The Peach Ito Threw Rots, and She Becomes a Beast Once Again
ON FEBRUARY 24 I RETURNED to Japan. This time I was alone. Just before I left, I bit my husband. Yes, you read that right. I bit him. A big bite too. It sort of scared me that I’d lost the ability to behave like a normal human being. He freaked out when I left for Japan, and now I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him again.
I left Aiko behind. If worse came to worst, I could go to the bank and shift money between our accounts, send my most important books to my oldest daughter who lived elsewhere, and I could leave the rest behind—yes, I could leave everything behind, bringing only a flash drive for my computer. I could kidnap Aiko as she came out of school, put her on a plane, and take her with me. These thoughts passed through my mind over and over as I planned how I might get her back.
When my husband and I weren’t face-to-face but talking on the phone, we’d sometimes settle down, but before long we’d start arguing about god knows what. I hated, absolutely hated the way he’d fire off arguments, one after another like he was trying to win a debate. I couldn’t take it. When I asked him why he was speaking to me so aggressively, he repeated the word aggressive. I couldn’t see him on the other end of the line, but I could tell he was rolling his eyes, and he let out a contemptuous sigh. You’re the aggressive one. If you think what you did to me the other day wasn’t aggressive, then I don’t know what is. I’m still having trouble walking.
He said, my thigh’s black and blue, so swollen it’s like a peach got stuck in it, and the peach has started to rot.
That’s too bad, I said—a simple, straightforward answer with no ulterior motive. To be honest, that was the only way I knew to express in English what I was thinking, but I must have sounded nonchalant, perhaps even unrepentant. When I suggested he go to the doctor, he responded in a very, very low voice—so low it was hard to hear.
Just what am I going to tell him? That my wife did this? Just try telling that to the authorities in this country. You ought to thank your lucky stars I’m keeping my mouth shut.
Why were we fighting? I don’t really know. I’d already forgotten. That’s how it is when couples fight. This is always how things begin, and when a couple splits up, there’s never any resolution. When I split up with my first husband, my second husband, and my third and fourth too, it was always like that. Fights start over dumb things but can still end relationships. When a Japanese couple reaches some sort of compromise, even if it’s only lukewarm, like a kettle left too long after it boils, the couple clams up and sticks it out. But my current husband was entirely different. He was British, Jewish, and raised in an intellectual environment. For him, debates were the stuff of everyday life. He’d made his way through the world, navigating the unsheathed blades of language for longer than I’d even been alive. My English, by contrast, is faltering at best. During our fights, he’d pick me apart word by word. Like he was picking up my poor English with chopsticks and dropping it into a sizzling hot vat of tempura oil.
He’d deep-fry and sizzle me.
I’d curl up like a shrimp.
In reality, our footings weren’t all that uneven. I’d made up my mind to master his style of aggressiveness, and though I could still barely read and write English, my English fighting abilities had progressed so much over the last ten years that even I was impressed. Still, I come from a culture where one either slashes at an opponent while saying nothing or commits hara-kiri. Slash at the opponent, or commit hara-kiri, how jolly. That’s probably what my husband would say in response. Jolly. The word usually means “pleasant,” but in my husband’s vocabulary, it meant something else. He used it sarcastically to mean “shameful” or “incorrigible.” When he said it, I felt like he was putting himself on a higher plane than everyone else. No, I couldn’t hold my own through words alone.
Deep-fried and sizzling. Scooped up by my feet. Knocked down hard. Driven into a corner. Caught in a hail of bullets, I take my last breath.
I say this all metaphorically, of course. The peach is a metaphor, the thorns are metaphors, my husband and mother and father are metaphors, the summer heat and winter cold are metaphors, everything is a metaphor. The only thing that isn’t a metaphor is me living as myself, and that’s all I had to hold onto.
So I fired back.
He’s a big man. Stand him next to me, and he’d look about twice as tall and three times heavier, but fortunately for me, he was getting old and his movements slow. I was also lucky he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d inflict physical harm. It was me who lashed out at him. My ability to catch rats barehanded served me well. He was about to grab my hand to stop me but didn’t intend to hurt me. I seized the opportunity to start throwing hard unripe peaches his way, without taking time to aim, but I had trouble hitting him even though he was standing right in front of me. (All of this is a metaphor, of course.) The peaches rolled around on the floor, running into each other, as if electrified, knocking into each other. Most missed, but one hit squarely and lodged in his thigh.
I was being unfair. I shouldn’t have resorted to projectiles to get back at him.
But did I regret it? Not really. I wanted to hurt him. You shouldn’t hit people—that’s just common sense. So I bit him. At that moment, I couldn’t resist the urge to hurt him, it didn’t matter how. Seeing the bite marks swelling up on his arm, I figured that now he’d know how angry I was. At the same time, I recognized I’d done myself in.
American culture abhors physical violence above all else. You can’t even lay a finger on a person—actually, that’s a huge lie. Americans think it’s okay to own a gun and shoot it, but you mustn’t inflict violence with your own hand—never, ever, ever. It’s all or nothing. You should not kill, but if you do, do it completely.
NEITHER OF US DARED REMOVE the peach lodged in his flesh, so there it remained, a visible reminder of his injury.
I supported you, I supported your children, I supported your work, I supported you while you took care of your parents, but what am I to you? Just a monster you want to slay, or someone who supported you, cared for you, and deserves your love?
My husband sent that to me in an email. (Trying to talk on the phone was so unproductive that we’d given up on it altogether.)
I supported you, I supported your children, I supported your work, I supported you while you took care of your parents, but you still don’t believe in me, do you? That’s what he wrote. Thinking it over calmly, I realized he was right. I didn’t believe in him. These ten years, I hadn’t believed in anything.
You’re right, I replied. Like you said, I don’t believe in you. In a sense, I haven’t believed in you this whole time.
I was being honest, but I could hear him groaning all the way through the internet when he opened the email, and the rotting peach sank even further into his flesh.
Our family’s happiness was shattered to smithereens.
My wife is ferocious, faithless, shameless, unfeeling, she doesn’t believe in me—her own husband. She doesn’t love me, she’s a beast. He was beating on the keyboard. He beat on it and beat on it. And as he did, he spelled out his abuse.
When he’s mad, he uses lofty words like Jane Austen and speaks with that special form of circuitous sarcasm unique to the British. Sometimes those things slip out even when he’s speaking normally. People often get ticked off at him, and he turns away, sighing that Americans just don’t get British humor. Honestly, I can’t say we Japanese get it either. Everything he writes just comes at me like a great big aggressive jumble of words—after all, I live in an English-speaking country but am practically illiterate. It took me hours just to digest his email.
He wrote, I supported you, I supported your children, I supported your work, I supported you while you took care of your parents, let me repeat, I supported you, I supported your children, I supported your work, I supported you while you took care of your parents—my freedom came second, and it’s caused me all sorts of emotional stress and loneliness. The peach is still buried in my thigh, and it still hurts.
I wrote back, I understand. But you’re so aggressive, so negative, you make everything impossible, you’re always 100 percent right and I’m 100 percent wrong. There’s a Japanese proverb, “the cornered mouse bites the cat.” That’s what happened. And let me tell you, it’s not fair to bring up money during a domestic dispute.
He responded.
Read this, and read this carefully, I’m not talking about money.
I could tell. The injury to my husband’s leg smarted as much now as the moment I inflicted it.
I supported you, I supported your children, I supported your work, I supported you while you took care of your parents, let me say it again! I supported you, I . . . He kept beating angrily on the keyboard.
You talk about compromises, but a compromise involves both parties giving something up. What are you giving up? Do you intend to give anything up?
You say I’m being negative. Negative? In my work, I’ve accomplished things no one has done before, do you think that’s negative? How can you say that?
You feel guilty about leaving the house.
You feel guilty about your work.
You feel guilty when you leave me for so long.
EVERYTHING MAKES YOU FEEL GUILTY, I’M SICK AND TIRED OF YOU FEELING SO GODDAMN GUILTY ABOUT EVERYTHING.
The last part was all in capital letters. He was screaming at me through the internet.
HE’D BLOWN HIS LID, BUT I did think about what he said.
His view of me was way off base. Is that how he really saw me? Do I feel guilty about leaving home? Do I feel guilty about doing my work? Heavens no. Not me.
That’s when I remembered why we’d started fighting. The reason behind it all.
We were having o-nabe for dinner. For those of you unfamiliar with Japanese cooking, o-nabe is a hot pot full of vegetables and meat cooked in broth. Usually it’s made over a portable burner on the table so everyone can sit around, cook, and eat together. I’d recently bought a brand-new electric burner, and we’d been having o-nabe every night. That meant that we were eating hakusai every night, since it’s one of the most common ingredients. In America, hakusai is called napa cabbage or simply napa—and in California there are piles of it in every grocery store. Napa makes you think of Napa wine, so it didn’t sound right to me. One evening as I was adding some to the o-nabe, I used the word hakusai instead of the English word. My husband didn’t understand, so I had to explain. That evening, I’d already had to say “enoki mushroom” instead of just enoki, “shiitake mushroom” instead of just shiitake, and “bean noodle” instead of harusame. I’d had to use the absurdly general word “sauce” to mean something specific like citrus-flavored ponzu. I always have to rephrase myself for him. So by the time we got to the hakusai, I was already in despair. We’d been living together for ten years, and during all that time he couldn’t even learn a simple Japanese word like hakusai? He was always saying, “I love Japanese food” and “I love o-nabe,” but could he prove it? To make matters worse, he was trying out the Atkins diet. That meant he was eating lots of high-fat, high-protein, low-carb food. He wouldn’t touch rice with a ten-foot pole. How could he possibly claim to understand his wife’s culture if he didn’t eat rice?
I shouted at him, and he shouted back.
I wondered what would happen if, somewhere down the line, Aiko asked us why we got divorced. Because of napa cabbage. How could I possibly say that with a straight face?
Several days later, I saw our parakeets kiss.
Originally, we just had a cockatiel. One day I tossed some of its old food into the yard, and that attracted a green parakeet. I caught it and brought it in to live with us. When the cockatiel perched on my hand and the parakeet was near, it got excited. When the cockatiel was free in the house, it spent the whole day flying back and forth over the parakeet’s cage, showing off. It talked non-stop. You’re a bird. Look! I’m a bird too! You’re a bird. Look! I’m a bird too! You’re a bird. Look! I’m a bird too! You’re a bird. Look! I’m a bird too! The cockatiel stopped perching on our shoulders and coming to the dinner table. Now it was a plain old bird who didn’t interact with us. My older daughter decided to take it to her apartment, and that made the parakeet lonely. Far away in Japan, Dad was home alone, with Mom now in long-term care. I hated the thought of bringing more tedium and loneliness into the world, so I went to buy another bird.
Aiko came with me. She pointed at a white bird and said, that one. It was a pure white parakeet with none of the usual yellow, blue, or green on its back. We tried putting it in the same cage as the other parakeet, but the cage was too small, so we bought a new one—a cage for newlyweds. We also bought a birdhouse so they could raise babies. As the birds flapped around wildly in the old cage, trying to get away from each other, feathers puffed out, and dancing around, I managed to catch the wriggling green parakeet and held it in my hand. It bit me hard. The white one was no problem. I let the birds go in their new home. The white parakeet sat still on a branch while the green one approached it as if to say, how handsome you are!
From then on, they couldn’t stop kissing. Lucky them, they had chemistry. Their kisses got deeper, and while I knew they were birds, I imagined them like people, tonguing one another, and I watched them with excited interest, wondering what would come next. They went on kissing shamelessly, oblivious to my husband and me. He snarled, those birds are the only ones in this goddamn house who get along. We don’t have that kind of intimacy anymore. His tone and expression made it clear he was in an especially foul mood.
And it was true. We weren’t close anymore. If, occasionally, we did show each other some intimacy, there was a one-in-three chance it’d lead to sex. We should have reconciled ourselves to not having sex anymore, but when a man gets older, that can become a sore point, and it’s easy for him to feel slighted. I wanted to avoid that.
But I didn’t just think it. I broached the subject of age out loud.
Oh, damn it. You’ve gone and done it now.
I shouldn’t have brought projectiles to a fight, but I did, and now I’d gone and used them. As we argued, I threw peaches at my husband. One buried itself in his skin, grew inflamed, and started to swell. It looked exactly like a bite mark.
I’m getting old.
I don’t have time.
My body won’t move.
His insecurities had mounted, but now he had the perfect excuse—his own wife had bitten him. His rage boiled over. I was wrong, no matter how I looked at it. I’d hurt him. My own spouse. Violently. I’d crossed the line. He was justified, and he exploded.
I’m getting old. I don’t have time.
My work isn’t getting the attention it deserves. I don’t have time. I don’t have the time to wait. My health is going downhill. My body doesn’t move like I want it to. Surgery isn’t helping. I don’t have time to wait. I’m old. I’m a sexual failure. I’ve failed over and over. Over and over. I don’t have time for this. I’m old, I’ve never been in this situation before, and I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t have time to wait. I don’t have time to come up with new ideas. I’m not satisfied. Things aren’t getting better. I don’t have time.
His anger was unrelenting. He had no time for me. He vented his anger at me. At himself. At me. But more at himself. At his limp cock. At his eyes. At his ears. At his heart. At his knees. At his shoulders. At his lower back. At his elderly, failing body. At his old, decrepit self. Yes, at himself.
THE DAYS WENT BY, THE weather cooled and then warmed up again.
I was walking to the clinic to see Mom when I noticed a grassy spot in the sun. There were clumps of a particular plant in it. I was thinking how lush it looked when I realized it must be henbit. Little reddish-purple flowers stuck out like tongues, and right before my eyes they seemed to puff out, and individual stalks began to grow. I noticed another flower, something like a white shepherd’s purse, scattered among them. It seemed too close to the ground for shepherd’s purse. I was thinking that it must be some relative when it too began to grow. As it did, it made a quiet rustling sound. There was mugwort too—impudent clumps had died and were giving birth to a new generation—and vetch, which had grown vines and looked like a baby sticking out a hand. I saw something twinkle in the grass. The more I looked, the more I saw. Speedwell flowers warmed by the spring sun. Their twinkling hurt my eyes. Near them, soft stitchwort plants bloomed quietly, revealing neatly arranged white petals. Scattered around were clumps of dried-up weeds. They lay dead and dry, motionless.
MOM WAS LYING IN BED.
She couldn’t move, but she was conscious.
Was she responsive? No. Was she out of her mind? Not at the moment. As the waves of her dementia crashed and retreated, the numbness in her body had spread. Her right hand was gnarled. It couldn’t move—it had died. A hand that was no longer a hand. A hand that had neither the shape nor color of a hand. Like dim sum chicken feet. Like it had been boiled. She had also lost movement in her legs, which had grown thin and frail. They wouldn’t have supported her even if she could have stood. She couldn’t urinate so the clinic had inserted a catheter. Previously she’d raised a fuss when they put in a catheter, but this time she didn’t make a peep. She was still taking a diuretic for high blood pressure, but she didn’t seem to be having problems with that. Still, she was so weak that it was all she could do to press the call button for the nurse with the pinky of her left hand. She couldn’t even turn the pages of a book or use a TV remote. She had been languishing away like this for ages and ages, unable to do anything, unable to move. Meanwhile, at home, Dad was experiencing unending tedium and loneliness.
I sat by her bedside, and she asked me, will you scratch me a little? I’m so itchy I can’t stand it.
I rolled up my sleeves, pushed her hospital gown aside, and scratched her all over—her back, her arms, her thighs, her belly.
Higher, harder, use your nails.
Her arms were slack and wrinkled. The skin on her belly was dry and worn. There was nothing left of her on the backs of her thighs. She was as thin as a bat. As a dried fish.
She moaned, oh, right there, right there, more, more. Don’t be namby-pamby, do it harder, use your nails. Harder.
I felt a tiny bump as I was scratching her. Just a teeny-tiny one. A rough, dry spot. Rather than hurt her by trying to scratch it off, I used the tip of my fingernail to press into it. Mom moaned, right there, right there, there, there.
I know how terrible it is to itch. Her suffering was contagious—as I scratched her, I grew itchy all over. Moving the ring finger and pinky of her shriveled left hand, which no longer obeyed, she had tried in vain to scratch herself, but ended up just stroking her own skin. She repeated, I’m so itchy but I can’t scratch myself, I’m so itchy! She didn’t seem to be suffering from extreme anxiety or depression, but she was living one day at a time, never fully present for any of it.
Long ago I saw a nature program on TV that showed a lion on a savanna eating a gazelle. The lion grasped it at the base of its neck, and the gazelle shook and twitched, but then it went limp, eyes open wide. I thought it was dead at first, but no, it was still alive. The lion sat down and began to eat. Was it dead yet? No, still alive. The animal was being eaten, and its eyes were open wide in a catatonic state. The voice-over explained that some chemical substance was being secreted inside the gazelle’s brain. The gazelle felt neither suffering nor fear, even as it was being consumed. I wondered if Mom’s brain was secreting the same chemical. Was that why she lay there all day distracted, suffering so little? Was that why she wasn’t worried about her growing paralysis or afraid of death?
Across the room was an Alzheimer’s patient about Mom’s age. She did all sorts of things—shouted, walked out of the room, came back in, then repeated these things all over again. In the bed next to Mom was another woman close to her age, but she lay quietly without moving. She didn’t even eat. Once when I was moving a metal chair, I accidentally knocked it hard against her bed, making a loud clang and shaking her bed. She opened her eyes wide but didn’t move a muscle.
Mom said, it’s probably easier when you get like that. (Mom wasn’t looking at the TV, wasn’t reading. She just stared at some fixed point.) The lady on my left sometimes talks to me, but I don’t have a clue what she’s saying. It’d be a lot less trouble for me if she just lay there on her own like the other one.
As night fell, Mom and the other old folks changed personalities and began to remember things. The wanderers wandered, the emotional patients laid their emotions bare, others ranted and wept. A visitor arriving at the dark clinic in the evening would pass the receptionist and go up to the patients’ rooms on the fourth floor to find a world without night. The lights shone bright as day. Nurses were busy jotting down notes as if all this was normal. Artificial anemones and lilies stood on the nurses’ desks.
A world without night.
A world of nothing but night.
I heard a wild howl. A deep male voice. Ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhhh. The man’s voice reverberated, filling the entire floor.
The lights shone for all they were worth.
As sleek as a clump of growing grass, the nurse jotted down some notes. As if nothing was the matter.
Ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhhh.
Ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhhh.
Someone was angry.
At old age. At their aging self. At the world. At the night. At their aging wife.
I WAS WALKING HOME AT night after visiting Mom when I smelled it—a violently fragrant aroma that clutched at my head and spun me around. That scent—a memory of desire—penetrated my brain, but for a second I couldn’t remember the plant’s name. I hadn’t smelled it for the longest time, but I thought, I know you, I definitely know you, I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you, I’ve been wanting, wanting, wanting to see something nice like you again—and that’s when I remembered. Sigh.
A daphne.
It was hiding in the shade of a wall about two meters away.
A gecko darted right in front of me, and with lightning speed, I reached out and grabbed it. Catching a gecko in the early spring is nothing compared to catching a rat. I put the gecko in my pocket for a while. The way it squirmed in my palm struck me as incredibly cute, and I wished I could keep it. I wanted it to live with me, I wanted it to be part of my family, but that was absurd. A gecko is a gecko. I let it scamper away into the darkness.
Even at times like this, you’re daydreaming about making a family? I let out a sad chuckle, hollow and alone.