Naomi Hirahara - Gasa-Gasa Girl

There was a mini kitchen in the corner, a wire dish rack holding a couple of coffee cups, a plate, and a few upside-down baby bottles. A desk by the hollow fireplace was overburdened by papers and books-it seemed almost as if it were spitting out and rejecting the weight of the information it carried. Mas turned on another lamp by the desk and peered at the books. Most were in English, but a couple were in Japanese. A Japanese-English dictionary, the fat kind that Chizuko had used when she was writing official letters, sat on a shelf. Even though Mas and Chizuko had sent their daughter to Japanese school every Saturday, Mari wouldn’t have anything to do with the language and had forgotten the little that she had learned. Chizuko was offended and sometimes hurt when the teenage Mari had hissed at her in public places: “Speak English, Mom, speak English.”

These couldn’t be Mari’s books: but then again, who else’s would they be? The son-in-law’s?

On the shelf next to the dictionary were a couple of photographs: the same one of the baby Takeo that Mari had sent to Mas, and a large one of Mari with her pale and scraggly husband, Lloyd, standing on some cement stairs leading to an official government building. Mas had not seen Lloyd for years, and that absence hadn’t done Lloyd any good. Instead of looking more refined and clean-cut, his hair was down to his shoulders and barely combed. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a tan suit, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. He was a no-good gardener, just like Mas. But while Mas was a Kibei, Lloyd was a hakujin man, over six feet tall. He had absolutely no excuse for falling into the same line of work as desperate men.

Taped to the wall over the desk was a grainy photocopy of a man’s image. Mas adjusted his Rite Aid glasses. A Japanese man wearing a straw hat and suit. A shadow fell on half the man’s face, but he looked important. Erai: a big-boss type. The image was black-and-white and had obviously been taken more than half a century ago, maybe in the 1920s or 1930s, about the time Mas was born.

The disorganized books and papers on the desk didn’t make much sense: Mari had always been like Chizuko, who’d kept their home in Altadena spotless. Every kitchen knife was sharpened (that part done by Mas after much nagging from Chizuko) and arranged by size in one of the kitchen drawers. The bills were paid immediately and filed away. When she was a child, Mari herself had lined up her pencil erasers by size at the top of the pink desk Mas had built for her. A few of them were those strange white Japanese ones wrapped in colorful cardboard sleeves. At one time they smelled like sugary flowers, but now, still left on the pink desk in Mas’s silent house, they were virtually odorless.

Something else was wrong with the Park Slope apartment. Mas had taken on a new customer a few months ago, a young couple with a baby, in Pasadena. Their wood-framed house had a sloping front yard-something Mas would have never taken on in his heyday. But now competition was worse than ever and he couldn’t afford to be choosy. Every time he waited at the door to talk to the missus, he noticed the trail of blocks, overturned plastic toys, and abandoned blankets. A disaster that only a baby could create. This front room had little sign of that.

Mas went into the back room, the bedroom. Again he turned on a light, the lamp beside the bed. Sure enough, a small crib stood in the corner. A few stuffed animals and packages of disposable diapers. By the crib was a large fluorescent lamp, almost like the ones Mas had seen in orchid greenhouses. What kind of strange life was Mari leading with this giant hakujin gardener?

A door in the bedroom led to a small backyard outside. Through the bedroom window, Mas could see that it had started to rain. He turned the double lock and opened the door. Finally, a faint patch of green, mixed in with dirt and gray.

Mas let the drizzle wet his hair, which had been combed back with Three Flowers oil, like always. He drew up the collar of his jacket and went up the steps to the miserable garden. Its condition didn’t surprise Mas. Most gardeners were too busy with other people’s gardens to put much energy into their own. Mas’s front yard had its share of dandelions, and the backyard would have been completely grim if it had not been for Chizuko’s leftover buckets of cymbidium. As he stumbled over some icy gravel, he thought he heard the ringing of a telephone in the distance. Not my phone, he thought, going over to examine a fancy iron bench and some metal rabbits and ducks. The square of green looked like last season’s Bermuda grass.

Someone had attempted to plant a few daffodils, and they were bravely breaking through the chocolate brown soil. The plum blossoms on the garden’s sole tree were still tightly closed, awaiting the warmth of the spring sun.

Before Mas could take further inventory of the hibernating plants, he noticed a figure at the open door. The son-in-law, a skeleton of a man, his dirty blond hair hanging down his head like seaweed. His face was ashen gray. Mas shoved his hands in his coat pockets and walked back to the apartment, preparing himself for the fake niceties that relatives who were virtual strangers said to one another at holidays and funerals.

But the son-in-law didn’t even bother to smile. “Mari and Takeo aren’t here,” Lloyd said. “And I’m not sure exactly where they are.”

The son-in-law was on the phone, sitting on the stairs that led to a wall. Mas remained seated in a beat-up easy chair in the bedroom and recalled the telephone message that Lloyd had just replayed for him in the kitchen. It was an old answering machine, the kind with a large dial for play and rewind.

“I’m not sure how I ended up here.” Mari’s voice, which had once been as solid and defined as polished stones, now sounded limp and flimsy. “I was taking Takeo for a walk, and before I knew it, we were on the subway, and now we’re in Manhattan. I think we’ll just stay the night over here. I’ll call you back later.”

In the other room, Lloyd had apparently gotten up from the nowhere stairs and was pacing on the hardwood floors in his work boots. He was still on the phone, perhaps with one of their friends. “She turned off her cell phone,” Lloyd was saying, “or else forgot to charge it again. I don’t know what’s going on with her.” And then in a hushed tone that Mas could still hear: “Her dad is here for the first time, for God’s sake. Why would she just take off like that?”

Mas pressed the palms of his hands against the arms of the chair. He ached for a cigarette, but hadn’t had time to stop by a grocery store.

Lloyd ended the phone call soon afterward and then stepped into the doorway of the bedroom. “Our friends in the Village are going to call as soon as they see or hear from Mari. I’m sure they’ll turn up somewhere.” Lloyd’s words were spaced out far apart from each other, as if he didn’t quite believe them.

Lloyd ran his hand through his hair, and Mas noticed that instead of a gold or silver wedding ring, he had a black and blue tattoo around his ring finger like a modern-day yakuza. Mas shuddered to think that Mari might have branded herself as well. “The thing I don’t get is,” Lloyd continued, “why would she pull this on the day you’re supposed to arrive?”

Mas traced the back of his dentures with his tongue. This Lloyd Jensen was an amateur. For the length of his body, it seemed that his brain should be much bigger. Obviously, Mari wanted to make sure that her father got a big dose of bachi, retribution, for all those times he had left the house with no word.

“Sure she come back,” Mas said.