The Dream of Water Read online

  “Nobody asked your opinion.” Hiroshi frowned. “You should leave important decisions to adults. It’s none of your business. Your uncle Kenichi and I aren’t related. He’s not going to live in my house.”

  “Will Jumpei and I ever come back to live here?”

  Hiroshi shrugged. “I don’t know. You are not old enough to keep house for me. You and your brother can’t live here until you are old enough or I can get married again. You can’t stay here without someone taking care of you.”

  The next morning, after Hiroshi had gone to work, Akiko and Kazumi came to help us move. They packed my brother’s clothes and books while I told the movers what to load onto the truck and what to leave behind. We were ready in a couple of hours. I went to get my dog, Riki, from his kennel outside, but he growled at the movers and would not get into the cab my aunt had called. While we were standing around trying to coax him, my brother started crying. “Shut up. Don’t be such a crybaby,” I scolded Jumpei. The dog began to whimper. I yanked at the leash, trying to drag him toward the cab, but Riki wouldn’t move. My brother was crying harder now. I almost felt like crying, too, but I just kept pulling at the leash.

  Ken Nichan put his hand on my back and suggested, “Maybe you and I can walk to their house and bring the dog that way. It’ll be a good walk.”

  I hesitated.

  “Come on. You like taking walks.” Ken Nichan reached out for the leash. Everyone else got into the cab.

  “You did a very good job with the movers,” Kenichi said to me while we were walking.

  “I shouldn’t have told Jumpei to shut up,” I said. “I only made him cry harder.”

  Kenichi just shrugged. That reminded me of my mother—how she never used to criticize me if I admitted that I had done something wrong.

  Later that night, when my grandfather came home from the paint company he owned and managed, he scolded Akiko in front of my brother and me for having allowed me to bring the dog.

  “You know I don’t like animals,” he muttered in a low, angry voice. “All they do is dirty up my patio and make noise to keep me awake.”

  “But I couldn’t leave the dog,” I said. “Father wouldn’t have taken care of him.”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Tatsuo snapped at me and then turned back to Akiko. “You should have taken the animal to the pound.”

  “Try to be a little more tolerant,” Akiko replied. “Your grandchildren just lost their mother. How could you expect them to give up their dog at a time like this?”

  Tatsuo got up and walked into his room without a word.

  * * *

  Kenichi stayed on at our house for two more weeks, until the first forty-nine days after my mother’s death had passed. During that period, her soul was supposed to be traveling to Buddhist heaven. The white smoke of the incense, going straight up, was said to point the way and guide the soul’s journey, so Kenichi wanted to make sure someone would be at our house to tend to the altar and burn incense.

  Even after he went back to another part of Kobe, where he lived with his sister, Keiko, and her family, Kenichi visited us almost every day after school. He had always been good friends with my aunt Akiko. Now he sat talking with her in the afternoon and then stayed for supper. I had started my first year at Kobe Jogakuin, a private girls’ school that had junior and senior high schools and a four-year college on a big campus up on a hill. Because we took the same commuter train line to our schools, Kenichi and I usually waited for each other at the station and walked back to the house together. It was as though he had continued to live with us after all.

  Hiroshi visited us for a few hours every other Sunday. Almost all of his visits ended with him yelling at me and hitting me. “Don’t look at me with that impertinent face,” he would say as his hand flew toward my cheek. It didn’t matter whether I was frowning, smiling, or trying to keep my face absolutely blank. My face was always an impertinent face. If we disagreed about something and I explained my view, he got angry at my talking back. If I said nothing, he got just as angry because, then, I was being sullen and stubborn. After a while, I expected him to hit me regardless of what I did or didn’t do. Nothing made any difference. The only important thing was to keep absolutely still while he hit me so that he would not miss and get angrier.

  I had heard somewhere that in bad traffic accidents, people who were asleep in the backseat were the least likely to suffer severe injury. They didn’t have time to panic, tense up, and do the wrong thing in trying to avoid being hurt. Hiroshi’s rage seemed as inevitable as a head-on accident. Often, I tried to picture myself sleeping in the backseat just as he was getting ready to hit me. As he lifted his hand, I would imagine the car swerving on a wet road. Then I would think of myself slumped against the seat, breathing deeply and easily with my eyes closed.

  Hiroshi relented only once, when I made fun of the sideburns he was growing. They had reached halfway down his cheeks in the two weeks I hadn’t seen him.

  “You’re too old to try and look like a movie star,” I taunted. “You look like a thug.”

  He was standing by the window next to Akiko’s sewing machine. He stuck his hand into her sewing box, pulled out a pair of scissors, and turned to me. I flinched, stepping back toward the door, and then stopped. But he brought the scissors up to his face and snipped off both sideburns without looking, tossed the hair into the wastebasket, and jammed the scissors back into the box. He had no hair left above his ears. His skin was the color of clay.

  “Is this what you want?” he yelled.

  “No,” I said. “You cut them too short.”

  He shook his head and walked out of the room. He was the only person I knew who could look stern and ridiculous at the same time.

  During my mother’s life, my father had spent little time at home. On the rare occasions when I saw him, he was either eating, or watching television, or sleeping. We scarcely talked to each other. Though I didn’t like him, I wasn’t afraid of him. It was different with my brother, who had spent every Sunday with Hiroshi the previous year at junior league rugby practices. My brother hated rugby. He cried on Saturday evenings just thinking about how rough the practice was going to be the next day. Even so, he never told Hiroshi that he wanted to quit. He was able to stop toward the end of December only because Hiroshi became too busy with his own rugby league. I now understood why Jumpei had been so afraid of him. Everyone avoided Hiroshi.

  Kazumi took my dog to the park on those Sundays and didn’t come home until Hiroshi was long gone and I was sitting alone in the room we shared. I could hear her tying the dog to the chain outside, coming in the house, and washing her hands. After that, she came upstairs and turned on the light because, by then, it was dusk. She always brought me a piece of cake or an apple, which I would eat in silence. She never asked me how the visit went. Instead, she just sat there with a worried look on her face, watching me eat; then she would ask me, “Do you want anything else?” or “Do you want to watch television?” “No, nothing else,” I would reply, or, “Okay. Let’s go watch television.” I smiled, to let her know that I was all right, no matter what had happened. Kazumi didn’t force me to say more. She nodded and smiled back or patted my shoulder in silence.

  My mother used to praise Kazumi for her kindness. “Kazumi is a very considerate person,” she had said. She was right. On the day I moved in, Kazumi slid her clothes to the right half of the closet to make room for mine. When both of our jewelry boxes didn’t fit on top of the bureau, she emptied all her bangle bracelets and beaded necklaces into my box and put hers away. I wondered how things might have been if our situations had been reversed, if she had come to my house to share my mother and my room. I didn’t think I could have been as kind and understanding toward her as she was to me.

  * * *

  One Sunday in early May, Hiroshi canceled his biweekly visit to referee a rugby game. On the telephone, he told me to meet him the next afternoon at his house. “Come by yourself right after school,”
he ordered. “Don’t be late.”

  But I was late. I missed two trains because they looked too crowded and I was afraid to get on. When I arrived at the house, Hiroshi was sitting in the kitchen with his jacket on. The ashtray on the table was full of squashed stubs.

  “Keep your coat on,” he said. “We’ll talk on the way. It’s late.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I’m walking you back to Ashiya. There’s no time for anything else.”

  Outside, it was getting dark. We walked down the hill without talking, Hiroshi a few steps ahead of me. I had a hard time keeping up because I was carrying my schoolbooks and gym shoes.

  At the bottom of the hill, as we turned east toward Ashiya, he said, “You and Jumpei can come home next week. Someone’s coming to take care of you.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, thinking of my aunt Keiko and some of my mother’s friends. I didn’t see how any of them could come and live with us since they had their own children.

  “Things would have been different if you had been older or if your mother had trained you better to do housework,” he replied. “But you have school and friends. I can’t ask you to stay home to do housework and take care of Jumpei.” He stopped to light a cigarette. The white smoke came out of his mouth and gradually disappeared ahead of him. “I know there are girls your age who can keep house and take their mothers’ places, so maybe you are old enough to do it. But your mother didn’t teach you much in that way. She only encouraged you to study and play the piano and do artwork. Besides, I don’t want you to make a big sacrifice. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  He kept on walking ahead of me so I couldn’t see his face. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying. His voice went forward while I walked behind. My science book kept slipping out of my arms.

  “The woman who’s coming is a very good housekeeper,” he added. “I’ll bring her to meet you and Jumpei before you move back to the house. You’ll like her. She’s very tall and stylish.”

  I straightened out the books so I could hold on to them better. “I don’t understand,” I said. “You said I should stay with Aunt Akiko till I was old enough, unless you could get married again. Are you saying that you’ll get married again?”

  “Not until next April,” he said. “You know we have to observe the one-year mourning period for your mother. We can’t have a wedding ceremony before that’s over with.”

  “But you are going to marry this woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’ll live with us even before that.”

  “She’s coming the day after tomorrow.”

  We walked on. It was getting dark fast. Soon the streetlamps would be lit. I didn’t know what to say. My gym shoes, tied together at the laces, kept bobbing sideways.

  Finally, I asked him, “Do you love her, or are you going to marry her because you need a housekeeper?”

  He stopped and turned around. I held my breath and stood still as his head whirled around toward me. The street was deserted. But he didn’t hit me. He just said, “You must never ask adults about love. You know nothing about it. It’s none of your business.”

  He didn’t speak again all the way to my grandfather’s house. I didn’t want to ask him anything more. I was sure he was going to marry this woman because neither he nor I could manage the house and take care of Jumpei. He must have lied to her and said he loved her. Nobody would marry him just to take care of my brother and me. I tried to picture the woman. Even though he had described her as tall and stylish, I could only imagine a short and fat woman in a plain brown shirt and dark pants, a white apron over them. Perhaps we would call her Obasan, which was what we called the live-in maid our grandfather Tatsuo had hired one year when our aunt Akiko was sick. I don’t want to live with a strange woman. I want to stay with Aunt Akiko, I wanted to say, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. What I wanted made no difference to him. The way he had talked, he had made me feel as though the whole thing was my fault for not being old enough.

  At the door of my grandfather’s house, Hiroshi turned and headed back to the train station. He was returning to the office to do the work he couldn’t finish because he’d had to wait for me. I went alone into the kitchen, where Jumpei was crying. I knew that Aunt Akiko had told him the news. Kenichi had been sitting in the corner, helping Kazumi with something she was writing or drawing. He came over and took my hand. “Are you all right?” he asked me. I nodded quickly, swallowing down the hot lump that kept pressing against the back of my throat, but I couldn’t say anything.

  * * *

  Jumpei and I moved back to our father’s house on Friday the following week. We got there at dusk and found the woman alone, making supper in her bright green shirt and brown pants. Our father was going to work late, she said. We had only met her twice before, but we were supposed to call her Okasan, “Mother.” I had told my father that I would prefer to call her Michiko Obasan, “Aunt Michiko.” Hiroshi grabbed me by the arm and shook me. “Call her Okasan,” he said. “Understand?” I nodded, thinking that at least in my mind, I would think of her as Michiko Obasan. My brother and I had called our mother Mama, anyway, so we were not going to have to address this woman in exactly the same way. Still, no one talked much during supper, and we avoided addressing her in any form. The chicken dish she served was brown with a thick sauce. The spices burned my tongue.

  After dinner, Michiko took a bath and put on a sheer white nightgown that had pink ribbons at the neck. While Jumpei was taking his bath, she laid out a crimson futon in Hiroshi’s room. I had never seen such a large futon. It covered most of the floor in the small room. The overstuffed quilted cover rippled like rough water. She put out her clothing for the next day—a white blouse, a mustard yellow skirt, balled-up brown hose, pink underwear folded up small as a handkerchief. She laid out each item separately, side by side. From the kitchen, where I was watching, they looked like small puddles, or stepping stones leading up to the crimson pond, which might, after all, be an island. The whole thing reminded me of those maps on which I could not tell what part was the sea and what part was the land.

  I took my turn at the bath. When I came out, Michiko was showing Jumpei the beauty lotion she used to get rid of dead skin so she would have nothing but smooth new skin. She squirted a small amount on her palm and rubbed it into her left elbow. Her skin came off in minuscule wormy shapes like pencil marks erased from paper. Jumpei and I took off our robes, sat on bath towels, and proceeded to rub the dead skin off our elbows and knees. When that was done, we tried the small joints of our fingers, the flat bones behind our ears, the disconnected vees at our throats. I hadn’t known there was so much dead skin everywhere. It took hours to get rid of it.

  Against the wall, there was a new, shiny brown dresser with many small drawers. From one drawer, Michiko pulled out a pink gown that looked like the white one she was wearing.

  “Here, you can have this one.” She handed it to me.

  “Thank you. It’s very pretty.” I slipped it over my head, trying to be polite. The material reminded me of balloons blown up too thin. My mother and I never wore anything but cotton, linen, or wool.

  Back in my old room, I laid out my futon and turned off the light. I couldn’t sleep. I lay with my face pressed tight against the pillow so I wouldn’t have to see the things hung up on the wall: my mother’s portrait over the black altar; by the window, a framed sampler of oyster shells and pearls she and I had bought in a seaside village the previous summer. There we had stood in the drizzle to watch a diver in a white robe plunge from a small boat into the sea. I had been afraid that the robe would get tangled around the diver’s legs the way my nightgown did at night and cause her to drown. Later that year, while my mother wept at night in her unhappiness, I imagined seawater flowing out of the frame into the darkness of the room. Now, sleeping in the same room, I was plunging endlessly into her tears. I was that diver with the long robe tangled around my feet. I sat up to keep from drowni
ng. Getting out of bed, I closed all the curtains as tightly as possible so no light from the street shone on the portrait or the oysters; then I took my cardigan sweater from the suitcase and threw it over the altar so I would not see its black surface. But when I lay back down, I still could not sleep.

  Before long the front door rattled. My father was home. I waited a little and then got up. I should be sure to greet him, I thought, since this was my first night back in his house. Right before I left her house, my aunt Akiko had taken me aside and said, “You must try very hard to show respect to your father and your new mother. You are the older of the two. Your mother would want you to set a good example for your brother.” After she had said this, my aunt looked pale, her lips drawn tight as if she were going to cry; she had told me to do something she wished I didn’t have to do, but all the same, I had to do it.

  Downstairs, my father and Michiko were sitting in the small room with the door half-open. I was surprised to see him already in his pajamas. I stood in the doorway for a while not knowing what to say. I thought he would be changing and sleeping in my brother’s room from now on.

  Hiroshi and Michiko looked back at me. They were sitting on her futon and drinking from a glass they passed back and forth. I had never seen two adults drink from the same glass; only mothers did that with very small children. Maybe he’s wearing his pajamas, I thought all the same, because it’s hot.

  “Why are you wearing that?” Hiroshi demanded, pointing in my general direction.

  I looked at my gown and realized how ugly it was with that sticky candy pink.

  “It’s hers,” I pointed at Michiko. “She gave it to me to wear.”

  Michiko said nothing to verify that. Hiroshi, too, remained silent. She passed him the glass they were sharing, and he took a sip.

  “Jumpei’s already sleeping,” I said. “Sometimes he cries if you wake him up in the middle of the night. You can sleep in my room tonight if you want to. I don’t grind my teeth anymore.”

  “Go back upstairs,” my father ordered me. “Don’t bother about other people’s business. Don’t come down here again.”