If You Follow Me Page 7

  “You can’t hide a thing from this one,” her dad said. “She catches every trick.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said. I liked this about her. Everyone else was so easy to fool. Her vigilance made me feel safe. As the three of us sat side by side in his study, tucked under an afghan, watching old black-and-white movies and working through his stash of junk food, I almost managed to forget why we were there. I almost didn’t envy their closeness.

  Lying in his bed that night, looking at the photos on the wall, I noticed one of Carolyn and her mother at the beach. Their hair was the same shade of red, their front teeth overlapped in the same way, and they wore identical grins, only Carolyn was looking at the camera and her mother was looking at her. When I said that I liked this picture, Carolyn told me that it had been taken right before they found out that her mom was sick.

  “I think it was the last time we were really happy,” she said. “No-holds-barred.”

  “Do you still miss her?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I always will.” She said this in such a straightforward way that I envied what seemed like a simpler grief. “I was thinking about what you said before,” I told her. “About how my father waited until I was an adult to kill himself? If you’re right, I almost wish he hadn’t. He was so depressed at the end of his life, it’s like he was a different person. Now that’s how I remember him, instead of the way he was before.” She didn’t answer for a while, which was another thing I liked about her. She didn’t just blurt out the first thing that came to mind.

  “I can see why you feel that way now,” she said at last, tracing my eyebrow with her fingertip, “but I’ll bet someday you’ll be glad you got that time with him. When my mom got sick, I didn’t really know her yet. I mean she was my mom, and I loved her, but I didn’t get to go through that adolescent phase where your parents turn into real people and you hate them for their weaknesses, and then you get older and appreciate them for the same reasons. Right now, all you can focus on are your dad’s weaknesses, but later you’ll remember more.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  The next morning at breakfast, Carolyn asked her dad if he would take her shopping for a suit. She had decided to apply to a teaching program sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education, and she needed something to wear to the embassy interview. We were graduating in six months, and we often talked about how we had no idea what to do next. This was the first I’d heard of her plan to teach in Japan. I had to remind myself that we hadn’t made any promises to each other. She didn’t owe me anything. I had no right to feel hurt.

  Her dad wanted to buy her a skirt suit with a blazer, but she insisted on shopping in the men’s department, selecting a single-breasted charcoal suit made of wool so fine it felt like silk, a white shirt and a blue tie. Her father remained silent as she disappeared into the changing room, avoiding the salesman’s eye, but when she emerged in that suit, looking proud and shy and lovely as ever, he got down on his knees to turn her cuff s, and then he taught her how to knot the tie, and I had to look away.

  After he paid for the suit, he was oddly quiet. He told us that he had some errands to run, that he’d see us at dinner, and he dropped us off downtown.

  “He’s upset,” she said.

  “Because you wanted a men’s suit?” I guessed.

  “Because he doesn’t want me to move to Japan.”

  “I don’t want you to move to Japan either,” I said.

  Instead of responding, she stopped in front of a tattoo parlor, grabbed my hand and said, “Let’s do it. Do you want to?”

  “Right now?” I asked. “Without thinking about it?”

  “If you think too hard about every decision, you end up never doing anything.”

  “But a tattoo,” I said, laughing. “It’s so permanent.”

  “Come on,” she said. “Even if you end up regretting it, you’ll have a good story.”

  She frowned as she flipped through a binder filled with Celtic crosses, prowling tigers, and big black Chinese characters. “This guy’s good with a needle but his taste sucks.” She picked up a pencil and sketched on the back of a flyer. Within minutes she had drawn a dragon with a long, pensive snout and a lean body that tapered into a wind-whipped kite, explaining that both she and her mother had been born in the year of the dragon. She asked if I knew what I wanted, and suddenly I did. When I told her, she didn’t ask why, didn’t insinuate that my desire was dark or ominous. She just nodded and proceeded to sketch. “That’s perfect,” I said when she put her pencil down. But she shook her head and picked it up again, drawing a rope knotted to the top of the anchor.

  “So someone can pull you back up,” she said. “When you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  Lying in her father’s bed, our fresh tattoos protected under thick pads of gauze, she told me why she’d decided to move to Japan. She’d gone to college near home because she didn’t want to leave her dad, but now it was time. Japan was the most foreign place she could think of, the money was good for English teachers, and she didn’t know what else to do with her life. “It seems like an interesting way to delay figuring that out,” she said.

  I thought about the Japanese exchange student that my family had hosted when I was in junior high. Her name was Takae, which she told me meant “expensive” or “tall,” although she was short and introverted to the point of invisibility. On Christmas morning, after unwrapping the presents my mom had put under the tree for her, she wrapped them all back up and then left them on her dresser for the rest of the year. Before she left, she packed them still wrapped in her suitcase. In the car on the way to the airport, she cried and told my mother that she didn’t want to go back to Japan, where she’d always felt like a disappointment to her parents, who’d wanted a son. She said that she had never felt so at home before, which made me feel guilty since I’d barely noticed she was there.

  When I thought of Japan, I also thought of a picture I’d seen of a Tokyo subway platform so crowded that a man was using a long stick to prod commuters onto the train. People talked about going abroad to find yourself. Japan seemed like a place where you could get lost.

  That night, I had the same nightmare that plagued me every time I managed to fall asleep. In it, I was up there with my father on the ledge of the bridge, gazing down at the city lights reflected in the dark gloss of the bay. Right before he jumped, he turned to me with his eyebrows raised, a wordless invitation to keep him company. And even though I did, I waited just a second too late and he never looked up. I hit the water hard, right after him, slipped into its cold depths, and fought my way back up to the surface, amazed to find that I was still alive, unhurt. I treaded water for a long time, waiting for my dad to surface beside me, and when this didn’t happen it dawned on me that he hadn’t made it. He was gone. And he never even knew that I had tried to follow him. I woke in a cold sweat, relieved to realize that it was just a dream until I remembered that it wasn’t really. He was still gone and I was still here. But I had no idea where I was. My mouth was dry and my heart threw itself against my rib cage. Then my eyes landed on Carolyn’s sleeping face. She was snoring softly, her lips parted over her crooked front teeth, her skin luminous even in the darkness. I pulled her close, whispering, “Don’t leave me,” knowing that I could never say something this needy if she were awake, but hoping the message would infiltrate her dreams.

  On the bus ride back to New York the next day, when she asked if I’d consider moving to Japan with her, I didn’t hesitate before saying yes. I had no idea how to make a life for myself in New York, and I couldn’t go back to San Francisco.

  San Francisco was that bridge.

  A few hours after our fight, I come upstairs carrying a giant bowl of egg noodles slathered in butter and ketchup. This is Carolyn’s kryptonite, the dish her mom used to fix for her when she was little and sick or upset about something. She is reading the novel th
at my mom sent me, and I can tell that she’s deciding whether to stay mad. I crawl under the covers next to her, and when I hold out the fork, twirled with noodles, she opens her mouth to take a bite.

  “How’s that book?” I ask.

  “Surprisingly, not that bad,” she says. “Of course the woman is obsessed with her weight, and of course she’s blind to the fact that the guy she should be with is right under her nose, but at least it’s funny. It’s a good escape.” Carolyn never used to enjoy escapist fiction. She only read serious literature, books she could learn from. I must be a bad influence. “Read to me?” I say, lying with my head on her lap. Carolyn claims that she’s a terrible performer, but when it’s just the two of us, no one else around, she’ll slip into each of the different voices, pausing in just the right places to draw out suspense; it’s way better than watching a movie. It’s like being able to share the same good dream.

  At the end of a chapter, she closes the book. I open the window and line up a carton of milk, a dozen eggs and a stick of butter on the ledge—groceries I bought to replace the ones that went bad—hoping they won’t freeze before morning. She turns off the lights and joins me at the window. It’s snowing lightly. The moon looks like a dented melon in a graphite sky. Its light reflects off every sparkling surface. Across the street, Mrs. Ogawa is standing in her front yard, wearing a flannel nightgown, scattering rice for her koi. The fish form a tangled mass at the surface of the water, their gummy mouths opening and closing. We watch the old lady croon a lullaby to the fish, rocking on her feet, her eyes shut.

  “Poor thing,” Carolyn whispers. “She’s not all there, is she?”

  “It’s probably for the best,” I say. “Can you imagine being married to the gomi police? I’ll bet he never lets her throw anything away.”

  “The horror, the horror,” Carolyn jokes. She doesn’t like to throw anything away either. The attic at her dad’s house is officially called “The Carolyn Museum,” complete with placards to go with various artifacts, like the depleted tube of Looney Tunes toothpaste she carried everywhere as a toddler. Carolyn is incredibly loyal to objects. I’ve given her things of mine that I didn’t want to have around but couldn’t bring myself to part with, like the boomerang my dad used as a paperweight. But whatever she takes, she keeps. I’ll never get that boomerang back.

  “Oh shit,” I say, watching as Amana leaps onto the edge of the barrel where Mrs. Ogawa is feeding her fish and swipes a paw across the water. Carolyn gasps as we watch the cat dart into the shadows, a wriggling carp caught in her jaws.

  “It’s not funny,” she says, burying her face in my neck to avoid looking at the old woman’s wrinkled face, twisted in confusion.

  “I know,” I say, swallowing my laughter, “but isn’t there some saying? Like catching fish in a barrel? Now we know why Amana was so fat when we got here.”

  “I don’t want to give the neighbors anything else to hold against us!”

  I wrap my arms around her waist and pull her closer, telling her not to worry, that the old lady is senile enough that she won’t remember any of this in the morning.

  “Come to bed,” I say. “I mean, come to futon.”

  “I have my period,” she reminds me, pulling away for a moment but keeping her hands on my waist in a way that gives me hope.

  Usually she’s the top, the spark that gets things burning, but lately there always seems to be some good reason why it’s not a good time. Behind her back I see something move in the upstairs window across the street, a gap in the Venetian blinds framing a face as round and pale as the moon itself. I don’t mention this to Carolyn. Instead I push her backward onto the futons and press my full weight on top of her. She can take it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  kawaii: (ADJ.) cute; adorable; tiny

  Amana likes to come and go through the bedroom window, using the pine tree as a ladder to climb up and down. In her nocturnal prowling, she must have knocked our groceries from the windowsill to the street below. By the time I got downstairs this morning, Mrs. Ogawa was already outside cleaning up the mess, maneuvering her broom around the cat, who was lapping up milk streaming between the shattered eggs.

  “Gomen nasai,” I apologize. “Reizoku wa kowareta. Neko wa itazurako.” I’m sorry. The refrigerator broke. The cat is naughty. It sounds like a haiku. I hope she gets it. The old woman nods and continues to sweep around Amana, who weaves between her rickety ankles. I lunge at the cat, but she leaps onto a table covered with bonsai trees and overturns a pot that falls onto the ground, cracking and exposing the plant’s hair-thin roots. I apologize again as Mrs. Ogawa picks up the shards, dropping them in a bag filled with our gomi.

  By the time I return upstairs, Carolyn is showered and ready for work, wearing a green sweater dress of mine that skims her body instead of clutching it. I’m still not used to seeing her in my clothes, or in clothes that show off her curves. Before we came here, she always wore pants, layered sports bras to flatten her breasts, and baggy hooded sweatshirts. She walked without swinging her hips and kept her head bent slightly as if pushing against a strong wind. She was more chivalrous and more aggressive than any of the guys I’d gone out with before her, opening taxi doors for me and engaging in shouting matches with guys who leered at us on the street. Back then, she liked me to wear the skirts. “You have great legs,” she said. “R. Crumb legs. You look like you could kick over a horse.”

  She sits on the floor with her legs under the kotatsu, the heated table that Miyoshi-sensei loaned us when it got cold. It has an electric coil bolted to its underside and a quilted tablecloth to tent in the heat. She is reading The Daily Yomiyuri and eating peanut butter from the jar. This is her personal jar of peanut butter. We both ordered jars from a catalogue of international imports, and when they arrived by mail she wrote her name on the lid of one, with a Sharpie. “I just want it to last,” she said when I complained that she was treating me like a roommate. Sure enough, I polished off my own jar long ago while she continues to enjoy the daily-recommended portion size.

  “Amana broke the eggs,” I say. “There’s nothing for breakfast.”

  “You have to go by Mister Donuts to throw out the trashsicle,” she reminds me.

  “We need a new refrigerator,” I say. “We can’t keep throwing out our groceries.”

  “First we have to go to the dump and get rid of the old one.”

  I’m about to tell her that there is no dump when she informs me that she and Joe are going this afternoon. “When did you talk to Joe?” I ask, trying not to sound too interested.

  “I didn’t,” she says, sucking the peanut butter off her spoon. “He faxed me.”

  “He faxed you?” I repeat. “Out of the blue? That’s weird.”

  “We fax sometimes,” she says. “It’s no big deal.”

  “When did all this start?”

  “All nothing. I don’t know.” She pauses. “I guess he faxed me for the first time on the anniversary of my mom’s death, just to say he was thinking of me.”

  “You told him about your mom?”

  “It came up last month when we visited the junior high. The English teacher wanted us to talk about our families. She told us to draw all of our family members on the board, and Joe drew like eight people, but I only drew a picture of my dad. The kids asked what happened to my mom, and when I told them that she died I started crying. I hadn’t even thought about her for so long. I guess it just hit me…”

  “The wave?” I ask, oddly jealous.

  “What?” She looks confused. “No, the fact that those kids were already three years older than I was when my mom died. They were so tiny. It made me realize how much I’d missed out on. Anyways, Joe was great. He took the attention off me by telling the kids how his parents split up when he was six, how his dad is about to get married for the third time, how he has three brothers by different moms. We started this excellent discussion about nontraditional families. Not exactly what that teacher had in mind!”

>   “That’s funny,” I say. “Yesterday, I told my class that my dad died.”

  “You did?” She sounds surprised. Carolyn thinks that I’m still in denial. She would probably laugh if I told her about my awkward attempt to translate the word “cremated” into Japanese. He became burnable. But the subject came up because we were talking about garbage: specifically about my inability to follow gomi rules. I don’t want to give her any more reason to think that I’m careless. I pick up the newspaper and she goes downstairs to put away her personal jar of peanut butter.

  Once again The Curry Lady of Wakayama has made the front page. Earlier this year, a woman named Masumi Hayashi slipped arsenic into a pot of curry at a neighborhood festival, putting sixty people in the hospital and killing four. While lab results determined that the arsenic in the curry matched a box of rat poison in the Hayashi garage, she has yet to issue a formal apology or explain why she did it. “Hayashi Won’t Break Silence!” reads today’s headline. Criminals here are always asked to explain themselves, as if there were logical reasons behind the most impulsive and violent crimes. Speculation has it that the poisoning was an act of revenge against her neighbors, who frequently criticized her for not doing her share of chores and for showing up late to neighborhood functions.

  I go downstairs to read the story to Carolyn. We both get a kick out of these Curry Lady stories. She is in the bathroom, standing an inch from the mirror, styling her eyebrows. First she brushes her right eyebrow with clear mascara, then she fills it in with brown pencil. Catching sight of me behind her, she startles and scrawls a diagonal line up onto her forehead, so that she looks theatrically mad.