Summertime

KAREN HILL ANTON

Before the real heat of summer, the rainy season came. A month of rain when all life seemed to take place underwater. Infrequently, the sun came out and the sky turned blue; a cruel reminder. As summer approached, the warmth turned the dampness into mold, a fine blue film covering everything. The tatami straw mats became unpleasant, and the futon, soaked with the mixed moisture of the air and our bodies, were as soggy as sponges.

Then the entire area would begin to crawl with bugs. And I fought them, trying to turn the old farmhouse, with its cracks and crevices, into an air-tight bug-free bunker. An impossibility. Poisonous centipedes that I feared would bite the children (the old woman had told me a grown man she knew had to go to bed for a day after being bitten) crawled out of the most unlikely places. One came from the back of a tansu, an old bureau we hadn’t moved from the place it’d stood when we moved there; the thing was black and orange with dust clinging to each of its one hundred legs.

Summers were unpleasant. Days started out hot, and all my energy was taken up with keeping Mai and Luca cool. And dry. I hadn’t known about the dry part when Mai was an infant, and had seen the skin on her neck slit neatly, and just as neatly, bleed. When I took off her kimono, the armholes of the soft white cotton were stained with baby blood. The old woman gave me a stack of cotton-gauze handkerchiefs and told me to pat Mai dry whenever she became damp with sweat; one cloth as large as a bath towel was to dry her after the bath. “Put this on her,” the old woman said, handing me a tissue paper with some white powder in it. I thought it might be the root of some wild plant ground to fine powder. It was talc.

The morning was hot and I was grateful to be finished with all the house chores earlier than usual. Mai sat at her table with pencil and paper doing her “studies,” in imitation of her big sister, deeply occupied. I wouldn’t even peer over her shoulder for fear of attracting her attention and distracting her. I could easily curb my curiosity for the higher goal of having time to myself. Luca lay on his zabuton; the large cushions we sat on were just the right size to be a small futon for him. He’d been well dusted with powder and was comfortable, entertained just by Mai’s presence. He was an easy baby; if he wasn’t hungry or wet he didn’t seem to need anything, and smiled more than he did anything else.

It was going to be a stifling hot day but the room was a sanctuary, dark and cooled by a breeze that passed through from the bamboo grove on the west side of the house.

Hardly spontaneously, but rather after looking around the room like a surveyor, I decided nothing else required my attention and that I could use the time to practice calligraphy. I’d all but given it up after Luca was born, but Kobayashi-san, Akira’s mother, had encouraged me to continue. She couldn’t have cared less about calligraphy herself, but she said, “Whatever brings you satisfaction, guard as precious.” She’d come up to the house for the first time about a month after Luca was born, bringing fruit and a bottle of wine. She seemed surprised I wouldn’t drink the wine because I was nursing, and after only a brief glance at Luca, looked through all the calligraphy papers I had lying on the desk. “Don’t bother trying to get a ranking,” she’d said, “You’ll put too much pressure on yourself and then give up.” I wasn’t even thinking about rankings though I realized it would be a way to measure my progress. Especially since my teacher never talked; his way appeared to be silent instruction and I found it frustrating. In five years I could count the times I’d heard him speak. Akira’s mother didn’t drive and I knew he’d had to put things on hold to bring her up to the house, but after only an hour’s visit, she slid her very small feet into a pair of Italian shoes and was already at the door when she said, “You don’t have to nurse them forever, you know. I nursed Akira and his sister Yuriko for exactly three months; I checked the calendar. They’re fine.” Akira had told me his mother was a “spoiled selfish woman” who only did what was absolutely required of her; he said she’d been neglectful of him and his sister and her duties as a wife, though his father never complained. She seemed all right to me, especially when she said, “Continue your calligraphy. The children will survive. Keep something for yourself.”

I’d kept calligraphy and enjoyed this moment now as I settled myself at the low desk. My inkstone was a simple but good one and I watched the slow disappearance of the characters, written in gold on the inkstick, as I ground it with water, and ink, the consistency of blood, filled the well. Applying the thick, ink-soaked brush to the delicacy of the rice paper always seemed incongruous; the black ink indelible, the paper white, light, even flimsy, had to be held down with a paperweight. Though I longed to write characters in the bold manner I admired, more often than not my resolve did not come out at the tip of my brush, and the weak strokes gave the characters a scraggly line. Sal had given me a zafu; this small bamboo leg-rest could be placed under the folded knees to take the weight off the legs, allowing you to sit in the traditional seiza position for hours. But Mai couldn’t sit at her little table for hours, and no sooner had I settled myself at my writing table than it was time for lunch, nursing, and naps.

While Luca continued to sleep, Mai and I went out to the garden. Far from stalking around in shorts as I once had, I now covered myself completely; the only skin showing was my face, and that was shaded by a wide brim hat. The vegetables I’d planted, a few requisite tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, were choked with weeds and stunted with neglect. Only my flowers smiled brightly in gratitude of the care I gave them. When we first came to the farmhouse I spent months filling successive wheelbarrow loads with rocks as large as babies.

“Mama, let’s visit Aki-chan.” Mai stopped playing and stood in front of me empty-handed as though she had not until that moment been busily occupied with her own pursuits, amassing the small rocks I’d piled up next to the weeds, lining them up along the thick hedge that fronted the house.

“Yes, maybe we’ll go down there later,” I’d said, turning to look around at her, “but Mai, please stay in the shade.” She refused to wear a sun hat because she said it made her curls flat (and surely the sun hats had been designed for people with flat hair) and I could see her face heating up. As was her custom to become immediately insistent, Mai issued a “let’s go now.”

I took an intentional breath and tried to offer Mai an alternative to her hard-head stance. “Would you like me to fill your pail with water so you can pour it over the rocks?”

“I want to go to Aki-chan’s now!” She’d gotten loud, and I knew Luca had woken up. He wouldn’t cry but simply open his eyes and roll his big round head from side to side.

Mai, who had insisted she needed to have my cotton work gloves, now easily grabbed the finger ends of the gloves that dangled over her own fingers, pulled them off, and said, “Let’s go.”

Luca was ready to go too; his bright eyes had no sleep remaining in them. As I got him ready I remembered Esther had asked for photos in her last letter and I had answered, laughing to myself as I wrote, “Who do you think is standing around taking his picture?” The baby pictures of Arwen and Mai had piled up to the point where getting them into an album would become a project. Sal and I spent the first few months after their births with camera in hand tying to catch them in a smile. Luca smiled all the time; even when he cried his face seemed to hate to give it up. It was too bad we had almost no photos of him.

Normally I would have carried him on my back, but it was much too hot and humid to think of skin touching skin and I put him in the stroller. The Ishikawas’ house was just a few minutes walk downhill from ours, but by the time we got there we were all in a sweat.

The old woman’s mother, the real old woman, sat on the engawa, the veranda bordering the house. Her knobby hands were all knuckles. She held a large sharp knife and carefully sliced something I couldn’t identify. At their house food was always in some stage of transformation, moving from its present stage into some other manifestation, usually pickled, sometimes dried. In the late fall it’d be fuki, and nothing about the long thin strips draped over a pole in the yard hinted at the fact that they were edible. Often dried shiitake mushrooms, browned and shriveled, were spread out on a mat looking like a hundred ugly toads.

“Dozo,” she said, nodding for us to enter. Old and soon to die, she had dispensed with all the other unnecessary words.

We stepped into the entranceway of the kitchen, and as the earthen floor and dark wood interior enveloped us in a welcome coolness, the very idea of bright sunlit rooms seemed alien and foolish.

The daughter-in law came out to say Aki-chan would be back soon. He ran from house to house in the village on his own, and most of the places he went were the homes of relatives.

“I’ll just wait here for a minute,” I said, declining an invitation that hadn’t been offered. The daughter-in-law smiled at Luca and said a few words, but he was already fretting, and the smile that was usually embedded in his fat cheeks disappeared. Now he was crying. I lifted him out of the stroller and patted and talked to him but I could already tell he was not going to accept comfort. I hadn’t seen her move, but the daughter-in-law was no longer in the entranceway and had no doubt passed into or out of the house to do some chore. The great-grandmother’s shadow had gone by, and I knew she was no longer on the engawa.

“Mai, hand me one of those handkerchiefs from the back of the stroller.” I felt more like saying “Go for help.” Luca, now a deep rose and howling, squirmed uncontrollably in my arms.

“When is Aki-chan coming back?” Mai asked, as though the moment were hers.

I sat down on the wooded step that led into the inner house and tried to nurse him; it was too late, he wouldn’t take my breast and stretched his legs and arms their full length in an effort to be free of me. Totally distressed, he would not be soothed and the dark foyer was now a hell filled with the energy of his cries.

I’d never seen him like this, had not known he had the passion for these tears. I stretched him out on the wooden step and changed his diaper though it was dry. Angrier now, indeed outraged, he cried louder. Now his distress was mine and the tears rolled down my cheeks in quiet uncontrol.

“Come,” the old woman said as she bent over me. She’d come into the foyer, her feet as silent as cat paws in her soft-soled working shoes. Quickly unfastening the hooks at the back of the canvas tops, she slipped them off and led us into the cool darkness of the front room. She left and soon returned with a frosted glass of plum juice and honey. “This will make you feel better. Drink it.”

Luca, now sucking and calm, was falling asleep in my arms.

“He was too hot,” the old woman said.

Mai sipped the cool drink served to her in a pink plastic cup and ran outside when she heard Aki-chan come in the yard.

I sat with the old woman for awhile. She made herself a cup of green tea and now seemingly completely refreshed, prepared to go back in the field.

“Take your time,” she said, indicating I could sit there.

Less than half her age, I was being told to rest while she went to do heavy physical labor. I’d fallen apart at a baby’s tears and now drained, was ready for a nap.

“Oh, I should be getting back,” I said, gathering my things together and making a point to stand straight.

[1995]