Amy Yamada - Bedtime Eyes

The tension between Coco and Jesse got worse and worse. She knew that it would be far better if she just sat him down and talked to him before everything broke down completely, and she also began to realize that she needed to employ a different tactic if she was to communicate with him properly. So eventually, out of sheer necessity, Coco started talking to Jesse more often.

“Will you be eating at home tonight, or going out?”

“Do you want a bath tonight, or a shower?”

“How much lunch money do you need?”

“Do you need me to sign the homework you left in your room?”

Even on this basic level, Coco found it incredibly difficult to communicate with Jesse. It was especially hard because she had always found it so easy to talk with anyone. But she knew she had to keep trying.

She continued to ask him questions every day, and although he just ignored her at first, gradually he began to respond.

“I’m having butter-fried fish with broccoli this evening. I suppose you’ll be going to get a hamburger as usual.”

“Nah, I’m staying in tonight. There’s something I want to watch on TV.”

“So you’re eating here tonight?”

“That’s right. Hey, have you seen Eighteen ? Mr. T’s in it. It’s great!”

So that night they ended up watching a third-rate drama on TV together. Although she was bored by the show, Coco sat and watched it.

Every couple of minutes Jesse would burst out laughing and look over to see her reaction, the look on his face saying, See, I told you it was great, didn’t I? And Coco had to laugh, too.

There’s a knack to looking after kids, she thought to herself. But that just started her thinking about Rick because he was so easy to deal with.

Rick still wasn’t back. He had already taken quite a bit of time off work to go visit his father, and Coco was certain that his extended stay meant that his father’s condition must be getting worse.

From time to time, left together with Jesse in this strange atmosphere, she began to wonder if Rick had ever existed at all.

As their conversation increased beyond what was absolutely necessary, Jesse’s efforts to rub her the wrong way began to taper off a bit, too.

Which is not to say they stopped altogether. For example, once when she wanted to write a letter, she found that the points of all of her pens had been broken. And another day, when she was in the toilet, Jesse was outside with a screwdriver, trying to break the lock.

By now, Coco had started to see these things more as childish pranks than as acts of malevolence, and she stopped taking them so seriously.

Before she had felt that Jesse was trying to hurt her feelings, but now she comforted herself that he was just trying to irritate her. When she screamed in reaction to one of his tricks, he waited in great anticipation for her to start shouting at him. She no longer let every little jab hurt her; rather than thinking of it as psychological torture, she began to see it as little more than physical inconvenience. When it got to the stage where it was nothing more than a minor irritation, she resigned herself to simply accepting Jesse as he was.

“My mother is beautiful, you know,” he said while watching TV in the living room one evening.

“Really?” Coco said, not raising her eyes from the book she was reading, all the while thinking, Uh-oh, here we go again.

“Yeah, and she keeps her house clean, too,” Jesse continued. “She collects Japanese pottery with pictures on it…”

“You don’t say?” said Coco, feigning disinterest, but thinking bitterly, Sounds like she has no taste.

“Her house never gets messy like this,” continued Jesse.

Well, that’s because she never reads any books. And she’s ten years older than me — so of course we’re going to like different things.

“And she’s a great cook, too. My mama can do anything, she’s the best mother in the world.”

So why does your wonderful mother refuse to take care of you then? thought Coco. And if she’s such a great cook, how come all she can manage to throw together is some god-awful concoction of rice and raw eggs?

“I think my dad should go back to her.”

For the first time in quite a while, Coco lost her temper.

“Just shut up!” she shouted. “If your mother is so great, why don’t you get the hell out and go back to her? I love your dad and I volunteered to look after you out of the goodness of my heart. Not because I care about you, but because I love your dad. Do you even know what it is for a woman to love a man? Shit, you don’t know the first thing about women, so don’t start that with me. If you love your mother so much, what’s keeping you here? You lived with her before, didn’t you?”

Jesse glared at her. And while the echoes of her outburst were still ringing in her ears, Coco realized that he was just an eleven-year-old boy, after all. She immediately regretted everything she had said, and in her head she could hear Rick’s voice telling her how, after he’d split up with his wife, Jesse had lived with his mother and she had agreed to take care of him, but after a month he had packed up all his stuff, tied it to j his bike, and come to Rick’s place. Jesse had told him, “Daddy, I can’t live with her.”

So you might expect him to hate his mother, but Jesse never had a bad word to say about her. By putting Coco down all the time, maybe he was just trying to make himself believe that his mother was better than she really was. Maybe it was just a dream he desperately wanted to see come true.

When she was calm, Coco could sympathize with him no matter how hateful he had been. But she still didn’t think that, just because he was a child, it was okay for him to hurt people. She just didn’t think it was right.

She didn’t think she would ever have a child of her own. In fact, the very idea frightened her. What would happen if she fell in love with a guy, they had a child, and then they started hating each other? The evidence of their love would still remain. The child would be living proof, and the idea of looking back on lost love made her feel sick. There was nothing worse than remembering the feelings you used to have for someone you now hated.

Rick accepted Jesse one hundred percent. And Jesse still loved his mother. Coco wondered why blood ties were so strong, and how it was that sexual bonds between a man and a woman could be so weak by comparison. It seemed to her that blood ties could easily break down walls of hatred, and sometimes that they could almost make time stand still.

She was a little ashamed of herself for having told Jesse he knew nothing about women. Perhaps there was nothing more straightforward than the love between a man and a woman, and if that love was a physical love, a sexual love, two people could forgive each other anything.

For that reason Coco thought that if Jesse were a grown man and she were having a sexual relationship with him, then most of these problems wouldn’t even exist. Right now she needed a man. She needed a man’s body. A man to console her, a man to take her in his arms and comfort her.

“Someone’s at the door!”

The sound of Jesse’s voice brought Coco back down to earth again and she hurried to the door. There was Greg, her old boyfriend, standing on the doorstep looking sheepish.

“How did you find me? How did you know I was here?” she asked.

“Hey,” he shot back. “I’m the one with the questions. I thought we were friends, but I had to hear it from Kay that you had become a mother.”

It was typical of Greg to turn up out of the blue like this when she was feeling so down.

Coco invited him in.

“I hear you’re having a hard time with the kid.”