Harmless Like You Read online

  HARMLESS

  LIKE YOU

  ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN

  To my mother and to the people who stay.

  Prologue, Berlin

  The small, female oblong stood in the shadows beyond the doorway. Sun buttered the sidewalk where I stood, but she was dressed for a colder season. Three scarves wound around her neck—a russet, a cardinal and a white with scarlet reindeer prancing along the weft.

  “Guten Morgen.” It was the first time I had seen a Japanese mouth shape the Germanic consonants. My German was too weak to know if her accent held the residue of Connecticut. Did the Saugatuck River flow along her vowels? Or did she speak as if she had always lived in Berlin’s history-scrambled streets?

  “Yukiko Oyama?” I dropped my half-raised hand to my side. “You’re expecting me. I’ve come about your husband’s estate.”

  “Come in,” my mother said. If she recognized my features, she showed no sign. She walked slowly, taking the banister, and irrational as it was, I wondered how someone so very small could be my mother. Her little hand clutching the iron rail appeared innocent as a child’s. Then again, misdeeds don’t swell the body. On impulse, I reached out. Her head was turned away from me. Just for a moment, I let my fingertips press into the forgiving wool of the reindeer scarf. Soft, very soft. Quickly I pulled away.

  She took off her slippers by the front door and revealed layers of socks. She seemed older than sixty. Very spindly. The hair that dipped in and around the scarves was striped with long strokes of white. I’d once wondered what my life would have been like if she’d taken me with her. On the table where a bouquet might go, a glass jar held a quiver of craft knives. The furniture was paint-spotted. A radiator thumped.

  “Tea—would you like some tea?”

  I nodded. Empty jars filled a large enamel sink. On a hotplate, she set a pot to boil. She coughed; one hand pressed the base of her throat, while the other wrapped around her mouth. The crackling noise, like leaves being jumped on, continued for a full minute. “Sick. Talking is difficult. Sorry.” Her voice did sound rough, the end of each word scraped away.

  The folding plastic picnic chair creaked as I sat down. I wrapped my hands around the mug she gave me. It was green tea, the cheap kind that comes in bags and always carries a slight bitterness. Still, the mug was warm in the cold. She left our family and for what, this shabby room?

  “As I said before, I’m here about Mr. Eaves’s estate.”

  She looked down, flecks of yellow sleep dust stuck in her eyes. Her fingers tugged at her scarf, like a schoolgirl sitting through a scolding.

  “You were married to him. Yes? He recently passed away.”

  I waited for her to ask what of. She lifted her mug to the side of her face and rubbed it against her cheek. For heat I assumed.

  “He left you the house you lived in together.” I pulled out the papers, pushing them across the paint-stained table toward her. “I just need you to sign for the deeds. Do you have a pen? Of course, there’ll be property taxes.” I’d gone over this with the lawyer from my father’s firm. “But you will probably want to sell the house. I’d be happy to put you in touch with an agent. So you’ll have to sign here, and here.”

  She reached into her sweater’s pocket and pulled out a black wax pastel. She aligned the papers, peering down to read the fine text. She signed her name slowly. Her signature was square, boxy and careful. She passed me back the first sheet of paper, signed the second and then stopped, the edge of the pastel still pressing into the page. She stared at her own name.

  “My son?”

  Yes. Yes. Yes.

  “Where is he?”

  Yuki

  1968, Quinacridone Gold

  A toasted yellow formulated for the automobile industry. It is the color of streetlights on puddles at night, pickled yellow radish and duck beaks.

  The flasher crouched on his usual stoop, eating a hot dog. Yuki didn’t cross the street or quicken her pace. She stopped and watched as he sucked the mustard off his knuckles, thick tongue pushing down between his finger joists. She was close enough to him to see the onion strands shiver in the breeze. He wore a beige fedora and a thin, beige raincoat, like a cartoon detective. For the moment, the raincoat was shut, but his naked legs displayed their spider-leg black hairs to the world.

  Yuki’s satchel bit into her shoulder. The weight of the notebooks full of empty pages pushed down on her—yet another year. What did the flasher do when not revealing himself to the world? Was he too trapped between a desk’s iron legs? He crooned the first bars of Revolution. The song was punctuated by the squelchy chewing of hot dog. Late-summer sunlight bleached the sidewalk as Yuki leaned against the warm glass of a shop window and examined the man. Faint lines dented the edges of his eyes and grease stained the cuff of his coat.

  An office girl clipped past carrying two steaming paper cups. The flasher jammed the last bite of hot dog between his teeth and whipped open his coat and sang full-throated and off-key. The girl kept walking, not even twitching her eyes toward him. Yuki marveled that the coffee didn’t slop. He was ignored by this chignonned woman, and she, Yuki, was invisible to him, a man who flaunted the shriveled purple stump of his penis on the first cold day of fall.

  She turned away. In the store window, shadows took great bites out of her reflection, leaving behind a curl of braid and a slice of cheek. She peered closer, but the closer she looked the faster her image vanished.

  She was sixteen. All year, misery had sloshed under her skin. It was so thick, it should’ve pimpled her pores, but her face was as smooth as it had been when she disembarked from the airplane ten years before. She squinted at the glass until the shadowy girl disappeared, replaced by patent-leather boots. The boots were White Album–white. She kicked her left shoe against the brick wall. Yuki’s Mary Janes had been resoled six times. Despite the polish, they had visible frown lines around the toes. They were the footwear of someone who knew her feet were as invisible as her face.

  Wind chimes clattered as she pushed open the door. The store stank of incense, thicker and bluer than the brand on her family altar. A male voice emerged from under the desk. “Need help?”

  “No, just looking.” Then, “How much are the boots? The white ones, in the window.”

  A boy unfolded, wiping dust off his jeans. “Those? Thirty bucks.” Yuki’s mother gave her five dollars a week for school lunch.

  She turned to go. Her hand was on the door, the metal plate cool against the heat of her embarrassment.

  “What’s your size?” he called out.

  “Four.”

  “Sorry, smallest we carry is a six.”

  Her hand clenched on the door. Of course they didn’t make shoes to fit her.

  “Don’t look like that. How about some sunglasses?” The boy smiled. “One size fits all.” He pulled a pair off a spinning rack and dangled them toward her. “They’re on summer’s end sale. Two dollars.” The sunshine was already flying south for the winter. Yuki didn’t need sunglasses. She put them on. They didn’t fit—the bridge was too big for her nose, and the frames swamped her, but the Tropicana-orange glass gave the world a golden flush. There were two dollars in her wallet, lunch for Thursday and Friday. Yuki bought the glasses.

  Outside, the world shimmered. Gold light skipped off fenders and slid down the long hair of NYU girls. The flasher was gone, but his empty hot-dog carton rested on the stoop. Ketchup marks looked less like stains and more like kisses. Her stiff, gray skirt shimmied in the breeze and she twirled, spinning it out wider. The glasses leapt up and down. The world flashed.

  The windows of her apartment winked tangerine as she stepped over a bisected rat corpse, probably abandoned by one of the alley cats. Yuki
lived at the edge of the Village with Chinatown to the south, and hookers to the north. Her parents could’ve afforded somewhere nicer—her father was a director of the East Coast branch of Japan’s most successful car company—but America had always been an interruption in their Tokyo life. She once asked her mother, why hadn’t Daddy left them in Tokyo? Her mom crouched down and said in English, “Daddy needs us,” as if to admit his weakness in Japanese would be too much of a betrayal. They had been in New York two thirds of Yuki’s life—her Japan was only the smell of boxes of tea Grandmother posted each New Year. Most of his colleagues came alone, returning to Japan and their families after a year or two. Yet, the company had claimed they needed her father in New York, his knowledge of the language and expertise in the culture being the strongest—each year in the country bricked him in a bit more. But this was the last year.

  She inserted her Mary Janes into the shoe rack, next to her mother’s pumps and below her father’s indoor slippers, their tatami soles worn into the shape of his feet. Her father had explained with horror that westerners wore shoes in their bedrooms, but Yuki couldn’t know if that was true—she still hadn’t been into an American’s bedroom. She slipped into her own flannel slippers and hid the glasses in her satchel.

  “Tadaima,” Yuki called, I’m home, as if her mother didn’t already know that from the creak of the door and the slap of her feet on the pine floor.

  In the tiny kitchen, Yuki’s mother frowned at a neat pile of mincemeat. The same pink as the fridge, and the toaster, and the gloves inside of which Yuki’s mother curled her fingers.

  “What do you think about cottage chīzu?” her mother asked in Japanese. It irritated Yuki when her mom used the Japanese for what were basically English words. Why say chīzu, when she knew perfectly well how to say cheese?

  “I don’t think anything about cottage cheese,” Yuki replied in English.

  “I’m making chīzubāgā. And the recipe says to use chedāchīzu.” After a beat Yuki realized her mom meant cheddar. “But you know your father, chedāchīzu gives him stomach ache.”

  “So why are you making him cheeseburgers then?” Her mom looked surprised and hurt. Why surprised? Her father was intolerant of cheese. He was intolerant of America. He wanted late-summer eel, fattened in cedarwood vats and barbecued on coals. He was a company man. The company had placed him in this outpost, but his exile was coming to an end at last.

  “Mom, no one makes burgers from a recipe.”

  Her mother seemed determined that the family be as American as possible, before they left. They’d travel in half a year—late March. The plum trees would be blossoming and the spring rains falling, or that’s what her father said. Yuki’s only image of plums was at D’Agostino’s, where each dusky fruit was petaled with the sticker of its distributor. Yuki had visited her grandparents once, and while she’d befriended their dog, she couldn’t do anything right for the humans. How many languages had four conjugations for My name is Yukiko, one for each level of politeness? Who knew there were even four levels of politeness? And who knew that being too deferential could be considered a form of rudeness? Yuki was a chīzubāgā—enough to make a Japanese person sick and still inauthentically American.

  “I’m going to my room.”

  Yuki took the sunglasses out again, but in the dark of her room everything just looked brown. She wished she had someone to ask, how do these make me look? On TV, there was always a popular gang and an unpopular gang. This mystified Yuki. How can you be unpopular in a gang? When she was in elementary school, girls had called her Yucky Yuki, but now they didn’t bother speaking to her. Perhaps, if she knew the right words, the right passcode, there might be a way in. Fat Carol, whose shirts they slid beetles down in fourth grade, had a boyfriend who played in a band. Stinky Alice’s new stepmother bought her a bottle of YSL Rive Gauche. But as the years went by Yuki felt more, not less, yucky.

  She emptied the junior-year books onto the desk. Her mother had wrapped them in brown paper to keep the corners from bending. Each textbook was drab as the next. She wrote her name on the inside cover of her geometry book. Despite her father’s weekend drills, each time she sat down to a math test, the numbers flipped over like fish dying in a bucket, sixes turning to nines and threes twisting into eights. She couldn’t blame him for looking at the marked quizzes with an expression fit for rotten salmon. She didn’t know how to explain that the numbers, perfectly well behaved at home, writhed in the woozy panic of the exam.

  Perhaps geometry would be different, better. She wrote her name in English. She wrote it in kanji. Both ways, it was pitiful as a squashed fly. Yuki couldn’t imagine that she’d be less alone in Tokyo, just because her face looked like the crowd’s.

  Yuki reached up and touched the postcard pinned to the wall with four red pins, the kind people in movies used to mark their places on maps. On a class trip to the Guggenheim, she’d seen this Viennese oil of a house. The windows were broken, but the balconies were strung with iridescent stockings and shirts. Sublime laundry. She traced a window with her fingernail, wondering how her name would sound in the language of that place. At least she’d got an A in art, not that her father cared.

  The next day, Yuki avoided the lunchroom. She’d spent all her lunch money on the citrine-glazed glasses. The window of the girls’ fifth-floor bathroom led to the fire escape, something she’d discovered last year after failing another math test. She’d seen the ironwork railings through the window, blurred behind the frosted glass and smeared through tears. As if commanded by the name of the apparatus, she’d escaped. Now, she needed it again.

  The only way onto the metal escape was through the window. Yuki climbed on to the sink, wedged her shoes against the taps. She wrenched the thick sash; it opened fifteen inches before it jammed. If there were a fire, they’d all burn. This was a fantasy she had during particularly lonesome lunches when she sat at the end table near the trashcans. She eased her torso out sideways into blue sky and slid out onto the rust-freckled struts.

  Yuki slipped the orange glasses from her pocket. With the glasses on, she almost didn’t feel the stinging in her stomach. Amber slid over the scene; she imagined it flowing over the schoolyard, freezing gossip mid-lip, pausing nail-polish brushes at half stroke, extinguishing sneaked cigarettes, rising into the teachers’ lounge to freeze red pens mid-check. Pigeons rose through the gilded air, breaking the illusion, and as she followed their flight she saw, a few steps up, a girl.

  The girl wore an avocado dress, with an acutely pointed white collar. She was so thin her cheekbones looked sharpened. A cumulonimbus of blond hair rose behind the white peak of her forehead. The girl elevated her left hand in greeting. Her right arm was strapped around her narrow knees. When Yuki lifted the glasses, the hair glowed even brighter, as if it had absorbed every drip of gold the glasses had to offer. Yuki couldn’t scare out the words burrowed in her throat, not even a “Hi.” She raised her hand to mirror the girl’s. But, it lifted in a rush like she was asking to be called on. She tugged it back down between her knees. There’d never been anyone here before.

  Yuki and the girl sat silent and separate on the metal struts until the bell rang, and Yuki coughed up, “I’m Yuki. Eleventh grade.”

  “Odile. Twelfth. It’s my first day.” The girl threw her hands up in the air as if to say, but what can you do?

  Yuki had never heard of anyone named Odile. “Cool name.” Everyone at school was called Kathy, Lucy or Amy, at a stretch Rachel, even the scholarship girls.

  “I know. I picked it myself.” In the playground, bodies swirled to the door like so much dish soap draining away.

  “I guess we should get to class,” Yuki said and slipped one foot under the window. The other girl made no move.

  During art, Yuki couldn’t concentrate on the tidy arrangement of fake flowers; instead she found herself curling clouds of hair across her sketchbook pages.

  Miss Shahn, leaning over, said, “Very Alphonse Mucha, but we’re sup
posed to be drawing from life. Or silk, in this case.” Here the teacher paused pushing her circular spectacles up her small nose. “I do like how you’ve done this chin tilt, and the smile, that’s good. Keep working on this, but the eyes are too big—if she had eyes this big, they’d be the size of grapefruit. You’ve got good instincts, but you have to draw from observation before you start making stuff up.”

  Yuki was almost entirely sure Odile was real. The mystery was solved during math. The plaid-vested school secretary interrupted simultaneous equations. “Has anyone seen Jane Graychild?”

  Yuki was happy for the break. “Who?” asked Mr. Schwinger, the math teacher.

  “Tall, skinny, blond, looks a bit like Sticky? Twiglet?” said the secretary. “She’s supposed to be in remedial, but we figured she might be lost.”

  Yuki put down the pen that had been doodling spirals around her x+2y. She had narrowly avoided remedial; by studying all night for weeks, she’d moved her C- to a C+; months of her life for one vertical line, and meaningless now that she was moving away. So the girl was in remedial. Yuki’s father would say ignorance was the weakest of bonds, but what did he know? She’d never seen him with a buddy.

  “Twiggy,” informed Kathy B.

  “I think I know who you mean,” said Kathy M. “She told me her name was Odale or O’ something.”

  “Irish?” asked Amy H.

  “French,” said Kathy B, the know-it-all. “She’s from a ballet school. I heard she got kicked out for sleeping with her teacher.”

  “I heard she refused to do him,” said Amy H.

  Kathy B looked annoyed. “How do you know?”

  “Shut up,” said Mr. Schwinger. “All of you.”

  When Yuki got home, her mother had made French fries. The salt-studded sticks were spread on a paper towel. The unfed fist of Yuki’s stomach flexed.

  Her mother gestured to the offering place. And Yuki used the long cooking chopsticks to drop in two bright potatoes.