The Path of Dreams
A novel
by
Eugene Woodbury
Copyright © 2010 by Eugene Woodbury. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Peaks Island Press. Smashwords Edition. Cover design by Eugene Woodbury.
Epigraph
I run to you
ceaselessly
on the path of dreams
Yet no night of dreams
could ever compare
to one waking glimpse
of you
Ono no Komachi
Preface
After New Year’s, Obon is the most important of Japan’s national holidays. Also known as the Feast of the Lanterns or the Festival for the Dead, Obon is the time set apart for the veneration of our ancestors. The time dedicated to the restoration of familial and generational ties. The time when we remember the dead.
The Japanese is an abbreviation of Urabon, a phonetic reduction of the Sanskrit Ullambana, meaning “to hang upside down.” It represents the suffering of those “hungry ghosts” whose sins have forestalled their reincarnation and consigned them to the torments of Hell. On the final day of Obon, the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month (according to the old calendar), the Ruler of the Earthly Realms grants forgiveness to all such benighted souls and thus upon all humankind. For none of us pass from this life pure.
The Festival has its beginnings in the Urabon Sutra and the story of Maudgalyayana, a disciple of Shakyamuni Buddha. Not long after his mother’s spirit passed from this life, Mokuren Sonja (as the Japanese pronounce his name) discerned her to be suffering the tortures of Ullambana. Water boiled upon touching her lips. Everything she ate turned to ash.
In despair, Mokuren sought out the wisdom of the Buddha, who told him that his mother’s bad karma was the consequence of a life given over to petty greed and stinginess. To merit her release from hell, Mokuren had to practice dana, or selfless giving, on her behalf. He was commanded to summon the ten sanctified priests from the Ten Worlds to his temple, tend to their material needs, and entreat them to perform for his mother a proper memorial service. Mokuren was further instructed that he must sincerely thank his mother for all she had done for him during her life, her failings and shortcomings notwithstanding.
This gratitude he expressed and these rites he performed. Because of his filial piety, his mother’s soul was reborn into the Pure Land. Mokuren lit bonfires to show her the way and danced with joy at the knowledge of her redemption.
All these elements of the first Obon remain with us to this day.
In the modern era, the festival is celebrated from August thirteenth to the fifteenth. We light small ceremonial fires, welcoming the spirits to our hearts and homes. As Mokuren served his elders, we too leave offerings of food, flowers, and incense upon the household altars. The Bon Odori dance brings friends and neighbors together to celebrate the harmony of all creation made possible by the disciple’s example.
On the evening of the final day, the okuribi bonfires burn like stars on the mountains, lighting the way to heaven. We cast paper lanterns upon the waters to guide the spirits of the dead back to the Pure Land. As they slip from this mortal realm, dancing along the paths of the ceaseless currents, the words of the Buddha are not lost from our thoughts, reminding us always:
The weight of obligation we owe our ancestors is as boundless as the heavens.
Chapter 1
Snapshots
Elaine Chieko Packard had a guilty conscience. Dreams. She felt guilty about dreams. But dreams so real she could almost believe she was not dreaming at all. One simple fact reminded her that these fantasies existed only in her mind: she was a missionary, for crying out loud.
Good girls—especially good girls who went on missions—didn’t have dreams like this. Good girls didn’t do a lot of things. They didn’t open their mouths when they kissed. They certainly didn’t go all the way. They didn’t get to the on-ramp, or even leave the driveway in the first place. Other girls did, the girls passed around like a wad of used chewing gum. And how gross was that?
As a teenager, Elly sat in church and listened dutifully to the lessons on morality and chastity, the slasher movies of moral peril. She didn’t even snicker about them to her friends, though it was a lot like watching the last scene in Time Bandits over and over and over: “Mom! Dad! It’s evil! Don’t touch it!”
If she wasn’t careful, she’d go kaboom too.
The subject was petting. Sister Summers approached it with half a dozen euphemisms and more frightening quotes from dead General Authorities before Jennie Howell finally blurted out, “But it’s okay once you get married, isn’t it?”
Sister Summers turned pale and changed the subject.
Elly considered the whole thing a pointless exercise. The girls who did fool around weren’t listening. They weren’t in class. They were sleeping in Sunday morning after spending Saturday night doing what the rest of them were being told not to. The girls who weren’t going to weren’t going to. She’d known since puberty that she’d never stand anywhere but squarely in the wasn’t-going-to camp.
Abstinence made sense to her. What she didn’t get was this incredible paranoia over losing it. To be sure, Sister Summers wasn’t paranoid. Only timid and easily embarrassed. Now Brother Collins, Elly’s Seminary teacher, he was paranoid. Every lesson on morality came down to us versus them. Her honor and good name hung in the balance. They were going to get her, like the dumb girls in the horror flicks always running up the stairs instead of down. One scream of regret. Disgraced for life.
The problem was, Elly never felt gotten to, pursued, or tempted. She felt, well, left out. And curious. Men were supposed to be the sex with sex on the brain. But women’s magazines were obsessed with it. At the supermarket, she’d mosey over to an empty register and sneak a Cosmo off the rack. What does a man expect of a woman in bed? She had no idea. How can you have the best sex ever? Ditto. Is he your sexual soul mate? Not a question that would ever come up in a temple preparation class.
The occasional boy who kissed her awkwardly at the end of a date didn’t arouse her to any breaking point. Didn’t arouse her at all. But deep inside her secret self she desperately wanted to believe she could be propelled to a soul-shattering act of wantonness—that it could overpower her completely.
“Don’t you wonder what it’s like?” Jennie Howell whispered to her one day after Seminary as they walked back to the high school, textbooks clasped against their chests like body armor. Elly shrugged as if she never gave it a second thought. She had a closet full of second thoughts.
“I mean,” Jennie went on, “I know for a fact that Karen Andersen did it with Jeff Clark, and they were both in church on Sunday. I mean, if you killed somebody you sure wouldn’t show up in church the next Sunday.”
Jennie thought too much about these things. So did Elly, though she tried not to make it a matter of public conversation. Secular or sectarian, sex education was like watching travel documentaries about distant, foreign lands she would never visit.
She’d grown up in a distant, foreign land—Japan. She wanted sex to be like that—thrilling and yet deeply familiar, and herself chock full of forbidden knowledge.
Elly stood in the Barnes & Noble, the fat romance paperback in her hands. Curiosity, that’s all. Yet she lingered over the words as she read. She saw in her mind’s eye, like a voyeur at the rear window, the man’s hands slipping inside the woman’s blouse, their lips parting—
She cast her eyes about furtively, as if the pictures in her mind were being projected in Technicolor on the high walls of the bookstore.
Elly knew about pictures—the time at Girl’s Camp when Becky Hoggan took a picture of her in the shower. Becky was not a good girl. Becky was the kind of bad influence they warned her about in church. But Sister Johannson looked upon her as a lost sheep worthy of being fellowshipped back into the fold.
The shower was a solar-powered contraption. It consisted of a black metal tank exposed to the scorching summer sun, a coil of PVC hose, a valve, a showerhead, and a blue plastic tarp stretched around a crude two-by-four frame. Elly was rinsing her hair in the thin, lukewarm stream, her back arched, her head flung back, when she heard the click of the shutter.
She cast a doe-eyed expression over her shoulder in time to catch a flash of sunlight off the camera lens. Without her glasses on, several blurry seconds passed before she realized what was going on.
“Becky!” she squealed, crouching down and covering her breasts with her arms.
“Just kidding. You’re out of film.” She held up Elly’s little Olympus.
“That’s not funny.”
Becky laughed. The corner of the tarp flapped back into place.
A week later, Elly showed her slides at Mutual. Everybody who’d brought a camera to Girl’s Camp had to, though it was mainly an excuse for the extroverts to show off. Witty, self-deprecating asides helped. Incriminating photographs helped too, as long as they weren’t that incriminating.
Elly had neither. She clicked through her slides with sparse commentary. This is the campsite. This is the lake. This is Jane and Sister Johannson. Good grief, why hadn’t she sorted through these slides first? This is Becky in her fatigues. A pretty good picture.
“This is—” Elly had to stop and say, “Oh, this is the shower.”
A few hoots from the boys at the back of the recreation hall. Some applause from the girls in the front. Unlike the boys, the girls were not amused by the prospect of running around for a week like feral children. No one else had thought of taking a picture of the shower. How very clever of her! Elly’s thumb pressed down on the button of the remote. Wait a minute, had she thought of taking a picture of the shower? The carousel clicked forward, the slide popping up from the lens housing, the next one falling down into the cradle.
She hadn’t thought of taking a picture of the shower.
Becky had.
Elly hit the back button. A purely instinctual reaction. The gut to the spinal cord to the tendons to the fingers. A blur of peach and blue flashed on the screen, followed by a moment of white. The picture of the shower snapped back into focus.
“Hey, we already saw this one!”
“Uh, it jammed.” Elly leaned over the projector, her body blocking the light. She pulled off the carousel and stepped into the shadows behind the bright cone of light.
“Um, I guess that was the last one.” Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe. Sister Johannson stepped toward her. She was going to reach out her hand and say, All right, Elly, hand it over. Then the bishop was going to take her to his office, shaking his head with profound disappointment. He’d summon her father. Then her mom would find out. Elly would claim it wasn’t her fault. Who knew what Becky would say, but no one would believe her either.
Elly eased herself into the closest seat, holding the carousel against her chest the way a drowning man clings to a Mae West. Sister Johannson said cheerfully, “Who’s next?”
LaRae Cordner sprang to her feet, a slide carousel in one hand and a boom box in the other. “I am!” LaRae could turn five minutes of kindergarten show-and-tell into a Broadway production. No one would remember Elly’s slides afterward. That suited her just fine.
Late that night, Elly sneaked her father’s slide projector into her room. She locked the door and closed the curtains. Why had she believed Becky? Then it occurred to her—the Photomat at Smith’s Grocery! Some pimply-faced kid manning the developing machines had seen everything! She’d never go there again.
The image pulled into focus. Elly exhaled in surprise. She’d seen herself naked before in the mirror. Coming out of the shower. In passing. The human body didn’t offend her. She could look at Leonardo’s Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David without blushing.
But this was different. To begin with, it was her.
She tipped the projector so the image displayed unbroken on the ceiling. The lack of shame in the display, the casual innocence in her nudity, that’s what made it so—different. Wasn’t she supposed to be embarrassed, mortified, chagrined? She wasn’t. She didn’t know this person. Yet this is who I am.
She lay on the bed and stared at herself. The dark cascade of her hair, the supple muscles of her back and belly. The concave slope at her waist. The curve of her breasts set against the vibrant blue.
She wasn’t unattractive. Really. It was an extraordinary revelation.
Elly hid the slide where no one would find it.
But that moment haunted her—her thumb resting on the button of the remote—when her family honor and good name hung in the balance. Foresight was not her forte. Hindsight wouldn’t have helped at all. Only sheer dumb luck had allowed her to stop the slide projector in time. Sitting in church, she relived the scene over and over. Her heart pounded in her chest. Sweat trickled down her back.
That moment came back to her at the Barnes & Noble. She looked at the glossy book cover, the bare-chested Fabio look-alike with his muscled arms wrapped around a buxom, raven-haired woman about to burst out of her décolletage. It was the wrong book. She’d picked it up by accident. Good girls didn’t do things like that.
She put the book back on the shelf and feigned a disinterested air as she strode to the remainder racks. That night, Elly Packard decided she would go on a mission when she turned twenty-one.
Chapter 2
The Nakamozu Nankai
Connor had seen her only once, on the Nankai station platform in Nakamozu. He’d been waiting for the southbound local. It was late in the morning, still cool in the shade, the sunlight bright on the steel tracks. He glanced across the gap. Two sister missionaries were standing next to the kiosk under the Arrival/Departure sign. He didn’t recognize them. They didn’t attend the church in Abeno. Maybe they’d come up for a zone conference from one of the districts around Wakayama.
The one with the sandy blonde hair said something to her companion, the one with the dark mane falling down her back. She turned and looked over her shoulder at him. Their eyes met momentarily. She was Japanese, yet not quite Japanese. She was too tall to begin with, and her hair was a dark mahogany brown.
Then the northbound local arrived and they were gone.
She would have thought little or nothing of him. Another expat adrift in the Kansai. Besides, he hadn’t shaved since winter semester let out. Nothing about him said Returned Missionary or even Mormon. He didn’t give the brief encounter a second thought.
Except that he dreamed about her that night—about the Japanese-American girl on the Nakamozu Nankai.
Connor rarely dreamed and rarely remembered what he dreamt, which was fine with him. Most times the cigar was just a cigar. Yet he recalled this dream with a specificity that crossed the line between reality and imagination.
The dream began with the two of them walking along a quiet street in the early evening. Perhaps a town on the Nankai Koya line, maybe Hashimoto. They entered a typical Japanese 1LDK apartment: a single bedroom and a combined living-dining room/kitchen.
The kitchen opened onto the bedroom through a pair of shoji sliding doors. The tatami-mat floor smelled faintly of cut bamboo. They got the futons out of the closet. He noticed she was wearing a track suit. The lettering over the left breast said, “Koya Women’s Junior College.”
He went into the bathroom, filled the o-furo, replaced the covers, and turned on the water heater.
In the bedroom, the woman—she must be his wife—had changed into a short happi negligee. She bowed her head and lifted her hair from her shoulders the way women do. Then she looked up and smiled. She put her arms around his waist and raised her mouth to his.
He felt it, like nothing he’d felt before in his life. A kiss warm and soft and electric. They kissed again, sinking down onto the futons. Her velvet skin brushed against his lips. She buried her face against his shoulder, her body trembling in his arms.
It was too real. The smart stagecoach driver hugged the mountain wall. How many times had he heard that analogy? Connor didn’t skirt the edge. He never got close enough to fall. Keeping his distance was a hard habit to break.
He retreated into the netherworld of waking sleep. As he pulled away and the dream dissolved, a look came to her eyes. The eyes of the girl on the Nakamozu Nankai. Asking who he was and why he was leaving her now after what they’d done.
Connor sat up, fully awake, his heart beating madly. He felt the dampness in the sheets around his groin. He swore in Japanese: “Shimatta.” Wet dreams were such a bother. Great while the dream was real and reality was the illusion. But what a mess afterward.
That Sunday after church, Connor caught up with the missionaries at Abeno station. He said in an offhand manner as they waited for the subway, “I saw a couple of sister missionaries the other day at the Nankai station in Nakamozu.”
“Nakamozu?” said Chalmers Choro. “Nobody’s assigned to Nakamozu. The closest district is Kishiwada.”
“That’d be Packard and Goto.”
Chalmers Choro corrected his companion. “Goto’s not in Kishiwada. She got transferred to Nara last month. So it’d be Packard and Eliason.”
Connor was relieved. What would he say if they ever met?
He skipped his stop and rode the Midosuji to the end of the line. At Nakamozu he transferred to the Nankai and continued south. Past Nakamozu the metropolis ended. Past Sayama the suburbs ended. The sleeper communities appeared farther and farther apart, tiny villages tucked into the corners of the terraced mountain valleys. If he ever moved back to Japan, this is where he would live. His dreams knew him well.
He got off at Hashimoto and hiked a klick into the hills above the town. He didn’t recognize the bend in the river he’d seen in his dream. Maybe it was a station along the Wakayama JR line. What was the name of the college on her sweat top? He stopped a pair of junior high school girls in matching tennis outfits and carrying matching tennis racquets. “Could you tell me where Koya Women’s College is?” he asked in Japanese when they stopped tittering.
“Maybe Kudoyama?” one of them guessed. They didn’t know. So he spent a few more minutes impressing them with his Japanese while they practiced their terrible English.
Two nights later the dream came again. It wasn’t the same dream. But it was about her, the girl on the Nakamozu Nankai. And it ended with their making love with a passionate intensity that resonated deep within his soul. When he awoke the following morning and she was not there beside him he felt a profound sense of loss. The dreams had awakened a hidden part of him, revealed the existence of something whose absence he’d never missed until now.
Connor hypothesized that he was suffering a delayed Freudian hangover. His libido was simply doing a bit of postpubertal catching up. The problem was the amount of detail in the dreams. He knew he didn’t know what he seemed to know. Not about Kudoyama. Not about her (whoever she was). And certainly not about sex. Nothing in his personal experience—not even Billy Bragg’s embellished accounts of the backseat romps in his cherry-red Camaro—could have provided him with the substance of these dreams.
Connor was a virgin, not that unusual among Mormons his age.
Curiosity won out over guilt. He wished for the dreams to return and they did. Though he and the girl never spoke, their dreamworld counterparts were never at a loss for conversation. But after that moment of breathless ecstasy, he forced himself awake, forced himself away from her. And then lay on his futon and wondered—wondered who, wondered why, wondered if this was what an intimate, physical relationship was really like.
Two weeks before he left Japan the dreams faded. When he left Japan they ended.
He missed her more than he missed the dreams. Her warmth and presence. But ultimately he was relieved (or so he told himself) when the dreams did not return. He put it down to some sort of long-delayed returned missionary stress syndrome, and so becalmed the vexations of moral Calvinism stirring in his Mormon soul.
Connor began summer term at Brigham Young University comfortably settled into the BYU bachelor lifestyle. The girl he’d dated on-again, off-again his senior year had gotten engaged to somebody else during his absence. He was enormously relieved.
Even at the time, she’d been a good Mormon girl, he’d been a good Mormon boy, and they’d permitted themselves at most a spark of light petting. Bishops, Connor knew, possessed an olfactory sensitivity to pheromones. They could smell sex, and Connor rested assured he smelled like buffed linoleum.
“Dating anybody new?” The bishop asked the question lightly, meaning that Connor ought to be, but he wouldn’t hold it against him if he wasn’t.
Connor replied with a self-deprecating grin.
The bishop walked him to the door. “I don’t want you to think I’m getting on your case. Truth is, the best things often come when we’re not trying so hard to get them.”
Connor wasn’t trying at all. Not trying was easy too.
But the night after he renewed his temple recommend with the stake president, the night before summer term began, the dreams returned. He sat up in the darkness, dazed by an acuteness of sensation that was almost painful. Japan had never been like this.
He hadn’t mentioned the dreams in his interviews. He wasn’t into confession. Bringing up the dreams would only make things worse. What did you do? he’d be asked. Because every problem had a cause.
But Connor couldn’t explain what he didn’t understand himself. I looked at a girl on a station platform in Japan. That’s all. Swear to God. Still, he applied all the remedies prescribed in situations like this. Because every problem had a solution.
1. Prayer.
2. Cold showers.
3. Reading the scriptures.
4. Reading The Miracle of Forgiveness.
5. Watching television until he fell asleep.
God, Connor was certain, would develop a guilty conscience
reading The Miracle of Forgiveness. To be sure, he hadn’t
broken any major commandments while under Billy Bragg’s
tutelage (though he had thrown rocks at a few). But when the dreams
came, they came no matter what. There wasn’t any way of keeping sin
from the door when it had directions and the key.
Only after climaxing could he tear himself away. Panting, soaked with sweat, fiercely angry at losing her and equally at losing control. Yet grasping again for that wonderful unreality.
The scent of her hair, the salt in her sweat as he kissed her breasts, the traces on his skin where her body pressed against his—lingered like a gentle sunburn. Hours later, studying in the library under the frigid blast of the air conditioning vents, he’d have to go outside and stand in the hot Utah sun and seek an equilibrium of body heat.
Chapter 3
Senior Companion
A knock and the bedroom door opened. A shaft of light spilled into the room. Melanie asked, “Elly, are you all right?”
Elly sat up as if shocked by a cattle prod. She touched her cheek. Her skin was damp with tears. Yes, she was awake. She was in her bed, in the condo on Ninth East she shared with Melanie Crandall, her once and forever senior companion. Elly put her hand on her chest and felt her heart pounding inside her rib cage. She took a deep breath, exhaled.
Melanie stepped into the room. “I thought I heard you moaning, like you were sick or something.”
Elly’s face flushed red hot. Thank goodness Mel hadn’t turned on the light. She looked at Mel’s blurred figure silhouetted there in the doorway. “I—I’m fine. It’s just that—I don’t know—for a minute I guess I forgot where I was. You know, still in Japan.”
Melanie smiled. “Yeah, jet lag. You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m okay, Mel.” She repeated herself in Japanese for emphasis, “Heiki desu.” Saying it aloud did make her feel better.
“I’m going jogging. Want to come?”
“No. And I don’t want to tomorrow either. Really.”
“Hmph,” said Melanie. “Not all of us gaijin are blessed with those skinny genes you Japanese girls have.”
“A-kan-beh—” Elly said, sticking out her tongue. “Anyway I’m haafu.”
“Then you got the half that counts. I’ll be back in thirty minutes. Put on a couple of eggs when you get up, would you?”
“Yes, senpai.”
A year and a half ago, Melanie Crandall had been her first senior companion. Her senpai. And in Japan, once a senpai, always a senpai. Not that Elly minded the relationship playing out that way. Two weeks after her mission ended, she’d flown back to Utah to start summer term at BYU. It was too much change in too short a time. But Melanie had taught her how to be a missionary. Now Elly hoped Mel could teach her to be a normal person again.
After the past several months in Japan, she was looking forward to a large dose of normality.
There were the dreams, to start with. At the end of the long, hot days, she found herself looking forward to the dreams. She looked forward to them, even knowing that in the morning she would be left haunted and alone, plagued with guilt, wondering in what deep, dark well of sin these dreams had been born.
And then there was Susan.
Pairing up with Susan Eliason, her last companion, had been a “favor” to the mission president, President Takada, which only proved that no good deed went unpunished. A year into her mission, Susan had been Dear Jane’d by her fiancé, who had the gall to write that he was sure it was an inspired decision.
Elly knew that if God had anything to do with it, God would have told the jerk to wait another three months.
So instead of being assigned a greenie to train, Elly’s task was to persuade her companion to see things through. Their first week together, Elly had to restrain herself from smacking her and yelling, “Snap out of it!” like Cher in Moonstruck. But she didn’t think that was what President Takada had in mind.
She tried empathy instead. Susan was delighted when Elly told her that she’d hardly ever dated before her mission (true). She certainly didn’t have anybody waiting for her (true). But Susan chalked Elly’s abstention up to an iron will and concluded they were kindred spirits. Elly didn’t bother dissuading her. Yes, men didn’t deserve them. Yes, men were pond scum. Yes, their brains were in their pants. A pox on all their houses.
Elly didn’t tell Susan about the dreams. She had a hard enough time telling herself. And then her mission ended and she went home to Kobe, where her father was the mission president. (Somebody in the Missionary Department must not have compared notes.) Traveling from the Osaka Mission Home to the Kobe Mission Home was all of a forty minute train ride. But the dreams haunted her less.
Then they stopped.
Now they were back.
Somehow, when she was in Japan, she’d never cried out in her dreams. The feelings and the intensity had never been as strong as now. Shimatta. Where had she picked up that expression? But her heartbeat quickened even as she cursed the beautiful, intoxicating dreams.
The front door opened and closed. Melanie trotted into the kitchen. Her hair was fashionably disheveled, her face streaked with sweat. Still, she looked great. Melanie could run the Boston Marathon and cross the finish line looking like she’d jogged around the corner to get a quart of milk. She tossed the Daily Herald on the table, peeled off her sweat top and draped it across the chair back.
Elly couldn’t understand why Melanie was always teasing her about her (lack of) weight. The only fat Elly could see on Melanie’s body was right where it was supposed to be, tightly contained within her sports bra. She had a chest that Elly envied, breasts that actually got noticed.
One day while they were proselyting Melanie said to her, “You know what I like about being on a mission? I don’t have to spend an hour every morning preparing to face the world. All that time wasted getting ready for dates—what a relief!”
“But you look great now!” Elly exclaimed. It was a good thing Melanie didn’t make herself up, or she’d draw a crowd for entirely the wrong reasons. Japanese schoolgirls constantly asked her, “Are you a model?”
Melanie shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose.” She rarely resorted to false humility. “But girls like me attract the sort of men who expect us to look like this all the time. I guess I got used to living up to their expectations.”
Melanie had taken a more realistic measure of men’s expectations since her mission, and had modified her vanity schedule accordingly. Simply having a pulse, she exceeded the expectations of most men.
Elly drained the water out of the saucepan, added cold water, and set the pan on the table. “Mugi-cha?”
“Please.”
She poured two cups of barley tea, then sat down at the table and took a sip. “Mel,” she said, “mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure, go ahead.” Melanie pushed aside the paper and picked up an egg. She hit it once on the table and rolled it between her palms.
“Have you ever, you know, with a boy—”
Melanie flashed her a look of mock horror. “Elly, how could you think such a thing! I’m not that kind of girl!”
“No, no, no. I didn’t mean that. I meant, like, when you were in high school—”
“You mean, making out?”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s just that, all those Young Women’s lessons, they were always so abstract. I wasn’t very socially active in high school. I’m not saying my Christmas Cake is going stale tomorrow. Well, maybe it is. But even in Japan, girls don’t start panicking when they turn twenty-five anymore, and—”
Melanie allowed herself a wistful smile. “To tell the truth, Elly, I was that kind of girl. Okay, not that kind of girl. But I was in the ballpark. If not on the field, then in the stands keeping the box scores. Salt and pepper, please.”
Elly slid the shakers across the table. “I followed the rules. Most of the rules. The important rules. I didn’t start really dating until I was sixteen. I did date non-Mormon boys. And allowed them a few more liberties than I should have. But I kept it above the waist.” She smiled again. “It wasn’t hard drawing the line in high school. Teenage boys are so immature. Being an early bloomer makes the contrast so obvious. And I promised myself that I would only marry a returned missionary.”
She passed the salt and pepper back to Elly. “The only time I really let myself be tempted was during my sophomore year. I had myself an honest-to-goodness returned missionary. Shawn Nance. A real nice guy. Marrying him wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. I got his wedding announcement on my mission. I was very happy for him.”
“How tempted?” Elly asked a bit too breathlessly.
Melanie shrugged. “Let’s just say that on more than one occasion we were rounding second base, headed for third. I’m sure it looked like an in-the-park home run.”
Melanie was a Physical Education major. She’d played fast-pitch softball in high school.
“But you didn’t—”
She shook her head. “You see, all those Young Women’s lessons, they were custom-made for me. Like giving me my own third-base coach saying: Hold up, hold up. The cut-off man’s got a strong arm.”
“What’s a cut-off man?”
“The guy who relays the ball from the outfielder to the catcher. Anyway, the moral scold in my head made me pause and say to myself, Mel-baby, home plate is still there. It’s going to be there tomorrow. It’s going to be there the day after. Don’t rush it. So, I went on a mission. I know bishops aren’t supposed to encourage girls to go on missions, but Bishop Broadbent was convinced that sooner or later I would be the downfall of some good elder. He was more than happy to see me off to anyplace-but-here.” She finished her egg. “Pretty lame reason, no?”
“Better than mine.”
Melanie shrugged. “A guy doesn’t need a reason. He’s simply expected to. It’s a giri thing—duty and honor and maybe even some actual conviction. Or because his girlfriend won’t marry him unless he does. Any reason a woman’s got is better than that.”
Elly smiled. She’d long ago resigned herself to the fact that she’d never have a body like Melanie’s. But common sense didn’t depend on genes or fashion sense.
Melanie read her thoughts and shook her head. “You’re a lucky girl, Elly. You’re smart and you’re real cute. But you don’t walk around with your own portable klieg light shining on you. You don’t have to wonder whether the boy who falls for you hasn’t fallen in love with the thought of how good he looks with you. With me, men begin with this and these.” She pointed at her nose, Japanese fashion, and then at her breasts. “And I can only let them down when they get to the other categories.”
Elly said, “I really don’t think they care.”
“I know. That’s the problem. I think living up to somebody’s expectations is ultimately easier than living down to them.” She disposed of the egg shells and plucked her sweat top off the chair. “See you in class, girl,” she said and marched off to the shower.
Chapter 4
Sex Education
Connor’s sex education started at the age of twelve. He was taking maturation at a leisurely pace. With three sisters ahead of him, this was uncharted territory. His parents felt no need to rush things along either. Still, he couldn’t do anything about turning twelve. Twelve was the age at which well-bred Mormon boys became deacons.
And that meant an interview with Bishop Hodgson, a friendly though timid man about the same age as his father. The bishop greeted him with a big smile, a handshake, and a “How’s it going?”
“Okay,” Connor answered with a shrug.
Everything went along smoothly until Bishop Hodgson asked Connor about masturbation. Except what he said was, “So, Connor, you, um, you got any difficulties with, um, with, um, self-abuse?”
Connor didn’t have the foggiest idea what the nice man was talking about. It sounded like something painful he’d do to his thumb with a hammer, and not on purpose. He hesitated. The bishop grew distinctly discomfited. The way he’d posed the question, Connor figured it was something he wasn’t supposed to do, and so he said that he didn’t.
The bishop’s relief was palpable.
On the other hand, Connor’s deacons quorum advisor took to the task of moral education with breathtaking enthusiasm. Evan Bushnell saw the enemy and the enemy had breasts, an approach to the subject that made priesthood lessons engrossing in a rather gross sort of way.
Example: The high school basketball team is going to the state championships, and they’re staying at this motel. The coach leaves to take care of some business. So they’re all alone. And the cheerleaders drop by. THE CHEERLEADERS! They’re GIRLS! That means DANGER! But do these poor slobs recognize the wolves in sheep’s clothing? NO. Just a bunch of heathen gentiles with their hormones on overdrive.
He had a half-dozen deacons on the edges of their seats. Well? well?
THEY ALL HAD SEX!
No kidding!
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!
That’s incredible!
BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I’M TELLING YOU RIGHT NOW!
Would it have made a difference?
THIS IS A WARNING!
Warnings usually came like that in priesthood, fast balls to the chest. Oof! Knocked the breath right out of him. The moral of the story had to. Because once he started thinking about the details, he came up with questions like: What high school basketball team around here ever made it to the state championships?
Despite Brother Bushnell’s apocalyptic stories, Connor soon learned that women were unlikely to throw themselves at him unless he first exerted a significant effort in their particular direction. Disappointments in life came like that—in the absence of high drama.
At any rate, nobody cared that Connor was Mormon either, except for the one day after history class when all the guys decided that maybe polygamy wasn’t such a bad idea. “Hey, Connor,” they asked, “how many moms have you got?”
“Just one. But my great-great-grandfather had three.”
His ancestral past left them in awe.
Scotia-Glenville High was a more conservative place than Provo, Utah. Connor was pretty sure they were still using textbooks from the late 1950s in the Health Education courses. His first sex education class took place in the fifth grade, and everybody had to bring in signed permission slips to view what turned out to be a video about The Facts of Life that was less explicit and entirely less interesting than what he could observe on any given episode of Nature or National Geographic.
The chief topic of conversation among the guys was that the girls got to attend a separate assembly all by themselves. An affront to equality and fair play. They all filed back to their classrooms. The school nurse came in and stood next to Mrs. Van Duren, their homeroom teacher, and asked if they had any questions. After a long, pregnant pause, Jimmy Wilson raised his hand. “How does the sperm get to the egg in the first place?”
Half the class burst into a fit of giggles. The other half stared at him. Was he being serious? Did he really not know? Or was this a joke? If it was a joke, it was a good joke. Should they laugh at Jimmy or with Jimmy? It was the day’s most serious quandary.
When the nurse was finished she took Jimmy with her. Jimmy returned twenty minutes later looking a bit ashen. After the class finally returned its attention to Mrs. Van Duren, he leaned toward Connor, in the next row over, and whispered, “What she told me—she was just kidding, right?”
Connor was happy to discover that when it came to sex, he wasn’t the dumbest kid in the class.
Connor learned about the birds and the bees the novel way—by reading novels. Starting with the first half of Hawaii, he worked onward and downward from there, all the way to Anais Nin. He never brought Anais Nin home from the library. There were times when it was better not to test his parents’ respect for the First Amendment.
Yes, his parents were supposed to be the ones leading him by the hand. But Connor was glad they didn’t try very hard. Bishop Hodgson was bad enough. His parents no doubt figured that if they could count on common sense and upbringing to impart the principles of good grammar and proper etiquette, they could count on parental osmosis to impart other lessons as well.
They counted pretty much right.
Not that he hadn’t been tempted by the dark side. There were the Playboy magazines his best friend Billy Bragg sneaked out of his granddad’s room. Perhaps the quality of smut in upstate New York was wanting back then. Or Billy’s granddad had dated tastes. But Connor couldn’t remember coming across anything half as good as what was in his mother’s art books, except that the Playboy nudes were markedly less corpulent. As far as he was concerned, Billy Bragg’s dirty magazines were another big coming-of-age nonevent.
Leaving home didn’t change things much, even as a freshman in the BYU dorms, where sin lieth not only at the door but walked in and introduced itself. Or arrived courtesy of the United States Postal Service.
Bart Lowe, who lived down the hall, spent spring break in Hawaii with his father (attending a Nu Skin convention). When he wasn’t surfing, Bart killed time catching rays on the beach and mailing postcards (in tightly sealed envelopes) of unclothed Polynesian lasses back to Provo, where the snowpack was still heavy on the mountaintops.
Connor got ratted out. On his way to class, the dorm mother stopped him and gave him a “you ought to know better” lecture. That was one of the dangers of living in BYU on-campus housing: informants everywhere.
Admittedly, Bart was leading them astray with pretty tame material. Bart might have been a gentile, but he was a conscientious gentile. He had taste, in other words. Howie Bradshaw had not so much.
Howie was one of three guys Connor shared an apartment with during his sophomore and junior years. Howie worked on the janitorial crew, and said that when the crew was on the dorm rotation, they’d find a couple of Penthouse magazines in the trash every Monday morning before room inspections. The dorms had apparently slid further downhill since Connor lived there.
Trevor Phillips had just gotten engaged, and Howie thought he knew how to warm the waters a bit. So he snagged a Penthouse when his supervisor wasn’t looking and used half a roll of transparent packing tape to fasten the centerfold to the inside of Trevor’s closet door while he was at class.
“Got you a wedding present,” Howie said. “It’s in your closet.”
Trevor thought that was the funniest prank Howie had pulled in ages. Once his fiancée found out, she wanted to see it too. Howie told his girlfriend and she wanted to see it. The only person who didn’t take a gander was Connor’s roomie, Roger Hollingsworth. Roger wasn’t going to take a step inside Howie’s room while that thing was in view. They all respected Roger’s wishes. Roger was a clean-living, clean-thinking Mormon boy if there ever was one.
The Roger Hollingsworths of this world made the Brother Bushnells of this world very happy.
Of course, Roger hadn’t become a Mormon until he was twenty-three, and had gotten his riotous living over with during his undergraduate days at the University of North Dakota. Besides alcohol and sex, he observed, there hadn’t been that much else to do all winter. “When I joined the Church,” he told Connor, “chastity was the toughest one.”
Roger got married at the end of winter semester. He was twenty-six, long-overdue by BYU standards, and well on his way to an MBA. He was eligible as hell. As the Apostle Paul said, better to marry than to burn.
Pretty much the prevailing attitude at BYU. Provo had more married students than any other university town in the known universe. Utah Valley Regional Medical Center boasted the busiest maternity ward in the country. Connor did not think he would be helping out with those statistics anytime soon.
Because for some people, chastity wasn’t the toughest one.
Chapter 5
Dr. Oh
The first day of class, summer term, Elly walked into room 2047 in the Jesse Knight Humanities Building, Japanese 301. She stared in amazement. The classroom was thronged with men. She knew half of them on sight. The first thing a returned missionary did at BYU was pick up his advanced language credits. This wasn’t so much a Japanese class as a missionary reunion. She felt as if she’d walked into a flippin’ zone conference.
She was even thinking things like flippin’.
Melanie had already arrived and was surrounded by a small flock of admirers, mostly guys from other missions who didn’t know she was just good ol’ Sister Crandall. Melanie was talking to a lanky, familiar-looking guy with short brown hair and bright blue Paul Newman eyes.
“Chalmers Choro!” Elly practically shrieked.
Greg Chalmers looked around. His face lit up in a welcoming smile. “Hey, Packard Shimai!”
She managed not to shake his hand and gave him a hug instead. He said, “I meant to tell you before I left, but sorry about Eliason. If I knew she was going to become unglued like that—”
“It’s okay. It wasn’t really her fault. Really. But that ex-boyfriend of hers is dead meat if he ever crosses my path.” She whacked him on the shoulder. “You know how it is, Choro. Shikata ga nai. I survived.”
“So what are you doing in this class? You’ll wreck the curve.”
“I can speak fine but I’m not so good at reading. Uncle says I’ve got to learn my kanji.”
“Uncle? That’s right. Oh Sensei is your uncle.”
On cue, Professor Oh strode into the room. He was a perpetually jovial man, a tad shorter than Elly and thin as a stick. “A bamboo shoot wearing glasses and a grin,” as Elly’s mother put it.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Too many tall gaijin in here!”
Anybody not at a desk found one.
“Konnichi wa!” Oh Sensei said with a bow.
“Konnichi wa!” the class echoed.
“Japanese 301,” Oh Sensei announced. “If you’re here to add the class, we have, let’s see, four slots left. Thanks to the wonderful complexities of the Japanese language, 221 is a prerequisite even if you are an RM.” He took note of Elly’s presence and added, “Except if you attended elementary school in Japan.”
Elly rolled her eyes.
“Two midterms, weekly quizzes. I don’t grade on attendance, but if I call on you for a reading and you’re not here, batsu!” He sliced the air with an invisible samurai sword.
That elicited a laugh.
“You think I joke? You write kanji many times! Wax on! Wax off!”
Someone asked, “What about extra credit assignments?”
“Extra credit? Hmm.” He tapped the end of his mechanical pencil against his chin. “Okay, you get engaged to my niece, automatic A.”
“Uncle!” Elly exploded in Japanese.
The expression of pretend-innocence on her uncle’s face said, What? What? Elly realized that he hadn’t mentioned her name. Oh, for dumb. The boy at the desk in front of her (because even at twenty-one they all looked like boys to her) turned around and smiled shyly at her.
She said tersely in Japanese, “I’m way older than you.” A year older, to be precise, but it did feel like decades.
They started on the first reading. Oh Sensei paused before the bell to take care of adds and drops. At the beginning of the second hour, he had everybody stand up and introduce themselves—where they were from, what mission they’d gone to. They were all RMs.
When it was Elly’s turn she said, “I lived in Hiratsuka and Yokohama until I was nine, but I mostly grew up in Salt Lake and Provo. I went on a mission to Osaka. Melanie was my first senpai,” she added, nodding at her roommate.
“Yeah,” Melanie said, “that’s why she speaks Japanese so well.”
Elly went to sit down. “Ah, ah, ah,” Uncle said, “you didn’t say when you got off your mission.”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Can anybody beat that?” Nobody could. “The greenie award goes to Eri!”
Everybody applauded.
After the bell rang, Melanie said to her roommate, “You’ve got the next period free, don’t you? Let’s do lunch.”
“Eri-chan,” her uncle said.
She was convinced he didn’t pronounce the L on purpose. Why her parents had given her a first name with an L in it was a matter she’d have to bring up with them one of these days. They’d done the same thing with her sister. Though the diminutive chan bugged her more.
“C’mon, don’t call me that in front of everybody,” she said under her breath.
“Oh. Sorry. Eri Sensei.”
Elly rolled her eyes.
Uncle said, picking up his papers, “Come to my office.” He started toward the door.
“What about?”
“So many questions, so little time, my little niece.”
From her half-inch advantage in height, Elly gave her uncle an exasperated look. But family was family. She got Melanie’s attention. “I have to go with Uncle,” she said. “I shouldn’t be long.”
“Okay. I’ll meet you at the Cougareat.”
His office was a flight up and down the hall. Uncle asked, “How are Sam and Emily?”
“Emily wants to get an apartment in Sannomiya, closer to the Kobe University campus. At least that’s what she and Mom were fighting about when I was there. Sam has spent less time in Japan than any of us but all he does is speak Japanese. Mom makes him speak English at home.”
“How old is he now? Eleven, twelve?”
“Eleven. You should put him in one of your language acquisition studies.”
“Speaking of which, did you ever run into Connor McKenzie? He was in Osaka spring term helping your Uncle Nobuo with that big translation contract for the SDF.”
The image of the gaijin on the Nakamozu Nankai station platform popped into her head. The brief look that had sparked between them. She shook her head to clear away the memory.
Her uncle interpreted the gesture as a no. “It was a thought.” They stopped in front of his office while he unlocked the door.
“This isn’t something Mom put you up to, is it? Did you tell this guy about me too?”
“I don’t know if your name’s ever specifically come up.” Uncle shrugged. He dumped his books on the desk. His office wasn’t all that big to begin with, and made all the more cramped by a pair of filing cabinets and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining each wall.
“Is he even at BYU anymore?”
“He’s in the master’s program, linguistics.”
“Oh. Whatever. Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“What? Oh, no. Have you ever thought about teaching, Elly?”
“Teaching? Well, I have thought about it.”
“Good. I’d like you to take over a section of 101. It’s Monday through Friday, two to four.”
“Japanese 101? You want me to teach a class?”
“Sure. Right now, your Japanese is more up-to-date than anybody else’s on the staff.”
“But I don’t know how to teach!”
“What do you mean, you don’t know how to teach? You’ve done nothing for the last year and a half but teach! You taught Eikaiwa, didn’t you? Church English classes? Language is language. Look, the lesson plan is outlined section by section, hour by hour.” He handed her a three-ring binder. “Here are Noriko’s notes.”
“Who’s Noriko? Why can’t she teach the class?”
“She’s having a baby. Stay a chapter ahead of the class and you’ll do fine. In a pinch just keep speaking Japanese. They won’t understand you anyway.”
“Well—”
“I’ll do the first week with you. You’ll get the hang of it by then. It’ll be easy. You’ll see.”
Easy for him to say. Oh women, her mother maintained, are the samurai in the family. The men provide the comic relief. Elly took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“Okay? Only okay? It’s okay! Exclamation points!! It’ll be fun, you’ll see. Room number 3090, two o’clock.”
She was sure she would see, all right. She wasn’t sure what.
Elly got an employment authorization form and faculty schedule card from the dean’s secretary. She descended to the basement floor of the JKHB where the TAs had their so-called offices. Room 1054, Asian Languages, was a squashed box of a classroom partitioned into a maze of tiny cubicles. She found Noriko’s carrel, placed her books on the narrow shelf, and sat down. Then lowered the chair a good six inches. She pulled out the yellow faculty schedule card and examined it.
Office hours. It made her feel so—grown up. When was the best time to have office hours? Probably right after class, four to five. Then home for dinner. That had a very white-collar feel to it. She filled in the boxes, went back out to the hall where the schedule cards were fastened to the corkboard next to the door, and replaced Noriko’s card with her own.
She remembered the time and hurried over to the Wilkinson Center.
The cafeteria at the Cougareat was packed. During the summer, every department on campus ran a camp: music camps, sports camps, computer camps. Roving packs of teenagers outnumbered college students. The scene was kind of creepy—it gave her flashbacks to high school.
“Over here,” Melanie called to her, waving.
The guy she was sharing the table with wasn’t happy to see Elly walk up. She’d have to get used to being the spoiler. “Sorry I’m late.”
“No matter,” Melanie said in Japanese. “You can tell me all about it.”
Elly got sweet and sour over rice at the Chinese concession. When she returned to the table, the boy had left.
“What happened to your boyfriend?”
“Him? Puh-leez, an opportunist.” Mel lowered her voice and said in a fake baritone, “Hey, mind if I sit here? By the way, what’s your major?” She finished her strawberry yogurt and licked the plastic spoon. “It finally dawned on him—I measure their IQ by how long it takes—that he wasn’t going to get my undivided attention.”
“Not on my account—”
“Girl, if I wanted him to stay, he would have stayed. I didn’t want.”
Elly laughed. “You’re so ruthless, Mel. If a boy paid that much attention to me, I’d feel obligated to jump into his arms.”
Melanie shook her head. “It’s a buyer’s market, Elly. Like in Japanese baseball, you never swing at the first pitch.”
“Or the second, third, forth, fifth.”
“Nine innings, that’s twenty-seven at bats. You should hang out in the Asian Collection at the library. All the RMs do there is hit on the Japanese girls. And vice versa.”
“Not once they figure out I’m really American and twenty-two and still a junior.”
“So bat your pretty brown eyes at the grad students. They’ve got a steeper earnings curve. What did your uncle want?”
“He asked me if I knew some student of his.” Elly shook her head in disbelief. “Like he was trying to set me up. McKenzie-something. Nobody that I know.”
“That’s what he wanted to talk to you about?”
“No, no, no. One of the Nihongo TAs is having a baby. He wants me to teach a section of 101.”
“Really? You’ll be a great sensei. Hey, that means if I visit you during office hours, you’ll have to help me with my 301 homework.” Melanie grinned. “Any rules against dating your students? Maybe your uncle is still trying to set you up.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. But any boy taking 101 is probably a freshman. And eighteen is so young.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Anyway, it’s a thought.”
“Not a thought I’m having.”
Melanie laughed. “I swear, Elly, your uncle’s got the right idea. If you don’t hire yourself a go-between soon, you’ll never get yourself hitched.”
Chapter 6
Dinner Invitations
Elly arrived home six hours later. “Tadaima.” she called out.
“O-kaeri,” Melanie answered from the kitchen.
Elly collapsed on the couch. Her roommate appeared in the doorway. “How was work, dear?”
“The longest three hours of my life.”
“Isn’t it a two-hour class?”
“Not counting office hours. Uncle told me to put together the lesson plan for tomorrow’s class. I somewhat panicked.”
“He’s not going to make you start teaching after one day, is he?”
“He promised he wouldn’t make me teach all two hours. But knowing Uncle, I’ll end up teaching one hour, fifty-nine minutes.”
“Sounds like being a junior companion all over again.”
It was exactly like being a junior companion again. And like observing her senior companion, she’d caught onto her uncle’s methodology quickly enough. It involved simplifying the elements of a dialogue so that the students could grasp the meaning without explanations in English.
Thankfully, the entire two hour class wasn’t devoted to the immersion approach. Reading and writing lessons took up the balance. Except for one or two of her students—in particular, a kid named Bradley—the rest hardly knew any Japanese at all, other than sushi, karaoke, and origami.
“You’ll get better at it,” Melanie said encouragingly. “Junior companions eventually turn into senior companions.”
The phone rang. Melanie darted back to the kitchen. She returned to the living room and tossed Elly the phone. “Your General Authority.”
“Hi, Grandpa.”
“Elly!” his voice boomed over the phone. “How’s my favorite granddaughter?”
“You’ve got a dozen grandkids, Grandpa. You can’t fool me.”
“Oh, but you’re the cutest.”
During her teenage years, her grandfather’s effusive nature only made Elly roll her eyes. Once in a moment of adolescent pique she’d asked her mother, “Why does Grandpa pretend he likes me so much?”
Her mother answered with a cross look. “He isn’t pretending. He only wants you to have no doubts about his affection for you.”
When she grew older, Elly came to appreciate the attention he lavished on her.
Her grandfather said, “We haven’t seen you since we picked you up at the airport. Why don’t you come for dinner on Sunday? You can bring that pretty roommate of yours along too.”
“Sure, Grandpa.” Elly covered the mouthpiece and shouted, “Mel, do you want to have Sunday dinner with my grandparents?”
“Sure!”
“Okay, we’ll be there, Grandpa, around one or so.”
“Maybe we’ll have a few other guests over as well.”
She knew right then he was winking at Grandma. Elly sighed to herself. But she wasn’t dissuaded. “Okay, Grandpa, see you Sunday.”
He said goodbye. Elly returned the phone to its cradle in the kitchen. “You know they’ll be inviting the most available bachelors in their ward to dinner.”
“I know. Eating dinner with your grandparents is like getting a fortune cookie before the meal. And you have to admit, your grandma does have good taste in men.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“You don’t appreciate what it’s like to have interesting relatives, Elly. I mean, the Ohs aren’t just Japanese, they’re interesting Japanese.”