One Bird Read online

  How could she do that? I wonder, as I walk up to the sill and reach for the containers. She knew I was staying with the Katos until Grandmother Shimizu could come from Tokyo. Did she think I would come back to the empty house every day just to mist the plants? Did she expect Kiyoshi and me to carry the planters down the hill to his house? No. More likely, she didn’t care what happened to them.

  She had no reason to care. She must have planted the seeds only to fool me.

  I quickly unplug the heating pads and stack the containers together, crushing most of the seedlings. The containers are unwieldy and wobbly; it’s hard to hold on to them. I keep walking, sidestepping down the narrow hallway into the kitchen, then out the back door into our fenced-in yard.

  In the light spreading out from my house and our next-door neighbors’, I walk past the maples and elders to the very back of the yard where Mother had planted three Russian olives and two camellias in a row. I stop between the two camellias and put down all the containers but one. Stepping up to the taller camellia, I turn that first container upside down. Clumps of moist soil fall to the ground, making a faint sound like a sigh. I toss the container aside and pick up the next one, empty it, and then the next and the next.

  When I have emptied all of them, there is a small heap at the root of the tree. Crushed seedlings are scattered in the soil like small threads dropped on the floor of a sewing room—pulled-out stitches and discarded thrums.

  The seedlings are better off this way. I have never inherited my mother’s way with plants. Even cut flowers wilt after a day in my vase because the water I put in is always too cold or too warm. The potted plants I sometimes receive as gifts—geraniums, miniature azaleas, cyclamens—shrivel up on my desk because I water them too much or too little. Mother often took the plants I nearly killed and coaxed them back to life, giving them just the right amount of water and light, pinching back their growth to keep the leaves thick and healthy. She should have known better: Without her the seedlings would dry up and die or be drowned in water. She shouldn’t have started them in the first place.

  I kneel down and smooth out the mound of dirt, spreading it over the grass at the root of the tree. Two summers ago, we buried our canaries under the other camellia, the smaller one. The canaries died because Father had forgotten about them while Mother and I had gone to stay with Grandfather Kurihara. We came home late at night to find Father gone and the birds hunched down at the bottom of the cage. Their seed dish held nothing but cracked hulls, and the water in their water dish had dried up. The canaries would not touch the seeds or the water Mother and I offered. They sat listless, their beaks opening up now and then, straining for breath. When I got up in the morning, meaning to call a veterinarian, the canaries were already dead. Their bodies were yellow puffs that looked like dried flowers and weighed almost nothing.

  Father came home the next night and explained that he had been suddenly called away on business in the last few days. He would not apologize.

  “Small animals are very delicate,” he reasoned. “You have to accept that they die easily.”

  “But they didn’t just die,” I protested. “You killed them by forgetting about them. Their being fragile had nothing to do with that.”

  “If you cared so much about them, you should have given them to someone else to watch. I had other important things to worry about.”

  “I wanted to give them to Kiyoshi. Don’t you remember? But you told me not to bother because you meant to be home every night.”

  Father shrugged and walked out of the room. A few nights later, he came home late, as usual, while I was sleeping. I woke up and saw him standing on my chair, trying to reach the hook over my desk where the canaries used to be. It must have been one or two in the morning. Outside, everything was dark and quiet. Inside the bamboo cage Father was holding, small birds were whirling around, making beeping noises.

  “I don’t want new birds,” I said. “I want an apology.”

  Father stepped off the chair, slammed the cage down on my desk, and walked out of my room. He stomped down the stairs, out the front door. In the cage, the birds were shrieking, battering their wings against the bars. I could not see how many there were. Covering my head from their noise and the light Father had left on, I went back to sleep.

  In the morning, the birds were sitting on their perch and making their beeping noises. There were four—little white finches with black markings and pink beaks. Father wasn’t home. I got dressed and walked to the nearest pet store and put the cage on the counter.

  “These birds aren’t from our store,” the old man behind the counter said.

  “Take them anyway,” I told him. “I don’t want a refund.” I turned around and left while the man stared. All the way to the door, I could hear the finches fluttering and beeping.

  Now, kneeling in the backyard, I remember the daffodil bulbs my mother had put in that fall, over the canaries’ grave. She planted daffodils because their petals would be the same color as the birds’ feathers; she was hoping that the flowers would give me some small comfort. The daffodils survived the winter and bloomed last spring, and this year, too, some leaves are already up—curled tight, smaller than my thumb. They are delicate as bird wings and beautiful, but they do not cheer me up. Not in the least.

  I stare at the leaves and remember the last thing I said to my mother when we were alone: “You didn’t have to lie to me.” The look on her face when she heard my words was the same look she had when Father called late at night to say that he wasn’t coming home. Each time he called, she seemed stunned, in spite of the other nights when he had acted in exactly the same way. In silence, she would throw out the tea leaves that she had carefully measured into his teapot, clean the kitchen counter, and go to her room. Some nights I could hear her crying. Though she tried to stifle her sounds with her pillow, I heard the quick, sharp breaths she took between her sobs. Maybe she never got used to my father’s thoughtlessness. But my father isn’t the only thoughtless person in our family. When I had accused my mother of lying, I didn’t care if my words hurt her; I wished she would cry. I have just destroyed her seedlings—seedlings she must have started for the same reason that she planted these daffodil bulbs, to give me something beautiful. It was unfair of me to think they were just part of her lie. Whatever her faults, my mother is considerate. Even when she was upset, she would try to cheer me up. I can’t think of the last time she said an angry or unkind thing to me. Unlike my father and me, she would rather cry than make other people cry because of her.

  Looking over the pile of dirt and dead plants, I think of other ways in which I am just like my father. Neither of us can be quiet for long. Quick and jumpy, we sit impatiently drumming our fingers on the table, or rocking back and forth in our chairs. My father’s mother, Grandmother Shimizu, is always scolding me for having no poise, although she never criticizes my father. Being restless, she says, is not as serious a fault in a man as it is in a woman. But Grandmother Shimizu is a very nervous woman herself, always picking at the tablecloth with her fingers as she sits drinking tea, her thin neck held tight as a knotted cord. Maybe my father’s family has given me their meanness and restlessness. I am nothing like my mother, who is quiet and gentle, who makes plants thrive.

  “Megumi,” someone calls from behind.

  Kiyoshi comes running across the yard, still in his uniform. He doesn’t have my backpack anymore. I am not sure how long I have been gone.

  He stops a few feet away, his big shoulders moving with his breathing. I scoop up a handful of dirt. “My mother’s seedlings,” I explain. “I put them out of their misery.”

  Because the lights are behind him, I can’t see his face very well as he stands there. He is not one to talk when worried or upset. He could stand there saying nothing all night, waiting for me to go on.

  I open my hand and let the dirt drop through my fingers. Kiyoshi once told me that his earliest memory is of sitting with me in the sandbox in the church playgr
ound. We were sticking our hands into the hot sand, stirring it around, having fun, when suddenly, I grabbed a handful of sand and flung it at him. I don’t recall throwing the sand at him, but I was happy to hear him remember that. I am five weeks older than he; I was always the tougher of us two.

  But now this memory makes me sad. We have known each other all our lives, fifteen years—more if we counted the months when our mothers and their other best friend, Mrs. Uchida, were three pregnant women, sitting side by side on a big couch and knitting baby sweaters, as in the pictures all of them had in their albums. I used to imagine Kiyoshi, me, and the other boy, Takashi, teasing and challenging one another on that couch, about which one of us would be the first to make our appearance. Kiyoshi and I go back a long, long way. And still, there is nothing he can say to make me feel better. It isn’t his fault. He had nothing to do with my mother’s leaving.

  “I’m sorry I was irritated,” I offer, even though my voice still sounds begrudging. “I know you were just trying to help.”

  “It’s all right.” He kneels down next to me and hesitates, as though he were thinking about patting me on the shoulder or ruffling up my hair—which he would have done when we were younger, back in grade school. He doesn’t now. We are grownup. He leans forward a little and says, “Are you all right?”

  I nod.

  “Let’s go home,” he says. “My father’s making us spaghetti for supper. He just got back from his hospital visits.”

  “Did Pastor Kato know what was going to happen today?” I ask. “You can tell me the truth.”

  “Yes, he knew.”

  “And you?”

  He nods.

  We stand up and start walking toward the house. Halfway there, I stop, so he has to, too. “Promise me something,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell your mother I did that.” I turn around and point toward the camellia tree where I have left the dead seedlings and the empty containers.

  He narrows his eyes a little, hesitating. Even more than I, Kiyoshi is a stickler for telling the truth, the whole truth.

  “She’ll just worry about me. Or feel sorry for me.”

  “She already feels sorry for you.”

  His bluntness takes me aback, but I don’t get upset. At least he is being honest.

  “Then I don’t want her to feel sorrier.”

  “Okay,” he agrees. “I won’t say anything.”

  We go in the back door, quickly walk through the house, switching off the lights, and then leave by the front door. The key turns hard.

  Good-bye, I want to say to the house. I almost imagine its square outlines sagging. Upstairs in my room, the three windows are completely dark. I used to love my room, especially in the fall, when all the trees in the yard were yellow and red, the colors of sunset; sitting on my bed, I would pretend that I was floating in the sky, that my room was a balloon sailing through the sunset clouds. How could I have been so happy when, downstairs, my mother was waiting for my father, who never came home? How could I imagine sailing on a silly balloon while she was making up her mind to leave me forever? “If I don’t leave your father now,” she had said, “I can’t bear to live long enough to see you grow up.” She was saying that her unhappiness had almost killed her. How could I be happy in my room while she was feeling so bad? I turn away from the house, feeling cold and dizzy.

  But Kiyoshi hasn’t noticed. He is already several steps down the sidewalk, his stiff, uniformed back toward me. Long ago, we played a game of tag, in which we tried to step on each other’s shadows. The person whose shadow was stepped on had to turn around and become the chaser, trying to step on other kids’ shadows. Now there is no moon out, and the streetlamps cast only weak gray shadows. All the same, I charge after Kiyoshi and stomp on his shadow’s blurry head.

  “You’ll never catch me,” I taunt as I sprint past him. I concentrate on the sound of my shoes hitting the pavement and try to think of nothing else. In a few seconds, Kiyoshi’s footsteps come clonking down after me. Ahead, in the cold, my breath streams out white and hovers like the thought balloons in the comic books we used to read. Weaving my way through the broken shadows of trees, I chase my blank thoughts as they shoot up to the sky.

  Chapter 2

  DISTANT CRICKETS

  Downstairs, in my mother’s old room, Grandmother Shimizu is practicing her samisen. The strings make harsh pinging noises that echo up the stairwell. She is playing much louder than she did last year or the year before. Although she would never admit it, Grandmother is losing her hearing. “Don’t mumble. Speak up,” she often hisses at me through her gritted teeth.

  “Grandmother Shimizu is a good person,” my mother used to claim. “She just has a gruff manner.”

  Mother wasn’t completely wrong. Three years ago, when I came down with the flu during my visit to her house in Tokyo, Grandmother Shimizu was like a different person. Every time I woke up, she was sitting by my bed, her back bolt upright, her bony hands gripping the edge of my blanket. She looked sick herself: wisps of iron gray hair stuck out around her skinny face, and her small eyes were puffy from not having slept. Once I was better, she brought me herb tea and broth she had made from old Chinese recipes; she did not scold me if I had no appetite. “That’s all right. Go back to sleep. Don’t worry,” she had said, her voice sounding soft and kind. But as soon as I was well, she was back to her old self—criticizing me for speaking too much and too fast, for not sitting still, for almost any little thing.

  The way she scolded me was nothing compared to the way she found fault with my mother.

  “How can my son enjoy being home if you don’t keep house better than this?” she would yell if she found a single crumb on the table, a drop of water splashed on the counter and left to dry. Though Grandmother is short and frail-looking, she made my mother cower with her angry words and silent stares. Often during Grandmother’s visits, my mother had red, swollen eyes in the morning, so I knew that she had been crying in bed.

  Even then, Mother would insist, “Grandmother Shimizu is strict because she loves us. She is from a different time. Correcting us is her old-fashioned way of showing love.”

  After having that flu at her house, I could see some truth in what Mother said. Maybe Grandmother loves me but can only show it by being gruff and critical. But that’s only true about her and me. Grandmother never loved my mother; anyone could see that from the look in Grandmother’s small beady eyes—a cold, dead-fish look. I wish my mother had not tried to make our family sound happier than we really were. The way she talked all winter about visiting Grandfather Kurihara, it was almost as if she had believed the lie herself, even while packing all of her possessions.

  Grandmother continues to practice her samisen. It’s only eight-thirty on Saturday morning, too early to be playing any kind of music. I have been up since six o’clock trying to work on my essay for school. I crumple another piece of paper and toss it into the wastebasket. How can I concentrate with Grandmother making so much noise downstairs, her fingers twanging and buzzing the angry strings? Besides, the topic is silly and far too broad: What is it like to be a high school student in 1975?

  The essay is for the time capsule project sponsored by Sumitomo Bank. In the vault of the bank’s Osaka office they are keeping a locked trunk, to be opened in the year 2000. It will contain newspapers, magazines, books, movie posters, photographs, and one essay chosen to represent each of the area schools. At our school everyone who is starting tenth grade or higher in April is supposed to submit an essay. The deadline is the end of this school year, the second Friday of March. That is only a week away.

  In the year 2000, I will be forty; my mother, seventy. I cannot imagine what we will be like then. Will we visit and write to each other, exchange flower bulbs and knit each other sweaters, just as my mother and Grandmother Kurihara used to? Or will I be like my father, who spent little time at home even during Grandmother Shimizu’s visits—going on business trips and leaving
Mother and me to entertain her? Will my mother and I ever get over our years of separation? When I am forty years old, will I still be angry at her for leaving me?

  Mother has been gone for only a month and two weeks, but it seems like a long time. As soon as Grandmother Shimizu arrived and I came back from the Katos’ house, Father and Grandmother sat me down in the kitchen and told me: Just as I expected, I am not to see my mother as long as I live in my father’s house. That means at least until I am done with college, seven years from now. Seven years is almost half of my life so far. My mother has left me, knowing that we will not see each other again till I am twenty-two.

  I stare at the blank paper on my desk. What can I possibly say about myself or about high school to people in the future? Who am I to speak for my entire high school, anyway? I am one of the four girls at Christian Girls’ Academy—nine hundred girls, from seventh to twelfth grades—who does not live with both her parents. Everyone knows who we are. The other three girls have one parent each because either their mother or father passed away a long time ago. I am the only girl in my school whose parents are alive but not together. How can I write an essay to represent our school, to tell people in the future what it was like to be a high school student in 1975?

  I pick up my pen and then put it down. In the past I had always been good at writing; every time there was a contest, I could count on getting an honorable mention at least, and often better. But this time is different. I have nothing to say.

  I look out the window, trying to think. But soon I am not really thinking of the essay, or anything in particular. Beyond the white wire fence that separates our two yards, my neighbor Keiko Yamasaki is sitting on her patio. Dressed in her fluffy white angora sweater and a gray wool skirt, she is sipping coffee from a large black cup. Nowadays, even when she is alone, Keiko behaves as though she were being admired or photographed. If I had binoculars, I could see her perfectly painted face—blue eye shadow, dark mascara, rouge, cherry red lipstick outlining her mouth in the shape of tiny angel wings.