Women On the Other Shore (8 page)

When the second term started up after summer vacation, the groups that had begun to take shape in April became set in stone.

Even the nondescript bunch Aoi belonged to, brought together by the accident of seating, was showing signs of surprising cohesive-ness. T h e members had different tastes in music and books, they didn't dress or wear their hair alike, and they had almost nothing in the way of mutual interests to talk about, yet for some reason they clung to doing things together as if their lives depended on it. Aoi herself took great pains to avoid getting bumped from the group.

She listened attentively to Keiko Nozawa's incomprehensible babble about anime, she feigned interest in Kana Hirabayashi's favorite fan-book even though she didn't like the star, she borrowed and read the girls' comics Natsue Shimodaira brought in, and she nodded in sympathy to the dreary health problems Mamiko Takano was always going on about.

Nearly every day, Aoi and Nanako met somewhere after school, and they often exchanged notes or called each other on the phone, but they never spent time together during the day. As in the spring, Nanako remained unaffiliated with any one group, freely talking with anyone and everyone, mixing and laughing with whatever group the circumstances called for. For her part, Aoi would have liked to hang out with Nanako at school as well, but she was convinced it would be courting danger. She suspected it was only a matter of time before their classmates began turning against Nanako, calling her a people-pleaser and a phony and a weirdo. Being linked to her could put Aoi in the line of fire, too, and she definitely didn't want that.

She cringed at her own small-minded calculating, and she hated herself for it. She sometimes even wished Nanako would blow up at her—come right out and call her the weasel she was, or tell her
she
was the phony and refuse to have anything more to do with her g Nanako never approached Aoi when she was doing things with he group at school, and she never accused her of being two-faced f meeting her only in a different location after school.

"Guess what," Nanako said, turning back toward Aoi with a smile

"We switch pretty soon to winter uniforms, right? Well, I've been thinking I definitely want to get my hem raised. Properly, I mean—

at a shop somewhere."

"Then maybe you should get your jacket shortened a bit, too.

Though I have no idea what that sort of thing costs."

"Really? I always thought the jacket looked better long. I actually asked my parents to get me a size bigger, but they wouldn't listen.

They insisted this one's still perfectly okay."

Thinking she'd heard someone call her name, Aoi stopped for a moment to glance over her shoulder. Nanako walked on without noticing. A taxi was driving at a crawl thirty or forty meters away. Aoi saw instantly that it was her father. He had his window rolled down and was waving as he called her name.
Oh, please,
she thought, pretending not to have recognized him. She didn't want Nanako to see her father driving a cab. He kept getting closer and closer.

Just then she spied the top of a bus coming into view down the highway, far ahead of where Nanako was now walking.

"The bus is coming!" she shouted. "Run!"

Summer was officially over, but the bus shimmered gently in the heat as it approached. "Aoi!" she heard her father call again from behind, but she ignored him and dashed after Nanako, grabbing her hand as she went by and practically dragging her the rest of the way to the bus stop. Apparently realizing his daughter was ignoring him on purpose, Aoi's father stopped shouting after her.

The two girls plopped down on the seat at the back of the bus, their shoulders heaving. Aoi watched her father's cab glide by outside the window.

"Whew! We made it," Nanako said, breathing hard beside her.

"You sure run fast, Aokins."

Turning to look out t h e rear window as the cab drove away, Aoi wondered what she was trying to hide. What exactly was she worried about? What did she expect Nanako to say if she met her father?

She knew very well Nanako wasn't going to say anything—neither about the m a n who drove a ridiculously overdecorated cab in a ploy to attract customers, nor about Aoi's own small-mindedness. And that wasn't all, she realized as she turned to face forward again, took a deep breath, and finally began breathing more easily. The fact was, Nanako never said a bad word about anything. Of course, she did make f u n of teachers she disliked, and she could sometimes really get going about what a stifling place this was. But she said "I like" instead of "I hate," declared "I wish I could" instead of "I can't,"

and if you ever heard her say "That makes me sick," it was always in a way that made you laugh. Yet somehow you never got the feeling she was trying to be a Miss Goody Two-shoes. Since she seemed to do all this without even being aware of it, Aoi imagined that she had grown up seeing nothing but happy things. Someone must have gone to great lengths to remove any sign of corruption or ugliness or cruelty or anything h a r m f u l along the path her life had led her.

What helped Aoi realize that Nanako never looked at things negatively was in fact the transformation that had come over her mother since moving to this town. They'd been here six months now, and Mrs. Narahashi had found work that occupied her from nine to four every weekday. Yet to Aoi she seemed like a completely different person from the one she'd known in Yokohama.

Mrs. Narahashi was preparing dinner in the dim light of the un-illuminated kitchen when Aoi arrived home from school.

"Isn't this awfully late for you to be getting home?" she said, but went on immediately as if not really expecting a reply. "Wash your hands when you're done changing. I want you to help me."

"Okay! Aoi said
in her best cheery voice and hurried up the stairs.
Closing the door to
her room behind her, she replayed in he mind the image of her mother standing in the kitchen with the light of the declining sun coloring everything orange, and she heaved a deep sigh. She got out of her school uniform and hung it up, then pulled on a sweatshirt and jeans and headed back downstairs.

"All right! It's gyoza night!" she said as she went to wash her hands at the sink. "Thanks, Mom. Seems like we've been having a lot of boring, old-folks food lately."

Her mother still hadn't turned on the lights in the kitchen, and the room had taken on a deeper shade of orange.

"I'm sorry, dear, but you've seen the meat and fish they sell at the co-op. All brown and disgusting. I'm amazed anybody ever buys the stuff. You may complain about our food, but it's hard when everything else is half-spoiled and all I have to work with is vegetables.

And sometimes even the vegetables are bad. Like today's chives.

Completely limp. Ready for animal feed as far as I'm concerned.

Doesn't anybody around here care? Do you suppose maybe that's all they've ever seen, so they don't know any better?"

Her mother spoke in fits and starts as she held the bowl with one hand and kneaded the meat mixture with the other. Now she paused and looked at Aoi, standing in the middle of the kitchen with nothing to do.

"If you'll get the tray from the cupboard, you can start filling the skins."

As Aoi took a seat at the table with the tray, her mother set the bowl of filling in front of her. Aoi spooned a dollop of meat onto a skin and folded it into a gyoza.

"Mom, do you know any place around here that does alterations, like to shorten skirts? Would Iwahashi Cleaners do something like that?'

She realized too late t h a t t h i s m i g h t n o t have been the best topic to bring up, but h e r m o t h e r was already off a n d running.

"Alterations are t h e s a m e story. You c a n ' t find a decent seamstress around here either. Forget Iwahashi's. T h e y have that old geezer basically r u n n i n g t h e p l a c e by himself, a n d their dry cleaning rates are sky high, too. W h a t do t h e y t a k e us for? Back in Yokohama we could always rely on H a k u y o s h a , r e m e m b e r ? Weren't they the best?

Great workmanship, a n d always so polite. Of course they're a name brand, so..."

Whatever her reasons for invoking " n a m e brand" now, it wasn't the sort of thing Aoi's m o t h e r h a d ever paid attention to before their move. She'd only g o n e to H a k u y o s h a b e c a u s e they happened to be located nearby, a n d she u s e d to crow a b o u t t h e bargains she got by dashing into t h e s u p e r m a r k e t just b e f o r e closing time and grabbing packages of beef on last-minute m a r k d o w n .

Aoi got up f r o m t h e table to switch on t h e overhead light. T h e orange glow filling t h e r o o m v a n i s h e d in a blink.
I saw Dad a while
ago. Will he be home for dinner today?
S h e was on t h e verge of blurt-ing the question o u t w h e n s h e s t o p p e d herself. This wasn't a topic she wanted to bring up either.

"Would you r a t h e r h a v e m a c a r o n i salad or potato salad, dear?"

She thought for a m o m e n t . " M a c a r o n i , I guess. With cucumber."

"All right," her m o t h e r a n s w e r e d , b u t t h e n went to the refrigerator and started taking o u t s o m e p o t a t o e s . Aoi said nothing and went on filling gyoza skins.

Gloomier and crabbier a n d all b u t completely drained of the almost manic cheeriness she h a d displayed before: this was how Aoi would sum up t h e c h a n g e t h a t h a d c o m e over her mother. But what she found most d i s t u r b i n g of all was her blatant fabrications of memory. Listening to her, you'd t h i n k she must have lived the life of a corporate president's wife back in Yokohama, buying nothing but brand-name fashions f r o m t r e n d y d e p a r t m e n t stores, cooking with only the finest brand-name ingredients from foreign-owned super markets, traveling by taxi on all her shopping trips, dining at famous restaurants with her family every weekend, enriching her mind at the Cultural Center and lunching with her housewife friends on weekdays. Her mother spoke of these things so often that Aoi wondered in all seriousness if she didn't have a screw loose. But every time she brought up one of these rose-colored memories, it was invariably followed by a comparison with the present, and so Aoi had come to understand it as part of a mechanism that, however precariously, helped her mother keep a grip on her sanity. She would shrink from no fantasy or delusion if it served to diminish the town in which they now lived.

Her father had not returned by the time dinner was ready, so the two of them sat down to eat without him. The room felt oddly quiet in spite of the television blaring at an almost painful level.

"How's work at the hotel?" Aoi said, unable to bear the silence.

"Getting into the swing of it?"

Mrs. Narahashi's first job after their move was at a country club, but something about the work there disagreed with her and she had quit after three months. A month ago she'd found a new job at a business hotel.

"What can I say?" she shrugged with her eyes glued to the TV.

"It's not really my kind of work, but there's not much I can do about it, is there? A town like this, you can't really insist on finding office work, or accounting. The ladies I work with are such hillbillies. They never stop yakking. So-and-so did this, so-and-so did that. All the latest gossip. They're so unsophisticated."

Aoi put down her chopsticks with a small sigh, which she took care not to let her mother hear. Darkness had crept up against the dining room window. A commercial blasted from the TV.

"Goodness, are you done eating already?" her mother said, glancing at Aoi's rice bowl, still half full. "I hope you're not trying to diet.

66

you'll only wind up stunting your growth." Without bothering to put down her chopsticks, she reached for the remote and changed the channel.

"Can we go skiing during winter break?" Aoi said. "I heard it's close if you go by car. You know how to ski, right, Mom?"

Aoi stacked her dishes and carried them to the sink.

"It's only September and your mind's already on winter break? Is this your way of telling me you can't stand school, Aoi?"

She had a vacant look on her face, staring at the TV with her chopsticks poised in midair. T h e opening theme to a suspense thriller came on.

"Whatcha been doing?" Aoi said into the handset. In her room upstairs, she was leaning against the door with the cord from the phone in the hallway stretched as far as it would reach.

"Just now? Reading," Nanako replied.

Aoi never heard any sounds in the background when she talked to her friend on the phone. She'd never seen Nanako's house, but she pictured a large, spacious home that was always quiet, and parents who were gone a lot. She didn't imagine that Nanako had to talk with her phone cord stretched to the breaking point just to get it into her room, nor that she had to sit against the closed door because the cord wouldn't reach her bed. But Aoi considered herself lucky to have gotten a phone put in upstairs at all.

"Reading what?"

"The book I borrowed from you.
Hey There, Little Red Riding
Hood.
I expected it to be a takeoff on the fairy tale, but it's about some guy going to Tokyo University."

"But it's good, don't you think?"

"Well, I guess I don't like books that are all words. I need pictures," Nanako said with the candor of a small child.

They'd said good-bye only a short while before, but Aoi already ached to see her friend again. She longed to escape from this dreary house, where she never stopped feeling her mother's mournful sighs eating away at her spirits, and to slip away somewhere bright and gay and free of negativity where she could talk and laugh with Nanako to her heart's content.

"So anyway, Aokins, where shall we meet on Saturday? Hanazawa Bookstore?"

"Yeah, that's as good a place as any. I can't afford to buy anything, but we can browse all we want."

"Who cares about buying. It's fun just looking."

They both fell silent. This wasn't unusual. They'd call each other for no reason in particular, and then they'd sit there for long periods of time without saying anything. But Aoi never felt awkward about the silence that flowed between them. There was no pressure to fill the dead air. She just sat and listened to the sound of Nanako's quiet breathing coming over the telephone line, drawing pictures in her mind of the room Nanako was in, of the things Nanako must have around her.