Bicycle Days (5 page)

They fought constantly. It was a large, sprawling apartment, and Alec made use of it in trying to escape to safety. There were times when he would hit Mark and start running before he had even finished his swing, his heart beating so fast that it hurt. His goal at those times never once changed: to find his mother fast became the most important thing in the world. Sometimes he would begin his sprint without knowing where she was in the apartment, and he would have to pass through almost every room just to find her. Then, tears in his eyes, he would race by her and hook his arm around her legs to slow himself down, finally coming to stand behind her with a firm hold on her skirt, around which he could peer at Mark’s angry face.

She protected him in that way, and Alec came to expect it of her. It seemed now that nothing was ever settled in those fights, merely swept behind a curtain of pleated skirts. Alec could not remember Mark’s fierceness ever once being talked out and understood, only pushed back inside for a little while. But Mark had always been like that, everything under the surface. Sometimes when they played together Alec felt the differences between them, the way he would talk and laugh and cry all the time, all nonsense and melodrama, while Mark kept to himself, not mean, but quiet and tight and far away. Alec wanted to bring him closer, make him talk. A good fight could do that. Sometimes it only took a few seconds to get things started. Being younger helped. He could flaunt the fact that the two of them had all the same television and bedtime privileges, even though he, Alec, was a whole year younger.

Most weekends the four of them drove up to a house they rented in upstate New York. But occasionally they would stay in the city. They lived uptown then, and on those days they would take walks down Fifth Avenue and into Central Park. Alec wondered what other people thought when they saw them together, whether they even guessed that they were looking at a
family. He and Mark never talked about how different they looked, how much they each resembled a different one of their parents.

Alec remembered the football his father always brought along, and how they would throw it back and forth among themselves while they walked. Every once in a while his father would surprise them all by tossing the ball to his mother. She would catch it, laughing, and throw it back. The walk always ended at Sheep’s Meadow. And she always sat on the same bench, reading the newspaper, while the three of them played touch football. Now and then her head would appear over the top of the paper. When one of them made a difficult catch or a long run, she would carefully set down the paper and clap her hands.

When he was on offense, Alec liked to huddle close before each play, watching while his father used his forefinger to map out the route of the pass play on his palm. Go down-and-out, his father would say, and the finger would do a perfect down-and-out on the hand-size playing field. Or it would fake a buttonhook and go deep, too quick for any defender. Then the snap of the ball, and Alec would be off and running for real, feeling Mark’s hand on his back, trying to run out from under it. More often than not, he would drop the ball, or Mark would knock it away. Things would be quiet after that, except for Alec’s breathing. He remembered that quiet, and the way his mother’s head would disappear again behind the newspaper.

The times when he caught the touchdown ball, he thought he could remember every one of them: feeling the hard football settle into his thin arms, the snug strength of it trapped against his body. Not stopping until he had run right through the makeshift end zone, turning to see his father standing far down the field, his arms raised above his head like a referee. The sound of his mother’s clapping was always crisp and strong, and it seemed to Alec in those moments as if they were the only people in the park.

D
inner with the family, a couple of nights later. Alec had bathed already. He sat at the low table, pulling now and then at the hem of his yukata to keep his underwear from showing. Mrs. Hasegawa and Yukiko passed in and out of the kitchen, carrying dishes of sukiyaki and small bowls of rice and brightly colored pickled vegetables. Mr. Hasegawa already had his chopsticks in the main serving dish, which was placed at the center of the table. Seated across from Alec, Hiroshi ate some rice by bending his head down to the bowl, putting his lips over the rim, and loudly sucking up little clumps of the grain.

The television was on, turned as usual to a baseball game. The Hiroshima Carp were leading the Hanshin Tigers by a score of 3–2. The Tigers were at bat. A burly American with a beard stepped up to the plate.

“Eh!” Yoshi said. “He is going to hit a home run.”

“He is fat,” Alec said.

“He is strong,” Yoshi said.

Hiroshi looked up from his food. “That’s Por-ta. He is American. Do you know him, Alec-san?”

Alec said, “America is a big country, Hiroshi.”

Mr. Hasegawa laughed loudly, showing the food in his mouth. “Alec-san is very funny. The funniest American I know.”

Mrs. Hasegawa and Yukiko sat down at the table. Alec noticed that his underwear was showing. He pulled again at the hem of his yukata. The sounds of eating grew loud. Arms reached into the center of the table and returned to their small plates and rice bowls with thin slices of beef, glass noodles, crescents of onion, flattened tubes of scallion, half-leaves of cabbage that were withered and soft from cooking. Hiroshi licked sauce from his plate like a cat. Mr. Hasegawa belched with great satisfaction. Porter fouled off four balls before hitting a home run.

“Sugoi!”
Yukiko said. She looked quickly at Alec, her face turned red.

“Por-ta is strong,” Mr. Hasegawa said, more of a grunt than a sentence. “Big and strong because he is American. Eh, Alec-san? And hairy, too. Do you understand
hairy,
Alec-san? Too much hair—like a monkey. It is because of the diet.”

“Because of the diet,” Alec repeated.

Mr. Hasegawa grunted, lifted his bowl, and shoveled in two mouthfuls of rice. “Yes. It is strange that you are not as big as Por-ta, since you eat the same food. But you have a lot of hair like him, eh? Hair on your head and hair on your arms and legs. Because of the diet.”

Alec looked at him. “Like a monkey?”

Everyone laughed. Hiroshi said, “Alec-san is like a monkey! Like a monkey!”

Mrs. Hasegawa used her chopsticks to pile Alec’s plate with more food. “Eat,” she told him. “Even if you are like a monkey.”

“The sukiyaki is delicious,” Alec said.

“No. It is terrible,” Mrs. Hasegawa said, looking pleased.

“Alec-san needs a haircut,” Mr. Hasegawa pronounced.

Alec touched his hair. He looked at Mr. Hasegawa’s crewcut, at the little spots of scalp shining through. “Haircut?”

Mr. Hasegawa grunted. “Your hair is long. I will take you to my barber. He cuts the hair of company presidents like me.”

Yoshi laughed, reached over, and rubbed the top of his father’s head. “Alec-san does not need a haircut like this one.”

“He needs to change his diet,” Mrs. Hasegawa suggested. “Then he will have less hair. The Japanese have the best diet in the world. Isn’t that so?”

Everyone agreed.

The baseball game ended, and players from both teams greeted each other on the field. Alec was thankful that the family’s attention could for the moment be focused on something other than his hair. Using a remote control, Yoshi began changing channels. MTV came and went. Several news and talk show programs flashed on the screen. A Japanese aerobics instructor called out the number of sit-ups she was doing. She vanished as quickly as she had appeared, succeeded by a herd of zebra scattering across an African plain at the approach of a lion. The voice of the off-screen Japanese narrator was disturbingly uninflected.

Mrs. Hasegawa and Yukiko began to clear the table. Alec stood up to help but sat down again when Mrs. Hasegawa shook her head and made a clucking noise with her tongue against the back of her mouth. She brought out a tray piled with mango, grapefruit, and kiwi.

“These are from my husband’s business,” she said. “In Japan, fruit is very expensive. But it is better than American fruit. Here, eat this.”

She put a grapefruit on Alec’s plate. He looked at it for a moment, aware that it had a much greater value in Japan than it did in America. He wasn’t sure he wanted to eat it. He felt everyone looking at him. Finally, Mrs. Hasegawa sighed loudly. She reached over and began peeling it for him, her stubby fingers easily breaking through the yellow skin. Alec watched her,
thinking of his mother, of how she had peeled grapefruits for him in just the same way. They were Florida grapefruits—the kind that relatives sent in boxes at Christmastime—and they were sweet.

Mrs. Hasegawa broke off a section of grapefruit and handed it to him. The family looked on in silence as he chewed. He could taste the juice running into his mouth. It was sweet the way the others had been sweet, no bitterness at all, and he wanted to close his eyes for just a second, so he could be alone.

“It is good,” Mr. Hasegawa said. “Eh, Alec-san? Number one. The best in the world, these grapefruits.”

Alec nodded his head. His eyes moved to the television. The zebras were gone, displaced by chimpanzees picking lice from each other’s heads.

“Eh! Look!” Hiroshi said, pointing. “Alec-san’s on television!”

Alec laughed along with everyone else, until he could no longer taste the grapefruit’s sweetness on his tongue.

A
lec stared through the tinted windows of the Hasegawas’ indigo Mercedes sedan, feeling victimized by fate. He was looking at a dead-end street, half lit by four streetlights. Oddly shaped one-story houses stretched in two tight rows, like pieces cut to fit the wrong puzzle. Some of the roofs were made of corrugated tin that extended out over the eaves in sharp-edged canopies. Other houses were capped by dark green tiles that curved over one another to form graceful, protective shells. Resting above the dim glow of the streetlights, the tiles appeared sea dark and ancient, like relics of another time and place that had been set down mistakenly in a jungle of tin and asphalt.

Evening had only just set, but the neighborhood appeared to be empty of people. No children could be seen playing together on the street, no adults talking outside to cool down. Alec found it hard to believe that every family ate dinner at exactly the same time each night. In the driver’s seat, Mr. Hasegawa grunted with satisfaction as he stopped the car in front of a small, dingy
building that looked like a tool shed with windows. A barbershop pole encased in Plexiglas stood in front, revolving intermittently, as though wounded. They got out of the car. Mr. Hasegawa grunted again as the central locking system operated with a quiet whirr. Alec looked at him across the hood, at the bristly outlines of his crewcut. He ran his fingers through his own hair, suddenly afraid of what might happen to it. He liked hair—it felt human. Bristles were for hedgehogs.

As they approached the barbershop, Alec saw that it was more dilapidated than he had thought. The exterior wall was scarred with gauges and discolorations, the white core of the wood showing through the original dark brown. And the corrugated tin roof had been severely dented where it extended out over the street. The front window appeared to be the only part of the building that was undamaged. Alec peered through it into a clean, well-lit room almost bare of furniture. A broad-faced man in a black-and-white-striped apron sat in the single barber’s chair with his feet propped on a stool, reading a newspaper. He inhaled deeply from a cigarette. His forehead seemed unusually long, and Alec realized it was because he had no eyebrows. A woman, her face pale and lifeless from too much makeup, sat in a chair to the man’s left. She looked absently at her fingernails, as if she already knew the condition of each one. At the back of the room, a gaunt teenage boy in a plain white apron stood stiffly with his arms folded across his chest.

Still standing outside, Mr. Hasegawa pointed two fingers through the window at the man without eyebrows and the woman sitting beside him. “The proprietor and his wife,” he grunted. He directed his fingers toward the boy. “And the apprentice. Do you understand, Alec-san? A Japanese barbershop.”