about a different camp, one of the most peaceful ones. Was Hiroshima in the version
of Lily’s story I read so long ago? Did I gloss over it then too?
I have the book somewhere, back in Brooklyn. I can read it again, find out how much I’ve forgotten, how much I must remember in some unconscious stream in my brain.
Brian can send it to me.
“Yes, I’ve heard of Lily,” I tell him. “I would be so grateful for her address.”
TOO LATE
IT IS TOO LATE for my mother to join me here. I can’t shake that knowledge, the sense that I should have done this years ago so my mother could see Japan. It’s not just that my writing is attached to her history, or that this country is the home of her first language. My impulse has always been to expand my mother’s horizons, because her life in tiny town Hawaii seemed so small.
My mother took care of the children.
It was my self-appointed responsibility to do what she hadn’t. To live the life that could be claimed vicariously; even when I knew my mother worried about some of the things I did, I also knew that she marveled when I accomplished them, when I was safe another day. That was my greatest success—to be alive and well somewhere else—and
there were calls in the middle of the night to double check, every time the evening news reported that someone somewhere in another New York borough had been mugged. My parents managed to stretch an uneventful 1950s existence into a lifetime. They raised me in a place where children could spend an afternoon without adults, diving beneath the lips of underwater caverns, because somehow, in the lazy shelter of this barefoot world, it was not ever possible to be harmed. Crime was rare, because anonymity did not exist, and besides, it wasn’t practical. Stolen cars turned up in a field of sugar cane once the tank was empty, because it was an island after all.
If it was odd that a woman who was so safe would worry so obsessively about her daughter, I imagined it was, in fact, the placid nature of my mother’s life that left her unequipped to deal with even the possibility of danger. When I was in college, my parents used to come to the big city every summer to visit me, and I would show them around, showing off, completely forgetting that my father lived in Greenwich Village when he was in college, and that the first time I ever visited New York, as a young teenager, my parents took me there, and my mother and I buckled our purses onto the epaulets of our raincoats so we wouldn’t be robbed. My parents, too, ignored the past and allowed me to be the worldly one.
In response, I honored my mother’s fear.
For all my plucky posture, I lived in New York very carefully, triple checking whether or not I had my keys, was heading in the right direction on the subway; I bought a lock
that featured a steel bar that went all the way into a hole in the floor when Brian and I moved into our first apartment so there was no way to force the door. If my mother’s fear had no root, it had branches, and I lived with her scenarios in my head: being knocked over by a bicyclist, picked off in a drive-by shooting, cornered by a gang of boys. It was Brian who chose New York. I followed him because it was where he went to college; I stayed because it was where he got a job. When we were together, it was exciting, but alone, I was easily exhausted. I narrowed my parameters: became the kind of person who always took the same route because that was what I knew, what worked, and there was a comfort in knowing it intimately, down to the length of each traffic light and the name of the vendor selling stale donuts on the third corner. In that way, I survived.
Japan, and especially Hiroshima, is a place without threat. My mother could have moved here by herself, discovered her history on her own. There is no protection to organize, no peace to make, no responsibilities.
She would have loved it.
Time moves, Ami told me, from present to past. That’s what the
of Lily’s story I read so long ago? Did I gloss over it then too?
I have the book somewhere, back in Brooklyn. I can read it again, find out how much I’ve forgotten, how much I must remember in some unconscious stream in my brain.
Brian can send it to me.
“Yes, I’ve heard of Lily,” I tell him. “I would be so grateful for her address.”
TOO LATE
IT IS TOO LATE for my mother to join me here. I can’t shake that knowledge, the sense that I should have done this years ago so my mother could see Japan. It’s not just that my writing is attached to her history, or that this country is the home of her first language. My impulse has always been to expand my mother’s horizons, because her life in tiny town Hawaii seemed so small.
My mother took care of the children.
It was my self-appointed responsibility to do what she hadn’t. To live the life that could be claimed vicariously; even when I knew my mother worried about some of the things I did, I also knew that she marveled when I accomplished them, when I was safe another day. That was my greatest success—to be alive and well somewhere else—and
there were calls in the middle of the night to double check, every time the evening news reported that someone somewhere in another New York borough had been mugged. My parents managed to stretch an uneventful 1950s existence into a lifetime. They raised me in a place where children could spend an afternoon without adults, diving beneath the lips of underwater caverns, because somehow, in the lazy shelter of this barefoot world, it was not ever possible to be harmed. Crime was rare, because anonymity did not exist, and besides, it wasn’t practical. Stolen cars turned up in a field of sugar cane once the tank was empty, because it was an island after all.
If it was odd that a woman who was so safe would worry so obsessively about her daughter, I imagined it was, in fact, the placid nature of my mother’s life that left her unequipped to deal with even the possibility of danger. When I was in college, my parents used to come to the big city every summer to visit me, and I would show them around, showing off, completely forgetting that my father lived in Greenwich Village when he was in college, and that the first time I ever visited New York, as a young teenager, my parents took me there, and my mother and I buckled our purses onto the epaulets of our raincoats so we wouldn’t be robbed. My parents, too, ignored the past and allowed me to be the worldly one.
In response, I honored my mother’s fear.
For all my plucky posture, I lived in New York very carefully, triple checking whether or not I had my keys, was heading in the right direction on the subway; I bought a lock
that featured a steel bar that went all the way into a hole in the floor when Brian and I moved into our first apartment so there was no way to force the door. If my mother’s fear had no root, it had branches, and I lived with her scenarios in my head: being knocked over by a bicyclist, picked off in a drive-by shooting, cornered by a gang of boys. It was Brian who chose New York. I followed him because it was where he went to college; I stayed because it was where he got a job. When we were together, it was exciting, but alone, I was easily exhausted. I narrowed my parameters: became the kind of person who always took the same route because that was what I knew, what worked, and there was a comfort in knowing it intimately, down to the length of each traffic light and the name of the vendor selling stale donuts on the third corner. In that way, I survived.
Japan, and especially Hiroshima, is a place without threat. My mother could have moved here by herself, discovered her history on her own. There is no protection to organize, no peace to make, no responsibilities.
She would have loved it.
Time moves, Ami told me, from present to past. That’s what the
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