Free Lost Girls and Love Hotels by Catherine Hanrahan Page B

gesture. “Maybe ten or twelve other cooks. So close our elbows always are touching elbows. Six A.M . to maybe ten o’clock nighttime. Six days a week.” The waiter pours the batter onto the table and Kazu shoos him away, pokes at the blob of batter, squid bits, and cabbage, perfecting its shape. “After working every day, do you know what I had to do? Part of Japanese culture? I had to take a bath with the other cooks. Giant round bath. All together.” Kazu unclips his cuff links. Small diamonds that might look garish on anyone else. Rolls up his sleeves. His shirt is immaculately pressed. I imagine his wife leaning over an ironing board, dressed in Dior and stiletto heels. “It is not easy to be alone in Japan,” he tells me.
    “So why didn’t you become a chef?”
    He sniffs, offers me a shake of his head for an answer. “About alone in Japan. Yes. Now I’m thinking my grandfather did it. I remember now. After retirement he walked to the sea every day. One hour from the house. Every day he sat in the same place, on a big rock, and smoked tobacco all day. His father was a fisherman. My grandfather, forty years post office. After that, watching the sea. Sitting on onerock. Smoking and watching from sunrise until nighttime. Alone.” Kazu’s eyes become glassy for a moment. Nostalgia taking hold. Then he comes back. “My family was thinking he was weak of mind. Fault of age.”
    “Did you think so?”
    “In truth I wanted to try it. When I was a boy. Sea watching.”
    “Go with him?”
    “No,” he says. “Alone. Different rock.” He takes a smoke out of my pack, but doesn’t light it. Just turns it in his hands. “Tell me what happened to you in Canada.”
    I adjust my posture. Shift my butt back on the bench and straighten my back. “I saw the white girl who’s missing. The one on the posters. At Shinjuku Station.”
    “Different person, I think. Answer my question please.”
    “No. I recognized her.”
    “Many blond-hair gaijin in Tokyo, I think.” He reaches over and touches my hair. “Example. Margaret.”
    “I know it was her. I have a feeling.”
    “Ah,” he says. “Feeling.”
    “Maybe she’s hiding out or something.”
    Kazu prods the bubbling batter with the spatula. “I don’t think so.”
    “Maybe she’s in trouble.”
    “You ought to forget this.” In one swift movement, Kazu flips the pancake, but it’s too soon. Batter oozes out the side. “She’s dead,” he says.
    I want to say It could have been me on the posters . “No. It was her I saw,” I tell him.
    “Use your brain. This happens.” He scoops up the fractured okonomiyaki into a little hill in the center of the table and signals for the waiter. “We’ll start again new pancake.”
    Start again. Impossible. “Don’t bother,” I tell Kazu. “I’m not hungry anymore.”
    I go to stand up, but Kazu reaches across the table and grabs my wrist. “You need food. Sit down.”
    We sit there quietly for a few minutes. Sipping beer and staring through one another. Both of us lost in the past. “ Natsukashii ,” Kazu says absently. A word I don’t understand. But I like the sound of it. The sibilant gush of it. I repeat it back to him. Natsukashii . Feel the uncanny joy of the alien. He nods at me.
    “Is your grandfather still alive?” I ask.
    “Dead,” Kazu says.

 
    I’m fifteen. Frank’s seventeen. Mired in the theater of high school. Anyone with eyes can tell. All the fat kids look alike. Faces somewhere in the middle of their cheeks. Lips squished up into grotesque puckers. The popular girls, too. Carbon copies. They all have shiny hair and noses like dolls’. Two expressions. Evil and vacant. Ditto for the weirdo loser intelligentsia. Bad posture. Bad eyesight. A penchant for disturbingly violent doodling. Frank falls into the latter category. I’m in limbo. “You just haven’t found your niche,” Mom tells me. The way she says “niche” rhymes with “bitch.”
    Frank and I avoid each other