Almost Japanese Read online




  Almost Japanese

  Sarah Sheard

  Coach House Books, Toronto

  copyright © Sarah Sheard 1985

  cover photograph copyright © Rick/Simon 2000

  COACH HOUSE BOOKS

  401 Huron Street on bpNichol Lane

  Toronto, Canada

  M5S 2G5

  Printed in Canada

  CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Sheard, Sarah

  Almost Japanese

  2nd Ed.

  ISBN 978-1-77056-347-6

  PS8587.H374A74 2000 C813'.54 C00-930203-4 PR9199.3.S53A74 2000

  Almost Japanese is available in a print edition: ISBN 978 1 55245 084 8.

  For my folks.

  ‘What one respects must be perfect.’

  Who was I before all this happened? I am trying to remember.

  Feet

  They left two parallel tracks in the snow as each parent took an arm and dragged me like a sack to nursery school. One morning, after two weeks of this, I suddenly announced that I would walk.

  My father came home that night with a gauzy sack of chocolate coins in his briefcase.

  Nose

  The woody smell of the arrowroot biscuits on a flowered plate at nursery school. The oilskin tablecloth covered with glasses of apple juice. The starchy smell of fingerpaints drying on my smock, a cut-down shirt of my father’s.

  More nose

  I am in Sunday school. Our church is on the membrane between a rich neighbourhood and a working-class one and I am feeling self-conscious in my scratchy Sunday best. A little girl with dirty legs smiles at me as she steps across me on the floor and I catch a sour smell. I point her out to my mother later and she tells me that God doesn’t like to hear those things in His house.

  Hips

  My first costume was a kilt my mother bought me to wear to kindergarten. I preferred costumes to ordinary clothes and began to make my own out of tea-towels, dustrags, my father’s old pyjama top.

  Skin

  When my father came home he always put his briefcase on the chair in the front hall. I was not allowed to open it but I liked to wrap my hand around the stitched leather handle which grew darker over the years. When the stitching unravelled, a bone of metal poked through. A witch’s finger.

  Ears

  I am squatting to watch the drops gather along the seam in the ceiling. A drop of water fattens and falls with a pat onto the damp halo of newspaper around my mother’s shoes.

  Arms and legs

  I got up on a chair. Reached for the five-pound bag of flour, broke it open and shook it out. Lay down and made angels, lots of them, all over the kitchen floor. For mom, when she got back.

  Vocal chords

  My mother, on her way out shopping, gave me her old muskrat coat to play with. I got out her black-handled scissors, cut open the coat and sewed pieces, inside out, into Indian leggings, complete with fringe. I was upstairs, admiring the effect in the mirror, when I heard her come in the front door, discover the remains scattered across the kitchen table, shriek my name. Just once.

  Face (loss of)

  The class photograph is passed from desk to desk. Little sighs of suppressed laughter. Something is happening. When the picture is handed to me it is terrible to see. Little pin-holes all over my face, felt through the back like voodoo braille. Why only my face? The whole class hates me.

  My hands tremble holding it out to my mother. She looks hard at it for a moment and begins to laugh – the kids did this to you? She pulls me to her, her vibrations shaking open my clenched-fist heart. It IS funny. She gasps out – Oh, the things kids do to one another. Would you ever be that cruel?

  I stop in mid-laugh, look up at her, open-mouthed.

  Hands

  My mother kisses my fingers goodbye through the letterbox.

  Skull and bones

  I pulled the covers up to my chin and rolled onto my back. From my bed by the window sill, I could see the stars straight above me. It was like sleeping outside but much cosier. A soft rain began to fall and the window sill gave off a damp wood-work smell. My sheets and pillow smelled good and I listened to the water gurgling down the eavestrough. It was at that moment, feeling so safe and peaceful, when suddenly another feeling swept over me – of disappearing into the darkness, of my parents, of everyone alive vanishing, rolling out the window, evaporating like rain. Death was night that lasted forever. How much time did I have before I turned into mud and got rained on and walked over by strangers?

  Before skull and bones?

  She turned from the sink to answer me, holding up a potato-peeling. You were this. You were a tomato in a sack. You were the dust blowing around the corner before you were born.

  Nipples

  Bruna, who cleaned our house, loved to startle me out of a sound sleep at the crack of dawn on Saturday mornings, whipping the covers off me and stripping the bed while the sheets were still warm.

  Bruna!

  I lunged for them back but a second too late.

  She saw everything! I was sleeping naked, like a movie star!

  Neighbours

  A senator and his wife lived on my street. The widow of a famous man lived two doors down. She was addressed as Lady B. A chauffeur did her shopping. Up the hill on the corner, Mr G. lived with his sister and their old nursemaid. In a house that looked like a French hotel with turrets and a balcony that wrapped all the way around. Gardeners came twice a month to feed the roses. Mr G. kept an Alsatian, Rudi, to guard him. When Rudi died, another dog took its place. A succession of Rudis, fierce and unpredictable, threw themselves against the fence every time I walked to and from school.

  Eyes

  When I was in grade three my father decided to build a fountain in the back yard, drawing kids in from blocks away. Other kids’ fathers didn’t do things like fountains. He showed us where he planned to dig, marking it with a ring of bricks. He pointed out where he would bury the pump. When he began to shovel, we could see how ropey his muscles showed under his work-shirt.

  He unearthed insects and wrigglers we’d never seen before. Flatworms and millipedes with legs that glittered as they frantically reburied themselves. My father told us the sun burnt them. He showed us ants’ eggs, grains of rice piled up neatly with black seeds showing through the glaze. He picked some up between his fingers to show we shouldn’t be afraid and although it revolted us he put an egg into every outstretched palm and we squealed as he did it but he was right. They were earth hearts, halfway between dirt and being alive.

  He finished the hole the next day. He lined it with heavy plastic, then began to lay bricks over top that, straightening up now and again to survey the effect. It looked like four walls in the ground. A nest of brick eggs. Nothing like the ornamental fountain in Peppio’s Italian restaurant where I’d been taken for my birthday. Then he installed the pipe and hose that connected to the pump and the fountain began to take shape. He dug another hole and buried the pump. I lifted one end of the scalp of sod he’d removed and he took the other and we swung it back into place over the wound in the lawn and my mother claimed she couldn’t spot it from her kitchen window, we’d done such a good job. After the mortar had dried and been waterproofed with a compound that stank and made us dizzy he ran the garden hose and filled the pool and all the kids who’d been watching took their socks and shoes off and paddled. It was so cold it made our bones ache but it was our very own swimming-pool. My father sent my mom off to buy goldfish.

  It was time to plug in the pump. A big kid picked up the extension cord to the buried pump, ran up the hill to the garage, through the window, and plugged it into the outlet behind the car.

  The lawn gargled.

  A rude string of farts broke out of the top of t
he pipe, then a rusty ball of water wobbled and rose into a dramatic plume. My father undid the baggie of goldfish, ornamental fantails, and we all leaned over to watch him pour them in. They looked fantastic, their fins undulating like pony-tails underwater – except they were swimming a little jerkily, all in the same direction, tumbling head over heels in the undertow towards the yawning intake pipe and then suddenly we only counted five instead of six and then three and then –

  My father dashed up the lawn to cut the motor but it was too late. A kid yelled and pointed. There on the wobbling ball of water danced little glinty bits of fish. Pink and gold. A fin, a head, part of a tail. The pieces floated into a quiet corner of the pool and we all watched silently as my father fetched the kitchen sieve and scooped the bits out onto a sheet of newspaper.

  After dinner, I looked out my bedroom window onto the fountain and saw there was hardly any water left. The fountain was giving off a dry, rasping sound as it sucked on air. But the Bennetts’ garden, below ours, looked like a rice paddy.

  My father worked on that pool all summer long. He tore out the bricks and laid in more plastic, re-bricked it and caulked the whole thing over with flexible rubber. Then concrete, fibreglass and turquoise pool-paint. It still leaked like crazy. The fountain drew in on itself. When it ran now, it gave off a dull, flat sound and the hose was kept running continuously to top it up. Compensating for evaporation, Dad said. That fall, when the ground froze, the whole rim of bricks heaved itself up on end, a jawful oflaughing teeth.

  The following spring, my father filled the pool in with dirt, leaving the rim of bricks as they were. The grass seeded itself over the dirt and clay and my mother planted bleeding-heart bushes in the middle. The fountain is still visible, years later, imbedded in the lawn like the miniature remains of a Scottish castle.

  That water wanted out. And it got out. Water was a natural teacher.

  My name is Emma. A simple one. Two syllables. Non-ethnic.

  *

  One night, my parents had a dinner party, and before the guests arrived my father decided to paint the front door. While my mother and I glided about the kitchen, polishing glasses, sorting out the cutlery, turned bread out of pans, brushed butter onto food, my father began methodically spreading newspapers over the front porch. He unscrewed the Medusa’s-head door-knocker, dropped her in Brasso, and began to paint. The dog discovered the opened can of black enamel and nosed the lid off the edge of the porch into the garbage pail, by which time the light was starting to fail, so my father rigged a bulb on a long extension cord from the living-room, down the front hall, through the porch and out the door. Just a little too late to catch the panpipe rill of black enamel hardening along the bottom of the door.

  I lit the candles. My mother retreated upstairs to dress. The dog, intoxicated by the fumes, began dancing and growling at the umbrella-stand. Dad printed a caution sign and strung it up across the porch, but it was unreadable in the gloom and the first guest ducked the string, pushed open the door and discovered the paint on his palm just after he’d embraced my mother.

  After the clean-up, I stowed solvent and rag in a can at the top of the cellar stairs where an inebriated guest, searching for the bathroom, inadvertently opened the door and drop-kicked the can downstairs into the loaded laundry basket.

  *

  The empty Chrysler, family car, coasts past us down the driveway like a dream. My father lopes after it, his arms like a sleepwalker’s, reaching for the wheel through the open window, but the car glides out of reach and he stops in the forsythia shadow to watch the double doors of the garage crumple inward like wet biscuit.

  When I open my eyes again, my mother and father are disappearing through the perfectly-shaped hole in the wood.

  This was the third, and last, time the car ran away.

  *

  My father wasn’t sure about a private school. He didn’t want his daughter turning into a conformist. But it was the uniform that made me want to go. Kilt, blazer, tie-pin, knee-socks, black oxfords. Like a business suit. That, and the fact that it was so close by. I could come home every day for lunch.

  And no boys.

  Thirteen. No blood yet.

  The approach (kyohan) to a bridge.

  We were getting a new symphony conductor! And he was Japanese. Very exotic. An exciting young discovery, the papers were calling him. His arrival coincided with my fourteenth birthday so, as a present, my parents took me to his opening concert.

  When a slight figure, in knife-thin tails and a mass of hair, darted onstage to the podium, we stood up to applaud him. He bowed and we took our seats.

  The overture began. His movements, his hair, his face. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. All the way home, I sat in the back seat, rereading his biography on the symphony programme, looking at his photo, listening to my parents’ exclamations about his long hair, his graceful conducting, his reputation.

  I kept savouring his name, Akira Tsutsuma, exotic syllables in my mouth.

  When he bought the Bennetts’ house next door, my parents said he was a genius. It would be like living next door to Marconi or Einstein! They said geniuses were born only a few times every century. Special people, touched by God. Geniuses probably experienced everything differently from normal people. Every day I’d be walking on a sidewalk that he walked on.

  Don’t envy him, my father said. He’s separated from other people because of his gift. It’s a huge responsibility. He’s probably alone a lot. He has to work a lot harder than ordinary people, suffer tons of pressure.

  I remembered reading about Schubert, who bubbled over with inspiration and scribbled music onto the tablecloth. And Tchaikovsky, who drowned himself. And Hank Williams. They suffered. Did Akira? I wondered if Akira had had a normal childhood. Had he been good in school or just in music? When he walked around outside did he hear ordinary things differently? Could he read symphony scores as easily as books? Did he speak English? Was he lonely in a city where no one spoke Japanese?

  From my bedroom window, I watched them unload his furniture. He didn’t seem to have very much. The next morning his car, a white Camaro, was parked in the driveway.

  I waited a week so he could get settled. Then I got too nervous thinking about seeing him so I waited another week. Then he left town on tour and another week went by.

  I watched for lights in his house.

  *

  He was back.

  I needed an excuse, something to take over, to meet him. My mother suggested brownies so I got up early and made two batches and then I made a third batch that was perfect so I cut each square out and arranged them in a tin that held its warmth as I carried it like a crêche down the street and up the flagstone steps of the house I still thought of as the Bennetts’.

  I rang the bell.

  My heart: my heart: my heart.

  The door swung open and there was His Face. Huge, up close. I said hello and he smiled and bowed.

  He waved me inside. His Japanese voice asked me to take off my shoes and he pointed to slippers inside the door. He took the brownies from my hand and then my coat and I felt big and awkward leaning down to undo my shoelaces while he watched. I was self-conscious about the size of my feet at that age. I hoped my socks were clean. The slippers he offered me looked so small. He was wearing a kimono. It was open at the throat and oh, his hair against the skin on his neck! Skin the colour of his voice asking me would I like tea and I nodded and was left standing alone in a room furnished Japanese-style, with cushions on the floor. No chairs. There was a low, black table, a white rug, eucalyptus branches in a vase by the fireplace which gave off a curious smell. A memory.

  He came back with a tray and my opened tin of brownies on it, two tea cups and a pot. He sat cross-legged at the table and I copied him. I stared at his hair which was mixed in with strands of premature grey. His hair was wet-black and glossy; it trembled when he spoke, springing like a fountain from the crown of his head and spilling into his eyes. His eyes rolled
up to meet mine, suddenly, and my scalp broke out in quills. His eyes were unlike anything I had ever seen before. Absolutely animal-shaped. We talked but I remember only a deafening pressure in my ears, my dry throat, his funny voice. I pulled everything in through my eyes – except his voice, creaky-gravelly, but also a bit feminine somehow. There was a strong Japanese tint to his words, to the way he repeated my name as he handed me my teacup. Em-mah. As though he was learning it by ear, like a bird.

  We stood up. He invited me to return. He definitely did say to come back. The click of the door behind me played over and over as I floated back down his steps. Em-mah. How soon could I come back?

  I walked up and down my street until I’d replayed every detail of the visit. Combed through it as though he was a dream I had to recall before the waking world tore it to shreds. I arrived back home and my parents fell on me. What was he like? I told them about his kimono and the slippers and how we’d had Japanese tea and how his furniture was totally different from the Bennetts’. I didn’t tell them that already I missed him. That everything around me in my own house had suddenly faded into black and white.

  That night, before I got into bed, I looked out my bedroom window at his house. His kitchen light was on. Maybe he was making tea. Maybe he was eating my brownies.

  He began appearing in the papers all the time. He was photographed at formal receptions, shaking hands with soloists and symphony personnel. I clipped everything I saw. I cut out his picture and biography from the symphony programme. I carried a photo of him in my wallet. I thrilled myself imagining the ambulance driver discovering it after I’d thrown myself in front of Akira’s car. I taped his picture to the dresser beside my bed so I’d wake up in the morning gazing into his face. I knew his Camaro by the sound of the engine as it came wheeling around the corner on the way out to rehearsal. I bought a ticket to his next concert and stared at him the whole time from the gallery rail. When my parents asked what had been played and who were the soloists, I’d forgotten completely and had to look everything up again in the programme.