Women On the Other Shore (17 page)

It was easy for Sayoko to lose track of time when their conversations turned to what came next after the training period was over, but everyone knew her circumstances well and she could always count on someone to remind her. Each time it happened, it made her feel like she truly belonged.

"Sorry to have to rush off," she said, getting to her feet.

"See you tomorrow," the women smiled.

Stepping into her shoes, Sayoko glanced back toward the table 129

as she put her hand on the doorknob. The others were carrying on their cheerful chatter amidst swirling clouds of smoke. Closing the door behind her, Sayoko raced down the stairs and emerged under a pale blue sky.

Coming out of the station, Sayoko retrieved her bicycle from the bike lot and pushed it across the intersection before hopping on. Taking the main roads, Akari's school was a seven- or eight-minute ride away, but she could shave about two minutes off her time by pedal-ing up the avenue of ginkgo trees, turning left at the tofu shop, and cutting through some residential back streets. It was after five now, but the sun still beat down as if it were the middle of the afternoon, and by the time she reached the tofu shop Sayoko felt her blouse sticking to her back. With each turn of the pedals she repeated mentally,
Damn it alll Damn it all!
She wasn't actually angry at anything, nor trying to curse anybody, but she'd lately been chanting this phrase to herself whenever she rode her bike. Somehow even the short seven- or eight-minute trip always felt like it took forever, like barely crawling along in stop-and-go traffic on the expressway.

Saying
Damn it all!
helped her push harder on the pedals and let her think she was getting through the exasperating slowness of it at least a moment or two sooner.

Other mothers who'd come for their kids stood outside the gate in twos and threes waiting for it to be opened. A group of women she often ran into at pickup time waved to Sayoko and greeted her as she got off her bike.

"How're things coming with the housekeeping business?"

"I feel like hiring you myself. Maybe I'll dip into the secret stash I've got squirreled away."

"You have a secret stash?"

"Couldn't get by without it."

Chiemi's mother was in home health, Ren's mother worked for a life insurance company, and Takuya's mother was a freelance trans-lator. Sayoko returned the greetings with a smile, wondering if these women, too, spurred themselves on with quiet shouts of
Damn it all!

as they pedaled their way here.

When the gate was opened, Sayoko made straight for Akari's classroom. She peered through the window from the hallway and found her daughter sitting by herself again, playing with two stuffed toys.

Every so often she would raise her head to look around the room.

When she finally caught sight of Sayoko at the door, she dropped the toys and came running to meet her.

"Guess what, Mommy," she said softly after throwing herself into her mother's arms. "Today I watched you all day, too. So 1 didn't cry."

Then suddenly she sounded on the brink of tears as she repeated,

"I really didn't cry, Mommy."

It occurred to Sayoko as she hugged her daughter tight that she herself had been the one crying hardest on their way to nursery school each morning—not Akari. Maybe Grandma Tamura was right: maybe it really was cruel to put a child Akari's age in school; maybe it really was a mistake for her to go back to work. She'd still been tearing herself to pieces over the decision she'd made. Inside, she'd been the one crying the hardest.

"I'm so proud of you, honey. Thinking about you kept Mommy strong all day long, too."

"Owww! You're hurting me!" Akari wriggled free of Sayoko's embrace with a giggle. Her bright voice filled the hallway.

"See you tomorrow, Akari's Mom!"

Several departing mothers shouted good-byes as they went out the door with their kids. Sayoko offered a hearty wave in return.

It gave Sayoko a decidedly odd sensation to see Aoi working on her laptop at her own dining table. With her eyes pinned to the screen, Aoi pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her jeans and put one in her mouth, then realized what she was doing and started putting it back.

"That's okay.
I don't mind," Sayoko said
from the floor by the coffee table, where she was roughing out some ideas for a flier.

With an embarrassed look, Aoi got to her feet and went to stand under the vent in the kitchen. Beyond the buffet divider, Sayoko heard the fan start up. In the tatami room, Akari looked up uncertainly from a picture book spread on the floor, and Sayoko gave her a reassuring smile.

"Mommy, come see," she said, beckoning to her, and immediately began pointing at pictures in the book. "This is a chimpanzee. And here's a giraffe."

Besides putting an ad on the web, Sayoko had suggested they make up a flier to pass out like the ones she'd collected from other operators. The jobs weren't suddenly going to start rolling in the minute they finished training, so in the meantime she could make the rounds of neighborhoods and apartment buildings stuffing mailboxes. Everybody agreed it had to be good for something.

Aoi had arrived at Sayoko's apartment a few minutes past ten, computer case in hand. Not accustomed to strange visitors, Akari fussed and cried for much of the morning, and even after she settled down she continued to interrupt their work by coming up to see what Aoi was doing and then running away, or by wanting Sayoko's attention for something. After lunch she finally started keeping quietly to herself, playing with her dolls or flipping through picture books—though she still eyed Aoi curiously from time to time.

Aoi emerged from the kitchen, and Sayoko handed her the drafts she'd sketched out in pencil. They spent some time going over them together, referring now and then to what other companies had done in the fliers scattered on the floor and making a number of adjustments in the wording and the placement of graphics. When they were satisfied, Aoi began laying out the actual flier on her computer.

132

Sayoko looked up at the clock on the wall. At his mother's house, Shuji would no doubt be taking a little snooze right about now. Or maybe the two of them were busy trashing Sayoko for refusing to celebrate Grandma's birthday with them.
Well
,
what do I care?
she shrugged to herself, and suddenly realized how good that felt.

To tell the truth, there'd been no real need for Sayoko to work today. It was Aoi who had come up with the pretext for her, suggesting that the two of them could put together the flier they'd talked about. She'd even offered to come to Sayoko's home to do it, so she wouldn't have to take Akari all the way to the office with her, and Sayoko had gratefully accepted.

It had all started the previous morning when Shuji said out of the blue, "Be sure to get something for tomorrow on your way home."

Sayoko had no idea what he was talking about. "What's tomorrow?"

"My mom's birthday. We do it every year. Why's it so hard for you to remember?" he said as if he regarded it as a serious failing on her part.

True enough, they had observed his mother's birthday each year by visiting her in logi on the nearest Saturday, and each year Sayoko had dutifully shopped for a present to take when her husband prompted.

She never questioned it. But now she wondered why she had simply done as she was told all those years. Her own parents lived not all that far away in Chiba, and yet never once had Shuji gone to celebrate their birthdays with her, let alone bought them a gift.

Sayoko thought back to Grandma Tamura's previous birthdays.

Shuji did nothing but loll about on the sofa all day, while his mother left the shopping and cooking and cleanup to Sayoko without lifting a finger to help. Then if Akari pestered Sayoko for attention when she had her hands full in the kitchen, Grandma blamed her for spoiling the
girl
and neglecting to teach her manners. "I brought up my two boys under strict discipline, I'll have you know," she would 133

declare, with an endless string of self-serving boasts and admonitions and
gibes to
follow. Last year Sayoko had picked out a summer scarf made of silk, and her mother-in-law barely glanced at it, declaring she didn't even realize they sold scarves during the heat of summer and setting it aside without so much as taking it out of the box.

Noticing Sayoko's sullen silence on their way home, Shuji tried to cheer her up. It was just his mother's way, she shouldn't take it personally, he told her; she wasn't very good at showing her gratitude or joy. Recalling it all now, it was a profound mystery to Sayoko how she could have thought at the time that she was lucky to have such an understanding husband.

Sayoko had related all this to Aoi as she sat writing up her work report at the end of the day on Friday.

"In that case," Aoi had responded with a mischievous smile,

"maybe I should tell you you have to work tomorrow. I can insist I need you to help me with that flier you said we should make."

Late that night when Shuji came home, it gave her a positive thrill to be able to say that Aoi had asked her to work tomorrow and she couldn't turn her down.

"Like there's some kind of cleaning that only you can do?" he'd retorted.

She ignored his sarcasm. "It's your own fault for scheduling the party without asking me. And besides, it's your mother's birthday, not mine."

As she heard herself saying this, she had to stop herself from chor-tling aloud. She remembered what she'd learned the night of her welcome party: keep something bottled up inside you and you just feel worse and worse, but put it into words and it turns into something you can laugh about.

Akari had become bored with her picture books and was getting cranky again; digesting her lunch had apparently made her ready for
a
nap. Sayoko went into the tatami room to pick her up and began gently patting her on the back. The low click of Aoi's computer keys was the only sound in the room. Beyond the sliding glass doors to the balcony, the sky rose high and clear. When Akari's breathing settled into a regular rhythm, Sayoko laid her gently down on the tatami and got a terrycloth blanket from the closet to cover her with.

"Could you come take a look, Chief?" Aoi whispered so as not to waken Akari. "Tell me what you think."

Sayoko tiptoed to the table and looked over Aoi's shoulder at the page she had on screen. "Housekeeping Service" it read in large bold letters, and Aoi had inserted their own marketing phrases into a design based on elements from some of the other fliers they'd looked at.

"This one's for housewives," she said, then scrolled down and added, "and this one's targeted at singles."

"Yeah, they look great," Sayoko said. "You're amazing. How did you learn to draw like that on the computer?"

"This is just clip art that I pasted in. If they look okay to you, I think you said you had a printer, right?"

"Yep. Just a sec." Stepping carefully over her sleeping daughter, Sayoko got the printer from where they kept it in the far corner of the tatami room and carried it to the table. Aoi connected the cable to her computer, plugged in the power cord, and switched the printer on, then clicked the "Print" button on screen. The machine clattered noisily to life. They both stiffened and looked toward Akari.

She didn't stir, and they exchanged relieved smiles.

Sitting side by side at the table, they went over the printouts and discussed ways to improve them. After experimenting with different fonts and colors and editing a phrase here or there, they printed out fresh copies to examine again, going through this process several times.

"I wanted to thank you," Sayoko said as she watched the printer puffing away, pushing out the latest version of the fliers. "For rescu-ing me from what I know would've been a very dreary Saturday."

"No, no, I should be thanking you. If we finalize these today, I can take them to the printer's first thing Monday. And I even got lunch out of the deal. If you find yourself in a similar predicament again, just let me know. I'll be happy to call you in on the weekend.

There's always piles of little stuff needing to be done."

Sayoko went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She'd come for iced tea, but some beer she had on hand for Shuji caught her eye, and she thought that might be more to Aoi's liking.

"Woo-hoo! Tea with a head!" Aoi clapped when Sayoko brought a tall can of beer and two small glasses to the table.

Taking a sip from the glass Sayoko poured for her, Aoi tilted her head to one side and surveyed the room.

"You're really quite the supermom, aren't you, Chief?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Laundry fluttering on the balcony, chilled glasses for beer, getting Akari to go down just like that. It's hard to believe you and I are the same age."

"Oh please. Anybody can do those things. There's no way I could do what you do—calling halfway around the world to charter buses and putting together big fancy tour packages."

"But you're holding down a job, too. You work outside the home and still manage to keep a neat house. My hat's off to you as a woman.

Not a dirty dish in the sink, no empty noodle cups on the counter."

"Well, I may have a job, but I never have to do overtime, and it's not brain work. I don't have to push hard all the time the way you do."

"Oh, stop it," said Aoi, slapping her on the back. "We sound like old ladies in a mutual admiration society."

Sayoko poured some beer into her own glass and took a sip. It was cool and refreshing.

A question popped into her head that she'd never thought to ask 136

Aoi before. "Can I ask you something?" she said. "Are you one of those people who don't believe in marriage?"

"I wouldn't say that. I just don't happen to have anybody at the moment is all. Actually, I was dating a guy last year, but he dumped me when we went on a trip together." Aoi topped off her glass and took another sip before continuing. "You know what he said when he dumped me? He said I was too cheap, everywhere we went. He'd been acting like the last of the big spenders, going around dropping exorbitant tips on everybody we ran into. He claimed his guidebook said that's what you're supposed to do. We eat at a tiny hole-in-the-wall that's not much more than a street stall and he leaves a huge tip. At the hotel he tips people who never even touch our bags, just for answering a question. It was when he started to tip a cabbie even after he'd blatantly overcharged us that I finally said something. I mean, for heaven's sake, we weren't asking the concierge to find tickets to the sold-out opera at the Met or anything. And what do I get for opening my big fat mouth? I get called a skinflint."