Bloodlines

HOLLY THOMPSON

Akiko set down the iron and watched with a shudder as Carl bit deep into the peach, fuzz and all. The thought of chewing on that fuzz, like the hide of a rodent, made her wince, but Carl sat back with satisfaction and gazed into the crater left from his large bite; he always gazed into peaches as he ate them, as if he were reading them, divining even, searching for sudden revelations in the ridged inner pits. Not fond of them herself, Akiko had suggested he peel them, and in the evenings when he sat at his crowded desk correcting papers, she served them to him on a square plate in neat peeled slices, toothpicks protruding, for which he always seemed grateful. But he clearly relished a peach most like this, just reaching into a bowl on impulse and biting in. He chewed slowly, ruminating.

“We don’t have these back in Ohio,” he’d said once when she’d asked how he continued to get such pleasure from a white peach. He spoke Japanese well, but often used English.

“What kind do you have?” she’d asked.

“Just those little yellow ones, too much flavor,” he’d said. And he was right. The summer before, several days prior to their wedding in Cleveland, he’d shown her, offered her a bite into a whole fuzzy lobed fruit, then at her hesitation pulled out a pocketknife to peel a section of skin and cut a crescent, handing it to her stabbed onto the blade tip. The taste was strong and dense. His mother had baked them into something they called cobbler, pans and pans of it, for the reception out on Carl’s parents’ stretch of back lawn, and later, after their honeymoon in Chicago, sliced them thin over biscuits and smothered them with whipped cream—shortcake, she’d called it. A month later, back in Japan, in their hot, dusty Kagoshima house with their furniture forever filmed with volcanic ash, Akiko, thinking of Ohio lawns and the coolness under tall shade trees, had asked Carl if she should make a shortcake like his mother’s. To her surprise he protested: “Suffocate strawberries, not these.”

Her own father had called him Momotaro—Peach Boy—and laughed at his infatuation with the fruit, joking that peaches would give him a long life. He’d even put up some peach liqueur and presented it to Carl, an enormous wide-mouthed jarful, the winter before they’d announced their engagement. Of course, that was before her father’s forbiddance of the marriage, back when Carl was still apprenticing to her father’s potter friend down the road, back when they were just dating once in a while, back when she still lived at home. Now her father refused to see Akiko or Carl, refused Akiko entrance to the family home, and forbade the family from communicating with her. Her mother insisted that this old-fashioned Satsuma streak would eventually fade, that he’d simply backed himself into a corner having once said that his ancestors wouldn’t tolerate the impurity of a marriage to a foreigner or the mixed blood of the children they’d bear. “But they’d still be your grandchildren! My children!” Akiko could recall protesting. “How could you disapprove of my blood?” But her father had bellowed back, “Who the child’s mother is, is of no importance!”

Her mother consoled her: “Be patient. He’s just nervous about a foreigner in the family. A foreigner for his youngest daughter. Don’t fret; it’s just a matter of time before you’ll be welcomed home again.” But after more than a year enduring her father’s cold silence, Carl having even quit pottery except on weekends and taken up a respectable teaching post at the university, Akiko had her doubts.

She ran the iron a few final passes over the gores of the skirt and matching short-sleeved jacket, then carried the outfit down the hall to the bedroom. She dressed directly before the low mirror, noting by the strain on the skirt’s waist-hook that she’d need to start sewing maternity clothes soon. She tilted the glass for a better angle; she liked seeing that soft bulging of her stomach, liked to turn sideways, rub it, warm it. She’d last met her mother in secret two weeks before, when she’d spilled the news, and it seemed in that short time she’d truly begun to show. She knew her mother would notice—with the slightest of glances, her mother caught everything.

Dressed and made up, Akiko carefully placed the box of sweets she’d purchased at a neighborhood specialty shop into the bottom of her large bag, and on top of the sweets two boxes of handkerchiefs. The handkerchiefs for her mother had dragonflies poised above a pattern of just-blooming water lilies; those for her father—green the shade of young bamboo, with a trunk curving up and leaves draping from the top—she’d spent a week searching for. She’d wanted bamboo, safe, a plausible gift from her mother’s “friend,” but indicative of her resilience should her father realize they were from his ostracized daughter; the bamboo would tell him she was bending, but hardly broken.

She hooked the bag over her shoulder and surveyed the kitchen for anything else to take to her mother, but seeing there was only a gift set of tea, one of which she’d brought the last time they’d met, she poked her head into the living room where Carl was reading an English-language newspaper: “Itte kimasu,”—I’m off—she called out. But instead of the quick ritual reply, Carl jumped up, rinsed and wiped his hands at the sink, then walked her to the entryway with his arm about her waist. He spoke alternately in Japanese and English. “You’re bearing up well. I’m really proud of you, remember that. But please, stay calm and take it easy for the baby—our little pea pod.” He placed his hand over her belly; he had a different nickname each week, reflecting roughly the size of the growing fetus. “Give your mother my regards,” he continued, “and tell her to come here sometime—you needn’t always hide in coffee shops.”

Akiko blushed. He kissed her softly on the cheek, and she could smell the peach on his breath. It was a tender kiss, stirring, but because of her makeup, because of the heat already beading her upper lip, and because of her preoccupation with meeting her mother, conversations already floating through her mind, the touch felt obtrusive, and she flinched. “Itte irasshai,” he said. “Itte kimasu,” she said again, and she stepped into her summer dress shoes, and went out the door.

She was grateful for Carl’s calm acceptance of their difficult situation with her parents. Though his initial reaction to her father’s dictum had been quiet, tooth-grinding rage, he now talked like her mother—“He’ll come around in good time”—and could even joke—“He’ll miss me too much. I make him laugh.” Sometimes she wondered how Carl could stand it, living in this country that was often so cold and unkind to him.

Recently he’d suggested she write a letter to her father, telling him she was pregnant, thinking that such news might move him to relent, but she’d reminded Carl that all the letters they’d sent months before, pleading for reconciliation, had been returned unopened, unread. Once in the early spring, Akiko had even ventured out to the section of river where her father frequently fished, but upon seeing her on the bank behind him where she’d been perched quietly for a full half hour, he’d pulled in his line, packed up his basket, and left, walking past her without a word. There seemed to be little hope, and Akiko couldn’t help but wonder when and if all this nonsense would make Carl want to move his new family back to the States, back to easier relations.

From near the apartment, Akiko took a bus and tram into the center of the city, glad to have seats the whole way. The day before, traveling to the culture center where she taught sumi-e, she’d had to stand the half hour into town, dizzy and weak-kneed, nearly retching, but too shy to ask for a seat with her condition not yet obvious.

From the tram stop, she went straight to the Cafe New Rose without pausing at shop windows, partly to keep her shoes from becoming too dusty with volcanic ash, and partly because she was running a few minutes late. Her mother would already be there, she knew, waiting anxiously, and indeed, when she stepped inside and peered hard into the darkness, she found her at a rear table, several large bundles and shopping bags at her feet. “Sorry to be late,” Akiko said. Her mother brushed the apology aside, insisting she’d only just arrived, but Akiko could tell by the empty water glass, by the unfurled washcloth, and by her mother’s dry brow—long since air-conditioner cooled, that she’d been there for some time already. Akiko noted her mother’s quick glance downward and instinctively put a protective hand on her abdomen. Then she tried not to sink too heavily into the chair, not wanting to alarm her mother, who, as it was, had stood with urgency to call the waitress to fetch a glass of barley tea.

“I’m okay,” Akiko said, though the odor of something from the kitchen, cooking egg perhaps, was turning her stomach. She forced the nausea back, and her mother finally, almost reluctantly, sat down in her chair again.

“Look, I brought you some things,” her mother said, reaching down to the bags at her feet. “Sachiko sent these the day after she heard the news. Of course, she sent them to Teruhiko—I told him the day you told me, and he called Sachiko that night.” Sachiko was Akiko’s older sister, married with two children in Kyoto, and Teruhiko her older brother, who with his wife had bought the house next door to their parents.

Her mother was breathless, opening her bags and producing samples of the contents for Akiko to see—tiny outfits, booties, blankets, and bibs from one bag, and ballooning shifts and maternity blouses from another. Akiko nodded graciously at each item but glanced around the cafe, embarrassed, glad they were at a rear corner table, and she finally persuaded her mother to replace the clothing and have a look at the menu so the waitress could take their order.

“Oh, I’ll just have the daily set,” her mother said, and when Akiko had indicated she’d have the same and the waitress had turned away, her mother leaned forward and whispered, “Your father knows.”

Akiko nearly spat out her tea. “You told him?”

“No, no, never,” her mother said laughing, though they both knew that he was now well aware that they met regularly. For whenever her mother planned to meet Akiko, she used the excuse of visiting an ailing friend Haruko. Yet after several such clandestine visits, before which her mother always prepared some gift ostensibly to take to Haruko, Akiko’s father had begun making suggestions. “Why don’t you take your friend some of your shiso-eggplant pickles?” he’d say, or “How about some Oolong tea today?” or “I bet she’d like those chestnut sweets,” or, handing her a bagful, “Some persimmons from our tree.” Her mother would agree, nervously pack up the goods, and pretend to go off to visit Haruko. But instead of meeting her friend, she would appear at a designated coffee shop or cafe and present Akiko with the sweets, teas, pickles, and fruits her father had selected—all her childhood favorites. Akiko would take them home and open the fancy packaging or furoshiki, sometimes tasting with tears the morsels that were all she now had of her father, other times, bitter, throwing them straight into the trash.

“You see I called Teruhiko before your father returned from gateball,” her mother was saying, “and of course he called Sachiko. But then Saturday, I guess it was, Teruhiko came over to help move that old sofa out to make room for a new one, and when they’d finished the moving and were sitting down eating some watermelon, Teruhiko just brought up rather casually—he’s a clever one, that Teruhiko—that he’d heard from your old friend Megumi that you were several months pregnant.”

Akiko smiled at her brother’s guile. “Well, and what did Father say?” she asked.

“Well, I was in the kitchen, mixing Calpis drinks, so I couldn’t see his face. I had to act surprised, of course, so I brought the Calpis in and sat down, excited, as if this were the first time I’d heard, too, and I asked questions, you know, if you were well, if he knew if you’d had morning sickness, when the due date was—and when your father heard the winter date, he said, ‘February. Is that so? Boy or girl?’ And Teruhiko and I laughed and said no one knew that yet. Then your father grunted and changed the subject. But he didn’t get angry. And lately several times I’ve seen him staring at nothing, just staring, then he’ll look hard at me, and I’ll ask what, but he shakes his head. Oh, I just hope he stops his foolishness so you can return home in peace for the birth.” The waitress came back with bowls of miso soup, and Akiko’s mother took a hot, airy gulp, then caught her breath.

Akiko hadn’t really pondered those details yet, under the circumstances, the complexity of receiving her mother’s care before and after the birth in the comfort of the family home. She sipped her soup and stirred the cubes of tofu up from the bottom. She’d just assumed she’d be able to return, assumed that all would be normal by then, always pictured herself recuperating in her old room, under her quilt with her favorite cotton cover and with the branches of that old pruned pine tree just outside her window sweeping against the outer wall of the house, just scratching, on a light breeze. Carl claimed to want to be present at the birth—insisting that the sharing of this beginning was of the utmost importance to a couple—and he also claimed to be willing to nurse her back to health, but Akiko knew that in February he’d be into his full teaching schedule, and that none of his colleagues would look with favor upon his taking time off to tend his post-partum wife; moreover they would frown upon her mother for neglecting her maternal duties to her daughter and grandchild.

Yet Akiko couldn’t imagine this issue resolving itself in time for her to recuperate anywhere but in their apartment. For there was no grand or easy gesture with which to apologize; she couldn’t very well back out of her marriage, she wouldn’t reject Carl for her father’s sake, and no gift would suffice, no word. And her father would never apologize either; he’d never imply that he was in the wrong. She knew that his initial outburst at the news of their engagement had been in the name of the household; he was the eldest after all, the family altar was in their house, and she was breaking with tradition. And she knew now that it wasn’t so much her having married Carl that irked her father, but rather that she’d flagrantly disobeyed him; instead of waiting patiently, however many months it took, for him to agree to the marriage, she’d waited only five turbulent weeks, then defiantly gone off to the States with Carl for an American wedding. There’d been no ceremonious joining of households, no exchange of betrothal gifts, no trousseau. She could see now that she’d rushed, hurled herself blindly forward, but ever since spending a summer in a California homestay program her first year of college, and especially since meeting Carl eight years later through her father’s friend and then in one of the sumi-e courses she taught, she’d lost her Japanese sense of timing. She felt forever out of tempo, always off just a beat.

In those weeks before she’d left home, her father had ranted about the purity of Japanese blood and the importance of ancestral bloodlines. “Your children would have no ancestral home! And what about the bloodline? There won’t be a Japanese bloodline!” he’d shouted. But she didn’t see the importance of bloodlines and pointed instead to the richness of duality, the fact that her children would have Japanese and American ancestors. Teruhiko was the eldest son anyway, married and likely to have children, true Yamashita heirs, and Sachiko already had children, now part of her husband’s bloodline. If Akiko married a Japanese, her children would be of a different household, and she would have to pray for the comfort of another household’s dead. Akiko was the youngest, a girl. What did it matter the blood of her children? The only bloodline of any import to her was the one coursing in her womb, twisting from the placenta, delivering oxygen to the little being forming in her belly.

But Akiko realized with a sadness that nearly choked her that her child might be born virtually without grandparents, with Carl’s parents thousands of miles away, and her own stuck in some feudal conflict. She bit her lips to still their trembling, but she could not still the worries for her baby, who would struggle for acceptance as it was being of mixed blood in this rigid society, but who, Akiko felt, shouldn’t also have to struggle for acceptance by his or her grandparents. She felt a tear well over, slide down her cheek, and couldn’t help the sob that followed.

“Ara . . . ” her mother said, promptly presenting her with a handkerchief. “Now don’t you worry. If your father’s still being stone-headed when the baby’s due, I’ll come stay at your apartment. Or you’ll come home anyway, and if your father doesn’t like it, he can leave. But he’ll want you to be home though, just wait and see. He’ll change. Bear up, now.”

Akiko nodded, though she knew women never told their husbands to leave. She knew it was her father’s decision whether she entered the house again. But her mother was probably right: he would soften, he would want the birth to be at the clinic near their house, and he’d want Akiko to be cared for by her mother. She recalled that her sister had come home for her two births, mostly at her father’s insistence; Sachiko had felt it was too far to travel, too long to be away from her husband in Kyoto, but each time she’d ultimately relented.

The waitress brought their lunches on two trays—pork cutlets, pickles, cabbage salad, and rice. Akiko nibbled, but only the rice and pickles agreed with her. Her mother prodded her to eat more of the pork, and she complied for several bites, then pushed the tray aside and sipped at her barley tea. Her mother frowned, then reached into another bag and withdrew two packets of tiny dried fish. “Put a spoonful of these on your rice each day—lots of calcium.”

Akiko nodded, but she didn’t want to think about food.

“Are you eating carefully?” her mother persisted.

“Now I am. Carl’s on vacation—he’s doing the cooking.”

“Ahhh,” her mother said, with genuine envy in her voice. “You found a good husband. What your father thinks doesn’t matter. You’re really very lucky, despite the trouble.”

Akiko concurred, though she didn’t feel lucky, just worn. And she knew that they were both well aware that what her father thought mattered completely. The waitress brought some hot tea and Akiko drank, hoping it might keep her awake until she got home. These visits had always been hard, but now with the baby growing inside her, they seemed to pain and tire her more. She felt heavy with sleep, and knew that this afternoon she’d need a nap. Some days she felt energized; on others she had to drag herself through the most basic of daily tasks—putting rice on, setting shoes out to sun, sweeping ash from the terrace, selecting fish, rubbing sumi ink, hanging clothes to dry.

Her mother paid the check and they left the cafe with bundles and bags dangling from their arms. They walked slowly to the tram stop and boarded together, pleased to find space enough to sit side by side. “Are you all right?” her mother asked repeatedly—as they approached the stop, as they stepped aboard, as they set the bundles overhead and on the floor.

“Yes, fine,” Akiko continued to say, though she felt weak and shaky. She wished she could lie down on the seat.

“We’ll get you a taxi. You look too tired to take a bus,” her mother said, and Akiko detected alarm in the quaver of her voice. She closed her eyes, not wanting to panic herself, trying to stop the blood draining from her face; her ears felt cold suddenly, her head was listing, and she was short of breath. Beside her, she could feel her mother sit up erect.

Moments later they reached the station, the last stop, and as Akiko started to disembark, she swooned. She felt the gritty wood on her knees, wanted desperately to lie down, to nap on the floor of the tram, the boards looked inviting. But her mother was lifting her up, and she felt the arms of another woman, a stranger. She saw them as if from a loft high above—struggling to collect and carry all the bundles, leading her to a bench, and then the taxi stand. Her legs could barely hold her.

But the outside air seemed to help, and by the time they were seated in the cab, Akiko was breathing more evenly. Her mother mopped her brow for her and gave the driver directions to the apartment. “Now I’m all right, Mother,” Akiko said. “Really. I don’t know what happened back there,” but her mother’s face remained drawn with worry.

“Stay quiet,” she said, and Akiko obeyed, closing her eyes, feeling for, and dreading, a wetness between her legs. She drifted into a shallow sleep until the taxi jerked to a stop.

They climbed out of the cab, and Akiko could walk on her own now, though her mother kept a supporting arm about her waist. The driver followed them up the stairs with the bags and parcels, and Akiko opened the door. “Tadaima,”—I’m back—she called out feebly, and she beckoned her mother to follow her inside. Carl was sprawled on the tatami of the inner room, reading, Akiko could tell at a glance, one of his university textbooks, and at the sight of her followed by her mother, he jumped up with a welcoming smile. But Akiko must have looked a wreck, and her mother’s words soon twisted that smile into a grimace of concern: “She needs to lie down. She fainted on the tram.”

Akiko could hear him gasp. Then he was in the other room, pulling futons from the closet, setting out pillows, drawing a glass of water, turning up the air conditioner, laying out pajamas, and with her mother, leading her to bed.

“I’m fine,” Akiko told them both, ushering them back to the kitchen. “Just let me change.” She closed the door and partition, and then, standing in the middle of the room, alone, took a deep breath. She unbuttoned her short jacket and undid the skirt-waist, fumbling to get out of her clothes. Then she pulled down her sweat-drenched pantyhose, terrified, not quite wanting to see, checking for blood; there was none. With relief, she ran her hand over her belly. From the other room, she could hear her mother and Carl talking in low undertones, and she felt like shouting to allay their fears, but she contained herself, dressed in the pajamas and put on a summer robe. Then she opened the door with decorum.

Both Carl and her mother looked up abruptly from the kitchen table. “I’m okay,” Akiko said. “I just need to take a nap.”

Her mother was studying her face. “Nothing hurts? Nothing feels strange?”

“No, I’m fine, really.”

“Well then,” her mother said, rising, “I must be going. Your father will begin to wonder. Oh, I almost forgot.” She reached into a shopping bag and pulled out a furoshiki bundle. “He packed this up this morning, for Haruko,” she said with a wry smile. “Tomatoes perhaps. He’s been talking about tomatoes all week. I was rushing so much to get the bags from Sachiko at Teruhiko’s that I never peeked inside.” Carl set the bundle on the table and began to untie it.

“Oh, and I nearly forgot, too,” Akiko said, and she found her bag by the entryway and pulled out her gifts—the specialty sweets and the handkerchiefs. She handed them to her mother, but her mother wasn’t looking, didn’t even reach out to accept them; instead she had a hand to her mouth, and a croak of surprise sounded in her throat as she watched Carl peeling back the corners of the furoshiki. Akiko turned to see what was inside.

Then she dropped into a chair, the faintness having returned. “Bring me the water,” she said, and Carl ran for the glass he’d set beside the futon. She gulped, and then he wrapped his arms around her, and she wept, the tears rolling onto his forearms. Her mother looked away, and they could hear her weeping, too. And then she was laughing. And Carl was laughing, too. For sitting inside the square of silk, in protective foam netting, were three enormous white peaches.

Carl reached around Akiko and removed some netting, and she could see it coming—that enormous bite, deep to the pit, dry fuzz and all.

[1995]