want to.”

“You want to wait for me or you want to sit outside?”

“Both.”

As I approached he stayed sitting there with his elbows on his knees, his eyes alternately watching me and scanning the ground, which was dotted depressingly with a cheerful array of wild violets and buttercups, a double reminder of his mother and summer’s golden approach.

The blue backpack whose curved flap he usually kept shut lay open as a lake on the top step. I could see, floating within it, a round tin of chewing tobacco, a pale orange and white pack of cigarette rolling papers, a red, white, and blue American history textbook, the black father-wallet I had glimpsed once at the library counter, two raspberry-flavored Tootsie pops, a red guitar pick, a well-worn composition book with the words AP English scrawled in small letters on the cover, a silver CD player adjoined to the now familiar headphones he had worn at the library, and a black mobile phone. It was a hasty glance but it made its impression.

How very real he was when we were apart, whether in solitude or in connection with others. I had never seen him use a mobile phone or heard him play guitar or observed him rolling whatever forbidden substance it was he rolled with those papers of his. He must have had so many habits that were unknown to me, ways of moving and speaking; the Saturday previous had merely been a sample.

“We don’t have to go inside,” I said, afraid the house would smell distastefully of smoke and perhaps prevent me from venturing further.

“Okay.” He picked up a rock and threw it at the woods.

“Do you know I bloody hate that word!”

“Why? Is it not proper English?”

“I could care less about proper English. It’s just so bloody agreeable.”

“Would you rather I be disagreeable?”

“If I did, then would you be?”

“I don’t know.”

“If I asked you to drink poison would you drink poison?”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“The appropriate answer is no.”

“Okay.”

I sighed. “You have to understand I’m in a very awkward, some might say, compromising position. When you say ‘okay’ I’m never sure if I’m forcing you along or if you’re truly in agreement. Does that make sense?”