one at a time. The first was before you were born. The next was after you started school. Since then, let’s see, I must have worn out two, maybe three.
Who cares if it’s ripped, it serves me perfectly well, I don’t need another. I won’t replace it, she would say, day after day, walking with her torn, misshapen basket. Only when the tears had outgrown mere tears would she give in and grudgingly buy a new one.
Another of the same, please, she would say, proffering the battered basket. The store, run by an aged couple, sold sundry household items. Straw hats, tin hot-water bottles, screws and nails, and shopping baskets. A large S-shaped metal hook hung from a rod that cut across the store, just below the ceiling, and from its tail-like bottom curve two or three baskets dangled.
The same kind, sure thing, hold on a second, the old woman replied. Without a word her husband stood on tiptoe and lifted a basket from the hook. The sunlight has faded it, I’ll give you a discount on it. A hundred yen off. I remember her saying that once. The baskets were unadorned, roughly woven, and in the summer the jutting bits of straw would prick your bare arm. You get this same basket every time, don’t you? Don’t you ever want to try another kind? the old woman asked. I never tire of this one. It’s easy to carry, Mother said, and curtly handed her the money.
I go there once in however many years, and every time that woman says the same thing, Mother grumbled when we left the store. There was ice in her voice. I glanced up, surprised, and there was a smile on her face. There was ice in her smile.
Mother took four quarters of a napa cabbage from the basket. Chrysanthemum leaves and shiitake. For a second the air smelled green.
After dinner the television came on.
When we had dredged the final strands of udon from the bottom of the earthenware pot, I lifted it, putting a dishrag between the handles and my palms, just in case, though it was no longer too hot to carry with bare hands, and made for the kitchen. The television clicked on.
“It came on by itself!” Momo cried, laughing.
“No one even touched it!” Mother laughed, too.
Seconds later, a noise like the cascading chirp of an alarm clock. It’s one of those, Momo said, gesturing toward a row of knobs. A red light glimmered there. It says alarm, Momo said. She pressed the red light with her fingertip. The chirping stopped. The television stayed on.
It was eight o’clock on the dot. Somehow, without our knowing it, the alarm had been set. Who did it? Momo laughed again. Her laughter is childlike. I set the pot in the sink, turned the faucet on, filled it to the brim. Let it soak, I thought as I turned the faucet off. There are times, when we do a thing, when we think it in words, and there are times when we think it not in words but in pictures, and there are times when we think nothing. Let it soak, I said to myself once again, to see how it felt.
Grandma, Momo asked, did you do it? It wasn’t me, Mother answered. Who knew it had an alarm, I had no idea. She takes the television manual from its drawer, puts on her reading glasses, starts reading. I guess it must have been set for eight o’clock when we bought it. It never went off before, though. It’s funny, I wonder why, all of a sudden.
The television was still on. A man appeared on the screen, running. The picture cut to a blue sky. Waves surging on the shore. Manazuru. I said the name to myself, watching the man on the screen. The slight hollow of his cheeks made him more handsome. The name Manazuru and the image of the man drift apart without ever having fused. Manazuru. I hadn’t repeated the word, but the feeling lingered.
The screen went dark with a click. Momo had the remote control.
My husband’s name was Rei. I only called him by his family name, Yanagimoto, once. The first time we met, repeating after the person who introduced us, to make sure I had heard correctly. Only that once.
I had trouble calling him by his name at first. I wanted to, I had no choice, but I mumbled. I tried to avoid speaking his name, and my speech grew strained. As if something terrible were sitting right beside me, on one side, and since it wouldn’t do to let him see too clearly how I was avoiding it, I struggled to maintain my poise while simultaneously, unconsciously, I shrank, my body pulled away, my motions forced, unnatural—that was the feeling, as my speech unraveled.
“So . . . how was it?”
“What, how was what?”
“Yesterday’s event, you said you were going to.”
I wanted to ask who had been at a gathering he’d gone to, what they had talked about, but when I couldn’t say his name even this simple question died on my lips. Then one day his name exploded from me like a cork from a bottle, and it was no longer a problem. Sometimes, however, even so, it unraveled. Because when I said his name, my mouth grew moist.
He called me Kei right away, very easily. He liked to build things. I hear the sound of him calling me, Kei, his voice, as he saws the wood, wields his hammer, assembles the pieces. The nails sank easily into the rattling board. The hard wood seemed as soft as sand. Sometimes a nail would bend under the powerful blow of the hammer, but the heads always looked new, unblemished, as though they had been pressed in with a soft rubber ball.
“I love how neat the nails are,” I said.
Rei smiled. “Say my name,” he said suddenly.
R-e-i. I felt jittery saying it. Clasping two nails between his fingers, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine. Don’t. I drew back, slightly, and Rei’s shoulders stiffened. Oh, I thought, then hurriedly spoke his name again. R-e-i. The nails dropped from his fingers. He picked them up immediately. The tips are sharp. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt. He had his excuse. He gathered the nails, held them to the board, lost himself in their immersion in the wood. He didn’t turn to face me again.
His creation became a shelf for Momo’s picture books. It is still there, in her room.
I debated whether or not to take down the nameplate: yanagimoto.
Five years had passed since Rei disappeared, and I had admitted to myself that he wouldn’t be back. The nameplate became a question.
It was too soon for him to be declared legally dead, but enough time had passed for a divorce. Suddenly I disliked having to live my life in the shadow of my husband’s nameplate. Now that we were living with Mother, it hung beside a second nameplate, tokunaga, my maiden name, and I also disliked seeing them there, side by side.
“Are you mad at him?” I asked myself. I was alone. Momo would be in her morning class at elementary school, sitting there in the middle of the classroom, staring blankly at the blackboard; Mother hadn’t yet emerged from her room—she takes sleep in little snatches, that is how she is made, sometimes at odd early morning times I would be startled to find her sitting quietly in the kitchen—I sat alone now and asked myself, straight as could be, Are you mad at him?
“Yes, I’m mad.” The answer came. I myself, answering myself.
Maybe mad is too strong a word. No, it isn’t too strong, if anything it’s too weak. I’m mad at Rei. I need, in my anger, to know why he left.
I didn’t take down the nameplate. I still go by his name. I am mad, but my anger assumes no form, it is in the cloaked depths, deep in my body’s core, that I rage at my husband.The core of me rages, but it also yearns. I have Seiji, but there is something that I can’t keep down when I am with him. Rei was the only one. Not just because he was my husband, but because he was the man he was, he was Rei, with him I could keep it down.
Maybe that was why Mother disliked him. Something close made distant, he knew how to carry things, leaving behind no fragments or clippings, his box was the right size, nothing had to be pushed in and no empty spaces remained, he held me ever so easily, he carried me away. I had been so close, and that man, Rei, distanced me, Mother’s daughter.
Now that we were living together again, were we close? Three women, our three bodies. Like spheres joined in motion, that is how we are. Not concentric spheres, each sphere cradles its own center, not flat but full,