I’m the sort of person who almost always has an internal dialogue going. I’m forever mentally constructing or polishing or embellishing or correcting some kind of script in my mind, for all sorts of occasions. For things that have happened to me, things I’m sorry about, things I’ve done and things I’ve forgotten to do, dreams I’ve dreamed – both figurative and literal – mistakes I’ve made – you name it. Maybe I want to explain myself, make myself look good in the eyes of others, justify my actions or opinions, defend myself, whatever. I just talk a lot. It can’t be helped, I guess; when I see things or hear things or experience them, I want to talk about them. Whether to explain them to others or myself. Talking helps me remember something I liked and work through something I didn’t.  Talking is about as close as I get to a raison d’etre.

Now Hajime, the man I am married to, albeit nominally at the present time – he is a person who has always managed to get through life on the fewest number of words possible. He was born that way, I think. When we first met, he thought my steady stream of conversation was rather charming. Cute. I would gush on and on and he would just listen quietly and then – totally all of a sudden – he’d start with this little heh-heh-heh kind of laugh at something I’d said that had tickled him. He’d start quietly and then really get into it, eyes tearing up, shoulders shaking. When I got him to laugh like that I knew I’d done pretty well. Plus I like to think all my talk actually helped him in another respect:  he had a constant supply of oral English to fuel his eager English-learning brain. But over time, my garrulousness started to bewilder him. Then it just irritated him, and finally it plain-old bored him. Now he hardly ever listens to me at all.

If this gets maudlin, I swear I will stop. I do not do maudlin. I hate maudlin. I’m just trying to be as matter-of-fact as possible about this all, and it’s sad but true:  I bore my husband. I read a book recently with the following dedication from the writer to his wife:  ‘To XXXX:  you were sometimes a pain, but never a bore.’ Isn’t that nice? Well, I’ve managed to be both to Hajime so far.

Anyway, for my kids, I’ve been working on the story of how their dad and I met for ages now, since almost before they were born. The actual story is pretty hum-drum,  so I’ve had to liven it up a bit, put in a little rivalry here, a bit of passion there, a suggestion  of disdainfulness on my part, a good measure of manly determination on Hajime’s.

The thing is, though, they never ask. The birds and the bees we’ve done, but never ‘Mama, how did you and Papa meet?’ Though once Mari, my daughter, came close – she told me about how the parents of one of her friends met and we had a good laugh (the friend’s Mom spilled coffee on the Dad’s crotch when she was serving him coffee in a Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant). So I seized the moment and said, ‘Which reminds me of when your dad and I met –’ and then, would you believe it, she suddenly remembered she hadn’t done her math homework.   

My internal dialogue isn’t just useful to me nowadays, it’s crucial:  there are so few people I really want to talk to. I just go about my day to day stuff, I mooch about the house, I make the kids’ lunches, I tend my tiny little balcony garden, I talk to the cat, and to myself, almost endlessly, whether out loud or internally, all day long. There are times that I stop in the middle of some mindless chore and I suddenly wonder: how did I end up here? How did I become this? What actions and decisions on my part might have sent me somewhere else, to be something entirely different? Yeah, I know: it’s not like other people haven’t thought the exact same thing before. I know there must be people who never look back and consider what might have happened, how the course of their lives might have been changed or gone a different route, but that’s not me. I think about it all the time.  

But getting back to the business of how Hajime and I met – just in case you are interested – or even, in fact, if you are not – we met in a swimming class. Intermediate. He was this brown, seal-slick, nicely muscled boy (well, he was actually 28 at the time, so hardly a boy, I guess), and for the entire semester we were in the class together, we ignored each other. I do remember thinking that he looked lonely, but as though he’d rather die than admit it. There was a really pretty woman in the class, Elsa, and he’d watch her, I remember, definitely interested. Problem was, she had a boyfriend, a fellow from Hawaii I think, or maybe it was the Philippines. Once in a while he’d glance in my direction in a speculative manner like he was thinking, ‘hmm, I wonder?’ then quickly look away as though he’d decided ‘no, definitely not.’

It was on the very last day of class that we finally got to talking. The teacher had car trouble that day and didn’t turn up. Elsa and her Hawaiian or Pilipino boyfriend stuck around, as did Hajime and I, and Elsa asked us if we might be interested in joining a group that swam from San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz every year. Hajime and I were probably, after Elsa and her boyfriend, the best swimmers in the class, but as it happened, we were – are – also weenies:  we’d both heard that there were sharks out there in the San Francisco Bay!  We both said ‘no’ immediately and simultaneously. It was comical, really. And for the first time, we turned to look at each other – very quickly – as if we recognized that we actually had something in common.  We both looked away from each other straight away, but something had happened in that moment, and in the next thirty minutes, instead of getting out of the pool and going our own separate ways, we got to talking. About swimming, the ocean, sharks, currents, how scary the depths of the ocean were, that sort of thing.

For three months the teacher had been calling out our name during roll call, but for some reason, Hajime hadn’t learnt mine. I knew his. Well, at the time I was studying TEFL and if there was one thing I was good at, it was memorizing long lists of foreign names. ‘Hajime’ was a cinch, what with my having heard it everyday for three months and him being the only proper foreigner in the class.(Not counting German Elsa and her Hawaiian or Pilipino boyfriend, both of whom spoke perfect English.) Anyway, he asked me my name and I gave him the full version:  Ruth Bahn. He sat there at the side of the pool, I remember, and said it to himself a few times. And then he underwent the most amazing transformation:  one minute he was Mr. Serious Listener and the next he was this grinning, laughing, thigh-slapping clown. ‘Rusu Ban!’ he yelped happily. ‘Rusu Ban!’ Because you see, my name is a joke in Japanese:  a rusu-ban is someone who stays at home and tends the fires while others are away. Answers the phone, signs for the packages, make sure all the windows are shut when it starts raining. Which is pretty ironic, really, when I consider the situation I’m in now.

At first I wondered what he saw in me, why we ended up as a couple. Now I think I have a better idea than I did then. For one thing, the old saw about how opposites attract – well, maybe that has some basis. Him the strong, silent type, me the famous chatterbox, him tidy and careful in his habits, me the slob. Etcetera. But the main thing was, I think – and this is truly horrible – the main thing was that I am Jewish. And Hajime’s family are Christian. I think he liked that. Here he is, Hajime, sent off to study in a country that is largely Christian and he brings home, to his good, pious, Christian family, not a nice, Presbyterian Japanese-American girl, or even a smart, Chinese-American Methodist or a sweet Catholic Korean or a pretty Pilipina Baptist or a hard-working Mormon Hawaiian or a Christian anything at all. Yep, I was Jewish. I think that was my big attraction.

So why did I pick him? This is a harder question for me to answer. Hugh, a fellow teacher at Exodus, where I work, a man I think it fair to say would be correctly, if crudely, identified by 99.9% of his fellow humans by the term ‘asshole,’ claims that ‘Western’ (by this, read ‘white’) women who end up with Japanese men are the dregs who ‘couldn’t get a man in their own country.’ (Hugh’s phrasing) He’s actually pretty much told me this to my face. Hugh is a short, flabby fellow with a balding pattern that even women who appreciate bald men, myself included, find repugnant (great, irregular bald patches on both sides of his head that instantly bring to mind thoughts of pubic ringworm, and a tiny wee strip of thin fuzz down the middle reminiscent of  Tweetie Bird with a bad Mohican). He’s lived in Japan for decades and his personality – well, let’s just say that it doesn’t come even remotely close to compensating for his looks. All in all, Hugh doesn’t have a whole lot going for him other than a monthly pay-check. He is married to a martyr by the name of Fumiko, who, the gossip runs, is currently seeking relief from her no-doubt dreadful life with Hugh in the arms of Matsuo, a part-time janitor at Exodus who is also a trainer at a local gym. Anyway, Hugh and his prejudices notwithstanding, that really wasn’t the case with me. I’m neither pretty nor plain, but I’ve never had the slightest bit of trouble getting boyfriends, not even in San Francisco, a city which is notorious for being a difficult place for straight women to score. I’ve had friends a lot smarter, prettier and richer who haven’t managed to find a boyfriend in San Francisco, but when I met Hajime I was still seeing a man I’d been with for years – we’d broken up but would still get together occasionally – and I was stringing along a guy I’d met at a folk concert too. Plus I had any number of flirtations going:  Ismael, the lovely fellow who ran the corner deli with his family, Malcolm, who did part-time work at the local library and was ten years younger than I, Johnny, the medical student who lived just down the street – ah, those were the days. Hugh should be so lucky.