12.06.06
written too oddly
When we moved, she came with large boxes marked only blue, red, black and whiter in neon markers. There was a box for each colour, filled to overflowing with dresses, skirts, empire-waited blouses. She never wore denim. Pants, she said, never suited her body type. So there was also a box marked stockings which spilled over with her carefully wrapped balls of coloured nylon and wool.
Each size was small. There are in our attic several large dresses, hanging now, fading in the sun with their prince tags still attached by plastic tabs.
She was supposed to have been larger, she told me. Everyone said so. They could see it in her long awkward limbs, they said. She would have to grow into them. And she did. One day they no longer seemed so awkward. She hadn’t grown at all, but their awkwardness had gone anyway. She told me that one day while looking at a bowl of milk before her and thinking about what they had said, she decided never to drink milk again. Then, after, they would say she had a protein deficiency. A lack of calcium they said then.
So, because she was so stubborn she is my tiny wife that I can carry limp-bodied in my arms.
My tiny wife knits over breakfast with her (awkward) arms, the ball of yarn hidden by the table so that it seems that the thread she pulls with her fingers is coming from her thing, multihued and roughly spun. On the obscuring table are fresh bread and scarlet jam, bowls of black coffee. I watch the kernels of popped rice rise and fall in my tea enjoying the warm nutty smell that is coming from the glass pot. They sink and ascend to the top of the pot as if dancing, jumping for the lid, agitated, excited about something coming.
At this time every morning I ask her if she is all right and every morning she pauses in her knitting, takes her bowl of coffee in both hands, and murmurs something gently over its surface. I can’t hear her, but the way her lips are pursed and the way the air ripples over her drink tell me she is fine.
It is sometimes hard to tell.
She has never displayed symptoms. She told me once that when she was younger she had gotten pneumonia and no one knew until after her left lung had collapsed. Her mother had thought that she was simply extraordinarily tired that night. It wasn’t until they saw the x-rays of her tiny chest filled with fluid about to suffocate her that anyone suspected anything was wrong. In kindergarten too, everyone thought she was a poor student when it was only that she was legally blind. It was only that she couldn’t see the chalkboard.
Now every morning she places disks of soft plastic over each of her hazel (never brown) eyes. She stares straight ahead at the mirror with her mouth hanging slightly open so that she can see me looking at her trough the doorframe.
The doctor had not believed her either. He said that she couldn’t be pregnant, that she’d always been irregular. There was no reason to worry, he said. Of course then she started to bleed and that was another story.
One day out of every week, she spends the whole day doing our laundry. I will be sitting in the study, dipping my nib into water again, and she will fill the house with the smell of her clean warm cloth. In the morning, she begins and there are white blacks and colours to be sorted. There are my colours: light blue, brown, red, simple colours that she throws together to be washed all at once in a crowd, but then there are her colours, things she bought for me that lay in multihued piles waiting for their turn in the pool.
I know I am not supposed to dip my nib in the water. I like to watch the patterns that it sets spinning in the water, feathery images that I try to read like tea leaves only the pattern keeps changing so that I wonder if that means my future is changing too. But, eventually even that fades away.
The clothes dry and she irons them for hours, bent over that long ironing board of ours. I was always amazed that her long (awkward) arms could hold that great weight of iron, the same one her mother had used. She showed me one the scars she had cotton from using it. As she pointed out each patch of delicate parchment like skin, she smiled up at me. I couldn’t smile back but only kissed her wrists and held her close.
When she is done with ironing, everything is folded. Everything is divided into quarters and put way. Our sheets go neatly into their cedar-lined drawers. My shirts rest on her curved hangers. The only thing that never moves is the pouch of bloody tissue that she keeps in her bureau next to the stamps and her stationary. When she opens the drawer to send a letter for me I can see her hand graze the satin pouch weighing so heavily on the wood.
At the end of the day, she is finished and I put away my papers. She calls me to our room and there I can smell the freshness of our bed sheets, and she we lay in the dark she curls into a little ball beside me. Are you all right, I ask again, and again she murmurs a little (now against my chest) and I think she must mean yes.
Tomorrow, coming from the market, I will walk with my shoulders bent towards the dark ground. It will be cold and snow will begin to fall so lightly that at first I will wonder if I am only thinking of it. A single flake will rest on my cheek and I will think it is a story that she will like. Her cloth bags full of food and her scarf around my neck (knitted more than green); I will walk head down to keep the cold from seeping in.
Then I will see her.
She wears her yellow dress. It is floating around her hips in the icy lake but with each step, it rises higher around her. I can’t help but think that for a moment she looks like a flower closing at night, her dress spread around her like that.
She notices me and as the turns to look, she smiles. I motion for her to come but she only mouths something that I cannot hear and turns back around.
Stones, the coroner said, she filled her mouth with stones.
shi-ou-sama at
