Mother!
To her surprise, it was the kind-faced daughter—but when had she gotten so old?—tearing through the door, her hands separating the plastic brush from the dustpan to sweep the breakfast bowl mysteriously shattered like ice floes across the blue and green linoleum.
* * *
—
THEY FORMALIZED their engagement in 1914. She was sixteen, Edward nineteen; they were together for forty-seven years. Forty-seven that would’ve been sixty-seven had he not fallen from the chair while changing the lightbulb above the foyer cabinet. The cabinet, teak with grooved beveling, stood on six legs and held all of their shoes. If only the lightbulb hadn’t died. If only the cabinet had stopped his fall. She no longer remembered what she was doing—drying her hands on her daisy dishcloth? All that survived was a series of tumbling sounds: wood chair against the wood door that had come unlatched, and the astonished look on Edward’s face, staring up at the May sky.
Edward died the following afternoon, surrounded by friends and flowers that spilled from the nightstand beside the hospital bed. She remembered thinking 1961 and catching her own aging reflection in the bathroom mirror. She was in black, her pale face like an old scuttling nun’s, and somehow this struck her as perverse, as though she’d glimpsed something she had no business witnessing. Like the time she caught her visiting neighbor, Elizabeth—Elizabeth Derby!—stroking the tie that was draped on the armchair, which Edward was fond of and wore often.
The voice in her head, which was not her own, said: Everything turns out as it must.
* * *
—
SOLACE CAME intermittently, like the bumpy signal of the radio she used to listen to in the few stolen minutes before dinnertime, alone in the shed behind the house in Niigata.
One morning, in a moment of such absolute peace, she looked out the window to discover snow had fallen. When had it fallen? Time had become glassy. She stared at the cup in her hand. How long had she been holding it? When she realized she’d been observing a robin twittering on the birdbath in January, she was surprised to find that she’d been resentful of Edward all these years for leaving her so abruptly.
* * *
—
SHE WAS hospitalized for the final time in the spring. She was coming down the stairs from her bedroom; the pain dazzled her. When she came to, she was in darkness, a faint sizzle still beneath her. When she moved, it flashed from her legs into her eye sockets, clarifying her body’s borders.
The injury was to her left tibia. It required a cast and did not set right. The doctor, a prim fellow less than half her age, clucked his tongue with all the reprimand of a wagging finger, as though she’d fiddled with the cast and displaced the bone.
Her daughters did not blame the doctor but did not blame her either. You know how she is, this small child who cannot be blamed for her mistakes. She looked at her new, bow-shaped leg and thought: at least she’d been faithful to Edward.
* * *
—
SUMMER SAW her get temporarily better. She remembered the names of her daughters, the name of her son. She even recognized their faces, knew their exact relationship to her, and asked about the people in the pictures they brought, nodding when she was spoken to. Her daughters were elated. They pushed her to widen her world, one inch at a time, always one more inch.
Soon her son’s children came to visit. They were bigger than in the pictures, and knobbier. She stared at them, her foreign grandchildren (but how familiar their chins!), until they hid behind their mother, whom she recognized from the pictures, but of whom she did not have a single memory.
Her eldest, Miriam, said, “Tell us everything about Japan.”
Her son, Robert, said, “Where did she put those Super Eights?”
Her other daughter, Marjorie-Keiko, said, “Mother, you do exactly what you want.”
The voice in her head, which was very much her own, said: When will they stop demanding?
* * *
—
EDWARD DID marry her, but not until 1948, when California repealed its antimiscegenation law. They could have married as early as 1942, when the first Civilian Exclusion Order nudged them to the liberal East, to the house Edward had bought, sight unseen, with his late mother’s money. But at that time world freedom was under attack, democracy at risk, and afterward, after the war, they were too tired to bother with what was a formality, until the repeal made the headlines and reminded them of not only the principle but the practicality of it. They, after all, had had three children technically outside of wedlock.
The house was a two-story Cape Cod. It had three bedrooms and a kitchen that opened into a living room overlooking a lawn divided by a pebble walkway, also visible from the attic with its lone cataract window that appealed to no one.
She spent three years confined to this house, to this view of the lawn and the backyard where she hung the laundry with her teenage girls and homeschooled her son, who looked so much like Edward but also enough like her to be bullied. Ching chang chong! It was the longest three years of her life, its taut monotony stretched by a shifting fear that made her rage at her children who couldn’t help testing the lockdown, lured by the voices of other children, other teenagers. For the first time, three decades since she’d last been in Niigata, she allowed herself to admit she was homesick, her heart squeezing with irrational longing, especially for her brother, who, as rough as boys were, had taken her gently by the hand to feed the ducks in the lake.
One night, unable to settle, she composed a letter to her family, but Edward—Edward!—had forbidden her to mail it, telling her they shouldn’t risk it, not even in liberal Massachusetts. Damn war.
She ended up complying—he was right: who knew when this country would come for them?—but she never forgave him this restriction. But maybe it wasn’t this or that confinement; what she resented was her own dependence, his complete authority over her. After all, these were prohibited days she’d been granted; unlike Bob, she’d escaped uninterned. What right had she to raise her voice? She pictured their house back west, the letters from Niigata, fed through the mail slot, piling by the door. She watched her children and reminded herself to be grateful for all that she’d kept, which did not include her yukata, just in case.
She did send that letter in 1961. It required additional postage, and she mailed it in a new envelope with a second letter, praying for her family’s safety and health.
A reply arrived weeks later in a large envelope containing both her letters, plus another in handwriting she didn’t recognize. For the rest of her life, she’d wonder how it might have turned out had Edward mailed her letter all those years ago.
According to the house’s current owner, her family home had been officially declared abandoned in 1951; he regretted knowing nothing further.