Stone Field, True Arrow: A Novel Read online

  “Excuse me,” Maya says to Jim Paine, who is still leaning toward her, expecting further explanations. “I’m glad you came to the show. Thank you.”

  Several people stop her to chat. When she catches up to Kay and Nate, they are standing by the drink table with plastic cups of mineral water. Kay looks away pointedly, but Nate shakes his finger at her.

  “You were rude, Maya. Your mother was trying to defend you from that dumb guy and you just went on talking to him like she wasn’t even there.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry.” Mentioning her father is the same thing as ignoring her mother. Her parents might as well be the sun and the moon; only one of them is supposed to be visible, but most of her life has been like the sunny days when a three-quarters moon appears in the low sky, pale and lopsided as a lemon slice cut too thin. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Maya mumbles.

  Kay holds her drink to her lips and takes a sip, peering at Maya from behind her bifocals. Her eyes, unlike Maya’s, are narrow and slanted. Her nose is thin and delicate, her mouth tiny and button-shaped; as a young woman, she resembled the beauties in the ukiyo-e. When Maya left Minneapolis to go to college in Milwaukee with Yuko, Kay was an inch taller than her daughter. Now they stand eye to eye.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me and stick around for a while,” she says, to both Kay and Nate.

  Before they can answer, Yuko is at their side. “Hi, Mrs. Mueller.” She sticks her hand out for a handshake. “It’s nice to see you. How’ve you been?” Sometime in the last ten years, Maya started calling Yuko’s parents by their first names, but Yuko doesn’t see Kay often enough to be so informal with her. When Kay got married the third time, Yuko practiced saying “Mrs. Mueller” so she wouldn’t call her Mrs. Anderson by mistake. “You look really well,” Yuko says, still offering her hand. “Are you enjoying the show?”

  “Hello, Yuko,” Kay finally responds, taking Yuko’s hand and shaking it.

  “Lillian wants to talk to you,” Yuko says to Maya, as she lets go of Kay’s hand. “You should go see her. That’ll give me a chance to visit with your mom.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right back,” Maya says. Yuko turns away from Kay a moment to wink at Maya, letting her know she is making this up to bail her out.

  As Maya turns to go, she hears Yuko say to Kay, “My parents will be happy that I saw you. My father misses working with you.” Maya can’t help smiling. For someone who’s usually so honest, Yuko can tell the glibbest lies with the straightest face. “It’s the way I was raised,” she always says. “Thou shalt be nice was the first commandment in our family. Even though we went to a Congregational church, our real religion was the Dogma of Politeness.”

  * * *

  At ten, people are beginning to leave. Kay and Nate are talking to a woman Nate knows from work.

  “I just know what my mother’s going to say about the show,” Maya whispers to Yuko. “She won’t talk about my work at all. Instead, she’ll complain that I spent the whole evening avoiding her. I should ask her and Nate to go out for a drink with us. She’ll still complain then, but maybe not as much.”

  “That sounds like a good idea, but I’d better grab a ride with Peg and Larry.”

  “I don’t have to go with them if you can’t.”

  “No, you should go ahead. You don’t want to hear your mother complaining for months. But I have to go home. Dan and I,” she blurts out, “we had a big fight. We have some things we need to straighten out.”

  Although they are surrounded by the bustle of people getting ready to leave, Maya feels the background noise recede. “What’s wrong?”

  Yuko turns down the corners of her mouth. “I’ll tell you another time. Listen, I’m so proud of you. I don’t want to spoil the evening by going on about myself. I’ll tell you next week on the way to Minneapolis.”

  “If you want to talk before that, you know where I am.”

  “Yeah, I’ll come pound on your door if I have to.”

  When they hug, Maya’s long hair swings forward and touches Yuko’s. The strands are almost the same color and texture. If they were woven together, no one would be able to tell the difference.

  * * *

  After Nate drives home alone, Kay suggests a restaurant halfway between Evanston and Park Ridge. “You won’t have to drive too far out of your way to drop me off later,” she explains. In the car, she sits with her right shoulder pressed against the passenger window, her neck held straight and stiff-looking. She doesn’t talk except to give directions. When Maya was studying photography, she could never get the right focal distance for objects in landscape—trees, rocks, ruined houses. If she stood too far, they receded into the background; if she was too close, they loomed too large and turned into shapes that made no sense. With her mother, too, there is no good place to stand.

  There is a thin covering of snow on the lawns in residential areas. The sickle moon has disappeared. “I’m glad I did that show,” Maya says, to break the silence. “The opening was nice. Lillian put a lot of work into it.”

  “Maya,” Kay says with a sigh, “you can do so much better than this.”

  “What do you mean?” Maya asks, even though she knows exactly what her mother’s answer will be.

  “You’re making artsy clothing for idle suburban women. Even with your art degree, you could have done better. It still isn’t too late to go into graphic design or museum work. You can do something more professional.”

  “But I don’t want to do those things.” On the cabbage her father cut open, the green lines circled toward the center like a road map. If he had answered her letters, she might have followed that map back to her childhood. She could have become a painter like him. “I’m happy doing what I do,” she insists. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about it anymore.”

  They pull into the parking lot of an Italian restaurant. In silence, they walk through the heavy oak doors. The hostess seats them right away and hands them menus, but no one comes to take their order.

  “I just want a glass of wine,” Kay says loudly. “I don’t know why the service is so bad everywhere I go.”

  “They’ll come and wait on us soon enough, I’m sure,” Maya whispers. “We should be patient.”

  Kay gets up from the table and goes to the hostess stand to complain. In a few minutes, when a young girl comes to the table, Kay orders a glass of Merlot; Maya asks for the same. The waitress shrugs and raises one eyebrow. “I waited on this bossy woman who was in a big hurry and all she wanted was a glass of wine,” Maya imagines her telling her friends later. “She was with this other woman who was really mousy. Maybe it was her daughter. She looked like she wanted to disappear into a hole in the ground.”

  The waitress returns right away. The wine trembles inside the glass when she sets it down. The wine-dark sea, Maya’s father used to say when he told her about Odysseus’ adventures. The miniature red horizon inside her glass is almost still now. “I wanted to ask about that envelope you forwarded to me,” Maya says to her mother.

  “What about it?” Kay says, taking a sip of her wine.

  “I didn’t realize you’d been in touch with my father all these years.”

  Kay tilts her head to the side and squints. “I wasn’t, really.”

  “How can you say that? He knew that you lived here, not in Minnesota. His assistant had your address.”

  “It depends on what you mean by being in touch.” She sets her glass down.

  “That’s nonsense.” Maya tries to keep her voice down. “Either you were in touch or you weren’t.”

  “I wrote him just once. I sent him my new address when I moved, so when he died someone would notify me. That’s all.” Deliberately, Kay picks up her glass and takes another sip. “Now I can forget about him. I suggest you do the same.”

  Maya glances away from her mother’s glass to her own. The candle on the table is reflected in a convex shape. If she stared long enough, she might be able to find her own reflection there, distorted and shrunk. Her m
other is smiling and nodding a little.

  “You can’t dwell on the past, Maya,” Kay says. “You should just let it go.” As Kay lifts the glass to her lips, Maya feels as though her mother were toasting her father’s death. If she picked up her own glass and drank from it, she would be joining that toast.

  “Excuse me.” She pushes her chair back and stands up. “My head is killing me.” As soon as she says it, she knows it’s true. She’s getting a migraine. Her medicine is in the glove compartment of her car. Walking across the restaurant toward the oak door and then pushing it open, she is not sure what explanation she has given her mother. She might have said, “I’d better go get my medicine,” or she might only have thought it. Though the light in the parking lot comes from white fluorescent lamps overhead, her vision turns into a narrow tunnel with yellow flames burning on its edge. In the halo of her migraine, she struggles to find her car.

  * * *

  Maya closes the car door, takes the medicine out, and swallows the bitter pill. Slumped over the steering wheel, the way Bill was the afternoon Kay broadcast her unhappiness on the radio, Maya sees yellow and purple disks colliding like angry coins. She thinks of Kay lifting her glass and drinking wine, waiting for her to join, her lips stained red. When Hades, king of the underworld, offered the pomegranate to Persephone, he might have looked like that. Persephone held the cracked fruit in her palm, picked three seeds, and ate them. Each seed meant a month in hell.

  Opening her eyes and leaning back in the driver’s seat, Maya feels the yellow and purple flickers receding. She turns the car key in the ignition and backs out of the parking space. As she rounds the corner of her row, the other parked cars look like shipwrecks preserved underwater. She keeps going past the next row, then the next, until she is at the exit. It’s late at night; there is no parking charge. The orange arm goes up, allowing her out on the street.

  In ten minutes, she is driving up the ramp onto the freeway, her car pointed north toward Wisconsin. Soon Kay will realize that her daughter is not coming back to the table. She will have to decide whether to get up and look for her or to go on as though nothing were amiss, pay the bill, and call Nate. Maya has no idea which her mother will choose. She has never walked out on her before. In Minneapolis, Kay screamed at her, shook her by the shoulders, dragged her down the stairs, and locked her up in a storage room in the basement, only to let her out in tears to deliver a long lecture. Maya watched her mother’s mouth open and close, open and close, the words darkening the air between them as though they were the black locusts in her father’s stories about famine. If she concentrated, she could make those words go silent. She put up with the scoldings for eight years until she was able to move away; she has kept at least a layer of civility between them on their short visits since.

  Now she keeps driving past one exit after another, thinking she should get off the freeway and turn around; at the very least she should find a gas station and call Nate so he can meet Kay at the restaurant. But it’s as though the car were driving her. She can’t even slow down.

  4

  The storm that was predicted for two days has finally arrived. Carried by the wind, snow slants over the freeway in white shafts of light. Jeff stares straight ahead as he drives past trucks that look like ice floes.

  “I know your mother means well, but I wish she’d leave me alone about being a vegetarian,” Maya says, when they are halfway home.

  Jeff sighs and does not reply.

  “If I had lunch with someone who was allergic to wheat,” Maya continues, “and if we had soup, I would never say, ‘Some crackers would be so nice with this soup. I always have crackers with my soup.’ I wouldn’t go on about all the wonderful bread I could get at the neighborhood bakery and then mutter, ‘Oh, but of course, you don’t care about that. I’m sorry I mentioned it.’”

  “My mother is seventy-five. She’s spent her whole life on the south side. You’re the only vegetarian she’s ever met.”

  “That’s no excuse for treating me like a freak.” A couple of years ago, her comment about the crackers might have made him laugh. “Your mother’s the only person I know who has macramé owls on her living room wall, but I don’t comment on them. I never say, ‘Macramé, how interesting. When did you learn to tie knots?’”

  “You don’t have to make fun of my mother,” Jeff hisses.

  Maya doesn’t know anyone who doesn’t say occasional mean things about their in-laws. She left her own mother stranded at a restaurant the week before Christmas and didn’t call to apologize for ten days, but she never told Jeff. For the rest of the ride home, she watches the snow fall.

  After the station wagon pulls into the driveway, Maya moves her car off the street. Jeff waits for her—his right hand holding the front door open, his left arm loaded with the Christmas presents his parents gave her. She can smell the raspberry-scented soaps and peach-scented candles his mother had put inside gold and silver boxes, wrapped in glossy red paper, and tied with green ribbons curled with scissors. The gifts under the tree—all Maya’s because the family had exchanged theirs a month ago—looked like a flower arrangement. Maya has always spent Christmas and Thanksgiving with Yuko’s family instead of Jeff’s, but he has never complained. Standing in the doorway, she leans up and kisses his cheek.

  “I’m sorry. Your mother doesn’t treat me like a freak. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  As they step into the foyer, he puts his arm around her shoulder. “It’s all right. My mother is weird about the food. I know it bothers you.” He lets go and closes the door behind them.

  * * *

  The phone rings while they are watching a movie. It’s ten o’clock. Jeff puts the movie on pause while Maya goes to the kitchen to answer the phone.

  “Maya, can you come over?” Yuko asks. “Dan split. We’re finished.”

  Maya is standing next to the cabinets Dan built for Jeff. They have handles carved from dark walnut, solid doors made of cherry.

  “When I got home from work this afternoon, he was waiting for me. His stuff was all in boxes and moved to the basement. He had a couple of backpacks he was going to take with him. They were in the foyer, in plain view, just in case I might not get the point.” Yuko sniffles. “He said leaving me was the only honest thing he could do. He couldn’t be with me when he was so completely in love with someone else. I was forcing him to lead a double life.”

  “He said that?”

  “He went on and on about how much he loves this other woman and can’t stay away from her.”

  “I’ll be over in ten minutes,” Maya says. “You just hang in there.”

  “I’ll try.”

  * * *

  In the living room, Jeff has fallen asleep on the couch. The movie has restarted without him. Maya pushes the PAUSE button on the VCR again before shaking him. He sits up and puts his arms around her. “Maybe we should forget the movie and go to bed,” he says, his hand caressing her back. His fingers cupped behind her neck, he pulls her closer and presses his lips against hers.

  Maya pulls back. “I need to be with Yuko. I’ll probably stay over.” She edges farther away. “Dan just moved out. She didn’t say where he went, but I assume he went to his girlfriend’s.”

  Jeff drops his arms. “He must have.”

  When Maya returned from Minneapolis a week after New Year’s, she and Jeff agreed not to discuss the trouble between Yuko and Dan. Jeff had talked to Dan and heard his side of the story. “We should let them be,” he said. “I’m sure they don’t want us, or anyone, talking about them and taking sides.”

  “Did Dan tell you what he was going to do?” Maya asks him. “He promised Yuko he’d stop seeing the other woman while he and Yuko got some counseling. He lied. He must have been in touch with her all along. Did you know that?”

  “It’s not fair to ask me. You and I agreed not to talk about this.”

  “That’s a yes, I think.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You didn
’t want to talk because you were keeping a secret for Dan.”

  “What if I was? If he confided in me, that’s none of your business.”

  There’s a click from the VCR, and the movie restarts. Maya gets up from the couch. “I’d better go. I’ll see you tomorrow after work.” She walks to the foyer without looking back, puts on her coat and boots, and steps outside. There’s already a layer of snow on her windshield. Sweeping the car with her brush, she watches the flakes swirl up into the air and mingle with the snow coming down.

  * * *

  Yuko has left the door ajar, so Maya goes in without knocking.

  “I’m in here,” Yuko calls from the kitchen.

  She is sitting at the table Dan built the year they were married. There’s a bottle of wine on the table and two empty glasses. Yuko is wearing a sweatshirt and blue jeans, and her hair makes a blunt, slightly crooked line across her nape. She doesn’t get up from the chair. Maya kneels down on the floor and takes her hand.

  “I cut my hair,” Yuko says, pressing her other hand into her eyes. “I braided it, chopped it off, and stuck it inside a big envelope addressed to Dan at his girlfriend’s house. I walked through the snow to drop it off in the mailbox.”

  Maya puts her arms around her friend and hugs her for a long time. Then she walks around the table and sits down.

  “Standing by the mailbox, I thought, Maybe this isn’t so bad,” Yuko says. “I heard the envelope hit the bottom of the box. Then I slammed the lid shut. I listened to my boots crunching the snow. Everything made a nice clean sound. But by the time I got home, I felt stupid. What was I thinking? I cut my hair and made myself look ugly because Dan hurt me. That’s sick.”