The Laws of Evening: Stories (11 page)

“Ara maa!” Mother said regretfully. “Somebody’s gone and replaced their slatted wooden doors with that all-weather metal kind.”

Aunt Miho visited us frequently. Several times, when the grown-ups were reminiscing about old times and everyone sat basking in familial warmth and intimacy, she took the opportunity to slip in something about Love or the Lord. Our laughter trailed away, and we fell silent as she talked: Mother, nodding with restless eyes (when did Miho start using that
voice,
she said in private), Grandma, her gaze averted with a certain sorrowful submission.

Aunt Miho targeted Grandma and Mother. Grandpa Ichiro was spared; he was losing his hearing, usually off in a world of his own. I too was excused, since my vocabulary was insufficient for grasping the finer points of Christian theory. “Wait, what does that word mean?” I demanded anyway at crucial moments. “Wait, wait! What does it
mean
?”

In the late afternoons, I overheard Grandma and Mother talking. “Childhood insecurities,” Mother whispered.

Grandma sighed. “It’s all my fault,” she said.

“It is
not
your fault!” Mother said.

It came to a head one week before our departure. My cousin, six-year-old Mikiko, came into the kitchen, where Grandma and Mother and I were sitting. “Mama says you don’t want to come with us to Heaven,” she accused, clasping her tiny arms around Grandma’s knees and gazing up at her with moist, reproachful eyes. “Ne, is that true?”

“Miki-chan, it’s very complicated,” Grandma said.

“How come you aren’t coming to Heaven with us? Don’t you want to be with us?”

“Ara maa…,” Grandma protested, and stood helplessly stroking Mikiko’s head over and over.

Mother’s lips took on a compressed look I knew well. I followed as she strode down the hall to the room where Aunt Miho was watching a cooking show on television. Mother slid shut the shoji panel with a
pang
behind her. I listened from the hallway, on the other side of the panel.

“Raise your child any way you want, but don’t you dare use her that way against my mother.” My mother’s voice was barely audible. “Can’t you
realize,
how much pain she’s had in her life?” she said. “How many times, since we were children, have I
pleaded
with you to protect her in my absence?

“And speaking bluntly,” Mother continued, “what you want from our mother is impossible.
My
father’s in Buddhist heaven, waiting for her. And when she dies, I’ll be at the temple chanting sutras for
her
. First-year anniversary, third, seventh, thirteenth, thirty-third, fiftieth! For the rest of my life. Even if I burn in your Christian Hell for it!”

Her wrath was magnificent and primal. At that moment, it didn’t even occur to me to feel sorry for Aunt Miho. I was swept up in an unexpected sense of vindication as well as a powerful loyalty to our trio. Over the following week, I was to sit before the vanity mirror and practice pressing my lips together the way Mother had. I would watch my face, with its pointy Caucasian features, become transformed with authority and passion. It would be many years before I felt the poignancy of Mother’s belligerent, childlike loyalty, with which she shielded Grandma from the others.

Mother’s voice now softened, for Aunt Miho was crying. “Someday,” she said, “you’ll understand, Miho. You’ll understand, the way love works.”

Even then, I sensed that my grandfather—not Grandpa Ichiro but my true grandfather—was a key catalyst in our family relations. That summer, for the first time, I was shown my grandfather Yasunari’s photograph album, concealed in a dresser among layers of folded winter kimonos. “Now remember,” Grandma and Mother told me, “this is just among us. The rest of them wouldn’t like it if they knew. Grandpa Ichiro either. Especially Grandpa Ichiro!” The album was bound in ugly brownish cloth which, according to Grandma, was once a beautiful indigo; it had matching brown tassels that were still dark blue in their centers. I was discouraged from touching it. Grandma and Mother turned the pages, with hands smelling of lemony dishwashing soap.

Mother never knew her father; she was only five when Yasunari died in the war. Throughout her childhood she, too, had been shown this album, during stolen moments when the others were away. It was hard to believe this young man in the black-and-white photographs, her own true father, was as much a stranger to her as he was to me. Yasunari was handsome, like a movie star, with fine molded features and eyes like elegant brushstrokes.

“We were happy, very happy,” Grandma told me. “Yasunari-san loved children. Every minute he had free, he was carrying your mother. Walking around, always holding her in one arm.”

“I think I remember being held by him,” Mother said.

“When he finally set your mother down, she’d cry. And keep on crying. Your mother, even back then, she could read people. And sure enough, he’d laugh and pick her back up. She even sat on his lap at dinnertime.”

I learned the rest of this story when I was nineteen, after Mother’s sudden death from mitral valve failure. Holding an adult conversation with my grandmother was an adjustment; I was so used to being the nonessential part of a threesome. But in the wake of Mother’s death, we took on new roles: she as surrogate mother, I as surrogate daughter. In this new capacity we spent hours discovering each other, with all the obsessions and raised hopes of a courtship.

Before the war, Grandma told me, Yasunari was a highly paid executive in the import-export business. When he died, he left young Grandma with a sizable inheritance. But her in-laws, determined to keep Yasunari’s money in the family, pressured her into marrying his elder brother Ichiro. Family obligation, they argued. A father for the child. Protection from wartime dangers.

Ichiro was a dandy. Despite the grinding poverty of those war years, he insisted on sporting an ascot and not a tie. A social creature, popular with both men and women, he drank with a fast set and then, flushed with sake, shook hands on tenuous business deals. In a short time he had gone through much of his younger brother’s inheritance. In contrast to his outward persona, Ichiro was surly at home, irritable and quick to find blame for the smallest things.

Even today, more than a decade after Mother’s death, Grandma revisits this as she and I sit alone, looking through Yasunari’s album. She speaks in a whisper, the same whisper she once used with Mother in late afternoons, even though Grandpa Ichiro is dead now and we two have the house to ourselves.

Many nights, Grandma tells me, she stood at the kitchen window while everyone slept, gazing at the moon caught among pine branches. Many nights she dreamed the same dream: Yasunari was outside in the night, standing silent in the alley. She could not see him, but she knew, as one does in dreams, that he was wearing a white suit like that of a Cuban musician.

“Take me with you! Please! Don’t leave me here!” she screamed after him in the dream, and woke to the sound of her own moaning.

Grandma went on to bear two children by Grandpa Ichiro: my uncle Koku, then my aunt Miho. In old photographs little Koku and Miho are always out in front, their beaming, gaptoothed faces playing up to the camera; although Grandpa is out of the picture, one senses his presence behind the lens, directing jokes to his favorites. Grandma stands off to the back, and Mother does too, her torso turned toward her mother in an oddly protective stance.

In this atmosphere, Mother’s social awareness developed early. She massaged her mother’s shoulders when no one was looking. She secretly threatened her half siblings when they misbehaved. She became a model student as well as a model daughter, thus depriving Grandpa Ichiro of any excuse to harass Grandma on her account.

In my mother, Grandma found an outlet for all the ardent romantic love she had felt for Yasunari. This child, she thought, is all I have left: of his genes, of his loyal, solicitous nature. Often Grandma left her chores and hurried over to the neighborhood playground where, using sleight of hand, she would slip a treat into Mother’s pocket: a bit of baked potato in winter, to keep her warm; in hot weather, a tiny salted rice ball with a pinch of sour plum at its center. This was during the postwar days, in the midst of food rationing.

There just wasn’t enough, she tells me now, for the other children.

Aunt Miho dropped by last week during O-bon, the Week of the Dead, bringing one of those seven-thousand-yen gift melons that come in their own box. She sat alone at the dining room table, sipping cold wheat tea. All afternoon we had visitors: friends of Mother, dead thirteen years now; friends of Grandpa Ichiro, dead three years. They all trooped past her into the altar room, bowing politely as they passed. Aunt Miho listened from the dining room as they chanted sutras at the family altar and struck the miniature gong. Christians cannot acknowledge Buddhist holidays, much less pay homage to their ancestors.

I put the melon on a dish and took it to the altar room, placing it on the slide-out shelf among a clutter of orchids and boxed pastries. “Mother and Grandpa Ichiro used to love those melons,” I told her, coming back into the dining room. “Auntie, you’re the only one who remembered.”

She smiled, with a warmth that her daughters rarely show me. She is still pretty. She now wears her hair swept back in a French twist, a style similar to my mother’s.

This afternoon, Grandma and I discuss Aunt Miho’s new hairstyle as we stroll to the open-air market to buy
hiramasa
sushi for supper. Our conversation has the same familiar rhythms I grew up listening to as a child. “She copies a lot of little things from your mother,” Grandma says, amused. “She always denies it though. Between you and me, I think she honestly doesn’t realize she’s doing it.”

“Mmm,” I say. Unlike my mother, I am uncomfortable discussing Aunt Miho. It’s bad enough that I, a mere grandchild, have usurped her rightful place as Grandma’s only remaining daughter. “This heat!” I exclaim, adjusting our shared parasol so that it shades her more fully. This solicitousness is a habit I’ve developed since Mother’s death, partly to carry on my mother’s role but also, especially in those early days, to provide an outlet for all the tenderness I never gave my mother. It seems to impress the elderly neighbors. “What a comfort your granddaughter must be, in your old age!” they say wistfully. And Grandma replies, “She’s just like her mother. Sometimes I actually forget who I’m talking to.”

“A! A!” Grandma now exclaims. We have just crossed Shimbonmachi Boulevard and are entering the crowded open-air market. “Good thing I remembered! Remind me, after the fish store, to buy shiso leaves for your dinner. To go with the sashimi.”

Whenever I accompany Grandma to the open-air market, the fish vendor—a shrewd older woman—sidles up to us with her most expensive items. “Madam!” she greets Grandma today. “After she’s back in America you’ll be kicking yourself, with all due respect, for not letting her taste this highest-quality roe! At its absolute prime, madam, this time of year!” She waits, with a complacent smile, as Grandma wavers. “Over in America,” she informs my grandmother, as she wraps up our sashimi plus two other unbudgeted purchases, “those people eat their fish cooked in
butter
.” She turns to me with an apologetic smile. “You sure have your granny’s laugh, though,” she says, exempting me from her earlier slur against Westerners. “Startles me every time, miss, coming from that American face.”

It’s true I bear little resemblance to anyone on my Japanese side. Sometimes I imagine Yasunari rising from the dead, and his shock and bewilderment upon seeing his own wife walking alongside a Caucasian, channeling to her all the love that was originally meant for him. But Grandma is adamant about our physical similarity. The way my thumb joins my hand, for instance, is the same as Yasunari’s, and I have the same general “presence” he and my mother did. And she recently confessed that in the early days, whenever I said
“moshi moshi”
over the telephone, she would have a crazy lurch of hope that Mother’s death had all been a big mistake. My voice, she insisted, was identical to my mother’s.

We turn homeward onto Temple Alley, walking abreast. Three years ago this alley was gravel; now it is paved. Our summer sandals make flat, slapping sounds against the blacktop, and I miss the gentle
k’sha k’sha
that had reminded me of walking on new-fallen snow.

The houses have changed too, since my last visit: many have been rebuilt Western style, with white siding and brass door-knobs. Shiny red motor scooters are parked outside. In the middle of one door hangs a huge wooden cutout of a puppy, holding in its smiling mouth a nameplate spelling out
THE MATSUDA’S
in Roman letters. A bicycle bell tings behind us: we stand off to one side as a housewife rides past, straight-backed, her wire basket filled with newspaper-wrapped groceries for dinner.

“Where was that little alley that never changed?” I ask Grandma as we resume walking abreast. She gives a short, puzzled laugh as I describe the alley to her.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says.

“Ginkgo tree?
Cicadas?
What kind of clue is that to go on?”

“There was an old-fashioned adobe wall,” I say.

Grandma shakes her head, baffled. “They’ve torn a lot of those down.” She stops short. “Meri-chan,” she says, “did we remember to lock the back door when we left?”