Individual Medley

◆

Whenever I had to shut my eyes and swallow the carsickness along the winding rural roads, or accidentally banged my head against the greasy windows of the school bus, I reminded myself that even then, it was better than the minivan. The minivan didn’t have working AC, and my mother braked aggressively, but it was its loud bumper stickers: PROUD TO BE CATHOLIC, Keep Christ in Christmas, My Child is an Honor Roll Student at St. Agatha Elementary and JESUS, I Trust in YOU! that I was ashamed of. My mother had shacked up with religion after my father died and anyone who peeled their legs from the minivan’s pleather beige seats paid a fee, to school it was a whole rosary and to closer places, the shorter Chaplet of the Divine Mercy.

In prayerful increments, I learned to measure distance.

◆

Almost twenty years later, I continue to keep Sundays sacred. I am a good wife and take most items off the conveyor belt of life as they come. Ever the model parishioner, Tarō attends an early service for the both of us. I spend the morning sifting flour, stretching dough and cutting the noodles necessary for lunch while Tarō, crossed ankles sinking a hassock, watches the news and the baby. A news anchor bleats at us pleasantly that there may be danger, another agrees and a third suggests the scenario unlikely. Our cellphones blip in unison with a second tsunami warning. I study the wording in the message, its thin level of urgency remains unchanged.

The windows ajar make the thick drapes pant. For a moment, I catch the scent of scilla from the over-the-sill garden my grandfather kept during childhood, until Tarō uncertain, clumsy with gestures, rushes to secure the drapes only for them to flap open again. With the baby we named Miki, after his mother, it’s impossible to leave the area. Yet, if I could manage to partition the sad, wet weather as easily as I cut the slimy rot from a bunch of cilantro, I wasn’t sure that I would. For once, it seemed to be on my side.

The baby who is not a baby anymore has my sense of balance and stumbles from one padded corner of the playpen to the other. She should be talking by now but is making us wait. We live on the sixth floor and Miki is getting heavier.

“Get that out of your mouth!” Tarō grasps the baby’s jaw between his thumb and index finger. He looks at me to see if I’m watching and plucks out a hairball from the baby’s mouth. Tarō and I make the sound of displeasure nearly at the same time.

In the distance, birds claw through sky.

It was during the third grade that I met in the cracked asphalt parking lot of the church that doubled as the elementary and middle schoolyard, an older boy, Pear-face, I called him in my head, his lips were always wet, glossy as if with butter. During recess, I shuffled around the periphery or found a stoop to read. He broke from his group of friends to say he’d been dared to kiss me. I could not stop staring at Francis’ approaching mouth. His doughy mouth smashed into mine.

Days later, while lining up for the bus, the same Francis from sixth grade stuck out a scuffed sneaker and tripped me. I clenched my jaw, tightened my abdomen and held my breath for the few seconds I thought I would be able to regain my footing. I barely braced myself as my knee made contact with a compact block of dirty snow. I tugged at my knee sock dampening with blood, saw the pale-yellow bone peeking under a thick slab of skin and covered it again.

I got back in line to wait for the bus, chose a seat on top of a wheel to keep my knee elevated. I’d always had a clinical fascination with pain. Unsupervised, I experimented with pressure and material to find the sweet spot between a welt and a bruise, but I knew this would leave a mark.

The air was so cold it smelled like barbeque. I continued home, pale and shivering to ask my grandfather who had seen his share of death, if the dead smelled this way in their urns. When he saw my knee, he ordered me to the tub and told me to sit still as he churned the handheld showerhead to the highest pressure. He took soap and lathered it in his hand.

“We won’t tell your mother,” my grandfather smiled, “don’t worry.”

Once dried, my grandfather found a needle for my knee. He threaded the needle on his first try. It entered and left behind a tight little row of stitches tied into bows. Even now, I cannot shake the feeling of his fingers curved inside the wound.

◆

Evenings before we move in together, when Tarō and I think simply buying groceries with him pushing the cart and I filling it with food we’ve never tried was what a married life could look like, we smoke our way around the reservoir. Though the route is familiar, my knees knock into each other, still.

Landing on a patch of duckweed in the water, a pair of swans fold their wings like napkins. The things we cannot give to each other do not yet seem unsurmountable. Our hands are calipers, reaching out to touch all the flowering plants we could name: plum, hyacinth, bergamot, peach and peony. Identifying them as if they belong to us.

Tarō takes my lipstick crowned cigarette, pointedly ashing it as he says, “I’m good except when I am with you.” We laugh, talk about anything but damnation. When a man sweating his white shirt transparent jogs by, close enough to listen to us, we continue our bad habits under a tree. The flame from the lighter illuminates his brown eyes.

He is a pastor’s son. “I’ve never done this sort of thing,” he’d confirmed the first night we spent together. Tarō’s extra fold of skin flapped against mine and the droplets slipped around my hipbones, his sweat collecting in the hollow of my stomach. Our bodies marked time with a slap, the kind our mothers hurt us with. Later, Tarō develops the habit of drafting long texts, bible verses and his interpretation, to men’s youth group chat while we lie naked after fucking. When like an audition he asks if he should go now, I reply, evenly, “Do you mind getting the lights on your way out?”

I stamp the cigarette. Tarō takes my hands and scratches the top of his arm.

“Tarō, I might claw you. See? My nails are long.”

He presses the nails against the soft palm of my hand and then against his barbell-callused one. “Carve me,” he says.

At school, I tried to stay out of trouble until Francis confiscated the lame rubber ball I would bounce against the wall of the school. He passed it from Steven to Vitas to Kyle to Matty and then back to him. Francis whipped it over the roof. I climbed to the roof, rolled the ball from the edge and unfortunately pelted a nun.

Eventually, as all mothers do, mine found out and at home, she met me at the door with a smack, “If I hear that you’ve let them hit you and take your things away, when you come home, I will hit you harder.”

First, I spent a glorious week of recess alone in detention reading books my mother wouldn’t approve of. Then, the following Monday, when the bell rang and cafeteria doors opened to the blacktop, I marched straight to Francis and punched him in the stomach. My knuckles cracked on impact. He laid like a snow angel in the middle of the asphalt, breathless while his friends laughed a circle around him. The thing I didn’t know back then was that I was supposed to be patient; I had to wait and be provoked, let him throw the first punch.

◆

When Tarō and I started seeing each other at our strict Christian university, we’d nowhere else to go, and resorted to renting out the viewing room at the library. He’d project old Italian films, or we’d waltz to the credits of Blue Velvet. Later, empowered by our tutoring positions which gave us keys to private study rooms, we’d sip from water bottles refilled with vodka and sleep there on the wooden furniture. Mostly there was kissing but we made time for education, and I watched as Tarō explained concepts to himself using his hand as a slate and finger as a pencil.

I work the knots in my palms and think, Maybe I had pushed too fast, done things in the wrong order. We moved across the world, but it hadn’t been far enough to escape judgement.

Guided by desperation to maintain their college freedom, our close friends paired off and proposed, a few even married before graduating.

On the phone I say, “Mom, I don’t think I can do this.”

“What do you mean? It’s not like you can return the baby.”

“What if I hurt her?”

“Children are surprisingly resilient.”

“What if I lose my temper, or she hates me?” I wasn’t whispering anymore and strangers on the bus were openly goggling.

“Think of the most uninspired, unprepared people you know. Chances are, they’ve at least one. If they can manage, why wouldn’t you?”

There was nothing that I could say anymore, yet we stay on the line for the remainder of my commute, the walk up the apartment, the washing of my hands and face, the change into inside clothes, the gathering of my hair to work on dinner, the slicing of a tomato in shape of a ripe heart, nearly an hour and a half like that, with the phone close enough we could hear the other breathing and neither relents.

By the baby’s third birthday, we have a diagnosis, a second and third opinion, more direction and debt. The results prompt Tarō’s mother to visit us. She gifts us a long weekend, minds the baby while we take a vacation in a house by a lake she rents from a distant cousin. They’re widening the lanes all the way down. After hours cramped in the car, as soon as we arrive, we take the pair of bikes resting against the porch and cycle two miles to the fillet of cold beach. It’s too early in the season to dip even up to our ankles in the water, but I’m tempted.

“Don’t,” he warns.

Silencing the GPS voice, he takes a bike in each arm and guides them further to the empty park. I choose a bench in memory of a man named Harold, dedicated by his loving children, for Tarō and I to slouch side by side. He waits for me to speak, to ask if he’s tired yet and if we should be heading back. Before I do, I make him wait with me on Harold’s bench for the yolk of sun to slip low into the lake and disappear in one gulp.

At the rental, I strip without ceremony, with the door ajar, my tampon string dangling between my legs and call out from the hot-pressured shower, Are you going to join me? The disability bathroom provides the grips, handles, and leverage necessary for Tarō to penetrate me from behind, but he hardly touches me. From under the water, I can hear the other set of relatives fight upstairs and watch my hair circle the drain.

The relatives, to hide their discord and its increasing volume, blast a familiar melody, a Lenten hymn. As the instruments and their voices keen, Tarō turns to me, bound in damp sheets, “Hey.” He asks, “Are you enjoying this?”

I stare out the window at the sickle of a moon. His hands open. He cradles my stomach, kisses my shoulders. Neither of us acknowledge what we’re pretending. I feel the earth swallowing, settling and hungry again.

After the playground incident and a few lies, my mother decided that I needed to improve my social skills. Summer gaped open. I began attending a local bible day-camp since my mother associated sleepaway camps with Girl Scouts—the cookie version of a pyramid scheme. We sang with counselor Travis about the power of love and played dodgeball. When we went to daily services, I always sat behind Travis and watched his ass clench and unclench every time the pastor said anything he did not agree with.

It wasn’t that my mother necessarily disagreed with the power of love, but she did not agree with all the free time allowed. Dodgeball wasn’t a real sport, she complained.

Camp was something my grandfather had instilled in my mother as dangerous. He and his family had experienced internment. “It could not be helped,” my grandfather recalled.

At the time, I had no idea what he meant. I was apprehensive about my mother’s expectations, the other children she wanted to mold me into. She pulled me out of camp.

My mother had always wanted to be a ballerina and insisted I did too. Dance became my first trial. The hours I spent in a box of floor to ceiling mirrors were ones which my mother could volunteer at church. In nearly new ballet slippers I padded my way to the bathroom, used the industrial-sized tub of liquid hand soap to coat the walls and mirrors, glue toilet paper onto the soap and spray everything with water. Three lessons into the program and by process of elimination Ms. Stacy called a meeting with my mother to suggest I not return.

◆

Tarō takes the chair at the head of the table. The baby in her pen sucks on her toy giraffe. It’s only noon. I redden a glass of wine large enough to fit my two fists, with pomegranate juice, partly to hide the quantity of alcohol, partly because it makes me feel like a chemist.

Though frequently I innovate in the kitchen, attempt recipes with the ingredients on sale at the market, Tarō always pretends he knows just how to eat. He sits quietly, expectantly places the napkin over his crotch as I set the dishes down. He wraps a clammy hand around my muffin top, pinches skin and mentions a new diet his female coworkers are swearing by.

I don’t have to be here, I think. Anger trails guilt. It does the sordid nights I spend crying forehead bowed to table, with all the plates blooming on the floor and the shouts at first halting and then tremulous, “I am trying. I try. I try really hard.”

I turn to check on the baby. The baby looks cheery, having substituted the giraffe for her stuffed pig. I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I let it go slowly. Then, reach for the dancing metal pitcher too late.

“Bukiyōdesu,” Tarō clucks leaving his seat for a mop. He doesn’t get far before he’s jerked back into place. The ceiling light is the first to rattle, groan and fall. My ribs follow suit. The floor becomes a waterbed on a bullet train.

Baby, I think, as all that remains untethered dominoes around me.

“Baby!” I call out, my elbows gathering skin as I crawl towards the pen.

Before gathering itself into a deafening whoosh, the wind sounds muffled, like a sonogram from the inside of a womb.

After the minor vandalism at the ballet studio, my mother thought that perhaps basketball would be the sport to repurpose my masculine aggression. She enrolled me for the public school rec team. I leisurely walked from one side of the court to the other and never once attempted a basket. It was easy because I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t make an effort to have the ball passed to me. My mother chalked it up to the fact that my posture of holding one arm with the other behind my back gave the impression that I was shy and fragile.

I wasn’t shy, but awkward. The captain had nicknamed me Spit. My mother heard it from the sidelines. She yelled at the coaches and then at the captain, even after I told her that she was embarrassing me.

At home, my mother told me, “Fighting for what you think is right is better than obeying.”

My grandfather took this personally.

◆

Pillars of hollyhock blur the window. Tarō is the type of man that drives with one hand limp around the steering wheel and the other clutching the brake. My fingers used to rest on the inside of his wrist, but there is a grudge he holds like a gun against me. He drops Miki and I off at the children’s hospital entrance for a series of therapies. His patience had been tested when the baby refused to stay still enough to dress.

Miki was beginning to express her hatred for corduroy. Tarō chose denialism when I recited the running list of her sensory displeasures. Despite the morning’s pants fiasco, or perhaps because of it, the baby sleeps in the noisy waiting room. I remember to exhale evenly so that I don’t draw any attention from the other parents.

On average the appointments are delayed two hours. When I wake her, Miki seems unimpressed by the environment. Before the tantrum can begin, I produce a plastic car whose wheels she like to spin. The baby takes it prisoner. As backup, I lay the stuffed pig beside her. Returning with coffee and stack of scratch-off tickets, Tarō uses Miki’s birthday and our anniversary as lucky numbers.

He says that lately I look as if I have been thinking through him and into past lives.

Not so distant, I think.

I am a bad mother. I worried it would catch up to us when the baby began school. I often found I leave the baby unattended. I’ve forgotten more than once to unbuckle her from her car seat. I let her shift sand for hours instead of socializing.

The baby screams so forcefully she pops her belly button. I forgot to tape a button to her navel and now she has an outie. Those are the small things.

I did not breastfeed her. I was angry at the swell of my body, the tug of milk. Ungrateful for the vertical pregnancy line that cut red-brown across my abdomen, I want to ask, without judgement, if it is normal to be so annoyed at the needs of another.

I wonder, is this how Tarō feels about me?

I comfort myself with the fact that I’d offered to work, but he hadn’t offered to cut his own hours to watch the baby.

Sometime after the birth, Tarō, the baby and I took the train to a salvaged car yard. Only I stayed awake, listening to her breaths, holding my own whenever I heard a change in rhythm. So still, I feared, she was dead.

There was hot spit rolling down her chin. Surely, signs of life. I relaxed.

Tarō carried the diaper bag and guided us along the junkyard. It had parts and tires strewn around the property and I couldn’t help but think of another messy birth, my body on the table, organs piled to the side. I should have been weaker, more vulnerable when the baby was delivered. Perhaps, Tarō’s concern, otherwise reserved for his parents and congregants, would have dulled the throbbing scar above my triangle of pubic hair.

Like a whorl of sepals, I’m supposed to protect them.

I reassure Tarō, “Einstein didn’t talk until he was seven or eight.”

And he reassures me, “When I climb into bed at night, I miss you.”

It goes both ways, since neither of us know what the other does in the dark.

My mother next enrolled me in soccer. She didn’t want me to be weak-minded. The team practiced twice a week and it was held in a field loaned by a rival middle school. An old cemetery stood behind it. As fall cooled, I passed time watching as trees in the cemetery gave little bows. I am bestowed the job of retrieving the ball when it inevitably flew across the field and into the dead.

It was then that I began having recurring nightmares of using skulls as soccer balls. In the nightmares they’d whisper threats:

“Hello, it’s me. It’s me, Katsuro.”

“It’s me, your father.”

“Do you remember my hands, Hotaru-chan?”

“Hisashiburi, Hotaru. Sumimasen.”

“Can you understand that?”

During the Saturday morning games, the referee asked me to stand up and stop picking at the patchy grass. I ignored him until he issued a red card. My sunburnt mother drove home with two hands on the wheel and her right hand shifting rosary beads, when we pulled into the parking spot, “Defense,” she concluded, “isn’t for you.”

It only took a puff of wind to sweep leaves against the gravestones. We were visiting. The other relatives with us knew the rituals and my mother and I stood back. Neither of us were with my grandfather when he passed away. That night at my aunt’s I’d been assigned the bed that had been his and found pages of sutras copied beautifully under the mattress for luck.

I decided then that it would be up to me to continue taking care of the kamidana. Only I could be trusted to do it right. I stashed it in my room when my mother collected what his other children had left behind for donation. I kept house for that miniature shrine, dusted daily, rearranged the white dishes. I lit the candles with the gas stove, watered the vases with sake and when that ran out, tea or soda and whatever I’d saved from lunch, convinced that I’d tricked the spirits into standing guard, instead of asking.

◆

My fingernails slip across soft cotton. Baby, I think.

I reach further. “Baby?” I repeat, clinging desperately to her fleshy ankle just as the walls flap. Pain like a pair of shimmering oarfish smacks against the bone behind my ear.

I remember I have a husband, with hair thick, almost waterproof, unless he keeps it submerged. His mother cut it twice a month when they lived close by. His mother is gentle, and he is mostly gentle. I call out his name.

“Here,” he breathes, “I’m here.”

I realize that in between my back and wood is flesh.

The following summer my mother opted for a more respectable sport, one that didn’t require as much sweating or grassy fields. She dreamt of me bouncing around in clean white skirts and crisp dresses. Tennis was the sport my father had played on weekends at the fancy country club with his work friends. My mother applied for a free trial membership and the amused woman behind the desk leaned over theatrically and promised her that the facilities and instructors could work miracles.

My coach was a high schooler I found charming even though I kept accidentally hitting him in the groin. Ultimately, my non-existent hand eye coordination and his fear of infertility dashed my mother’s tennis ace dreams. The optometrist placated my mother for a while, with a diagnosis of my own. Minimal depth-perception, peripheral vision. Mid-June I went back to the couch and played Tetris until I couldn’t look at people’s faces without wanting to push their eyes down to their mouths to form a perfect line and disappear.

◆

The lunette of Tarō’s brow bone is dark; the nights that I don’t end up in the chair of the baby’s room I stay awake and can hardly make it out of the shadow. I listen to the snores, gifts from a deviated septum. They accompany his plodding heartbeat. He’s been building himself up at the gym, and I want to wash his body again, wash the memory of his saliva dry, crusted on my face. It was easy to sink into roles, but I’d never stopped wanting to touch him.

Tarō’s mother pulls me aside, uncovering the necklace she wore close to her chest with a bead for Tarō and three others for each water baby she’d lost. His mother doesn’t think the vacation is enough, she suggests attending marriage counseling at a sister church. My mother’s advice is to baptize the baby. Perhaps, she says, a sign it’s time to convert to the right church.

I ignore both mothers. Instead of services with Tarō, I take Miki to the neighborhood playground. Other kids have stopped asking her if she wants to play. She’s chosen a shaded spot in the farthest corner of the sandbox to dig a pit. I watch her shovel at the cool sand until she’s satisfied the space is large enough for her to sit inside.

My grandfather had taken me fishing on Sunday mornings. Before my mother woke for her prayers and early Mass, we’d be far and late enough that there wasn’t time to accompany her. At the lake we’d squat side-by-side with the fishing poles saying little for hours. During the spawning season, he showed me where they scarred each other from fighting. He’d taught me to bleed a fish. Begin by carving out the gills and snipping the ventral artery. Then trim the dorsal fin and dorsal artery, followed by the lower ones. Lastly, tug the head back. Like the way I ask Tarō to pull my hair when he fucks me from behind.

Most nights, I prune my fingers masturbating and when I leave the bed to wash them, I catch my reflection in the mirror. An almost thirty, damp rag of body beams back. My forehead kisses the coldness of the bathroom sink and I imagine Tarō’s reaction to finding me there, drowned in a shallow puddle of tap water.

As a last resort, my mother registered me for the summer YMCA membership. I woke up at 8:30 am, complained and slid into my swimsuit like an eel. I shoved my hair into a rubber cap and fumbled around my room for goggles.

I swam the medley in haphazard, desperate sprints. I only breathed right before the flip turn at the end of the pool. Butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle. By lunchtime, my lungs burned, and my legs felt like Jell-O. My reencounter with camp came this way. At the YMCA, the camp kids always had their bad art plastered along the walls. They crowded the courts when they played basketball. They flooded the locker rooms and showers like ants without a mission. Worst of all, they took precedence over the open swim times.

It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to continue to swim laps cramped with other patrons while they used four lanes to splash around. I was jealous of their fraternity. They knew each other by name—spent their whole summers together. They were popsicles all lined up, laughing in their bright suits. I was paranoid that they were snickering about my bad form in breaststroke or how my chlorine-discolored swimsuit kept bunching and riding up, no matter how I adjusted.

My mother was on bereavement, and she spent weeks with me at the pool. She timed my laps and held thumbs up if it was within my average or higher, a thumb down if it wasn’t. She sat apart from the other parents. Her fingers made rounds along the rosary beads while she counted down. My ears burned when it was a thumbs down, convinced everyone had witnessed my poor performance.

◆

“Baby,” Tarō grunts.

“Yes?” I reply

“No. Baby.”

“Here,” I reply, as if to say I have her. Tarō drapes himself over my body. As our cover splinters and fails, his abdominal muscles seize above me. He takes the shape of another table and I attempt a similar position over the baby, sucking in my stomach to create enough of a hollow for her. I can’t tell what time it is, so I begin to count in the familiar way. I barely hear Tarō heaving aloud a single command, tometekure, but have no way of knowing his plea is to the angry gods of tectonic plates and not me.

I joined the final summer competition between camp and non-camp kids. My mother signed me up. I recognized Shelby from class, but she was too busy to wave back. I was still smarting from this when the whistle for the individual medley event came earlier than I expected. My dive was callow, a splash behind the others, but by the flipturn into backstroke, I caught up to the pack. I’d practiced breathing once or twice per length of the pool instead of per stroke to gain distance. Breaststroke was my weakest stroke but I’d rested my legs enough to rely on them. I flew during freestyle. I felt the competing currents from the other swimmers swish further back. My fogged goggles were useless. I kept my eyes shut as I counted the strides with prayers. I heard cheering.

My hand smacked the edge, my lips the concrete.

◆

I feel Tarō’s erection pressing against my back. It is one of the handful of times since the baby was conceived. Five years ago, Fridays were date nights. The hemp ropes got a lot more use then, when he made the cockring tight as a wedding band. Under his weight, I try to keep all this longing inside, but it starts to slip out when I remember Tarō wiping his cum off my back in one motion with his gingham blue and green boxers. I laid where we fucked and pretended that if I stood very still I would never have to leave that moment of my breasts on the mattress, my hands tangled in the pillowcases, his unhesitating wipe and how badly I wanted it to take fruit inside me.

10.

I ripped off my rubber cap and goggles, whipped them against the stands at my mother’s feet. She had her thumb down. She reached for the handkerchief she kept folded in the inner pocket of her purse. It had been faithful during long sermons and flu seasons. I had seen my mother once bury her face in it, weeping, body racking when she thought no one was looking.

There was blood pooling in my mouth, and I felt around for my missing front teeth. I dove back down with my eyes wide open. I could just make out the distended faces above me. I held my head between my knees. There was the silence I wanted. At the bottom of the pool, I allowed the heat to leave my body. My hair undulated behind my head, gently, like seagrass. The coolness of the water caressed my scalp, finally swallowed me whole.

◆

In the nesting doll position, with Tarō heaving above, and the baby crying below me, I want to grow in all directions. I want to stretch my wrists out to the sun. I visualize the floor plans, estimate the firm strokes against the riptide. I can navigate the tangled mangrove of household items if I commit to the task like a ghost.

The walls pimple in raised holes. Tarō’s back does, too.

We stay like this and after a while, I resurface.