In Plain View. Julie Shigekuni
to return to the monastery. She’d ask the nun about Ritsuko and bring back more ahn-bread. But two events kept Daidai from returning to Holy Heart Monastery in the month of January: first she found out she was pregnant, and then, a week later, she miscarried.
Daidai’s mother was elated to hear the news of her pregnancy. “I knew it!” she said. “I’ve had a good feeling about this month.” Even over the phone Daidai could see the spritely woman dancing around her kitchen, planning in her head for the birth of her first grandchild. A week later when Daidai drove over to tell her she’d miscarried, Mako sat down and wept.
Taken aback by the dramatic display of grief, Daidai tried to comfort her. “I’ve been to the doctor—twice now. The first time for tests, all of which came back negative.”
But Mako refused to accept assurances, wiping at her eyes even though she wasn’t the one to have experienced the loss. “Are you sure there’s not something wrong with you?”
Daidai shook her head. Feeling her heart rate quicken, she drew in a deep breath and counted down from ten as she let it out.
“There’s nothing wrong, then?”
“Look,” Daidai said, waiting till she’d gotten down to zero. “If I hadn’t been monitoring my cycle so closely I might not even have known about the pregnancy. I’m told a quarter of all pregnancies abort spontaneously in the first weeks.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a fact.” She shrugged, hating to argue. “The miscarriage proves I’m able to get pregnant.”
“Maybe you just don’t want to have a baby.” Having stated the underlying reason for her upset, Mako sat perfectly poised and erect, still dabbing at her eyes, letting Daidai ponder her assertion. Did she not want to have a baby?
“You’ll get your grandbaby,” Daidai said, unwilling to entertain her mother’s doubt.
“You don’t have to have a baby to be happy,” Mako said, refusing to let up.
As far as Daidai knew, babies were, to her mother, synonymous with happiness. So why say the opposite of what she meant? “I don’t think you mean that,” Daidai said, careful not to let on to what she was really thinking. The way Daidai saw it, her filial debt to her mother increased every year in proportion to her age, so that by thirty she owed her mother a baby—at least one. That was just the way things were between women of Mako’s mind-set and their daughters. Even though she’d lived on the West Coast from the time she was a teenager, her upbringing in Tokyo had prevailed. Her traditional Japanese father had picked her husband, then a line worker at the car plant he ran. Peter Flynn certainly wasn’t Japanese, but he was loyal and hardworking.
Daidai could imagine her parents young from pictures she’d seen, but she doubted they’d ever been in love. As far as she knew, love was an acquired skill, brought on by familiarity and common goals. Or maybe it was instinct, tempered by effort.
“Don’t talk to me that way,” Mako snapped.
“What way?” Daidai tried softening her tone.
“Baka!” Mako bared her teeth and threw her arms up. “You never listen to me!”
“I always listen to you,” Daidai said softly, befuddled. Did Mako actually believe that a miscarriage and not wanting to have a baby were one and the same thing? “Hiroshi and I have gone through a lot of trouble to have a baby,” she said, unable to stop herself now, pacing the room, stepping out of the way of the towering black unit that spanned the length of the wall. Bolted to a stabilizing beam after it had toppled in the last big earthquake, the console housed a flat-screen television beside a set of model Toyotas (the first Toyopet Crown and Land Cruiser alongside a Corona and Corolla), photos of a young Daidai in various stages of development, and wooden plaques that charted Peter Flynn’s rise up the ranks at Toyota. He’d been Production Manager of the Year in 2008, the year before he died.
Next to the Buddhist altar her grandfather had brought with him from Japan, the martyred Jesus caught Daidai’s eye, placed there by a woman whose judgment she now called into question. It occurred to her then that her desire to curate arose not from the peculiarity of her origins, but from her inability to situate herself in the images she’d been given. Turning from the artifacts of her childhood back to her mother whose defiance had collapsed into sadness, she could see her contribution to the confrontation she’d sought to avoid. “I can hear what you say as well as what you mean,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Mako said. “Why don’t you say what you mean?”
“I think you wanted me to have this baby, maybe even more than I wanted it, and you’re disappointed that I miscarried.”
“Of course I’m disappointed!” Mako said, no longer able to contain her anxiety.
Daidai bit her lip and turned away. “Have you heard how Mr. Hashimoto is doing?” she asked, suddenly remembering the question she’d meant to ask earlier.
“Maybe not so good.” Mako shook her head. “I heard he was mugged. Hurt pretty bad.”
“Mugged?” Daidai echoed, struggling to make the transition in her thoughts. “Inside his shop?”
“No, it happened in the middle of the night.”
“Was his house burglarized?” Daidai asked, doubtful that Danji would be anything but asleep in the middle of the night.
“I know, that’s what I thought, too.” Mako nodded deeply, seeming satisfied that they’d found a point of agreement. “But that’s not what happened. Evidently Danji was out on the street. He’d get out of bed, dress himself in the middle of the night like he was going to work, and leave the house. Who knows how many times he did that. The police got in touch with Gizo, and now they’re saying Danji has dementia. He got mugged when he was walking, and they left him there on the street.
“Louise didn’t tell you?” she added.
“No.” Daidai shuddered, thinking it time for a visit with Louise.
Mako shrugged. “Gizo handled it. Probably just some drug addict looking for money to get a fix. Picked the wrong guy to mug. Dead now.”
Mako’s stories could be so confusing. She tended to jump from point to point without transitions. It was the listener’s job to make them. Maybe because she thought in Japanese the problem lay in translation, but to some extent she was also just someone who expected a listener to make leaps of thought. She had an agile mind, so everyone else should, too. “Are you saying Gizo went after the person who mugged his father?” Daidai asked.
“I don’t think anyone would have hurt Danji if they knew who he was.”
“Do you mean no one would hurt Danji because he was such a nice man, or because they were afraid of Gizo?”
“Wouldn’t you be afraid of Gizo?”
She could be so infuriating! “Why would I be afraid of Gizo?”
“Honestly, Daidai, I thought this time off might be good for you,” Mako said, disgruntled by her daughter’s inability to follow her logic. “You’ve spent so much time looking at things, but what has that done for you if you can’t even recognize what’s happening with the people right under your nose? Reminds me of how your father would come home from work talking about how that bumper looked wrong on that car or complaining about the shape of a taillight. He knew how cars were supposed to look and he could see them just fine, but the rest was up to me—I’d have to point out the people around him making friends, remind him that those were the ones who moved up in the company. It’s a good thing that my father wasn’t fooled. He noticed Daddy and made him manager. You’re just like him. You see the thing just fine, just not the hand that made it.
“What?”