My Year of Meats (18 page)

Each sojourn into the heartland had its own viscosity—a total submersion into a strange new element—and for the duration, the parameters of my own world would collapse, sucked like a vacuum pack around the shapes of the families and the configurations of their lives. But as we settled on the plane, and took off, and flew out of Indiana, I felt a slow return to my forgotten skin as the world reinflated, and I began to dip into all the corners and crevices of my own dormant concerns.

I had only two weeks to do the edit.

Ueno would learn about the lamb.

I was feeling kind of queasy. Just nerves. Or my period. It was way overdue. Maybe I’d stopped out of sympathy with Christina.

I still hadn’t seen Sloan. Hadn’t seen him since Fly.

Ueno was going to be furious about the lamb.

He would try to have me fired.

But how could he? Screw the Beef. Lamb was Lovable, and I had just shot the most mouth-watering show of the season.

And with that thought, I unbuckled my seat belt and walked to the lavatory at the back of the plane, closed the flimsy folding door behind me, and vomited into the metal toilet.

The girl in the wheelchair struggled down a rutted dirt road toward the camera. A plaid lap robe shielded her damaged legs and covered something on her lap, large and lumpish, which she took great care to keep from tipping over. The wind was strong and it was blowing her hair about her face. Akiko wanted to help her. Why didn’t anyone help her? The wheel of her chair got caught in a rut, and the girl rocked back and forth, careful not to upset her bundle, until she freed herself, then continued valiantly forward. Then, when she reached some invisible mark, she stopped, looked up, and smiled triumphantly. She lifted the lap robe and revealed a domed platter underneath. She uncovered the platter and offered it up to the camera. It was the prettiest ring of Hallelujah Lamb Chops, each upturned rib decorated with a little white angel skirt made of frilly paper that looked like wings. In the center of the ring was a heart made of mashed potatoes, with cranberry lettering that read “Sweet 16.” The girl looked steadily at the camera, her blue gaze melting the lens, penetrating its glassy barrier and capturing the hearts of housewives throughout Japan. Then laboriously she maneuvered her wheelchair around, but before she went, she shot one more heavenly smile back over her shoulder.

At the market, the butcher had only six chops left. They were Australian, but Akiko figured that John wouldn’t know the difference.

With a pair of scissors she cut the fringe on the frilly angel skirts for the lamb, carefully following the steps demonstrated on television. Why the girl wanted a lamb chop after waking up from her coma was a mystery. Well, it hadn’t been a coma, exactly, but almost. The girl couldn’t move or speak or eat. Akiko wondered what it would be like to be incapacitated like that. After she fell into the china cabinet, her stomach had hurt so badly she couldn’t get out of bed, and all she wanted was to slip into a coma and not move, not speak, not eat. There were no townspeople. Nobody came. Their cluster of
danchi
high-rise buildings had a population five times that of the town of Hope, but no one knew about her illness. If her neighbors had known, maybe some of them would have come, if only out of curiosity, to stare, but they wouldn’t have thought to bring her the Thing in Life That They Loved Best. Akiko tried to think about the things that she loved, but she couldn’t come up with a single idea, except maybe her secret purging. But it wasn’t a secret anymore. And it wasn’t about life. It was about dying. Maybe she was in a coma after all and just didn’t know it.

Akiko had read somewhere that pointed toes were a symptom of comas. Ever since she had fallen into the china cabinet, she’d been having a dream that was causing her to flail her arms at night and point her toes so hard she got cramps in her calves. She couldn’t understand the dream. It was about Moses. In a Western art history class she’d taken in university, she had seen a sculpture of Moses by Michelangelo from the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome. Moses had bull horns on his head and this was how she recognized him in her dream. He was standing by the Red Sea, only it wasn’t a sea but more like a fast-flowing river, and he walked out into the middle of it and the waters parted for him, just as one might expect. There he stopped and waited for her to come, but whenever she tried, the red waters closed again, over her foot. Moses stood safe and dry, tossing his horned head like a bull, impatiently, holding his hand out to her to lead her to safety. There was no choice. She had to follow. Arms flailing in circles so as not to lose her balance, Akiko ran on stiffened tiptoes in a headlong tilt toward Moses as the waters of the Red Sea closed behind her.

She’d wakened John with all her flailing and finally, she told him about her dream. He’d gone to a Christian university, so he was very offended that she should dream she was an escaping Israelite, since that would make him an Egyptian oppressor. Akiko tried to convince him that this couldn’t be the case: she hadn’t remembered why Moses was crossing the Red Sea in the first place. But John insisted she must have known. It was common knowledge, even if you hadn’t attended a Christian university.

The lamb was in the oven when John got home and the timing was almost perfect. He was a little late, which was fine because it had taken a bit longer to cut the tiny skirts than Akiko had anticipated. When she took his jacket at the door, she could smell beer on his breath. It made her nervous. She hesitated in the kitchen, in front of the refrigerator, but he called out for a beer, so she had no choice but to bring him one on a tray. Something was wrong. He was sitting at the
kotatsu,
holding the remote, flicking through the news programs on the television. Akiko retreated, glad dinner was almost ready and that it was such a special one. She reentered the living room proudly, holding up the pretty crown of lamb chops like an offering. She knelt down in front of him. He took one look at the meat and recoiled violently.

“How dare you serve Australian lamb in my house!” he hissed, then he lunged forward and knocked the platter from her hands. She raised her arms to ward off a blow. He obliged, boxing her ear with his fist and knocking her into the television.

“Australia is a land of criminals and traitors,” he declared as he got to his feet and headed toward the door. “That is where you belong. How could you do this? I can’t stand the sight of you! I wish you would go away to Australia!”

After he left, Akiko lay against the television for a while. The nine o’clock news was on, but she couldn’t hear it over the roaring in her ears. Eventually she picked up the meat from the floor and put it back on the platter. She pulled off a little piece and tasted it. It was delicious. She went to the whiskey cabinet and poured a glass. The next few hours she spent sipping whiskey and nibbling at the delicately charred fat of the lamb. It was the best meat she’d ever eaten. She gnawed all six chops, then sucked the bones dry. Afterward, she went to the bathroom and waited, but the animal inside her was quiet. Instead she felt a vague cramping in her pelvis. She pulled down her underpants and sat on the toilet, thinking it might be the onset of diarrhea caused by the strange meat. She waited, but nothing happened. She stood again to pull up her underpants, and that was when she noticed the faint, pinkish-brown stain.

After the edit of the Bukowsky Show, I was still feeling sick and oddly exhausted. I sent the show in, got on a plane, and flew to Minnesota, to visit my mother in Quam. I didn’t even wait around for the approval from Tokyo. Kenji knew how to contact me if there was a problem.

Quam, Minnesota. It is always odd to go back. When I was growing up there, I don’t remember seeing a single Asian other than Ma, and maybe that’s why it never crossed my mind that I was different. I was a Little, after all. I look at the Little family photos now, taken at my grandparents’ dairy farm, and I can’t understand how I could have been so blind. I mean, here is this solid embankment of weather-beaten Anglo-Saxon farmers, Grampa in his overalls, Grammy in her faded flowered dress—I swear she’s holding a pitchfork—and then the pale-eyed, pale-haired sons and daughters flanking them, all equally eroded by the sun ... and then there is me. An American Gothic gone wrong. The earliest picture shows Grampa holding me in the palm of his hand, like a pet rabbit, or something he might skin for dinner. I am staring straight at the camera, eyes shaped like little almonds, with kernels inside that are as black and hard as coal. Grampa is watching the top of my head with his rheumy blue eyes, and my pitch-black hair is standing on end, long, perfectly straight, astonished. Like young wheat. Grampa told me that Grammy and Ma used to take turns spitting on it to make it lie down and that this was the thing they could do together, without language, which made them feel closer and more like a family; but it never stayed down for long.

I should have known I looked different, because when I played cowboys and Indians with the neighborhood children, I was always the Indian princess. I was tall for my age even as a kid and generally won most of the battles, and I used to get into terrible arguments with this boy named Farley, who said I was cheating by winning because the Indians were supposed to lose. I didn’t get it. I knew I wasn’t cheating, but I definitely wasn’t going to lose, either, certainly not to assuage Farley’s sense of historical propriety.

And how I remember, there was this game that my best friend, Polly, and I played during the first snowfall of every year. When the snow had just dusted the ground, we would take long sticks and draw faces on the asphalt road in front of my house. I would make Japanese faces, with big circles for heads, and then eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Polly would make American faces the same way. Only the eyes were different. Mine were just two slanty lines, slashed quickly in the snow, but Polly had to draw entire little circles. It took her a lot longer to do this, and since it was a race to see who could draw more faces, she always lost. The faces represented our two countries’ soldiers and we called the game World War II. We’d play and play, breathlessly rallying our troops until the entire street was filled with faces and it was dark and my Japs had won. I guess I did know something about difference after all. But it didn’t feel racial yet. More like different color teams in gym class. Later I learned in school that the Japanese had lost that war, so once again I’d been practicing revisionist history. I didn’t mean it. I just couldn’t seem to avoid it—and maybe that’s why I ended up in television.

I finally got it one day at a Peewee League softball game. It was an away game, and this black girl from another team called me a “chink.” She was the third baseman, and I had just hit a triple and had run as fast as I could and was standing on her base, panting. The girl sort of reached over and tapped me on the butt with her glove. “Nice hit, chink,” she said, smiling. I didn’t know what it meant, but she was so friendly when she said it and it sounded like this special thing, sort of like “slugger.” I remember standing there catching my breath and smiling at her and feeling so proud, and when the next batter up bunted to first I took off, but not before I heard her softly call out, “Go, chink! Run!” I made it safely home and scored, and afterward I went around for a couple of weeks calling all my friends “chink” and slapping them on the butt. Finally my teacher asked me if I knew what it meant. When I admitted I didn’t, she called my father.

In my early teens, when Polly and the other girls were assembling ideal boyfriends from the body parts of teen movie idols and lead guitarists, I was conjuring a mate along very different lines. The way I figured it, I had the chance to make a baby who could one day be King of the World. An embodied United Nations. I went to the Quam Public Library and looked up “The Races of Men” in an old Frye’s geography book.

This sounded promising. I liked lists and categories even back then.

I’m a documentarian. I’m not making this up. The book is the Frye’s
Grammar School Geography
published in 1902 by Ginn & Company, Boston. I know because I went back to the library to look for it, and it was still there, so I checked it out again. The Quam Public Library is not computerized yet, so you have to fill out the slip at the back of the book. You write your name under that of the last borrower and hand the slip to the librarian. When I took the card out of the manila pocket pasted inside the back cover, I recognized, about halfway up and written in pencil, my twelve-year-old script. Five kids had checked it out since then. I wrote my name again and gave it to the librarian. I was going to put a stop to this.