Ruth & Naomi, 3rd Installment

Years passed. Mari was born, then Kei. Naomi and I got closer and closer, while my relationship with Hajime began its long, slow decline. Makoto died very suddenly when Mari was about three; Naomi grieved – and to a lesser extent so did Hajime and his brother and sister –  but the awful truth is we also breathed a sigh of relief.  I quit my job and got caught up in raising the kids – pretty much single-handedly, though of course, Naomi did a lot. Hajime spent more and more time at the office. At some point during the first ten years, he began to develop an obsession with caravans. Mobile homes. Winnebagos, King of the Road, Route 66. Trailers for sale or rent.

 I don’t know how this happened, where he got it, but Hajime got the notion that this was the last frontier opened to young Japanese people with guts and drive and English language skills. Somewhere this must have coincided big-time with a middle-aged crisis, because by this time, Hajime had passed the 40-year mark. Whatever the case, he suddenly decided to go back to the States and buy a trailer. He had a green card, after all, partly courtesy of yours truly, and he covered the whole scheme nicely by claiming that he was going to develop mobile homes for adventurous, youthful Japanese retirees. I know he is in fact doing something business-related over there which involves trailers, for all that he is virtually incommunicado. But business isn’t his aim: he just wanted out.

Naomi wasn’t fooled, not one bit. Given her generous, upbeat, irrepressible nature and her overall inability to lie or dissemble, she did a pretty good job of trying to act as though it didn’t matter, but I know how upset she was and how disappointed. Hajime was her eldest, and she once confided to me that she never had been able to understand him. What, she asked me, what could she have done differently with him? She had loved him, encouraged him, tried not to keep him back or coddle him, protected him from his father’s wrath, praised him for his achievements. And yet look what happened!

Money stopped coming in on a regular basis, and I had to go back to work teaching, once again at a conversation school. The kids and I moved back down to Tokyo to live with Naomi. This arrangement suited us all just fine, really: we all loved living with Naomi and she was thrilled to have us all in the same house, and we were all happier not having a sulking, irritable man around all the time.        

Now’s where it starts getting hard, because this next bit – this is the one time in my life I’m fervently glad is over. We had this happy little family going, you see, just Naomi, Mari, Kei and me. I went out to work, Naomi stayed home and kept house. The kids loved Naomi – which is no surprise – and of course, Naomi thought they were the cutest, smartest, finest, most morally advanced kids she’d ever met. We had a good, comfortable routine, too. I’d get up and pack my sports bag, wake up the kids and make their breakfast. Naomi always had a hard time getting up in the morning, but she’d kick in just before I left, start the business of getting the kids’ lunches together, remind them to take their completed homework assignments to school, help them find the last-minute ‘if-I-don’t-have-it-I’m-done-for’ stuff, all of that. She’d be walking the kids to school while I was right in the middle of my morning swim at the YWCA pool. My joining the Y was her idea: she said I needed my daily swim for stress control. For all of that – and for so many more things – I miss Naomi so much.

Sometimes even now when I’m on my way home from work and I catch the whiff of onions frying, or broiling fish, or that good smell of rice steaming –  I can still see Naomi there in our little kitchen. I can still feel that warm, secure feeling you get when you know that there is someone at home, someone who actually wants to hear about your day, who is cooking dinner for you. Bustling and banging around in that little kitchen, an apron tied around her little dumpling figure, just about where you might imagine her waist ought to be. Three good giant steps across the room and you’d gone from one end to the other, that was how small it was, our kitchen, but Naomi reigned in it like a queen. She could rustle up a delicious meal from fewer ingredients than any human being I’ve ever known before or since. Naomi.

She’s gone now, you see. We lost her last year.  No one saw it coming, either. None of us. This is a woman who just didn’t get sick. Never off with a headache or a sore throat or a cold – nothing. Once I remember she had trouble with one of her feet, but that’s it. ‘Oh you make her out to be such a paragon,’ says Vanessa at work, who’s mortal enemies with her own mother-in-law and would love to be able to trade Don’t you just hate ‘em mother-in-law stories with me. But the thing is, I don’t.  I’ve never embellished anything about Naomi, she just was the way she was. Intrinsically good, without any side to her.

When we first got here, Hajime and I, it was difficult, like I said, what with the tension between Hajime and Makoto. Sometimes it just got to me. I’d think that if I had to listen to any more of Makoto’s careful, insidious, erudite-sounding arguments and Hajime’s sullen angry come-backs, I’d just go crazy. Naomi had a way of kind of tuning it out – she’d go into the kitchen and hum to herself. Hymns, usually: ‘Abide with Me,’ or ‘Break Thou the Bread of Life.’ The men would be bitching back and forth at each other and she’d be in the kitchen preparing a meal, bustling around with those pots and pans not in an angry way, but cheerfully nervous – that’s the only way I can describe it. Later I found out how tense their endless bickering really made her, how all their mutual animosity saddened her, but at the time I thought she was a little like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand, just trying to ignore it all and smile through it, pretend it wasn’t happening.

Anyway, the tension between Hajime and his father really got to me those first few months. That and loneliness. I didn’t know anyone in Japan other than Hajime and his family at the time, and he and I didn’t have much of a social life at all at first. I got so desperate I actually went to church with Makoto and Naomi a couple of times, just on the off-chance that I’d meet someone there I could talk to, someone I’d have something in common with. Some of the ladies there seemed very nice, but they were all a lot older, and obviously I couldn’t understand the Japanese sermons (I am told that Makoto was a brilliant orator, but at the time he just looked silly to me up there behind the pulpit, gesturing wildly, his eyes flashing, scanning the room as if for stray sinners he thought weren’t getting the point he was making.)  I started working shortly after we arrived, teaching English ‘conversation’ at a depressing little conversation school out in Chiba, but I couldn’t find any friends among my colleagues either, who all seemed a silly bunch. There were three men (two Americans and a Canadian) who were heavily into the night-club scene, picking up Japanese girls who were gaga for any guy as long as he was foreign, two other married women who were best buddies and in a mutual – and exclusive – admiration society, and a Hawaiian fellow who I think was gay, but who wouldn’t talk to any of us, ever.  

One of the married women, Beverly, in a moment of rare camaraderie, told me about the Foreign Wives’ Association. Her husband wasn’t Japanese, but she knew about it through some friend who’d married a Japanese man. I was thrilled. Straight away I joined my local chapter of the AFWJ and went off to my first meeting in a state of real excitement. I’m not knocking the AFWJ – I know a lot of women who belong to this group and it’s been a real life-saver to them. But it just wasn’t for me. That first little group – my local chapter – it was just a bunch of women bickering about their mothers-in-law. Who sounded, quite frankly, atrocious. I just listened to their stories and thought how awful those women – the mothers-in-law – sounded, how petty and mean and back-biting and bitchy.  But I couldn’t join in, really, could I? What could I say that wouldn’t have sounded ridiculous? ‘Actually, my mother-in-law, Naomi, is pretty much my best friend just now, a really lovely woman.’ Yeah, sure.

That was early days, when I really didn’t know Naomi all that well. Frankly sometimes I even mistrusted her almost overwhelming kindness and affection. I just couldn’t believe that someone could really be like she was, that natural, that trusting and friendly and open. Always interested in other people, listening attentively to their problems or their stories or whatever.  So on the surface, during that first year or so, I was reasonably friendly to her, gave every appearance of trying to get to know her and being friendly. But deep inside, I remained aloof, unconvinced. Some part of me would look at her and mentally ask Who are you, really? Why do you pretend to be like that? What are you trying to sell me? Because of course, Naomi was a Christian, and everyone knows that Christians want to spread the word.  I’m not sure when I finally figured out that she wasn’t selling anything or trying to spread the word, that she really was the way she seemed. I think her goodness just grew on me, gradually. But even when I wasn’t completely sure of her, there was no trouble between Naomi and me. She didn’t push me, she didn’t boss me, she didn’t lord it over me. And she never tried to hog Hajime’s affection. What there was of it.

Unlike those other awful mothers-in-law and their unfortunate daughter-in-law victims, Naomi never berated me or patronized me for not being able to understand how things worked, for doing the wrong thing or misunderstanding a situation because of my foreignness. For instance, I referred to ‘oshinko,’ (pickles) as ‘oshikko’ (pee) quite a few times before I finally got it straight, and Naomi would always giggle and lean over at some point and say, kind of conspiratorially, ‘Remember pronounce N Ru-su!! Or you are talking oshikko, and that is  pee-pee!’ Never to embarrass me, never to humiliate me or show that she was superior.  Whenever she corrected me, in fact, it was always fun. I never felt like I’d done something stupid – she just acted as though my learning Japanese was endlessly interesting and amusing, a great source of fun. And she’d work in some story about her English (which she was, it has to be said, inordinately proud of), some huge gaffe she’d made (she called them ‘boo-boos’). ‘Oh Ru-usu,’ she’d say, after I’d just committed some Japanese verbal blunder, ‘You don’t feel bad about that boo-boo. I remember first teacher tell me when I ask English word ‘what?’ sound a lot like I saying bad word “fart” instead! Make me embarrass to ask question!’