by Carmen Mason
I could not tell if she had hair or was bald as neither was impossible with this Japanese waif, rather wraith, with a voice like cobwebs drawn across the air.
Once she left and went home, only to return an hour later because I’d not answered the door on the first knock. She arrived every Monday at five, then later at four when she’d taken on another job before her night shift at the Fat Cat Jazz Club in Greenwich Village. She always wore a pale yellow or green woolen knit “goobalini” pulled low round the border of her placid child’s face, and she never removed it despite her peeling off and piling up of her two faded, plaid lumberjack jackets and one tweedy, moth-munched sweater she folded neatly on my sitting-room couch. Her spindly glasses always shielded her shy and indirect eyes. She had no adornments, no makeup or jewelry, scarves or doodads. She had perfect tiny teeth beside the one she had to have removed, because it had rotted and half fallen out. “It doesn’t hurt now, so maybe I not go. My friend say I must. She say the infection go to my brain and scare me.” Her faint but not annoying breath was of coffee or tobacco, depending, and her hands were so strong yet looked so delicate.
I had seen her neatly printed ads on the City Island street poles, called her on her cell and asked to meet her and, happily satisfied, I hired her to start the next week her hour-long shiatsu massages on my sitting-room floor throughout the harsh winter. When she was finished she would let herself out if I’d fallen into a lovely sleep but, if not, we’d sometimes have a brief conversation as she layered herself back up to leave. Eventually my appreciation and my telling to my friends of her wonderful massages created a group of thankful customers.
At the beginning of every hour, while she removed her hiking boots, I’d begun to run warm water with foamy bath oil in the sink. She’d shyly tiptoe into the bathroom and warm up her hands because the first time she’d massaged my back I’d leapt up in a paroxysm of an icy chill-causing stupor, then laughter had come from us both. “My hands so cold. I try give up the cigarette today. It being hard for me.”
There were no signs of guilt or embarrassment when one day she suddenly spoke of her unannounced leaving of her stunned parents and little sister from their small Japanese farm “far, far out in countryside,” nor of her illegal arrival to America, her hiding for one year in an upstate SUNY dorm room, and finally, her running away in the middle of the night and her hand-to-mouth odyssey, ending in her discovery of City Island and an offer of a rented room in one of its waterfront houses owned by a well-off Greenwich Village antique dealer.
Sometimes she would come with cold coffee, and I would heat it up for her before she left to take the bus and train into Manhattan for her all-night employment, which entailed serving jazz-club groupies from NYU and The New School—never losing at the Cat Club basement ping-pong tournaments and cleaning the bathrooms and kitchen before taking the train back to City Island at six in the morning.
One day she brought me a Pez dispenser, something my mother would never have bought me when I was young. Another day she lingered to peruse my wall-to-wall bookcase and said, “Ah, yes, that Scad Grald and the rooshin. I like them. I read lot of that and I study the rooshin.” With prodding I realized she meant Scott Fitzgerald and the Russians; she loved “Anna Krena” also, “Ki-oott Ham-soon.” When I offered her Knut Hamsun’s Pan, she moved dramatically back, giggling, her thin fingers covering her one half-gray tooth.
“Oh no, I lose everything. This fourth pair eye glass in one year. Don’t know why. Even my backpack and then, one minute have it, then gone and no one round.”
Another day she walked in and sat quickly down on the couch, then floated her left arm up to me to show me a white beaded bracelet, much too big for her wrist. “My mother send to me from Japan. Look inside.” She slid it off and into my hand.
“Look there, a woman and a monkey.” I held the bracelet up to the late afternoon light and saw a Buddha, the little monkey at its feet, and Japanese scroll letters on the right, all inside the miniscule bead. “It the figure of my birth year, she send it to me.”
I wondered how they had found her and if that had meant she was forgiven but didn’t ask. All through the massage, trying to stay in the exquisite moment of now and touch and deep loosening of bound-up nerves and sinews, I thought, I must tell her about my father’s ebony cabinet filled with beetles, butterflies, and the tiny bullet I held up to my eye to see the Lord’s Prayer, as complete and clear and amazing as her white-bead Buddha. I’d tell her about the green light Fitzgerald mentions at the end of Gatsby because it is the same green beacon one can see sometimes from the end of City Island. I’d tell her she did the right thing to run away, first from the hard thankless life of her parents, then the cold state college which could offer her no solace. I’d urge her not to give up.
One day she spoke about her best friend, her boss at the Fat Cat Jazz Club, whose son had just been hospitalized for schizophrenia and now he needed her for longer hours into the morning. I asked her what she really wanted to do and she said something with music or her voice. “I like the jazz, the musicians, they very, very smart. They read books, then bring to club. I allow to take home to read. So far I don’t lose any.” Another day, she said she was taking up piano tuning, had bought a book, and was teaching herself. Sensing the leanness of her life, I was skeptical suddenly of her sanity, her common sense. I asked if at least she had a piano to practice on. She laughed and said, “Oh, course, there a piano where I stay, yes.” She seemed unbothered by my growing concern.
I began to tell her about seeing Yoko Ono at the Grammys and how she had been a performance-artist, painter and singer long before John Lennon, and that despite her harrowing, wailing soprano voice, she’d managed to make some bearable recordings. I wanted to say then but didn’t, You see, you are already so much like her, eccentric and uncanny and different. You don’t have to accept a nine-to-five or sell yourself out. You’re young, you have the rest of your life, but now, in your twenties, this is the freest time you’ll ever, ever know apart from childhood, and perhaps, your childhood wasn’t all that free, considering you had to run away and break their hearts, and all at once I wanted to tell her to take the world she chose rather than the practical one I had, and yet I also wanted to say, perhaps you should go back to school now, it’s been four years and surely you can get into some program so you’ll have something to help you out of the mess you’re in.
One Monday, she arrived more breathy than usual. When I asked, “How’s everything?” she said, “Oh, not so better but…” I offered, “You mean, rather up and down?” She looked closely at me, considering, then, “More like left to right.” She told me the owners of her rental were returning and needed her room back.
When she went home after what would become our last massage, she had left her watch on the glass table and called to say she’d stop by for it on the way to work the next afternoon. The following day when she knocked I ran to open the door and handed her the watch and the biggest orange I could find from the refrigerator drawer. Her giggle rose in the frosty air as she opened a plastic grocery bag to show me a small pile of delicate oranges. She did not reach out her tiny hand for the orange so I dropped it softly into the bag and returned it to her. We smiled at each other and then she was gone.
In the weeks to follow I asked about her at her favorite coffee shop and found a few people who’d been her clients, and they too had not seen or heard from her. As far as I know, none of us have ever seen her again.
Carmen Mason: “I have been writing poems and stories all my life, won a few prizes here and there, but most of my pieces have demanded to spill out in the middle of the night or while walking or driving! I have often pulled over just to scribble something I will get back to once I am home again! And if VOICES welcomes me I am very pleased!”
