Women On the Other Shore (5 page)

can you believe it? A two! I asked Naomi, too, but she refused to tell.

She just kept insisting it was t h e worst, it had to be the lowest in the class. But there's no way it could've been worse than me. I'm such a total pea-brain, it's n o t even funny."

Nanako prattled on a b o u t o n e thing and another as they continued down t h e dusty sidewalk. Clumps of tall, spindly weeds grew here and there along t h e roadside. Something about the way Nanako talked reminded Aoi of w o m e n her mother's age. Women who took no interest in most of w h a t went on in the world and, within the one tiny little slice of t h e world they did care about, refused to believe that a single shred of ill will or distrust or any other troubling sentiment could exist. T h e kind of woman she'd seen strike up conversations with h e r m o t h e r in train stations and tourist spots as if they were sisters or something. They were friendly as could be, and they'd overwhelm you with kindness. But let anything go wrong, Aoi reminded herself, a n d they would coldly shove you away almost every time.

The students already waiting at the bus stop were strung out in several small groups, each engaged in its own heated conversation.

Aoi fell in line, and Nanako halted next to her, still prattling on.
She
must go the same way I do,
Aoi thought, listening vaguely.
I wonder
where she lives?

Directly across the street from the bus marker with its badly rusted timetable stood a shelter barely big enough to hold half a dozen vending machines ranked side by side. Several students went whooping across to buy canned drinks, then came racing back. Cars and trucks kept zipping by at high speeds, but there was still no sign of the bus. As they waited, Nanako skipped incongruously from one topic to another: from their pop quiz in math to their choice of electives, from their choice of electives to the latest movies, from the latest movies to the best way to make French toast. About the time Aoi was wondering how they'd gotten onto French toast, two buses came along one right after the other.

Pressed tightly together in the center aisle jammed with fellow students, Nanako looked up at the taller Aoi.

"You don't mind if I come to your place, do you?"

"Hunh?" Aoi popped her eyes wide.

Nanako buried her face in another student's back and laughed.

"You did it again!"

"Aren't you going home?" Aoi said.

"As if. My house isn't even this direction. I only came this way because I wanted to go home with you." She was grinning as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

No one was home when they arrived. Mrs. Narahashi was either out on the job hunt or shopping for dinner. A yellow shaft of sunlight cut through the dimness of the dining room as Nanako followed Aoi in and plopped down at the table. The chair she chose was the one Aoi's father always used. It gave Aoi an extraordinary sensation to see a classmate she barely knew sitting at the dining table in her new house where she didn't even feel entirely at home herself yet.

Aoi went into the dimly lit kitchen and opened the refrigerator to 38

see if they had any juice. All she found to drink was milk and Calpis. She got out two glasses and started to add ice. One of the cubes slipped from her fingers and clattered across the floor. She realized for the first time how on edge she was.

Nanako waited at the table with chin in hand. "Yippee, Calpis!"

she exclaimed like a child when Aoi set one of the glasses in front of her. Lifting her drink, she gulped it down all at once, then wiped her mouth with t h e back of her hand and broke into a big smile.

As sunlight poured into the dimness of this still vaguely unfamiliar room where a girl with short hair sat smiling at her, Aoi experienced a feeling of deja vu. But she knew it was not any actual event that she recalled; it was a scene from her daydreams. She was remembering a scene she had pictured countless times in her fantasies: a kind and not unattractive girl, someone well liked by everyone in her class, had said she wanted to be Aoi's friend, had come to visit her home without needing to be begged, and sat there looking at her with a warm smile. Over and over and over again, Aoi had dreamed of the day she would be part of this utterly ordinary scene.

After holding her new friend's boyish gaze for several moments, Aoi quickly turned and stepped back into the kitchen. She couldn't let Nanako see that her eyes were beginning to fill.

"You know, Aokins," Nanako called after her, stretching the words out in a bit of drawl. "There's something really relaxing about your house. Can I see your room, too? Later on?"

"Sure," said Aoi, twisting the tap and splashing water on her face.

"Ahh, Calpis is so good!" Nanako exhaled with satisfaction. "Say, Aokins, you're new here, so you probably don't know very many places yet, right? Maybe one of these days I can show you a special place I know. It's been my secret hideout ever since I was in grade school."

Nanako jabbered on without pause in that manner that reminded Aoi of women her mother's age who refused to entertain
the slightest suspicion or wariness toward other people. From the
kitchen, Aoi put in the occasional "Uh-huh" as she continued splashing water on her face. The water came out of the tap much colder
here than at the apartment in Yokohama.

Why had this girl befriended her? Why had she asked to come to
Aoi's house? Why did she want to show Aoi her secret hideout? Why
had she picked Aoi? What did she want?

Aching to ask these questions but unable to, Aoi simply
went on
grunting "Uh-huh, uh-huh"
as her
diminutive friend rattled
on.

Finally she reached for
the
faucet and twisted it tight. When she
straightened up, drops of water rolled down
her face
and fell to the
kitchen floor like tears.

40

•3

Training for t h e n e w h o u s e k e e p i n g v e n t u r e was slated to begin on June 2, which would be Sayoko's first day on t h e job. Aoi instructed her to wear clothes she didn't m i n d getting dirty and to be in front of the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi b r a n c h across f r o m t h e south entrance of Nakano Station at 9:00 A.M.

Sayoko was so d e t e r m i n e d n o t to be late t h a t she arrived twenty minutes early. S h e stood w i t h h e r back to t h e bank's closed shutter as she waited, gazing o u t at t h e gently falling rain and thinking about Akari. She'd d r o p p e d h e r d a u g h t e r off with G r a n d m a Tamura only a short while before. M i g h t she already be in tears?

O t h e r m o t h e r s she k n e w h a d w a r n e d her how hard it could be to find a place in a licensed nursery school, and she remembered reading t h e s a m e in h e r p a r e n t i n g magazines, but somehow it hadn't sunk in t h a t this would apply to her. She imagined blithely that all she had to do was submit an application, and t h e facility of her choice would immediately w e l c o m e Akari with open arms. So she spent the weeks b e f o r e she started work visiting every nursery school within walking distance of h e r building, carefully inspecting each facility's surroundings a n d t h e size of its playground as well as observing what t h e children were like a n d how t h e childcare staff interacted with t h e m . But t h e n w h e n she decided on her top three picks and got her applications in, she was told by her first choice that they had ten people on their waiting list; and although the lengths of their lists varied, n o n e of t h e schools could take Akari immediately. T h e best Sayoko could do was to p u t Akari in line. With her starting date 41

at hand, she'd been forced to ask her disapproving mother-in-law to babysit until one of the schools called with an opening.

Aoi had said a white van with an "At Home Services" logo on its side would come to pick her up. Watching the rain drip from her umbrella as the minutes ticked by, Sayoko felt like a homeless day laborer waiting in the park for a job broker to show up. Even though this was her first day of work in five years, her heart wasn't beating any faster. She wasn't especially fired up, nor was she particularly nervous. She was filled instead with a defiant resolve that, damn it all, she was going to do this, come what may. Shuji's mother had agreed beforehand to take Akari, and yet when Sayoko went to drop her off that morning, she couldn't resist getting in one of her digs.

I never wanted to be the kind of mother who wasn't there when her
children got home
, she declared even as Sayoko was hurrying back out the door.
It's beyond me how a woman can abandon her child just
so she can go to work.

Sayoko spied the "At Home Services" logo at about five past nine as the white van of Aoi's description turned into the plaza in front of the station. Moving quickly from her spot in front of the bank, she trotted forward toward an opening in the curb beyond where the buses stopped. The van pulled up and the front passenger window slid down. A middle-aged woman with a dry complexion peered across from the driver's seat.

"Hop in the back," she said curtly in a deep, masculine voice without bothering to ask her name.

"I'm Sayoko Tamura. I look forward to working with you," Sayoko said with a polite bow, then opened the back door. Several women already seated there nodded vaguely in her direction.

"Good morning. I'm Sayoko Tamura from Platinum—"

"Get in, get in," the driver growled impatiently, and Sayoko climbed hastily aboard.

She settled into the seat behind the driver, next to a young 42

woman with bleached blond hair. Suddenly she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find Aoi sitting in the middle of the next seat back.

"Miss Narahashif she exclaimed. "What are
you
doing here?"

"I have to learn t h e ropes too," she said in a low voice, flashing Sayoko a peace sign.

On Aoi's right sat an older woman with graying hair gathered at the back of her head; on her left was a baby-faced woman who wore no makeup but looked like she must be pushing forty. Neither of them said a word, and Aoi offered nothing further either. This apparently wasn't the moment for the greeting Sayoko had rehearsed last night in the bath. Only the rhythmical
fwump-fwump
of the wind-shield wipers cut through the silence in the car. Soon the blurry red light through the water on the glass changed to green and the van moved forward. Nakano Station receded into the distance beyond the screen of raindrops.

A
job broker picking up homeless day laborers.
Sayoko recalled the image that had gone through her mind as she waited for the van to arrive, and nodded to herself that she'd had it right. The driver was the broker, and Sayoko and the others were housewives with no means of earning their own keep who found themselves adrift.

Sayoko quickly pushed aside these self-abasing thoughts by repeating to herself emphatically that she was going to forge on, come what may.

After about twenty minutes, the driver called out three names, and the blonde, the grayhair, and the babyface got out to follow her into an apartment building. When they were gone, Sayoko turned toward Aoi, but found her dozing with her mouth agape. She sat quietly and waited.

Soon the driver returned and pulled the van back into traffic without a word. Another twenty minutes later, she stopped in front of a building with a white tile facade and announced, "Everybody out."

Sayoko and a bleary-eyed Aoi got out of the van. T h e rain was about the same as before, neither lighter nor heavier. Their driver unloaded some cleaning supplies from the back and locked the car

"Follow me," she said brusquely, and started toward the building with a bucket in each hand. She entered the code for the security door and let them inside, then led them to the elevator and pressed 5.

Sayoko and Aoi followed shoulder to shoulder, walking in silence. Aoi widened her eyes and made a funny face each time their eyes met.

They proceeded in single file down the well-polished fifth-floor hallway to a door marked 506. From the building's elegantly appointed exterior, Sayoko expected to find a suite of luxurious rooms, but what she saw when the woman unlocked the door and pushed it open made her want to recoil.

"Come on in," the woman said, entering.

Sayoko stepped nervously into what turned out to be an empty studio apartment with just one main room of approximately four meters by five. The breath of its former occupant seemed to linger faintly in the air, as if the premises had been vacated only moments before. Compared to what they had passed on the way up, the inte-rior of the apartment looked old and dated, and Sayoko's skin went cold at the astonishing filth she saw everywhere. Too many stains to count discolored the carpet, which was visibly matted with fallen hair. Strewn across the entire room were small, white, gravel-like pellets that presumably came from a cat's litter box. A heavy film of nicotine had turned the wallpaper the color of the setting sun, and a sticky substance of unknown nature and origin clung to the walls in spots as well.

The state of the two-meter-square kitchenette was no less shocking. The exhaust vent was covered so heavily with blackened grease, Sayoko doubted its blades would respond to the switch. The gas range was likewise caked with a thick black veneer of grease and dust and baked-on food scraps across the entire top. What would 44

it take, Sayoko wondered as her eyes roamed about the room. How long would you have to let things go for a place to get this bad?

"Good grief!" Aoi gasped as she entered behind Sayoko.

Sayoko stiffened, half expecting Aoi to be scolded for her out-burst. Instead the woman turned to look at her with a wry grin on her face.

"What're you so shocked about? Your place is pretty much the same."

Sayoko was secretly pleased to note that the woman did know how to smile.

"Give me a break. I never let it go this far," Aoi said.

"Well, I hope you're both ready to put in some serious elbow grease. Don't expect any mercy from me," the woman said. She turned to look at Sayoko. "Your first assignment is to get this entire place looking spick-and-span again," she declared. "Here. Take this."