F O R E I G N E R S

RUTH

I’m the sort of person who always has an internal dialog 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. 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 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 charming. Cute. I would gush on and on and he would just listen quietly and then he’d suddenly start this little heh-heh-heh kind of laugh at something I’d said that had tickled him. He’d laugh quietly at first and then really get into it, eyes tearing up, shoulders shaking. When I got him to laugh like that I was so proud: I knew I’d done pretty well. And I think all my talk helped him in another respect:  he had a constant supply of English to fuel his eager English-learning brain. Say that again, he’d command. That thing you said just now, that way your uncle put salt in belly button, dipped celery into it. Tell me about it again – just same, the way you said it.  He found me charming, I tell you. At first.  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, but then he’s not exactly around anymore . . .

If this gets maudlin, I swear I will stop. I do not do 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.  Recently I read a book in which the author wrote the following dedication to his wife:  ‘To XXXX:  you were sometimes a pain, but never a bore.’ Isn’t that sweet? Well, I’ve managed to be both to Hajime so far.

I’ve been working on the story for my kids of how their dad and I met for ages now, since almost before they were born. As it  happens, the truth is pretty humdrum,  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 lap 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 – oh, so many things. How did I end up here? How did I become like 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. 

CASEY

Three months after Etsuko left, Casey could only marvel at the amount of dust that had accumulated in such a short time. He lay on his side, contemplating the fur-like build up along the tracks of the sliding glass door, the mouldy, fuzzy look the tatami matting had taken on. The window sills, the television – everything was obscured by a thin layer of dust. There were no sharp edges left in the apartment, it seemed.

Etsuko had left so abruptly that Casey’s friends and family still assumed that it must have been a spur-of-the-moment thing. Casey didn’t have the energy to try and convince them otherwise. Up until shortly before she left, their apartment had been a mess: with both of them working there was almost never any time for cleaning, and getting housework done had never been as much of a priority for him as it was for Etsuko. She had come straight home from work one day and begun cleaning as if her life depended on it, starting as soon as she had kicked off her shoes and hung up her coat. For the next week cleaning became her evening ritual, and one room at a time, their apartment began to look almost exactly as it had when they had first moved in. Hairs and scum disappeared from the toilet, and the sink and bathtub acquired a long-lost sparkle. The kitchen cupboards were tidied, the top of the stove polished, the microwave components removed and individually scrubbed. The vacuum cleaner was plied over the floors and rugs were beaten and aired outside. Bundles of trash were discarded; even the ragged old jeans and sweater Casey used for DIY chores disappeared. On the day Etsuko left, the place had been immaculate.

Where did dust come from? Casey remembered the soft white drifts of it under his parents’ bed when he was a kid, lying there like some sort of fabric. ‘Who puts it there?’ he’d wanted to know and his mother had laughed. ‘Dust bunnies. They leave it under our beds every night while we’re asleep.’ ‘What, you mean like the Easter Bunny?’ he’d pursued, and she’d been highly amused. ‘Yes, honey. They carry it in a pretty basket and they don’t miss a single house.’

Both of his parents were like that all through his childhood: neither of them would ever give him a straight answer. ‘What am I, Japanese or American?’ he’d queried, and the answer always depended on their mood. ‘Both.’ ‘Neither.’ ‘Japanese-American.’ ‘Who gives a hoot?’

They were Japanese because their last name was Nakamura and Casey’s grandmother Okutani was born in Japan and still had a kimono she wore on special occasions. They were American because he preferred peanut butter sandwiches to onigiri and thought that the salted plums his father kept in the cupboard were gross.  No matter what everyone said about American not being the way you looked but the way you felt, he knew that his mother, with her red hair and grey-green eyes, was considered more American than his father. Never mind that his great-grandpa Nakamura had come to America before his great-grandpa O’Canny; Casey wasn’t stupid. His mother looked like an American and talked like an American. His father talked like an American.

The door opened. Casey took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

‘You ready for school, Kenji?’ he asked, hating the phoney perkiness in his voice.

‘Nmm.’

‘Is that yes or is that no?’

‘Ready.’

‘Are you completely dressed?’ He waited, but there was no reply. Sighing, he turned over onto his left side. Kenji stood in the doorway, his hair still mussed from sleeping, but more or less dressed for school. His face was a complete mask of indifference, but Casey was getting better and better at reading it. ‘Hey, guy. You want breakfast?’

Kenji shrugged almost imperceptibly. ‘Nmm.’

‘Okay, then. You got it. One breakfast coming up.’ What would it be, though, he wondered, as he struggled to his feet. Leftover pizza from last night? The remains of the coleslaw he’d had for lunch a few days ago? Or should he risk the three-week old eggs in the fridge?  Eggs kept indefinitely, didn’t they? If you cooked them until they were as hard as rubber, you killed all the salmonella germs – he’d read that somewhere.

Three months ago Casey had wished –  just for one brief, selfish moment – that Etsuko had taken Kenji with her when she left. Now he was beginning to see that she had left him a lifeline.

RUTH

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 the best swimmers in the class (after Elsa and her boyfriend), but as it happened, we were – are – also weenies:  we’d heard that there were sharks out there.  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, even if it was only our weeniness and a fear of sharks.  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 names during roll call, but for some reason, Hajime hadn’t learnt mine. I knew his.  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 every day 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. Hajime’s family are Christian, you see. 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 colleagues 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.

But that still doesn’t answer the question, does it? The thing is, I’m not sure myself why I hooked up with Hajime. I think, if I am to be brutally honest, that my own reasons, though different from Hajime’s, were hardly more well-considered. Hajime was a nice guy, to be sure, and he had good manners – I’ve always liked that. He was gentle, too:  we were talking once and a cockroach ran right up his leg. Hajime, never turning his attention away from me, calmly cupped his hands and caught the creature, went over to the window and set it free. How many men do you know who would do something like that? He spoke English well too, something I appreciated as a teacher of English as a foreign language, and always with that lovely, exotic accent. But why I actually chose to marry him – I have no idea. He asked me, okay? He proposed. Why is it that any of us end up with the people we end up with?

CASEY

Casey stared out the windows of the train as it rattled across Tokyo. It was an overcast day, neither rainy nor clear, and the concrete and asphalt outside all seemed to be the most depressing shades of beige and grey. It was only two in the afternoon, but the train was still jam-packed. Odd how everything he could see out there was virtually the same as it was when he’d first arrived: the same buildings with their tacky signs, the same coffee shops and stores that had looked so exotic back then when he didn’t know what they were. And yet how different his life was now.

Ten years earlier, when he’d first arrived in Japan with a one-year teaching contract, the world seemed to be full of opportunities. His students had been fun and lively – and interested in him. And girls had found him fascinating, too, there was no denying it. The first thing everyone wanted to know, of course, was whether he was Japanese or American.  He’d had a ready answer for them: ‘A little of both I guess, but I’ve got an American passport.’

At first it had been a novelty to live in a country where he resembled 99.9% of the people around him. Casey’s mother had always joked that her DNA had been swallowed up somewhere inside him, that she’d never have believed he was her baby if she hadn’t personally been there when he was born. In Colorado he had always stood out, but in Tokyo, he could go anywhere he liked and never get cat-called, never have anyone hit him up for a free English lesson on the train to work.

Being an expatriate in Japan was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. Not being able to read the signs, having no idea what the announcements on the train might mean, the delightful anonymity of living in a city like Tokyo where no one knew him or cared what time he came home! Having grown up in a small town, it was all the more wonderful.

After a while, though, the thrill of not understanding the language wore off and Casey began to see that having some facility in Japanese would not just be an advantage, it was essential. Not having the language wasn’t so bad for the obviously western-looking Americans like his friend Carl with his blonde hair and freckles: all they had to do was learn a few words and phrases and the glass was half full. With a few Japanese phrases and a smattering of the most basic vocabulary they were stars, and no matter how little they could say or how imperfectly they could say it everybody was impressed: Wow, Carl! Only six months in Japan and already you speak Japanese so fluently!  For Casey, the glass was half empty. Never mind that the little Japanese he did know was quaintly pre-war and barely comprehensible; never mind that what little he knew had taken him ages to acquire. Most people in Japan, Japanese and foreign alike, seemed to feel that a guy who looked Japanese ought to be able to speak Japanese. Well, he’d been game: he’d enrolled in Japanese language classes his fourth month there. Which is where he’d met Etsuko.

‘Eat the eggs, Kenji.’

‘They’re hard.’

‘Of course they’re hard! They’re cooked. You have to cook eggs to kill all the germs in them.’

‘Mama doesn’t cook them like this. Sometimes she doesn’t cook them at all.’

Casey started to protest, but then realized this was true. Etsuko had the sickening habit of pouring raw egg all over a bowl of rice and eating it, just like his Grandma Okutani had done on a few memorable occasions.

'Okay,’ he said, thinking on his feet, ‘these are American eggs. Japanese eggs are soft, American eggs are hard.’

‘I hate American eggs.’

Scraping Kenji’s uneaten eggs into the trash, Casey remembered what one of the other single fathers on the Parents Without Partners site had written:  Take it all one day at a time. Well, that was just what he did. Every single day – one foot ahead of the other. Keep walking – that was his philosophy. Just keep moving. Count your small successes. That was another useful tip.

The first few weeks after Etsuko had left, he’d had a terrible time just getting up in the morning. He started work at 3:00 in the afternoon, just before Kenji got home from school, arriving home well after he’d gone to bed. Kenji had been late for school on numerous occasions, but one month after Etsuko had left them, Casey had managed to solve his morning problem by the strategic placement of three alarm clocks. He and Kenji were now back on speaking terms too, which was a real plus.

Bundling the trash up, Casey stopped for a minute and stared at a picture of Kenji and Etsuko he had taken four years ago on Kenji’s fifth birthday, when they were on vacation in Okinawa. Both of them were grimacing, the sun in their eyes – he was a terrible photographer – but even in this awful picture you could see how closely the two resembled each other. Kenji might bear a strong resemblance to Casey’s Grandma Okutani, but you would never guess that he was anything but Japanese.

Tossing the trash into the bin outside, Casey could see Etsuko’s angry accusation in Kenji’s eyes. What was it he’d said this morning?  I hate American eggs.  Odd how that comment had stung.