Women On the Other Shore (25 page)

"Let's not blow this too far out of proportion now," she snorted.

"Just because they accepted your bid doesn't mean the job is done."

Raising the camcorder back into position, she shouted "Go, Akari!" at the top of her lungs.

"I've been thinking," Aoi said with the mischievous smile of a child about to do something she knew she shouldn't do. They were passing through the gate as the crowd broke up after the last event 192

on the day's program. "Selling your first job calls for a celebration.

What do you say we go on that hot springs trip we talked about?"

"When?" Sayoko asked.

"Right now," Aoi replied coolly.

"Now?" Sayoko raised her eyebrows.

"Uh-huh, right now. The three of us. You and me and little Akari.

Tomorrow's Sunday, so it's perfect."

"Now?" she asked again.

Mothers pushing bicycles with their children strapped into kiddie seats milled about outside the gate, talking and laughing loudly, still bubbling with the day's excitement. Several women waved to Sayoko and said good-bye as they headed for home.

"It's not even two o'clock yet, so we could go almost anywhere we want, but I suppose we should keep it fairly close. Enoshima's maybe a little too close, though. How about Atami? I know a great place to stay in Atami. We could gaze at the ocean, enjoy some tasty eats, and soak up the waters."

Aoi spoke in a hushed tone, as if she were unveiling some rare and treasured object. Sayoko stared back with her mouth agape.
There's
just no way,
her better judgment told her, but another part of her was urging,
Why not?
It irked her to think of the evening she had in store otherwise: Shuji coming home without the slightest inkling of her triumph, she greeting him as though nothing had happened and watching Aoi's video with him. Her husband kept putting down what she did as the kind of work that anybody could fill in for in her absence, but the fact of the matter was that he couldn't even feed himself a decent meal if she wasn't there, and she felt like teaching him a little lesson.

"You'd like to go, too, wouldn't you, honey?" Aoi squatted down to be at eye level with Akari. The child giggled sweetly as she slid around behind Sayoko's legs. She seemed to have become quite a bit more comfortable with Aoi today.

193

"Maybe I'll just do it," Sayoko murmured.

"All right! That's the spirit!" Aoi swept Akari into her arms and rubbed cheeks with her.

"Sto-o-op! Let me go-o-o!" Akari giggled again as she tried to wriggle free.

Coming out of the station, they crossed the traffic plaza and headed down a narrow street lined with aging hotels. At the end of the street the view suddenly opened up and the sea spread out before them.

"Wow!" Sayoko exclaimed, stopping in her tracks.

Aoi promptly sat down on her haunches to rest. In a partying mood, she had downed two beers followed by two sake one-cups in rapid succession and fallen into a drooling slumber on the train ride from Tokyo. Now on her feet, the effects of the alcohol were catching up with her.

"Ugghh! I don't feel so good. I guess I got a little carried away."

"Look at that! We're here! It's the ocean!" Ignoring the red light, Sayoko grabbed Akari's hand and scurried across the street, clam-bered over the guardrail, and came to a halt on the sand. With the sun still high in the sky, the flat face of the sea glittered brightly.

The beach was all but deserted. To one side stood a food stall with a huge cob of corn pictured on its sign.

Sayoko started for the water but felt Akari dragging her feet. She looked down.

"What's the matter, sweetie?"

Akari stood with her feet planted firmly in the sand, pulling back on Sayoko's hand with astonishing strength. Her face was drawn and her entire body clenched in fear.

"Oh, that's right," Sayoko realized. "You've never seen the ocean before," Chuckling at the sight of her daughter turning herself into stone, she squatted down beside Akari and tried to reassure her. "It's 194

okay, sweetie. You can relax. It's nothing to be afraid of. You actually went to the beach once when you were a baby, near Grandpa and Grandma's house in Chiba, but I guess you don't remember.

I promise, you don't need to be frightened. Isn't it pretty?"

Akari stood glaring at the endless expanse of water, her lips sealed in a firm line. Aoi finally caught up with them, gasping for breath.

"Where do you get the energy to run like that, Chief?"

"Can you believe this child?" Sayoko said, pointing at Akari with a chuckle. "She sees the ocean for the first time and she's petrified."

"Wow! You never saw the ocean before? Then this'll be an experience to remember!"

Apparently forgetting how winded she was, Aoi swept the frightened girl into her arms and dashed for the water. Akari screamed like she'd been set on fire. Sayoko hurried after them, the soft sand grabbing at her feet.

Since she still had her plastic picnic blanket with her from Field Day, Sayoko spread it on the beach, and she and Aoi sat down with the sobbing child between them. Nothing stood in the way of the sun, and it felt to her as if summer had returned.

"I really can't believe this," she said.

"What?" Aoi said, stretching out on her back.

"That I'm here. It hardly seems possible."

Aoi stared up at the sky. "It's not as if we flew to France or Egypt, for goodness sake. We're only a ¥2,000 train ride from Tokyo."

"I know."

Akari wouldn't stop crying, so Sayoko rummaged in her bag for a piece of candy and put it in her daughter's mouth. The girl still whimpered occasionally as she sucked, clinging tightly to her mother, but she also turned now and then to cast a curious eye at the sea.

Low waves rolled onto the beach in a spray of white foam, then left 195

their white traces on the sand as they receded. The crash of the waves reached their ears a split second later. A black kite soared high overhead.

"I'm getting hungry. I'll be right back."

Aoi leaped to her feet with her wallet in hand and hurried off toward the food stall. Minutes later she returned with two ears of roasted com-on-the-cob and two cans of beer. Handing one of each to Sayoko, she sat down cross-legged and bit into her corn. A whiff of burnt soy from the basting sauce filled Sayoko's nostrils, and she dug her teeth into her own toasty warm piece. Akari had finally dried her tears. She reached for Sayoko's corn, wanting a taste.

"This reminds me of when I was in high school," Sayoko said.

There'd been a period during her senior year when she and her then best friend spent a lot of time going to the beach a couple of short train rides from where they lived. They sat on the sand and talked for hours on end. She could no longer recall what they talked about, but she remembered how forlorn she always felt when she saw the sun beginning to set.

"I hated going home, so we hung around as long as we could, until the sky was completely dark. Because once we go home, tomorrow's automatically going to follow, right? That was the part I hated, I think, more than anything."

"It reminds me of high school, too," Aoi said. She sat with her legs crossed, gazing off at the horizon.

"You lived near the ocean, too?"

Aoi didn't answer. Instead she said pensively, "There's something refreshing about the beach, isn't there? It's so easy to procrastinate, putting things off day by day, but then the next thing you know you've got a whole pile of stuff bearing down on you,
oof,
demanding immediate attention. Suddenly the pile feels so heavy, you just know you're going to collapse under its weight. But then you come to the beach and look at the ocean, and it's like the whole pile just melts away. Maybe it's only an illusion, but I always feel this tremendous relief somehow."

Sayoko looked at Aoi. She had no way of knowing what might be included in the "whole pile of stuff" that bore down on a woman who ran an entire business. But it was certainly true right now that her own pile of things—the day-to-day irritations, the pent-up rage with nowhere to go, the nagging uncertainty about the future—seemed to be melting away like the foam on the beach.

"Maybe when we get old, we should build houses together by the sea," Sayoko said. "Spend our days sipping tea and watching the waves roll in."

"Now you're talking!" Aoi said. "You can't imagine how many times I've fantasized about something like that. With a whole bunch of kindred spirits living right next door to each other, you know."

When Aoi said it, it no longer seemed like a mere fantasy; it sounded closer to the finished blueprint of a readily attainable dream.

"Mommy!" Akari interrupted loudly, holding her hands up for her mother to see. They were covered with sauce from the corn. "I'm sticky," she said plaintively, sounding nearly ready to cry again.

"I know! Let's go wash them in the oceanl" Aoi exclaimed, putting down her half-eaten cob of corn. She picked Akari up and raced toward the surf. When they reached the water's edge, Akari burst into tears again, screaming at the top of her lungs. Aoi bent over to touch the child's hands to the water, then ran from an approaching wave with whoops of laughter. Squinting her eyes, Sayoko watched them go through the same motions again, and then again. Aoi's red coat lifted in the breeze. Akari's shrieks began to sound as much like laughter as crying. Their gold-bordered silhouette danced at the water's edge against the glittering sea beyond.

The sun tilted lower in the sky as if drawn toward the horizon by some hidden power. A band of orange light stretched
up the middle
of the sea like a kimono sash unfurled on the waves.

197

The flurry of crying and fussing and laughing and panicking had worn Akari out, especially after the excitement of her first Field Day, and she grew droopy in Sayoko's arms. She nodded off for a moment, then jerked back awake. "Mommy, guess what?" she said, drowsily trying to reinsert herself into the conversation. A few gentle pats on the back later she drifted off again.

The setting sun reached the horizon and rapidly began to sink, bathing the sea with crimson light. Overhead, the sky had already darkened to a pale indigo.

"Brr, it's getting chilly," Aoi shivered. "Shoot! I just realized I forgot to call for a reservation. The place I was thinking of is on the hill right behind the station. Let's just show up and see what they say."

She got to her feet and brushed the sand from her clothes. "And after steeping ourselves in the springs here tonight, we could head to Hamamatsu in the morning for their famous eel, and on to Nagoya by evening for chicken wings and beer. Wouldn't that be perfect?

Then another hop, skip, and we can stuff ourselves silly on Osaka cuisine the next night."

Aoi's breezy tone brought a good-humored laugh from Sayoko.

And the day after that, it's look out, Kobe, here we come!
she almost quipped, but instead the smile melted from her face. Suddenly she was asking herself: Where exactly did she think she was going? What if it wasn't just to Hamamatsu or Nagoya or Osaka that she was stepping out, but to somewhere much farther away—somewhere so far away she could never find her way back?

When I'm with you, I feel like I can do anything.

As the remark she'd made earlier that day played back in her ear, Shuji's face rose before her. This was the man who never lifted a finger to help with parenting or household chores and regarded her work with open contempt. It hit her with a chilling jolt that being with Aoi really did make her feel she could do anything. Why go on nursing her grievances? Why not leave her unappreciative husband 198

and strike out on her own with Akari? Somehow, being with Aoi gave her the illusion that she could do it; they would survive. Just as it had made her decide to come to Atami.

But Sayoko grew uneasy about staying for the night. She'd set out on an overnight jaunt thinking it would serve as a light slap on the wrist for Shuji, but it struck her now that even a single night away from home could easily blow up into something much bigger. Wasn't there something far more vital for her to be doing than staying in Atami tonight? If she had time to soak in some hot springs bath, shouldn't she be sitting down face to face with her husband and getting all her discontents and grievances and doubts out into the open?

"You know what?" Sayoko said as her companion stepped over the guardrail separating t h e beach from the road. Aoi swung around to look at her. "If we don't have a reservation anyway, how about we just go on home today? Maybe find a nice place to eat first, and then go on home."

"Why do you say that? If you're worried about the cost, it's no sweat. I'm treating," she said easily. Sayoko thought she'd grown accustomed to Aoi's glib ways by now, but the words stuck cloyingly in her ears.

"It's not that," Sayoko said. "I didn't bring a change of clothes for Akari, and sleeping in a strange place, she might wet the bed or wake up crying."

"That's no problem. If she needs clean clothes, we'll go buy some,"

Aoi said cheerfully. "I'm sure we can find a kiddiewear store in the shopping arcade. And it won't bother me if she wets the bed or cries."

As she listened to this, it suddenly dawned on Sayoko how utterly different their two worlds were. Was Aoi going to take out her wallet and offer to pay again at the kiddiewear shop? Would she really remain so unperturbed as she watched Sayoko frantically changing wet bedding or trying to quiet her sobbing child?

"I'd love to go on to Hamamatsu or Osaka or wherever," Sayoko 199

said, forcing a smile. "But running away isn't going to get me anywhere, you know. And besides, the day after tomorrow it's back to work already. Time to wrestle with our responsibilities again. We're not schoolkids who can fritter our days away at the beach anymore."

The smile dissolved from Aoi's face and a hollow blankness spread in its place. "Running away?" she murmured in a barely audible voice.

Taking alarm at the sudden change in her, Sayoko hastened to explain. "I was thinking maybe I could teach my husband a lesson by going away for a night without his consent," she said. "But I realized, just running away from my problems like that isn't going to accomplish anything. The thing is, I really do feel like I could go to Osaka with you, or to the ends of the earth, so at this rate I could wind up abandoning my husband for good."