mothers and sons
suzanne kamata
I'm at the playground, sitting on a swing. There's a temple next door and, from time to time, the suggestion of incense wafts over. The chains holding me squeak as I sway, rutting a groove in the dirt beneath me. With the heel of my sneaker I dig up a child's barrette. My throat clogs.
I'm sitting on a swing, recalling how he sat here, too. He soared high above the ground, shrieking.
A little while ago an elderly woman was pulling weeds behind the slide.
“Where are you from?” she asked me in Japanese.
“America.” I said it with pride, in that “don't -you -wish-you -could -be -so -lucky” tone.
“Ah, so.” She nodded. The skin around her eyes crinkled, but her smile was stiff. She seemed to be reflecting, remembering, and she turned away. Maybe she'd heard about me.
Finally, the hour arrives. The hour of soldier-suited children lugging red satchels, kicking at rocks and cans as they go along. They pass in groups of three or four, sometimes bumping each other and laughing. Usually there is one serious older child leading the way. Sometimes a mother.
I stub out my cigarette in the sand. I bury it deep, pat the dirt over it. I shade my eyes against the mid-afternoon glare and look down the lane.
Even from a distance I know exactly which one is him. He is with two other boys, but he scuffles along, chin to chest, ignoring the others. His yellow hat is wadded into his jacket pocket. The brass buttons of his blazer catch the sun. He is coming this way.
I rise from the swing, heart pounding. I walk to the edge of the playground. A quartet of pony-tailed girls crosses to the other side of the road when they see me. They giggle behind their little hands. I barely hear them. He is coming closer, but he hasn't looked up yet. I see that his dark brown hair is longer than before, brushing over his ears. He is deeply tanned from outdoor play. An adhesive bandage is pasted over his left knee.
One of his friends grabs the yellow hat from his pocket and tosses it into the air.
“Oi,” he says, irritated. “Kaeshite.” Give it back. He swipes at the boy's head.
The other two boys toss the hat back and forth, but I can tell from their high, excited voices, from the way that they keep in line, that they are teasing him out of affection. They are not bullies, not the little monsters who steal lunch money and wield knives that you read about in the newspaper. They are only trying to pull him out of himself, to bring his attention to them.
I am so caught up in watching them that I almost forget why I am here. Remembering, I raise my hand as far as my temple and call out, “Kei!”
He looks up, searches for a moment, and finds me.
From this close I can see the lush fringe of his lashes, the dimples in his cheeks. In his eyes, I detect yearning. Just for a moment. Because then, out of nowhere, his grandmother appears. She must have seen me. She must have noticed me even as I stood entranced by this boy. She runs to him and the others fall away.
“Kei!” I shout again, but she won't let him look at me.
She holds his head firmly against her side and rushes him off down the street and I can do nothing but watch.
I have lost him again. I have lost my son Kei.
The last time Kei and I were together, I took him to McDonald's, the one near the train station. He ate a cheeseburger (minus the pickles), an order of fries (plus half of mine), and a little cup of vanilla ice cream. I can still see the smear of sticky white on his upper lip.
“I've got tickets to a soccer game. Semi-professional,” I said. "Do you want to go?"
His smile blasted like a hundred suns. “When? When?” His hand tugged on mine, as if he wanted to drag me off to the playing field right then.
“Next Saturday,” I said. “We can take our lunch and eat it in the stands.” I was thinking about how I'd get up early and mold rice balls in my hands, how I'd fill each one with a different surprise: pickled plums, bonito flakes sprinkled with soy sauce, tuna and mayonnaise. “What's your favorite pro team?” I asked.
“The Antlers,” he said.
I nodded. Next chance, I'd watch them on TV.
“They've got Kazu. He's my hero.”
I reached over and wiped the ice cream from his lip with my finger. “Well, you know what? You're my hero. I love you more than anything else in the world.”
He squirmed, but he was smiling. “I love you too, Mom. So why can't I live with you?”
The rumble of a train pulling into the station resonated on my bones. What if we just hopped aboard one of those cars and let it carry us as far as it would go?
“You know what? I want you to live with me, but Obasan and Daddy want you to live with them. It's two against one.” I'd meant to speak lightly, but his eyes darkened. “I'm going to get you back,” I said. “I'll find a way for us to be together. I promise you. Anyway, you've got soccer practice, right?”
His features softened. He nodded.
“So let's get you back home. And then you can start ticking off the days till the big game next week-end.”
On the following Saturday, I showed up at the appointed time and rang the doorbell. Not even door-to-door salesmen bothered with the bell. Most visitors just went ahead and slid the door open and called out a greeting, since the entryway was considered public space. But I, who'd once lived in this house, could not bring myself to do that.
I could hear the singsong chime on the other side of the door, then footsteps. Not the sound of my son's puppy-dog scramble, but the measured, muted steps of Yusuke's mother.
She slid open the door and raised her eyebrows. “Hai?”
“I've come to pick up Kei for the soccer game. I promised him—”
“Oh, well, I'm sorry. He's not here now. He went to Awajishima for the day with a friend.”
“Awaji Island? To the amusement park? To the zoo with koalas?” I'd taken him there just two weeks before. “But we had plans. I told you. I told Yusuke.”
She shrugged. Her hand was on the door, eager to pull it shut. “I guess Kei changed his mind.”
I had never hated her so much as I did at that moment. I suddenly knew that she had been plotting against me.
It is evening, hours after I sat in the park, watching my son. I am at the table with a bowl of cream stew, thinking about Kei. I'm already dressed for work, in a black silk ensemble that I wore two nights ago and haven't yet washed. It still smells of cigarettes, even though I'd aired it out on the balcony. I'm eating my cream stew, thinking about the way the sunlight ignited Kei's hair, the ginger strands, when the doorbell rings.
I never answer the door unless I am expecting company. Most of the time, I don't even bother to glance through the peephole. We get a lot of door-to-door salespeople in this apartment complex. They peddle everything from bras to strawberries. And I, the fallen foreigner, get a good number of visits from cruel-hearted children. They come to pester and gawk. They stuff used tissues and wads of chewed gum through my mail slot. Once, a dead bird.
The doorbell chimes again and again. I count up to ten, and then I plug my ears with my fingers.
Now there is pounding. The door vibrates. I hear the scuffle of feet and then a phlegmy cough and I know that it is some man and that he is after me.
I think of turning off the lights, but that would give me away. I hold my breath until the pounding stops and the footsteps click down the corridor. I listen to the elevator doors sliding open and closed, to the labored grind of machinery as my visitor is lowered to the first floor. A car door, opening and slamming. The rev of a souped-up engine.
I've lost my appetite. I dump my stew, the bits of carrots and pork, into the trash and put on lipstick: Rabblerouser Red.
It takes a shot of whiskey to get me out the door. I need that hot sharp burst for the courage to get me down the dark hall and through the ill-lit streets. I down another shot for an extra jolt of confidence and then I splash on some cologne and am headed for work.
I think about Veronica and what I will tell her. She, more than anyone else I know, will understand the pain that's cracking me apart.
Veronica hasn't seen her own little boy in three years, not since she left him behind in Manila to come to Japan and earn money for his support. The boy's father was a U.S. marine, a good old boy from Kentucky, and although he married Veronica, the marriage didn't last. He shipped out, leaving his ex-wife and child behind, and Veronica has heard nothing since.
Now the boy lives with her mother. The grandmother sends the photos that Veronica shows me when we don't have any customers. The boy's milk tea eyes are shy. He is missing his front teeth. Sometimes they talk on the phone, and the next evening Veronica will show up with a heavily powdered nose and red veins shooting across her pupils.
I think about Veronica all the way to the club, and I'm able to put the pounding and the heavy footsteps out of my head. When I reach the entrance, my shoulders loosen. I let the breath flow out of my lungs.
Mama Morita welcomed me back, no questions asked, when I showed up on her doorstep a year ago.
“You're like a daughter to me,” she'd said, embracing me. Hugs are rare in Japan, and I'd clung to her for a good five minutes.
I'd spilled my story—the full schedule of private English lessons that had dwindled into nothing, the unpaid rent, the threatened evictions. My empty refrigerator. All I had left was a cupboard full of cans of Spaghettio's—Kei's favorite—that I had been tending like a shrine.
“You can start working again tonight, if you like,” Mama Morita had said. She patted my hand. Her heavy rings clunked against my knuckles.
And so here I am, a year later, still working as a bar hostess.
The other women are gathered, lounging on the cushioned stools, like a scene out of a harem. Veronica, in a peony-painted cheongsam, is in the back painting Betty's fingernails. How nice it would be if we could just lock the doors and drink and gab all night long without fingers creeping up our thighs. The thought has barely entered my mind when our first customer of the evening breezes in.
We all go quiet at once. I hear a sharp intake of breath. I know it isn't Mama Morita. She is all charm as she floats to the doorway.
They man is wearing a gaudy aloha shirt, the short sleeves revealing intricately tattooed forearms. His hair is permed and a gold toothpick flashes at the corner of his mouth. I can't see his eyes behind the dark sunglasses. I feel like laughing because he is nearly a caricature of a Japanese gangster. But of course I don't laugh because I know almost immediately that he is here for me.
“Jill, why don't you keep this gentleman company.” Mama Morita has her arm though his as she escorts him to my table. She nods to another hostess who busies herself preparing a tray of peanuts and liquor.
I know that I am relatively safe here. Mama Morita will be behind the bar, keeping on eye on things, and there are witnesses all around. I sit there and wait for him to speak.
He isn't interested in chit chat.
“I've heard that you've been bothering the Yamashiro's son.”
He uses the word “chonan,” to indicate eldest son, heir.
“He's my child,” I say. I should be scared, I know, but I feel as if I'm in a B-movie, a comic book.
Mama Morita sets a couple of drinks before us, and just to show this thug how little I respect him, I take a swig before he's even touched his glass. She's mixed them especially strong and the drink kicks in right away.
“Do you have any children?” I ask. “Do you have a son?”
He ignores me. “You're working illegally as a hostess on a tourist visa,” he says. He looks around the bar, rests his gaze on the beautiful Veronica, on Betty with her vermilion fingernails. “And so are they.”
The threat is clear. He means to have me deported, to destroy my benefactor's business. But I won't be cowed.
What I'm thinking is: My son is in the hands of crooks and I don't want him growing up in that house.
I decide to bluff. I bow my head, force tears into my eyes. “Wakarimashita,” I say. “I understand.”
He smiles then and I get a good look at all of his silver teeth. He downs his drink with one tip of the glass and then he leaves without paying.
No one tries to stop him.
About once a month, Veronica and I have dinner together. We take turns cooking comfort food for one another. For me, it's often macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, eggs scrambled with smoked salmon.
On this evening, we sit in Veronica's impeccable apartment—no dust to write your name in here—the windows pushed open to welcome sea air, Filipino pop music spilling from the stereo. We stretch out on tatami, our heads cushioned by zabuton.
Veronica's got a dish of adobo on the stove. She says that the vinegary aroma brings back memories of Cebu.
"Do you think you'll ever go back?" I ask her. We've had this conversation before. It's almost a ritual by now.
“Someday,” she says, twining her black hair around her hands. Her red fingernails peek out from among the strands. “How about you? Do you want to go back to your country?”
“Someday.” I almost tell her then what I've got planned. I'm bursting to confide, but it's a dangerous thing. I stopper my mouth with a beer bottle and take a long swig.
And then we move on to our next favorite topic, our dreams of true love.
“He'll be tall,” Veronica says. “A basketball player.”
I stretch out admiring my glitter-painted toenails. “Mine will look like Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously.” I giggle. “He'll write haiku all over my naked body. With his tongue.”
Veronica wrinkles her nose. “That's just sex. I want somebody who'll make chicken soup when I'm sick in bed. A guy who will help Luis with his homework and teach him how to fix a car.”
I nod. It's been awhile since I've been laid, so I tend to get distracted. “I want a guy who will hold back my hair when I'm throwing up in the toilet bowl. I want a man who'll pick his socks up off the floor.”
Veronica goes over to the refrigerator and gets herself another bottle of beer. She pries off the cap and takes her drink to the window, looks out to sea. Our momentum is lost.
“His birthday is tomorrow,” she says, in barely a whisper. “He'll be nine. Can you believe it?”
I reach out and touch her shoulder, feel her wilting under my fingers. “Men,”I say softly. “Who needs them anyway?”
But the thing is, we do need them. We need them sitting on those worn, crushed velvet chairs, sucking up drinks, sharing their million and one woes so that we can take their money and pay our rent, save up for plane tickets and long-distance phone calls.
The next evening, Veronica and I are both a little hung-over from too many beers, depleted by confessions. But we put on our make-up and our almost-silk polyester dresses and arrange ourselves at the bar.
The first group to come in is from the board of education. They're already wobbly and as red as strawberries from an earlier party. Mama Morita guides them into a corner and they flop into chairs, loosen their ties, and begin passing around the songbook.
Veronica goes over with a little notebook to write down their selections. One guy with a bad toupee tries to pull her onto his lap, but she swats his hand away. “Dame, dame,”she says, waggling her finger. “Be a good boy now.”
Betty and Yoko start pouring whiskey. The more these guys drink, the more money we make. We've devised a repertoire of drinking games, some recalled from my American university days. Betty takes a coin out of her pocket and I see that she's about to engage them in a round of “quarters.”
I'm still sitting at the bar, nursing a seltzer. Mama Morita is saving me. She's got four Filipinas, but I'm the only American.
A couple more groups come in—bankers, and then some insurance guys, and then there's only one hostess left. Me.
The door swings open again and a man steps in. He's rather portly with thinning hair. His eyes, behind dark-rimmed glasses, turn down at the corners, giving him an air of perpetual melancholy. Unlike our other customers this evening, this one walks in sober. He stands in the doorway looking slightly bewildered, but only for a heartbeat. Mama Morita glides over as soon as she sees him and takes his arm. She settles him at a table. He sits facing outward with a view of the room. Before he has time to feel lonely, I sashay over with a smile.
“Konbanwa.”
He half-rises and bows. “Dozo, dozo.”
I wonder if this is his first time in a hostess bar.
“How about a whiskey?” I ask in Japanese.
He nods vigorously and I get to pouring drinks. “Karaoke?” I ask, proffering the songbook.
“No, no.” The guy actually blushes. “Uta ga heta.” I can't sing.
“Well, then,” I slide into my Marlene Dietrich bargirl croon. “How about if I sing something for you?”
He nods again, even more vigorously than before. “That would be fine.”
We engage in more chitchat till my number comes up.
Veronica brings the mike over, leaning in just enough for my guy to catch a whiff of her perfume. He gazes up into her face, into her smile, and blinks a few times. He watches as she whirls away from us, back to the table with the superintendent of schools. He stares at her while I sing, “Country roads, take me home to the place I belong…” His eyes are still on her when I sit back down beside him.
“Shima-san,” I say, pressing a hand on his arm. “Did you like my song? How about if I refill your glass?”
He turns to me as if waking from a dream.
A month later, I'm stirring grits, thinking about Veronica and Luis. I try to imagine what it would be like to relinquish the care of one's son to another willingly. I look at her, smoking at my kitchen table, and wonder how she had felt when she'd left her son behind.
“So what is that you're making?” she asks.
“Shrimp and hominy grits. Good for the soul.”
She smirks. She was less than impressed with the Spaghettios I served up last time, but I know she'll eat up anyway.
“Ready for another drink?” I ask her.
“Sure.” She holds out her empty glass.
We are having watermelon daiquiris. I refill her tumbler with pink sludge. “So how are things going with Shima-san?” I ask.
“Okay,” she says, and shrugs.
She's already told me that she's been out to dinner with him. He sends her hibsicuses and santan, which Veronica suspects he has imported from the Phillipines. Boxes of cookies from Negros.
“Do you think he'll ask you to marry him?”
She sighs and looks out the window, past the palm trees, beyond the sun-bleached sand to the horizon. “He's asked me already. He says that Luis can come and live with us. My mother, too.”
I know that she doesn't love this guy. She isn't even attracted to him. And yet I know that she will go ahead and marry him. “Maybe you'll meet someone else,” I say.
She shakes her head, swinging her curtain of hair. “I miss Luis. I don't want to wait any longer. And I'm tired of the Cha Cha Club.”
All this talk has unsettled my stomach. I feel the flutter of nervousness when I should be getting hungry. The grits are starting to congeal in the pan.
Veronica shrugs and gestures to the table set with paper plates. “Let's eat,” she says. And we do.
The lawyer's office looked like my husband's office, or like every other office I'd seen in Japan—big desk, dark paneled walls, black vinyl sofas flanking what my mother would call a coffee table, but was more accurately a place to set down down tea cups. On Yusuke's office walls there were paintings. Gotonda-san's walls were bare, save for some official looking documents stamped with orange ink, which I took to be his licenses. Of course there were no photos of his family around. There wouldn't be.
Gotonda-san stared at me for a moment through his thickly framed glasses. “Hai?”
I introduced myself. “I've been told you speak English,” I said.
He froze.
I decided to rephrase in Japanese. “Eigo shaberimasu ka?”
“Chotto,” he replied. He pinched the air to show me how much he could understand. Only about a centimeter.
I assumed he'd heard all about me from Mama Morita. When I invoked her name, he seemed to remember a few details. He stood up, lit a cigarette, and started nodding vigorously. His glasses slid down his nose. “Sit, sit,”he said, waving to the sofa. He laid a yellow legal pad on the table.
“I ask you some questions,” he said.
I sat down and tapped out a cigarette of my own.
“Do you work?”
“Yes. I'm a hostess at the Cha Cha Club.” No use perjuring myself.
He nodded again several times, pushed his glasses up his nose, and took a drag. The ash on his cigarette was growing perilously long.
“You were faithful to Yamashiro-san?”
“Yes. Completely.”
I had been an exemplary Japanese wife, had I not? I'd spent six years under the watchful eyes of Okasan. There was no way she could accuse me of an affair.
I riffled through my past, through my conversations with Yusuke. Had I told him about the Prozac? About the pot I smoked in college? About posing in the nude for the life drawing class?
Was I going to lose custody because I smoked cigarettes?
Gotonda-san puffed his own cigarette and shook his head. “You know,” he said, finally looking at me, “It's not a crime in Japan to kidnap your own child.”
I'm stepping into the Silver Bell Wedding Chapel in heels and a pastel polyester suit. The clothes are on loan from Betty. I don't have much in my closet these days besides surf wear and sleazy hostess attire. Certainly nothing for a church wedding. But this isn't really a church. It's a steepled playhouse on the roof of a hotel. The Caucasian clergyman in the choir robe isn't really a minister, either. He's probably an English teacher Monday through Friday, an actor-for-hire when Western-style wedding comes up.
I slide into a pew at the front, next to Mama Morita. She's already got her hankie ready. I'm hoping her mascara is waterproof. I remember that Mama-san ever took vows herself, and I wonder if, at times like these, she has regrets. Of course, there is still time. You never know.
She reaches over and squeezes my hand. I pat hers back, scratching my palm on her rings.
A few more guests bustle into the chapel and then the “minister” nods to the organist, a Japanese woman in hot pink tulle, and Braham's wedding march fills our ears.
There are no little girls strewing rose petals, no parade of bridesmaids and ushers. Everyone turns to the entrance at the end of the aisle, but no one comes. Has she changed her mind? I look around the room, trying to read the faces of the others. It's then that I spot the tiny Filipina woman in glasses and a bun, and the coffee-colored boy next to her. His hair still has comb tracks. His is wearing a powder blue suit. His face suddenly lights up and I turn to see that the doorway has filled with a cloud of white froth. The bride's two hour make-up job is concealed by a veil. She moves slowly past the pews, in time with the music. She walks by herself. No one is giving this woman away. She has decided everything on her own.
As she approaches the altar, her waiting groom, the bursts of flowers, I see that the boy is leaning toward her. And Veronica, she's not looking at her husband-to-be; even through the lace I can see that her gaze is directed at him. Her son. Luis. She winks at him and takes her place in front of Mr. Shima. He hesitates, then takes her hands, holds them as if they might break.
As the ceremony gets underway, I find myself diving into my purse for a tissue. Such plain hope on Shima-san's face! And Veronica's look of cool resignation. I pray that she will learn to love him. I wish them a thousand years of happiness—Veronica, Mr. Shima and Luis.
It's time for me to get my son back.
about the author
Suzanne Kamata lives in Shikoku, Japan, with her husband and bi-cultural
twins. Her fiction has appeared online in Literarymama.com and
Talesmag.com. She is the editor of The Broken Bridge: Fiction from
Expatriates in Literary Japan and the author of River of Dolls, a short
story collection forthcoming from Curbstone Press.
return to archive >
