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  “Yeah,” I say. “Too bad they have to go and become real women.”

  “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the futon,” he says, tweaking my nose. Who does that? And why is he always touching us?

  “Aren’t you worried about hurting them?” I ask.

  “I’m more worried about them hurting me,” he says. “Shorinji kempo is all about sizing up your opponent, figuring out their weaknesses and using them to your advantage. A little girl is going to be quick and light on her feet, even if she can’t match my strength.”

  “Just how strong are you?” I ask. I feel light on my own feet, as if the blood in my veins were carbonated. I could punch someone out. I could kick over a horse. I could lift my car off the ground and spin it around on the tip of one finger.

  “Why, pet? You want to arm wrestle? What’s the prize?”

  “Save your strength,” Carolyn says. “You’re going to need it this afternoon, when we take the refrigerator to the dump.”

  “You can’t,” I say. “There is no dump.”

  “What are you talking about?” Carolyn says. “How can there be no dump?”

  “Because,” I say, “in this microscopic crowded country, nothing really gets thrown away. It’s all burned or recycled.” Only as I say these words do I realize their truth. “You tell her,” I say to Joe. “I’m sure when you lived in Shika, Miyoshi-sensei must have gotten on your case about the gomi rules.”

  “Not really,” he says, raking his hair out of his eyes.

  “Because he followed them,” Carolyn says.

  “I didn’t make much trash,” Joe says. “My students—well, their mothers—took pity on the young foreign lad living alone. I don’t think I fixed one dinner all year.”

  But then he remembers how he had an old stereo he wanted to get rid of, and Miyoshi-sensei told him to put it in the wire cage by the river. Carolyn runs up the flight of stairs and returns grinning, reporting that it already holds a rice cooker, an old microwave and a pair of headphones. Joe says that it must be the day when electronic goods are picked up, that if we hurry we can move the refrigerator out right now.

  “You’ll never have to see it again,” he tells Carolyn.

  “Or smell it,” she adds.

  “Will you take the blame?” I ask Joe.

  “Take the blame?” he repeats, laughing. “We’re not committing a felony.”

  “Fine,” I say, “so when Miyoshi-sensei gets upset, you’ll tell him it was your idea.”

  “No worries,” he says. “Hiro never gets upset with me.”

  Carolyn opens the front door wide, and Joe slides between the wall and the fridge. He tries to push it forward but it won’t budge, so he turns around and uses the back of his shoulders, groaning softly until the fridge advances a few inches. He straightens, shakes his head and shoulders in a Rocky impersonation. Carolyn laughs, covering her mouth. The three of us each take a corner. We all open our arms wide and it’s like a group hug, the refrigerator coming between us. On the count of three we lift the fridge and carry it a few feet before the enamel slides down our palms and it lands with a thunderous clatter.

  “Let’s tip it,” Joe proposes. “Think martial arts. This thing is bigger than we are. We have to bring it down sideways.” Carolyn comes downstairs with the kotatsu, the heated table that Miyoshi-sensei loaned us. Joe and I tilt the fridge, walk it out the door one corner at a time, and hoist it up onto the squat table, which sags under the weight. Joe backs his truck up to the building, leaves the engine idling and jumps up into the bed with a goatlike agility. “Push gently,” he says. “I’ll get out of the way at the last second.”

  “You’re going to hurt yourself,” Carolyn says.

  “I’ll be fine,” he assures her. “Just watch your own fingers.”

  I make it look like I’m pushing gently as he requested. I put a lot of muscle into that push. As metal hits metal, I expect every door on the block to fly open, every neighbor to pop out to see what’s happening. But the street remains empty.

  The river this morning is yellow, not the golden yellow of sun reflecting on water, but hamburger mustard yellow, a jaundiced soup. Carolyn and I stand on the riverbank while Joe slides the refrigerator out of the truck bed. Miraculously, it lands standing up, right next to the wire cage. Joe places a heavy boulder in front of the refrigerator, explaining that you’re supposed to take the door off its hinges, but this should keep any little kids from getting trapped inside. Carolyn walks around the Amana, tracing it with her finger.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to miss it,” I say.

  “Of course not,” she says, but I can tell she’s lying. “Look at what we almost forgot.” She holds up the picture of our digital daughter, half her and half me.

  “Cute kid,” Joe says. “Who is she?”

  “She’s ours,” I say, glad when Carolyn doesn’t correct me or explain.

  “Can I keep it?” she asks, and I say sure. Part of me wishes I’d gotten to it first, but a bigger part is glad that she still wants it.

  Joe and I are in the library, chatting with Noriko before first period, when Miyoshi-sensei enters, karaoke machine in hand. I’m about to tell him how we took the refrigerator out this morning—I want Joe to take the blame as promised—but before I can speak, he hands me a letter. Noriko and Joe both stop talking and stare, and I’m grateful when Miyoshi-sensei pops his CD into the machine and asks Joe’s help to decipher the lyrics.

  Dear Miss Marina how are you?

  I’m not so great. Yesterday, Ogawa-san called me again. Maybe you tried new gomi technique. This time you throw gomi in sushi restaurant bin. Oh no! I think. Restaurant need own gomi space. They have much fish and rice and chopstick and so forth, to dispose every day. I know my English is so bad. Maybe you couldn’t understand my gomi letters well enough. So let me be more clear. When you throw gomi in anotherbody’s bin, even restaurant bin, this is like throwing gomi on anotherbody’s futon.

  Thursday is Moku-yobi. On a Thursday you can throw electronic goods such as radio, clock, blender, and so forth, in wire cage by the river. It’s close to your home, so you don’t have to carry far. Some manufacturer will come to collect electronic goods on Thursday afternoon, to break open for good parts.

  Speaking of good parts: good part of Thursday is: Mister Joe is teaching with us today. So you shouldn’t prepare any lesson on girl thing. I think students enjoy Mister Joe’s lessons so much. He is very talented, don’t you agree? Tonight we have “enkai.” This means faculty party. Enkai fee is 5,000 yen. This includes dinner, all you can drink beer and sake, and Japanese “onsen” bath. Please come to Royal Hotel at 6 pm to take a bath. It’s Japanese bath, meaning all together in one water. Of course only man with man, woman with woman. So I can’t see you. After dinner, we can enjoy singing karaoke. I hope Mister Joe will duet with me. He has voice like sweet melon. He sings like professional.

  That’s all for now.

  See you,

  Hiroshi Miyoshi

  “Thank you,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  And while I am sorry that I got into trouble, and that he had to write me yet another gomi letter, I can’t help but think that people here spend way too much time rooting through the garbage. I’m sure the sushi restaurant really has that many chopsticks! At least he didn’t say anything to shame me in front of Noriko and Joe. I remind myself that he doesn’t want to give me these letters any more than I want to receive them. He hits Rewind and we listen to a song called “Jambalaya,” which sounds like it’s being sung by chipmunks.

  “Pole the pirogue,” he reads off the lyric sheet. “I can’t catch the meaning of this.”

  “I think it’s Cajun,” I say. “Or Creole. Whatever they speak in the Bayou.”

  “The Bayou,” Miyoshi-sensei repeats. “Now I plan my next vacation. Travel agent recommends Gulf Coast. He says I could hear great music and enjoy barbecue Longhorn.”

  “Sounds deelish,” Joe says, and I laugh in spite of
myself.

  “Have you ever been to the Bayou?” Miyoshi-sensei asks me.

  “Once,” I say. “But I was really little and I don’t remember much.”

  I was with my parents on that trip. I must have been seven or eight. We went on a swamp tour, and the captain of the boat had a cooler that was full of beer and a live baby alligator, its jaw held shut by a rubber band. After lunch, he passed it around like show-and-tell and my dad slipped the rubber band off. When it clamped down on his finger, he flung it off the side of the boat. The captain kicked us off too, miles from our rental car. This is all that I remember—this, and the way my mother cried as we trudged through swamp grass.

  “How about you?” Miyoshi-sensei asks Joe. “Have you been to the Bayou?”

  “Love, this is my first time out of England,” Joe says.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I say. “I mean you’ve been to other parts of Europe.”

  “Roight,” he says, but the way he avoids my eye makes me think that he’s lying. He stares at the bulletin board covered in pictures of himself and I notice for the first time how cheap they look, grainy and pixelated, like the kind of flyers that get stuck under your windshield back home, advertizing tire sales and cut-rate electronics.

  Miyoshi-sensei lights a cigarette, watching Joe get up to flirt with Noriko.

  “I should warn you about tomorrow’s ensoku,” he says to me.

  “What does ensoku mean?” I ask.

  “Outing,” he says. “Tomorrow is long-walking day. To observe the end of autumn, the whole school will take a long walk up the river, to the sea. We will pass by your home. It’s convenient, if you forget something.”

  “Great,” I say. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Looking forward?”

  “A long walk sounds like fun.”

  “Hmm,” he purses his lips and blows a ribbon of smoke that curls toward the ceiling. “Maybe fun is incorrect usage. We will walk all day, in one long line of bodies. By the end, we come to feel like Japanese imperial prisoner of war.” I laugh, and he smiles at the success of his joke.

  It’s raining this afternoon and Carolyn faxes to ask for a ride home, addressing her fax to Joe and me both, so I go with him to pick her up. She sits in the middle, the three of us pressed hip to hip in his truck’s tiny cab. Every time he shifts, his fist rubs against her knee and I feel the friction. He suggests that we all drive up to Wajima, a fishing town at the tip of the peninsula, and I remind him that we have to go to the faculty party.

  “I think I might skip it,” he says. “Things are a bit dodgy with Noriko.”

  “You seem pretty comfortable together,” I argue.

  “Do you know she didn’t even bother telling me she got engaged? I had to learn about it from Hiro.”

  “That’s terrible,” Carolyn says.

  “The worst part is what he said. He explained to me that at the ripe age of twenty-seven, Noriko is getting up there. If she doesn’t marry soon, she might miss her chance. ‘If you don’t have this intention in your mind,’ he said, ‘you had better step to the side.’”

  “Unbelievable,” Carolyn says. “That is so sexist.”

  “Maybe he’s just looking out for her,” I argue.

  “Come on,” Carolyn scoff s. “She’s old enough to be an old maid but she can’t make her own dating decisions?”

  “I reckon it’s for the best,” Joe says. “Noriko is a sweet girl and all, but I need someone who can stand up for herself. A partner.”

  I try to catch Carolyn’s eye. When we got together, she made me promise never to call her my partner. Partners were in business together. We were lovers. It really bothered Carolyn when straight people used this term “partner,” to seem hip and inconventional.

  “I’ll go for a drive with you,” she says. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “Miyoshi-sensei is going to be disappointed,” I tell Joe. “He was counting on singing a duet with you.”

  “I’m sure he’d rather duet with you,” Joe says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should hear what the other teachers have been saying.”

  “What have they been saying?” Carolyn asks.

  “Miyoshi-sensei is always passing her secret notes. Everyone thinks they’re love notes. They keep asking me whether the feeling is mutual.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I scoff.

  “Don’t lie, pet,” Joe says. “I was right there when he gave you one this morning. You read it all quiet like, blushing even…”

  “That was no love note,” I say.

  “So what was it?” Carolyn asks, looking at me for the first time all afternoon.

  “It was nothing,” I say.

  Let her be the jealous one for a change.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  taoreru: (V.) to fall; to collapse

  Inside the lobby of Shika’s Royal Hotel, a carpet patterned with purple and gold diamonds stretches from wall to wall. Chandeliers throw puzzles of light on the black lacquer bar, and Japanese women in French maid costumes pad in eyelet lace slippers, balancing trays of beer bottles and sake. One of them approaches me and bows.

  “Miss Marina?” she says.

  “Hai.”

  She reaches into the pocket of her apron and hands me a note written on hotel letterhead in Miyoshi-sensei’s too familiar linked cursive.

  Dear Miss Marina,

  This become final gomi message. This method, I learn today, is no good for sharing some important rule with you. Of course Ogawa-san called me about refrigerator situation. To tell the truth, I was kind of so disappointed. To tell the truth, I couldn’t believe the phone. To stand a huge refrigerator by river walking path is illegal and dangerous. “Itsu taoreru,” Ogawa-san say. When will it fall? “Itsu taoreru, Itsu taoreru?” he repeat, and I repeat after him. When, Miss Marina, when will it fall?

  Do you consider another person? Me? Mister Ogawa? Some kindergarten child playing by the river? I consider Mister Ogawa. I have no choice, when he calls me every day. You have become huge responsibility for me. You are my job, but recently my job become heavy like your refrigerator. Mister Ogawa is old man. He can’t move huge refrigerator alone. So you and I must “brainstorm” together. This is how I feel honestly. A storm is moving in my brain. Can Miss Marina hear my words?

  For tonight we had better forget our troubles. Everyone is taking a bath. Let’s not talk about refrigerator tonight. Tonight we become clean, and tomorrow is Long Walking Day. Then we had better figure out how to move a refrigerator back inside.

  See you very soon,

  Hiroshi Miyoshi

  I am naked with my colleagues. We sit on pink plastic stools at the low showers that surround the black slate tub. One by one, the other women finish rinsing off, stand up and ease into the bath. For the third time, I pump soap into my hands and fleece my body with suds until I’m almost decent. I am trying not to think of the tattoo of an anchor on my breast, or how large my ass feels sticking out behind me on this stool. I am trying not to think about dusk falling over town, or the refrigerator about to fall by the river. I wonder if Miyoshi-sensei told the other teachers what I did, whether he complains in Japanese about my inability to follow the rules, his heavy burden.

  I hesitate at the edge of the tub, cowering behind a tiny towel smaller than most dish cloths. My colleagues look up and smile invitingly. The elderly history teacher pats the surface of the steaming water. The school secretary makes a satisfied mmm sound. Rub-a-dub-dub, twelve ladies in a tub. I drop my towel and plunge into the scalding bath, but my breasts bob to the surface, two pink buoys.

  Noriko, who has been soaking in the cold tub on the deck, walks in through the sliding glass doors and toward the bath on the pads of her toes. Steam rises off her skin. She is slightly, charmingly, bowlegged, so thin that her pelvis is visible beneath her skin, jutting out like the top of a heart. I remember the new bride on display in her glass van, surrounded by possessions. That woman see
med so vulnerable, whereas Noriko looks perfectly at ease. She slides into the bath next to me, points at my anchor tattoo and says, “sekushii.” Sexy. When my nipple stiffens (only reflexively!) I start to apologize but she says “sekushii” again and all of the teachers let out ripples of laughter. Tension melts in the steam. “Ookiisugi,” I say, cupping my breasts in both hands. Too big. She shakes her head and says, “sekushi-sugi.” Too sexy.

  The sound of water rushing into water is nice. I slide forward, slip under the surface and let the bath fill my ears, push against my eyelids. I open my mouth and taste a sip. It’s a little salty, this water we’re all steeping in, this broth of us. After a while, my fingertips start to feel like rubber, wrinkly and numb. When I touch my own skin, I have the gorgeous illusion of someone else, someone new, touching me for the first time. I don’t want to get out. I don’t want to face Miyoshi-sensei, to have to apologize yet again. But eventually the other women stand up, towel off and get dressed in the hotel yukata, cotton kimonos patterned with exploding, hot pink fireworks. Noriko calls my name, tells me that it’s time for the banquet. To my surprise, the yukata fits me. Noriko ties my sash in a pretty bow and the other female teachers tell me that I look very beautiful, very Japanese, that I’m sure to break hearts. At least I think that’s what they’re saying. All I know is they’re softening up to me, and I have to say, it feels good.

  There are no tables or chairs in the hotel banquet hall, just two rows of cushions in front of lacquer trays spaced far enough apart to make conversation awkward. Most of the teachers are already kneeling and eating. The sound of chopsticks scraping dishes and glasses clinking fills the room. I am trying to figure out where I should sit when Miyoshi-sensei beckons me over.

  “Mari-chan,” he says, “I know you don’t like beef, so I ordered tofu for you.”

  “Miyoshi-sensei,” I say, “I got your note. Gomen nasai. Shitsureishimashita. Sumimasen.” I’m sorry. I have committed a rude. Forgive me.

  “Not tonight.” He holds up a hand. “This is enkai. A party is no time to sing the gomi blues.” I laugh and he fills my glass with beer. “Japanese enkai is a rare and precious chance to take off the tatamae. The work face. And show the honmae.”