Kiku pulls on socks and her father’s old winter kimono, indigo cotton lined with bark colored flannel. Its weight calms and warms her as she wraps it over her pajamas. In the middle of the long bedroom closet, Josh’s warm weather clothes are sandwiched by still air. Kiku sniffs his favorite barbecue shirt, a faded flowered Hawaiian one. She is rewarded with the very faint scent of smoky meat and an even fainter trace of Josh, the stalwart molecules having burrowed into the fabric to hibernate.
In the bathroom the lone toothbrush rests on the wooden shelf above the sink. Its shelf mate has run off with Josh. The shaving cup, brush, and razor have also gone to Seattle. Kiku admires the loyal cup remaining. Sumi made it the perfect size for rinsing and spitting. Josh had asked Kiku if he could take it, for he had a special fondness for this daughter-made thing. “You’re going to have to rough it,” Kiku had told him, taking the cup from his hands. She’d been smiling as she said it, but her words had been clipped. He’d chosen to believe the smile.
The cup is porcelain, glazed a soft blue with violet tinges. Kiku remembers showing Sumi how to roll out the clay and make the parts, the sheet of sky and its thick, full moon base. Sumi didn’t like the look of a handle, although Kiku showed her various kinds. Sumi was certain. “No arms, just the sides.” The white line drawing on the cup shows a girl with arms reaching out and long braids trailing as she flies into the twilit sky.
Kiku absently picks up the toothbrush and wanders the hushed house as Sumi and the rest of Berkeley sleep on. In the small parlor that is Josh’s home office, the desk is clean. The papers that once lived inside it have already shipped out. She turns the desk lamp on, but moves it to the floor so that it is not too bright. Gaps on the bookshelves show where papers and journals once overflowed. Kiku made Josh stop packing once she’d seen how quickly a husband could absent himself. Everything else must wait for the summer move.
This school year had started with a bang. Josh had come home on a warm mid-September evening whooping and hollering.
“My girls, I got the call! From Kin Bauer himself! Kin Bauer! Can you believe it?”
Kiku looked up from chopping vegetables and carefully set down the blade, while Sumi came running and leapt into her Papi’s arms.
His girls asked simultaneously, “Who’s Kin Bauer?”
“Kin Bauer is the big man in Northwest Coast tribal culture up at U. Wash. He is wanting to retire and is looking for someone to carry on tracking creation stories.”
“Enter, Assistant Professor Josh di Palma,” Kiku said.
Josh’s face lit up. “Kin Bauer read some of my papers on the ecology movement and creation stories.”
“Did he like them?” Sumi asked.
“He must have. He wants me in Seattle.”
***
Later, behind closed doors, Kiku had many questions. “Why do you have to leave in three months?”
“Professor Bauer will be attending his last round of storytelling festivals starting in December. It would be best if I went with him, got introduced around. The elders trust him.” Josh mimed the passing off and receiving of a relay baton. Kiku was not amused.
“Josh, you know that school goes until June, for me and for Sumi. Why can’t you wait for the new school year?”
“The storytelling festivals happen only in winter. The rest of the year there are other festivals, but winter is special. Honey, you would love it! They tell these stories in the dark about the beginning of time and by telling them again, they believe they are remaking the world.”
“Surely the world can start again next September,” Kiku said. Now Josh was not amused.
“Not from what the other anthros say. The Northwest Coast elders have been hit hard by the Hong Kong flu, so the storytelling is in danger of literally dying out.”
“Okay.” Kiku meant okay, that she understood his reasons. Not that she agreed and was happy. She wanted to see his point, and another part of her was starting to steam.
“I’m sorry, but this is the break I’ve been waiting for. More than what I could have hoped for. Kin Bauer!”
He was sure he had to leap, and so he did.
***
A faintly darkened rectangle with a wire nail shows where Josh’s favorite picture used to hang above the desk. Kiku squints in the dim light and recalls a black and white Edward S. Curtis photo of two squatting raven dancers from a Kwakiutl ceremony. At thirteen he found it in a junk store in South Philly, when he was first discovering photography. This picture, more than anything, led him to anthropology and his love of the Northwest Coast tribes.
Kiku would often find Josh corresponding with his northern contacts at the desk or listening to indigenous language tapes in the leather lounge chair with a lap blanket and notebook. She’d tell him dinner was soon, and before he went to wash up, he’d look up at the picture as if looking into a magic window. Or as if asking the raven dancers to wait for him. He’d long dreamt of the sea and river people. And now the photo graced his bare studio apartment in the rainy Queen City a short bike ride away from the University of Washington. The picture, the magic window, had transported him closer to the Kwakiutl, the Haida, and the Tlingit people who’d captured his heart.
Kiku sits for a moment in the wooden chair, tapping the lone toothbrush on the oak desktop. She crab walks the chair over to the window to get a view of the stars before dawn. They twinkle above the dark green thorny vines of the bougainvillea, which will turn the side of the neighboring Giordano house magenta, come spring. She gets up and moves the empty desk in the dark to face the window. It glides into its new place easily on the wooden floor. She pushes it back and forth until just the right view is framed. She mimes writing a letter, pausing to look up and is satisfied with what she sees.
Kiku heads to the kitchen to make some tea. She looks in on Sumi, who is curled up at the top of her bed with a swirl of blankets trailing. Kiku opens the crammed kitchen hutch and shakes her head. She pulls out the checkbooks and files marked ‘household’ and ‘studio.’ She steeps the kukicha and extracts the strainer, placing it in the sink where the revived tea twigs give off a slightly bitter aroma and a curl of steam. She loads up a tray with the teapot, cup, and papers and heads back to the office.
The files and checkbooks go in the big lockable drawer. She finds the key taped inside, but not alone. There is a shred of paper with a flaming heart around “J + K”, which makes her touch the back of her hand to her lips. The initials are in Josh’s unique fountain pen script, which is clear and reliable as a printed font. She locks the drawer and pockets the key and the love note in the corner of the kimono sleeve. It is hard for her to stay mad at Josh when he is so dear.
She will bring her stationery and cards and stamps here too. Kiku sips at her tea and looks out the window, but in the still dark just sees her reflection. She watches the woman there drinking tea and tries to picture life in Seattle.
She thinks it will be much the same, her potter’s life at the wheel circling around home and Sumi and Josh. Her MFA degree will allow her to teach at college level. Sumi will be in school most of the day, entering first grade. Josh will be out in the field more often than in the classroom. Still, they will have dinner parties and family bicycle rides and tell stories and laugh. And they will all be together in this new place.
The sky is starting to pink up. A small flock of twittering birds rises up in a feathery cloud from the hydrangea below the window. Half of them fly off to the bougainvillea, the other half settles down in the bush again.
Watching this, Kiku almost chokes on her mouthful of hot tea. Things will not be the same, not at all! Moving up north, they will be leaving Idell and Jeremy behind. Kiku and Idell have taken care of Sumi and Jeremy together ever since the di Palmas arrived in Berkeley three years ago. How can she and Sumi get on without them?
In the rush this fall, Josh had skipped over this very important thing. He thought this home life that Kiku and Idell had spun for their entwined households was easily portable. They all miss Josh terribly, but daily life has continued smoothly, all because Idell and Jeremy remain. Kiku cannot imagine everyday life without half of their family.
Other questions tumble out of that shifting window, and dueling ravens fly by. Where will her studio be? Will she have a converted garage like the one here? Or will she have to work at school, assuming she gets a good teaching position at one of the colleges? She needs her fine mud and fire almost as much as food and water. Josh wants her to wait and see. There will be time to scout out everything for her in the summer, he says. But Kiku is impatient to know what will happen. He would not wait for her to finish her master’s degree and hasn’t considered whether Seattle will be a good place for them, for all of them. Kiku feels her jaw tightening and places her palms on her face.
She grabs a pen and adds to the love note “+ S + I + J.” She wants her whole family.
***
“Idell, I don’t want to break up our family. I need to talk to Josh about this whole Seattle mess. I think it’s all a big mistake. Maybe he can get his position back.” Kiku held her sister-friend’s hands tightly on the front porch. Idell is calm, as Jeremy and Sumi run past them and jump into the car.
“Don’t worry, Sweetness, everything will be fine. You’ll see. Jeremy and I will help you with the move. We’ll even caravan up there to take a look around. Maybe we’ll want to move there too. Lots of time to sort things out.”
Idell has already looked into the future and has seen Jeremy and Sumi growing up together. She has seen a restaurant for herself and nameless, countless good things for Kiku. She keeps all this to herself. Idell is not worried.
Kiku drops the kids off at school, giving them each an extra hug, and heads up to Sebastopol to work. She is well on her way to completing her thesis project with a Japanese master potter named Jun Morikawa. The drive is fine, and she lets all her worries fly out the open window as the scent of apples reaches her nose from the surrounding orchards.
***
Kiku and Morikawa-sensei have been looking at pictures of the classic Zen rock garden in Kyoto called Ryoanji. They admire the raked white sand in concentric rings around the standing and lying down stones, like islands and the still sea.
“You sit there at the edge of the garden, and from any point you can see fourteen of the fifteen rocks,” Morikawa-sensei is telling Kiku. His white wiry eyebrows dance in wonder. His English is good, but they go back and forth, slipping into Japanese half the time.
“Why can’t you see all of them?” Kiku adores this man, who despite being squat and rocklike himself, reminds her of her beloved Pop. He seems just as unflappable and always ready to be amazed.
“It is how they are arranged, something about the sightlines. The monk there told me that if you reach enlightenment, you see all fifteen at once.”
“Any bird flying overhead could do that.” With this Kiku makes Morikawa-sensei laugh, for he loves birds and keeps a white cockatoo on his porch.
“Yes, most birds are enlightened already.”
“But how does it feel actually sitting there?” Looking at the pictures in the book, Kiku thinks that each stone must have a presence, and the space in between them surely would resonate with a fullness, as if the emptiness is also alive.
“Nnn, let me see. It felt like the rocks were vibrating. Maybe it was because I was meditating, but…I could almost hear them breathing.”
They decide to play with this idea of the breathing rocks, thinking that it is the placement and the intervals that make the whole composition sing. Kiku sweeps the large white table. Outside they gather fallen pine needles from the recent storm and make circles of the overlapping small branches around each of Sensei’s vases and bowls. He moves the pieces around just so, or rather, he lets them arrange themselves.
They experiment with this feeling of space and relationship. How far, how close, and just right. She considers Josh, Idell, and Jeremy, how far, how close they are. Sumi is like a smaller rock off Kiku’s shore. Kiku will keep her close and always watch over her.
Later when Samantha, Kiku’s photographer for the master’s project, comes by to take pictures, she gets it right away. “The famous rock garden!” These images framed on the wall will convey the same vibrant sense of space as the Zen garden. Kiku will have her own islands of work on pedestals to illustrate the various themes, both traditional Japanese themes and tenets from international modernism. People will move through the potent space, and it will be wonderful. This is the toast that Kiku and Morikawa-sensei and Samantha make with some good hot sake.
***
Something is eating at Kiku. It’s a month after that women’s circle, where she admitted to relying more on Idell than on Josh, and she finds herself simmering as she sets the timer for the hard-boiled eggs. She offers Sumi a slice of crisp apple, and the girl hops back to her drawing. “Thanks, Mama.” Sumi had started calling her ‘Mama’ shortly after Josh left. Kiku doesn’t mind, but wonders how long this will last. She misses hearing her own name.
“I want something for myself,” she tries out the words, and the eggs answer with affirming burbles. Idell would know what that means, even though it seems to Kiku that both of them have everything. Right now Idell is heading up to a house sit in Point Reyes to do a spell of Dreamin’ Big. Idell needs time every once in a while to let her imagination wander. Startling good things like new business ideas, garden plans, and adventures for the family rise up out of her essence when she takes a well-deserved time out. Idell would know what Kiku means.
Kiku likes that her work is often solitary, and that the spinning of the potter’s wheel allows her to dream big while being productive. Now she sits and makes a list across the table from Sumi. She prints in dark green magic marker a list of things important to her. She reads the list as she peels the cooled eggs and grates them. Everything boils down to Art and Love. Work, money, pottery, and school all fall under Art. Marriage, family, and friends are subsumed by Love.
There is also the abundant beauty to be seen and felt, something in between Art and Love. Kiku prizes the sureness of belonging with her close people, making and eating delicious food, walking in the Berkeley hills and anyplace else made for wandering, and having time to dream in the family’s Japanese tub. A life of Art and Love. Her self-propelled livelihood balances on a seesaw facing the equally strong and weighty pull of family and friends and all that arises from connection.
When she calls Sumi over for egg salad sandwiches, she tells her girl, “I am lucky. I have a life of Art and Love.”
“Me too, Mama. Look!” Sumi runs off and back with her picture in progress. A rainbow telephone line is connecting them to Josh. Jeremy is orange with green hair, Idell is blueberry blue, and Kiku has red hair and pink skin and Sumi the opposite. Josh alone is black and white with little bird shapes flying out of his mouth. “Papi is telling us stories.”
***
On the wall by the phone is the calendar of images from Thailand that Joni gave Kiku. On each Sunday square through mid June, Sumi has written Papi talk, which Josh likes to call ‘Poppycock.’ Time between family calls grows resonant and full, as each stores up treasures to remember to tell the long-distance beloveds. Kiku flips the pages and sees this six months of time, a seemingly long time filled with more Love and Art to be transmitted to Josh secondhand. She sees the short pause of Easter week, where all of their school breaks miraculously overlap for four days.
She wants something else to happen, to have something just for herself in this window of time between their old life in Berkeley and their new life in Seattle. Maybe like Josh’s photo of the raven dancers, this window will transport her to the next good thing.
This time could be a pregnant pause. Catching the breath. The space in between.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Harada often writes of loss and the new life that arises in her short stories and novel-in-progress. In her healing practice Deep River Healing, she works with grief and loss and how they move through body-mind-spirit to spark transformation. She is a proud member of Laguna Writers community in San Francisco.