If You Follow Me Read online

  I don’t say this. Instead I tell Ogawa-san that Haruki did a great job in English class today. “Sodesune,” Miyoshi-sensei agrees, reaching into his briefcase and pulling out the boy’s worksheet. He passes it to Ogawa-san, who scowls and turns it around and around like an indecipherable map to a place he’d rather not go.

  “What was his score?” he asks at last.

  “Hyaku pacento,” I say.

  “One hundred percent?” the old man repeats, sounding grudgingly impressed. “I can’t believe it. All he ever does is sit in his room, listening to noise.”

  “Haruki loves American music,” Miyoshi-sensei tells me. “He introduced me to his favorite band called Smashed Pumpkins.”

  “Smashing Pumpkins,” Haruki and I correct him in unison.

  “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known…” I sing, then stop abruptly. “Sorry,” I say. “I have a terrible voice.”

  “I have one unusual idea,” Miyoshi-sensei says, “for how Haruki could improve English and confidence in one convenient method. He could join karaoke club. In karaoke, correct words appear on screen. You couldn’t make a mistake. There’s nothing to fear, ne?”

  It is easier for me to picture the boy flapping his arms and lifting into the sky than crooning into a microphone. But Miyoshi-sensei seems excited. “Have you asked him?” I say. “He already said yes.” He grins. “Belonging to a club is mandatory for all students. He has to join one. How about you?”

  “How about me?” I repeat.

  “Would you like to try? A club needs more than one member.”

  “But I can’t sing,” I protest.

  “You can sing,” he insists. “You must simply change gear. Like a bicycle.”

  “I think I’m a one-speed.”

  “You are not a one-speed,” he says. “I can tell.”

  After hitting Play on his karaoke machine, Miyoshi-sensei launches into song. It’s “Close to You,” by The Carpenters, a horrible song but his voice is good, a steady tenor, and he nails every syllable perfectly, just as it darkens on screen. I’m sorry when he stops singing and hands me the microphone, hitting Rewind. “Why do birds suddenly appear…” I come in too late and rush to the end of the verse, my voice quavering on the high notes.

  “I told you,” I say. “I can’t sing.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he says. “Have you heard a baby learn to speak? Baby begins with singing. Speech comes second. When we learn fear, we forget how to sing.” He pauses and I reflect upon this. “When you are afraid you breathe like this.” He bounces his shoulders up and down. “Baby breathes from the belly. Like this.” He pulls his shirt close to his torso and I watch it expand and flatten when he exhales. He gives Haruki the same instructions. “You have much room for air,” he says. He hands him the microphone and hits Rewind again, but when the music starts the boy doesn’t make a sound, sitting frozen in place as usual. “Just like me,” Miyoshi-sensei prompts him, “they long to be…”

  “Close to you,” Haruki finally joins in, his voice a helium whisper.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  He tells us both to stand up and then wraps handkerchiefs around our eyes, explaining that he wants us to sing blindfolded while we walk around the faculty room, listening to our voices reflect off different surfaces. This is a new Miyoshi-sensei, a man with a plan, no one to say no to. We put our trust in him, and before long it starts to pay off. As Haruki and I take turns on the verse, I manage to hit the high notes and he starts to sing for real. I realize that I’ve never heard his voice before. It’s fine, remarkably unexceptional. The way he keeps quiet, you’d think he had something to hide.

  I am leaning against the wall, listening to him take his turn singing, when I hear something else: the crunch of suppressed laughter. I strip off my blindfold and see three boys in the doorway, their fingers pressed to the underside of their noses. I’ve seen these boys. They are members of the technical class, the ones who sexually harassed their last female teacher. Two of them are Goth, with bleached hair in sculpted disarray and gobs of eyeliner, while the third is a ganguro, or “blackface” with a huge Afro-perm. To me they look more goofy than scary, but Haruki is obviously petrified. His shoulders are bouncing up and down, and his blindfold is pushed up on his brow. When he rips it off and throws it to the ground, the boys laugh harder. He pushes through them and bolts down the stairs.

  “Are those the boys who bullied Haruki?” I ask Miyoshi-sensei, who has collapsed on the couch, his head in his hands.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “Does that mean yes?” I press.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Probably. He never told.”

  On my way out of school, I pass the open door to a classroom in which a woman wearing a kimono is distributing flowers to a group of girls seated in a circle. The daylight is fading and the room glows with two kerosene stoves and I linger at the threshold until the woman turns around and sees me.

  “Miss Marina?” she says.

  “Yes,” I say, wondering if we’ve met. She has a striking face, triangular like a cat’s, with high cheekbones and eyes that are gray rather than black. Her hair is more gray than black too, short and messy, alive with cowlicks. I think I’d remember her.

  “My name is Keiko,” she says. “I teach elementary school art. Also I coach ikebana.” She gestures at an arrangement on the floor, an asymmetrical spray of purple cosmos with chocolate brown centers, puff y marigolds and pussy willows. “Do you want to try?”

  “Wah!” the girls exclaim. “Your English is so good, Ishii-sensei!”

  “Thank you,” she says. “English is my favorite subject, in my student time.”

  “What a coincidence,” I say. “Art was my favorite subject.”

  “Coincidence?” she echoes, tucking her short hair behind her ear. “A coincidence is like fate,” I try to explain, but this isn’t quite right. “It’s when two people have something unexpected in common, or two strangers meet for a reason.”

  “Like destiny?” she asks, and I nod. “Sorry, but I don’t believe in this.”

  “Me neither,” I say, laughing. “Life feels too random.”

  “It’s all accidents,” she agrees. “But,” she holds up a finger, “if there’s no destiny, then a…coincidence is even more lucky, ne?”

  “That’s true,” I say. “I never thought about it that way.”

  “It’s lucky to meet you,” she says. She hands me my own newspaper cone filled with blooms and grasses, a shallow ceramic bowl and a pronged metal disc, and the girls make room for me in their circle. I ask if I should copy the arrangement on the floor.

  “Not copy,” Keiko says. “Inspire. Ikebana should look wild. Like nature put it there.”

  My dad would’ve liked this wild style of floral arrangement. He used to keep garbage bags and a trowel in the back of his car, and when we drove through state parks on our family road trips, if a flower or plant caught his eye, he’d leave his engine idling while he got out and uprooted it to replant in our own yard. He called this, “liberating the natives.” My job was to keep a lookout for state troopers. My mom told him that he was setting a bad example, but he said that he was like Robin Hood. And it was true. When our garden was in full bloom, he made lavish bouquets, filling jelly jars with flowers to give to the nurses at the hospital, his favorite patients, the guys who ran the coffee shop on the corner, the dry cleaner. At his memorial ser vice, people I didn’t know kept coming up to me to say how much they’d appreciated receiving his bouquets, what a special man he was, so full of life; the unspoken question lingering in the air.

  I’ve just finished placing the final stem in the metal brush when Keiko pauses in front of my desk, tilts her head to one side and says, “Ikebana is so difficult, ne?” I feel deflated, assuming I messed up somehow. I must not have cut the stems short enough. The flowers are flopping to the side, weighted by their blossoms. Still, it doesn’t loo
k so different from her arrangement and I wish I could see what I did differently, what I did wrong. “Ikebana is so difficult,” she repeats, “so I can’t believe this is your first time!” After a moment, I realize that for once I’ve done something right.

  “Kawaii,” a few girls say, but Keiko shakes her head. “It’s not cute. It’s wabi sabi.” She explains that the character for wabi means stillness or loneliness, while sabi means old or broken.

  “That doesn’t sound very pretty,” I say.

  “No,” she agrees. “It’s not pretty. It lasts.”

  When I get home, there’s a note on the refrigerator.

  M.: Joe and I went to get some sushi for dinner. C.

  It’s barely five, but the sky is almost black by the time I reach the sushi restaurant. From outside I can see Joe and Carolyn still sitting at a window booth, empty plates stacked between them. Laughing, Carolyn lifts a hand to cover her crooked front teeth. This is a new gesture, one she must have picked up from her students. Joe raises his chin as I enter the restaurant and Carolyn swivels to face me, her expression hard to read. “Sorry I’m late,” I say, as if the three of us had planned to meet here. I slide into the seat beside her. When I kiss her, she turns her face so my lips find the hollow behind her jaw. The sushi chef in the middle of the conveyor belt looks at us, his knife poised in midair. I reach for a plate of egg sushi as it passes by and trickle it with a stream of soy sauce, watching the yellow darken.

  “Sorry we finished eating,” Carolyn says.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “Do you mind hanging out for a while? I’m starving.”

  “We’ve got five minutes,” Joe says, raising his Sapporo bottle to request another.

  “You two have somewhere important to be?” I ask.

  “We’re meeting some of the lads from the power plant for a pint,” Joe says. “Caro hasn’t met many people on her own. It’s been rough on her.”

  “I know,” I say, wishing that he wouldn’t speak for her, and that she wouldn’t let him. “It’s been hard for me too.”

  “But you teach in Shika,” Carolyn says. “Everyone knows you.”

  “They know my name,” I say.

  “You should come,” she says, but she doesn’t sound like she means it.

  “I’m pretty tired,” I say. “I had a long day.” I wait for her to press, to try and coax me into joining them, but instead she asks what happened and I tell her about the karaoke club incident, how Haruki got laughed at by the boys who bullied him.

  “That the shut-in?” Joe asks, and I nod. “I remember how hard Hiro worked to get him to join his homeroom last spring. He was at that boy’s house every afternoon for a month, listening to music with him, talking to him, forcing him out of hiding.”

  “Really?” I say. “He never mentioned that.”

  “It was like a personal mission. The teachers placed bets on whether the kid would stay in school once he started coming.”

  “It’s still tenuous,” I say.

  “I reckon it doesn’t make much difference,” he says. “Waste of space, innit? The way he just sits there doing fuck all.”

  “That’s harsh,” I say, even though I’ve thought the exact same thing.

  “We’re going to be late,” Carolyn says, reaching across the table to pick up Joe’s wrist and look at his watch. “I’m sorry to leave while you’re still eating,” she says to me.

  “No problem,” I say. “Have fun.”

  She reaches for her wallet but Joe says, “Allow me,” slapping down a thousand yen bill, which comes five hundred yen short of their total.

  At first I think that someone must have broken in. The ikebana arrangement is strewn across the floor in the entryway, the leaves ripped to shreds, the flowers torn from the trampled stems. I hold my breath, listen for the sound of an intruder still lurking, but all is quiet and still. Even the refrigerator’s engine is silent, the enamel warm as I squeeze past to investigate the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and storage area. Aside from the ruined floral arrangement, nothing is out of place. The house is just as I left it an hour ago, down to the sour milk stench.

  I go upstairs with a pot of tea and turn on the kotatsu. Sliding my legs under the heated table, my feet collide with something soft and I hear what sounds like a newborn cry. “Come here, Amana,” I say, rubbing my thumb and fingers together, eager for the cat’s small warm comfort on my lap. She crawls out on unsteady legs, her face stained a dark ochre, her eyes glazed and filmy. “Kitty?” I say. “What’s wrong?” She jumps up onto the table and retches, throwing up the chewed head of a flower. When I try to pick her up she recoils, leaping onto the window ledge where she teeters for a moment, then topples out. By the time I get downstairs she is gone, which I take to be a good sign. If she can run away then she must be okay.

  Animals like to be alone when they’re sick, to lick their wounds in private.

  Carolyn comes home just before midnight, smelling like whiskey and cigarette smoke, with her eyebrow pencil and lipstick worn off. I ask if she had fun and she shrugs, says it was okay. She doesn’t offer any details. When Carolyn has a crush on someone, she stops talking about them, at least to me. She says I make it impossible for her to be honest.

  A few weeks before we left for Japan, Carolyn and I were at the Union Square Barnes & Noble reading guide books, when she put hers down and said that she might like to sleep with someone else. Not hypothetically. “We have an open relationship,” she reminded me. “So I wanted to let you know.” Carolyn always said that desire shouldn’t be pinned down; that lies ruined relationships, not infidelity, and monogamy was a heterosexist construction. So I was shocked when she told me that she wanted to sleep with a guy, a line cook at the restaurant where she worked, who gave her rides back to the dorm on his Vespa. I knew the rules. There were none. We just had to be honest. I’d agreed to these terms because I sensed that they were nonnegotiable, because I wanted to be as cool and unconventional as Carolyn, and because I hoped that I would change her mind. When I said that I had no idea she was even attracted to guys, she told me that she wanted something fun and easy for a change. “Everything is out in the open with guys,” she said. “They don’t crowd you. You can keep certain things private.” I tried to stay calm. I took a sip of my cappuccino and dabbed the foam from my lip. “Fine,” I said, “but if you do sleep with him then I won’t go to Japan with you.” If she did, she kept it hidden. She didn’t want to come here alone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  reizoku: (N.) refrigerator

  Amana never came home last night.

  All morning Carolyn has been searching for the cat, convinced that something horrible must have happened to her.

  “Don’t worry,” I say, pulling her by the hand out of the storage area, where Amana sometimes curls up in boxes to sleep. “She’ll come home again when she’s hungry.” Carolyn grabs the box of Grape-Nuts from the cupboard, buries her hand in it, and crams a handful into her mouth. I ask if I can have some and she turns her back on me, hugs the box of cereal to her chest. “Just one handful,” I coax her, sliding a palm under her arm, accidentally brushing her breast. As she raises her arm to ward me off, the box of cereal gets knocked to the floor. Grape-Nuts skitter everywhere and Carolyn drops to her knees. Within seconds she’s not just crying, she’s sobbing, like a car shifting directly from neutral to fourth gear.

  “Hey,” I say, offering her a hand up. “They’re just Grape-Nuts.”

  “That’s not the point,” she says, crying harder. “Nothing is mine here.”

  “I’ll buy you a new box,” I say. “You can write your name on it with a Sharpie.”

  She shuts herself in the bathroom and when she finally comes back out, twenty minutes later, her makeup reapplied, she’s missed the bus to Hakui.

  “I can give you a ride to school if you want,” I say.

  “It’s not like I have a choice,” she says.

  It’s a dreary morning, gray and bone-chillingly cold. When C
arolyn climbs through the passenger-side window, the peg that locks the door catches on the back pocket of her favorite pants. Ripping, the wool makes a sound like tires driving through slush. I wait for her to start crying again, but her face just turns red while her nostrils whiten and flare. It’s a scary new expression on a face I thought I knew by heart. I turn the key in the ignition, but the engine refuses to turn over. Sputtering, it seems to be laughing at us.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks. “Why won’t it start?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess the battery must be dead.” My bewilderment is an act. I know exactly what’s wrong. The needle on the gas gauge is aiming straight at empty.

  “I’ll call Joe,” she says, going back inside to change.

  Enter Joe, a knight in a miniature Toyota “YO” truck, the other letters painstakingly scratched off the fender. His acoustic guitar rides shotgun, its hourglass torso covered with a patchwork of stickers, some politically correct (Arms Are for Hugging; Recycle, The Earth’s On Loan From Our Children), some band names (The Clash, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), but mostly photo booth shots of Joe himself, a tall blond man in the center of group after group of black-haired girls, tucked around him like petals around a stamen. He jumps out of his truck, kisses both of us, and apologizes for being a bit damp, explaining that he just came from a morning shorinji kempo practice.

  “I didn’t know you did martial arts,” Carolyn says. She’s all blinky and peach now, one of the only people I know who looks better after a big cry.

  “I’ve got the darkest belt in my dojo.”

  “If you do say so yourself,” I mutter.

  “Well, pet,” he says, “since the other members of my dojo are a dozen elementary schoolgirls, the competition’s not too stiff.”

  “You do martial arts with little girls?” Carolyn asks.

  “Oh Caro, it’s fantastic. Those girls don’t understand about race or nationalism yet. It’s a shame they can’t stay that way forever.”