The Telling. Zoe Zolbrod

older student by the time he returned to re-enroll, Toshi lived in an apartment near campus, but he brought his girlfriend to our house for dinner regularly. She was an artist who’d defected from mainland China, a striking and interesting person. I remember her sitting in the visitor’s spot at our dining room table, her back to the bay window so that from my position across from her she was silhouetted by the black night.

      We were glad to have her; she was easier to converse with than Toshi. One evening after the meal, she moved beyond small talk when conversation turned to life in China. Her voice became fierce, almost shrill, as she tried to explain to us what her family had endured during the Cultural Revolution—forced relocation, near-starvation. I could sense the brutal dissonance she was experiencing, her need to emphasize the reality of her past as she found herself in these surreal surroundings, a homey place across the world from the home she might never be able to return to. The crack in her composure only made me admire her more. She brought a breath of the world to our house, an air of significance.

      The people who traveled through our dining room because of Toshi tended to do that—suggest something beyond our hectic routine out there in the woods, where we typically cycled through the same faces and places week after week, year after year.

      My uncle visited us when Toshi had established himself outside our home, but still in our town. Physically, Morris resembled a shorter and clean-shaven version of my own father, and the familiar aspects of this unfamiliar person created an off-balance curiosity within me, a sense I still associate with extended family. My uncle was a practicing Buddhist, and he had an air of equanimity—in my memories he’s always wearing the same slight smile—but he carried tension with him into the house. Perhaps it came from the pressure of everyone else wearing that same slight smile, too, even if they felt something other than the mild acceptance it suggested. Decades later, my father told me how anxious Toshi became in his father’s presence, but I had intuited that even as a child.

      One morning at breakfast my uncle asked me if I’d like to hear some Japanese poetry. I said yes, of course—I don’t recall my exact age, but I was old enough to be polite, probably even old enough to want to broaden my horizons. He took a breath, fixed his eyes on mine, and let out a loud, long, undulating tone in a pitch I’d never heard before, then moved into something I could recognize as neither poem, song, nor chant but only as weird. I struggled to contain my embarrassed laughter. My little brother peeked his head in the room, a stricken expression on his face, and then fled. There was a split-second pause, just long enough for me to quit holding my breath and begin congratulating myself on winning the contest of composure. But no, my uncle was not finished; he was just inhaling deeply to hold another long warbling note that led to another verse. And then there was another. And another. And more. His eyes never wandered from mine. He seemed scarcely to blink. My urge to laugh waxed and waned, but I managed not to succumb to hysterics, even when my face felt like it was going to break. Finally, it was over. My uncle, with his little smile and measured voice, explained to me in some detail what I had just heard. He may have mentioned the occasions when the poem was sung, its meaning, its historical origins, I don’t know. I was waiting for the kind of bridge-building comment my parents would have been likely to make, some acknowledgement that to a child raised in Pennsylvania the long chant must have appeared strange in the extreme, but it didn’t come.

      “That’s interesting,” I said when he ended his explanation. I forced an extra bit of umph into my pasted-on smile and retreated to my room.

      At another point when Toshi was no longer sleeping at our house but when I was still quite young, his mother, Chiyo, came to our home for an afternoon, visiting from out of state. Before her arrival, the air of an occasion was evident, as well as the strain. And then there she was, the same petite woman whose image I had admired in my grandparent’s stairwell, but now quite American in appearance. Instead of boasting ivory sticks and combs, her black hair was cut short and styled like Dorothy Hamill’s. She wore a rabbit fur jacket, tight jeans, and heeled boots. She spoke very softly. We all sat properly in the living room as my parents made polite inquiries. After a decent interval they suggested—as they’d prepped Toshi they would—that mother and son might like to take a walk in the woods across the street to have some time together.

      As soon as they left I went to get my friend down the street, and we followed, spying. We saw them from a distance, on the other side of the field where we sometimes played kickball. They looked like a couple: Toshi taller, bent towards his delicate companion almost protectively; two handsome, sleek people in a clearing in the woods, dappled in yellow-green light.

      Where did she come from that day? She must have driven. Our town was near nothing. The closest airport was two hours away. She did not sleep at our house. She did not, to my recollection, even take Toshi out for a meal. What did they say to each other in the woods? What did anyone ever say about the past? Even when he was thrown out of his father’s home, when he ran away from ours, Toshi was not given to—or taken in by—his mother. “She doesn’t have much money,” I recall my father saying. “She lives in just one room.”