* * *
—
THE FIRST time she was hospitalized was three years ago, in 1978, the year Robert announced his engagement. Robert, her son. She was admitted for pneumonia but diagnosed with cirrhosis on top of a bad case of the flu. The cirrhosis was a shock; she was a proper woman. When the doctors asked after her medications, she produced her modest list. Nobody could have suspected that the prescription she’d dutifully filled had been treating a healthy heart but destroying her liver.
Six months later she was admitted again. Fainting on the way to the market. She was treated for a concussion but diagnosed with malnutrition; she was prescribed a four-day stay that dribbled into two weeks.
At first her children worried. Then they were angry. They blamed each other, then blamed her. When, finally, they realized she hadn’t uttered a word for days, they called in more doctors, more men who touched and probed her, first with words, then with beeping objects, finally turning to her children to inquire after her daily functioning, her history of diagnosed depression, neither of which they knew anything about.
The test results came back inconclusive, but one thing was certain: her brain had changed; age had worn holes in it, siphoning her ability to cope with a world that had become complicated with a tangle of things she couldn’t or shouldn’t do. For months, perhaps years, she’d been losing herself, her body and thoughts, even her feelings, no longer hers to command or own.
But of course her children were a worry. Like the sharp-eyed one, still unmarried at fifty-two. Some days, when she thought about this daughter, she was glad of the house Edward had left them. Other days she couldn’t place this face, this sharp pair of eyes, which she mistook as belonging to the nurse who asked brisk, disgraceful questions to expose her. One day, quite without warning, she sharpened her own eyes and said, Marjorie, Marjorie-Keiko, you’ll never bring home a husband, will you?
* * *
—
SHE RECEIVED her second tomato in 1920. Six weeks pregnant and wild with fever, she’d even frightened Edward, who’d cursed the June heat, unaware that it was an entirely different fire that was stoking her furnace. As always, the Exclusion League was fanning the national passions, igniting the resentment of even their own neighbors—Edward’s family friends!—who spat in her direction behind his back and hurled rocks at their windows when he was out. She almost cost herself and Edward his heir, flying out to confront the vandal who, luckily, turned out to be a lone, unarmed boy of barely fifteen. Then it was over: a new Alien Land Law passed, shuttering all the remaining Japanese-run farms in the region.
Cherokee Purple: the fruits were large, the color of bruises. When she tried one, she was surprised to find it sweet, nothing at all like blood.
Four years later America closed its ports to all Asian immigrants, special cases pending. When Edward brought the news, she expected his usual tirade, but all that came was the angry thwack of the newspaper striking his open palm. The sound itself was startling, but it was the snap in it that flipped her heart, uncovering a coil of fear that had been fattening there. After all, with the borders officially closed, she’d ceased to be Edward’s romantic commitment and become instead his permanent liability. For the first time she found herself cursing her father, his optimism that had let him leave her, his then fifteen-year-old daughter, here. Of course, it was still 1913 then; they’d assumed he’d return as usual, if not the following summer then the one after.
But the world turned out to be tired of the usual, and in retrospect it was only hopeful ignorance that had allowed them to stand on the pier that final morning, her father becoming in his gray suit, she unbecoming in her frock, cut and sewn to complement Edward’s cream jacket. The ship, Hikari, sleek and modern, was admitting passengers, and her father, a lover of technology, paused to admire it.
The sea was calm, polished to a high gleam, and so was her father when he turned to offer his hand, first to Bob, then to Edward, then finally to her, pulling her in at the last moment to squeeze her shoulders, once, twice, before scissoring his legs and severing himself from them. Was she disappointed? Of course she was. But what words, what gestures, could they have exchanged? The horn bellowed; the passengers waved and shouted. Like her father, she corralled her face. The horn bellowed again, and soon the ramps lifted; water began rippling along the ship’s keel, and a sick feeling pushed into her chest, propelling her arms into a wave. She waved and waved, two frantic flags. But his face, a rapidly diminishing button, never changed, his eyes transmitting nothing, not to her, not to Edward, who had kept his hand firmly around her waist.
* * *
—
IN THE winter the sharp-eyed daughter began staying with her. This daughter stayed in the living room even when the wind howled and the cold drifted in through the picture window.
Sometimes the daughters’ visits overlapped, and their voices rose to bitter, accusatory shouts before dropping again to apologetic whispers, the faithful picture window reflecting the shoulders of the two women resigned to an unpleasant but necessary collaboration. Once in a while, one or the other stormed out, slamming the door and paralyzing the house. On these nights she prayed for deliverance, summoning her father, mother, and brothers—and even Edward, who was annoyingly swift to respond. One by one, they gathered atop a mountain whose gentle peak, neon with green grass, beckoned to her, and in time she understood that this was her destination too. This landscape, canopied by a giant mushroom cloud, binding them together.
* * *
—
ONLY ONCE did Edward turn his back on her. Edward the chivalrous. He was halfway up the drive with the morning papers when he froze, a slightly paunchy statue who pivoted the next moment to the compost pile, unaware of her shape in the picture window.
Minutes later, they met in the house, and before she could utter a greeting he pivoted for a second time, unhooking his coat and leaving without breakfast. Of course she went to investigate. Sprinkled with yesterday’s scraps, the newspaper was wet but whole, and it still took her some time to find the article so tiny she might’ve missed it anyway in her afternoon skim between housekeeping and dinner. HIROSHIMA MAIDENS ARRIVE FOR FREE TREATMENT. The story, seven lines total, praised the spirit of American charity, magnanimous enough to welcome the “grateful girls, survivors of the world’s first atomic blast.”
She broke five plates that afternoon, her furious hands dropping his heirloom china in purposeful succession: two for the silenced girls; two for the phrasing (grateful!); and one for her outrage at Edward, who hadn’t bothered to shred the shameful report.
Over the weeks, more newspapers turned up in that corner of the yard as the maidens were treated and displayed. Then, four years later, she found a page carefully splayed on the dining table. JAPAN’S FIRST MISS UNIVERSE. She read the feature, the headline large enough that she would never have missed it, and fed strips of it to the rotting pile.