My Year of Meats (12 page)

Writing this article was not an exercise in the type of positive thinking that John was so adamant about. It was not putting her in a good frame of mind for pregnancy at all.

It was no good, Akiko thought. She just didn’t enjoy writing magazine pieces like this. It wasn’t that she didn’t like writing. She used to enjoy her old job at the
manga
publishing house, filling in gory details in the serial stories for the illustrators to put pictures to. She had hoped to have a strip of her own one day. But that was before her marriage.

Akiko’s marriage to John was proposed by John’s boss at the advertising agency to Akiko’s boss at the
manga
house. They were business associates and drinking companions, and one night, at a small, intimate members’ club in Shinjuku, John’s boss had confided to his friend that he had a promising young employee who needed a wife, and he asked for help. Akiko’s boss had thought for a minute, accepted another watery scotch from the hostess, and shook his head. He couldn’t think of anyone appropriate at his company, he said regretfully. The hostess nudged him with her blunt elbow and chided him. How untruthful and ungenerous you are, she said. A handsome man like you must have many pretty young ladies working under you, but you are so selfish you want to keep them all to yourself. The two elderly men chuckled, and Akiko’s boss laid a hand on her leg. He slipped his fingers under the edge of her miniskirt. You’ve gained some weight, he said, squeezing her plump thigh, and that’s when he remembered Akiko. The hostess slapped his hand and he withdrew it, then offered his friend a bride.

Akiko wasn’t exactly fat. On the heavy side was how people described her. She was very aware of this, especially on her first date with John. It wasn’t a date, exactly. More like a meeting she’d been required by her boss to attend. He had walked by her desk one day and stopped, as though remembering something, then turned back and stood beside her. He had never done this before, and she was terrified. Her heart was thumping and she didn’t dare to look up.

“Tanaka ... Akiko, isn’t it?”

“Hai,”
Akiko whispered.

“Mmm. What are you working on?” he asked.

She mumbled the name of the strip.

“Good, good. How old are you, anyway?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“About time to marry, don’t you think? Any prospects?”

Akiko’s face turned crimson. “No,” she gasped.

“Good. Good. I have someone in mind for you. A good, solid salaryman, works for my friend’s company. We’ll have tea with them tomorrow. We’ll leave here at three.”

The meeting took place at an elegant tea parlor in the Ginza, decorated all in aqua blue, with huge fish tanks built into the partitions separating the deep cushioned booths and a shimmery ceiling above. John and his boss sat on one side, Akiko and her boss faced them.

Akiko had worn a navy-blue suit because dark colors were slimming. She ordered Earl Grey tea because she’d read it was worldly, but her hands were trembling so hard she couldn’t lift her cup. She sat with her hands clenched in her lap, picking at the edges of her lace handkerchief. She dared look up only once at the heavyset young man with slicked-down hair who was being proposed as her future husband. Bright-tailed fish swam back and forth behind his head and she felt herself mesmerized by their flitting and darting, so she looked back down again quickly. She could feel the men’s eyes fixed upon her. The two bosses tried to keep a conversation going, asking each of them questions. John answered his tersely; she could only nod or shake her head. She knew she was making a bad impression, but her throat had constricted and she could barely swallow. Words were impossible. Have some pastries, John’s boss urged. Have some more tea. But it was no good. She was bloated, she had a terrible headache, and the blood pounded in her brain with such force she felt like she was deeply submerged, far underwater, diving past the fishes for pearl oysters at the bottom of the sea. She was afraid she would lose consciousness before she reached the surface again. She also felt like she needed to pee.

In the taxi on the way home from the meeting, Akiko’s boss had reproached her for her silence.

“Why are you so shy?” he asked. “You must make more of an effort or you will never be successful in finding a good husband.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“You do want to get married, don’t you?”

She nodded silently.

He sighed. “Oh, well. You never know.”

It was true. You never knew. How could you know if you wanted to get married or not? At the time, when the prospect of a good marriage was offered to her, she’d never even considered the possibility of an alternative desire. She had been simply grateful. But now, after more than three years of marriage, she realized she might have had plenty of desires, but she gave them all up before she even knew what they were.

The following day her boss stopped by her desk again and chuckled.

“Well, we got lucky this time. Ueno liked you after all. He wants to see more of you. He’s going to call you for a date.”

Akiko again felt her throat constrict.

“Now listen. It’s fine for a girl to be shy, it’s attractive, even, but a man likes a wife he can talk to. Eventually you are going to have to learn to be more outgoing, understand?”

Akiko nodded. But on that date, and on subsequent ones, it turned out not to matter, because John was able to fill up any conversational spaces with his own words and opinions, and Akiko was grateful to him for that. They would go out to dinner together, but she could never eat much. After that first meeting and long into the marriage, her throat frequently clenched and went into spasms, making it difficult for her to swallow. That’s when she started to lose weight. She managed to train herself to relax enough to get the food down, but in order to do that she had to eat very quickly and think about something else. The problem was that most of the time, the food wouldn’t stay down for long, but the way she figured it, at least it looked like she was eating. She knew she was deceiving John, but she didn’t want him to worry.

When Akiko stood up from her desk, the severe abdominal pain continued. She limped into the bathroom to get a drink of water. She stared at her face in the mirror above the sink. The scab above her eye had come off, leaving a thin white indentation.

The day she visited the specialist in the Ginza, she had come home expecting the worst. The doctor had threatened to call John at work with his diagnosis. John had been acting strange and the last thing he needed was the news that his wife was sabotaging her own fertility. Akiko attributed his edginess to stress at work and problems with the meat campaign. She had been doing her best to be supportive, to watch the programs and give her opinions for what they were worth, and to cook the meat as best she could. But it wasn’t easy. Most of the recipes were crude, inaccurate, and not at all delicious. She found herself cheating more and more, cribbing from other cookbooks and adding ingredients that the original American wives had never heard of.

So that night, when she got back from the Ginza, she had made the special Texas-style Beefy Burritos that she’d learned from the Mexican family. It was one of the best recipes on the show and she had secretly improved it with the addition of some spicy Korean bean paste and ground ginger root in the marinade. John seemed to like the dish. He hadn’t liked the show very much, but he thought the Beefy Burritos were good. He was a big fan of anything from Texas.

He was late. When he finally walked through the door and kicked off his shoes, he was holding himself very stiff. He walked through the living room into the kitchen and stopped, inches from her nose.

“So. Let’s get this straight. You don’t want to have children, is that right?”

He had heard from the doctor and he was drunk. He spoke slowly, deliberately, trying not to slur his words.

“Is that right? That is what the doctor told me on the telephone today. He was very annoyed with you. And with me too. He said that as a fertility specialist he was accustomed to seeing patients who wanted to conceive, not ones who damaged themselves in order to prevent it. What do you say to that, Akiko?” He swayed a little, peered down, and squinted in her face.

Akiko was silent, blinking her eyes, trying not to wince. His breath reeked of beer and greasy
gyoza
dumplings.

“Perhaps you lied to me,” he continued. “Perhaps you married me under false pretenses. Is that right?”

Akiko shook her head.

“No? So. You do want children, then?”

Akiko nodded.

“If that is indeed true, why do you stop your menstruation by throwing up? There. You see, I know everything. I know your secret. Hah!” The force of the single, malodorous blast of laughter propelled him backward toward the wall. He caught himself before he fell, and leaned casually against the china cabinet for support.

Akiko shook her head again. “I ... I can’t help it,” she said weakly.

“Well, well. That is not what the doctor said at all. He said you were perfectly capable of controlling it if you wanted to. So now, how can you explain that? You obviously don’t want to get pregnant, but you say you want a family. That makes you either a liar or a fool. Which is it? Which is it I’m married to?”

“We ... we could ...”

“Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

“We could adopt ...” She got her voice back and almost shouted. “We could adopt ten children! Ten Korean children, like the Beaudroux family of Askew, Louisiana!”

John reeled as though she’d hit him. He strode over to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and shook her so hard that her head flipped back and forth on her thin neck.

“I want
my own children.
Mine. Do you hear?
Mine!
Not some bastard of a Korean whore and an idiot American soldier. I want
my
genes in
my
child. That’s the point!
Mine!”

And with that, he gave Akiko one last violent shake, with such force that she slipped from his hands, spun once, fell over the back of a kitchen chair, which caught her squarely in the abdomen, then collapsed against the china cabinet. The cabinet was one of the first pieces of furniture that she and John had bought together and they’d chosen it for its blunt and rounded edges—a baby couldn’t hurt himself if he fell against it while learning to toddle. But they hadn’t reckoned on the sharp-edged handle that now gouged Akiko right above the eye. Blinded by the sudden blood, she groped her way into the bathroom. When she reemerged, John was gone.

 

 

Now, examining her face in the mirror, she saw that the scar would actually be quite small. The skin around the eye itself was healing too—

Soon she would be able to go outside again. John had forbidden her to leave the house until the injuries stopped showing. But he had been coming home early to help her ever since the accident. In fact, when he came home the next day he was sober and contrite. He apologized to her, formally, by getting down on his knees and bowing until his head touched the floor. He had even been doing the grocery shopping. Akiko faxed a shopping list to his office, and he would pick up the items on the way home from the station. He had told his boss that Akiko was ill, and the boss, who took a special interest in their marriage, having helped arrange it, excused him from overtime. Akiko was finding it difficult to breathe very deeply, partly because of the severe pain in her abdomen from falling over the chair, and partly because John was now spending so much time at home. But he was being very kind and polite to her, and it was a relief, a treat, even, not to have to face the market and the shopping every day. Still, she was looking forward to his next business trip, so she could relax.

The tinny Yamaha organ laid down a bridge of notes, like stepping-stones, for the Preacher to walk along as the voices of the Harmony Five subsided and the congregation released them with a last “Hallelujah” and a lingering “Praise the Lord.” The Preacher didn’t miss a beat.

“And now I ask those of us here who are newcomers, I ask our new brother and sister, to stand
up
now and
tell
us your names and how you came here today, so we can
truly
welcome you among us....”

The Preacher had fixed his gaze upon us, and as far as I could see, there were no other newcomers jumping to their feet. I elbowed Ueno, who was sitting rigidly beside me on the wooden pew. I thought it was only polite to let him go first, on his own. He was so damn cocky about his English ability, and besides that, I was furious at him.

“Self-introduction,” I hissed in Japanese. “Stand up and tell them who you are.”

He looked around, stricken. The church was small, but the entire population of Harmony, Mississippi, had turned out to look at us. He got shakily to his feet.

“I ...” His throat was dry and his voice cracked. He swallowed hard.