Resilience (4 page)

I suppose that in real life, we have to distinguish between those catastrophes we can repair and those that require us to face a new reality. John and I used to be “fixers.” If there was a problem, we would put all our energy behind fixing it, for ourselves or our families or friends, even for children who played on the sports teams we coached. No problem was too small or too large. If you work hard enough you can fix anything—or so we thought. And not just “could”—we had to. We were, we believed, obligated to right things, and so we did. And then Wade died, and we could not control the very most important thing in our lives. Accepting that this catastrophe was not vulnerable to our will was nearly impossible. Finding ways to make the erasure of this boy not so complete was all we could accomplish
now. A new reality, considerably less good than the one we had before he died.

Eight years later, I had arranged my life around my new story. It would always be a central fact of my life that I was the mother of a dead boy, but it was not the only fact. My husband was in the United States Senate, my oldest daughter was in college, and I was sufficiently healthy to have had two more children. But not healthy enough. In 2004, I found out I had cancer. I determined to be a model patient so that breast cancer would just be a chapter in my new Wade-less life. And for a while it seemed to have worked; the treatments yielded what looked like a good result. But less than three years later, the cancer came back. This time it was incurable. No amount of being the obedient patient was going to change that. I could not control my own body. I still do what the doctors tell me to do. I still hope, perhaps without reason, that if I am very, very good, I will get to live and one day watch my youngest graduate from high school and one day hold my grandchild. Despite my hopes I understand that rogue cells inside my body have more control over my fate than I have. My new reality.

Last year my husband told me of an indiscretion,
and my sense of what I meant to the people around me was, to put it lightly, shaken. We had, I believed, a great love story, bound as we were by triumph and defeat, by exhilarating achievement and shattering grief. We had walked side by side for three decades and in my foolish dreams would walk side by side, hand in hand, for three more. But even if my illness somehow allows me those days, it will by necessity be different because, at the very least, I am a different person now. I was not wounded, not afraid, not uncertain before, and now I always will be. He can try to treat the wound, and he has tried. He can try to make me less afraid, and he has tried. But I am now a different person. I am the Army wife, too, with a husband I don't quite know, and I have to accept him, if I can, with the new scars—many self-inflicted—which he now bears. The way we were is no longer the way we can be. A new reality. Maybe a new life.

Let's start with the unavoidable fact: If I had special knowledge about how to avoid adversities, about how to spot the pitfalls of life, I would spot them, I would avoid them, and I would share how it is I have managed that. I do not. I have a lot of experience in getting up after I have been knocked
down, but clearly, I do not know anything at all about avoidance. We all tumble and fall. I certainly have, but in truth it is going to happen, in some degree, to all of us. Oh, maybe everyone we care about will live to attend our funerals. Maybe disease will never make you afraid of a curling iron burn. Maybe everyone whom you love and who loves you will be loyal to you in every way for every day of your life. Or maybe not.

oshiko placed the samisen in front of me. My sister Nancy and I were kneeling on the floor of our quarters on the Marine Corps Air Facility at Iwakuni, Japan. Toshiko was kneeling in front of us. Toshiko had promised that when I was ready I could learn to play the instrument. And here it was in front of me. The body was a little less wide than long, slightly larger than a banjo. The neck was polished sandalwood. Just three strings, one thicker than the next, stretched from the neck over a buffalo horn bridge to the catskin-covered body. It was simple and beautiful. Next to the samisen she placed a plectrum, or pick. It was sandalwood with ivory at the wide end, and nearly eight inches long. I reached to touch it, but Toshiko's hand reached mine before mine reached the plectrum. Her motion told me to be patient, and as if to show me how, she sat
perfectly still for what seemed like five minutes to a nine-year-old girl.

Patience was something at which Toshiko excelled. She had left her home in Hiroshima when she was ten years old, about the age I was when she first placed the samisen before me. She traveled to Kyoto, to the narrow streets of the Gion Kobu district, to begin her training as a geisha. Someone, perhaps her mother, knew that the ten-year-old would grow to be a beautiful woman, with a serene face and delicate features. And knew, too, that these gifts of beauty, serenity, and delicacy could make her a sought-after geisha. The first months in training would be a disappointment, surely, as she served as a maid in the household in which she lived. The most tedious chores would be saved for her, a test of her determination, her work ethic. She studied dance and art and the samisen in the morning, worked in the household in the day, and attended to a geisha returning from a night's work sometimes into the early-morning hours. She would have to wait through these months before developing enough skill to become a maiko, an apprentice geisha. But patience was something at which Toshiko excelled.

Toshiko studied in the famous Fujima-Ryu system, one of the most rigorous courses of training, but one that would, with her beauty, allow her to be one of the top geishas. Over the years, she perfected her dance, her samisen playing, her conversational skills. She planned to leave Gion and join her sister in Tokyo as a full-fledged geisha, with the world in front of her, but first she would return home to her parents in Hiroshima. It was a mild August of 1945, an excellent time for travel.

Toshiko had been home for two days when, as she arose, she heard the sound of a general alarm throughout her hometown. There had been alarms before in the industrial city, warnings that American bombers might be approaching, but Hiroshima had largely been spared from any bombings. No one was surprised when shortly later the all-clear sounded. Toshiko had waited for the all-clear before leaving to go to the market. August was the month in which schools were not in session, and Toshiko walked past children working at their family store or playing in the alleyways. She was turned back to look at a stickball game in an alley she passed when she was knocked to the ground. It was as if a
huge, dense, overwhelming wall of heat had raced down the street and knocked her and everyone around her to the dirt. Or it seemed so, as those like her looked back on it. It was probably hours later that she regained consciousness. Her clothes had been ripped away and her chest and arms were covered with loose charred skin. Her hair was burned away in the back, since she had turned her head to watch the children when the force of the first atomic bomb used in warfare hit her body. She could see only a gray soup of soot and smoke around her, and she could hear the sounds of people moving, wailing, or calling for help. Weakly, she closed her eyes again.

After months of treatment, Toshiko was able to return to a somewhat normal life. But it could never be the life for which she had planned and trained for a decade. Her hair had grown back and her face was largely unscarred, but her chest had literally been blown off. The scars crept nearly up to her neck and would have shown in the open neckline of the fine kimonos she had acquired as a maiko. The burns made her arms look like the arms of a ninety-year-old woman, and the pattern of the kimono she was wearing that morning was, in places, burned into
them. Keloids that looked like smooth boils grew in places on the scars. A geisha was the meeting of a beautiful woman with the skills of dance and the arts. A man in conversation with her was to be flattered, not only in words but by the mere presence of this exquisite creature. And Toshiko, to say the least, was no longer exquisite.

The life that she had expected, filled with luxuries, prestige, and stimulation, was not going to be. The skills she had so diligently acquired had little value in her new life. Toshiko did begin to teach dance, but there was not much demand in postwar Hiroshima. The American military base that opened on the site of the Japanese air station in Iwakuni provided a new opportunity in the mid-1950s. Young women from Hiroshima found work there as maids and seamstresses in the homes of military families. Toshiko let a friend who worked there tell her employer that she was available to teach Japanese dance to the American children who lived there.

My mother heard about Toshiko and contacted her. Would she be willing to teach a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old? Toshiko agreed and began coming each week to our house on the base. It was an hour trip from Toshiko's home in Hiroshima to
our home in Iwakuni. She would walk to the train station in Hiroshima, ride to Iwakuni station, and take the bus to the gate near our quarters.

Hiroshima would now always be home to Toshiko. The people of Hiroshima had all been through the horrors of the atomic bomb, and they all wore scars, physical or emotional, as a result. It was, I suppose, the only place where she could now feel at home. In E. Annie Proulx's brilliant novel
The Shipping News
, the main character, Quoyle, is a “damp loaf of a body” who is out of place his whole life until he returns to his ancestral home in Killickclaw, Newfoundland, a community inhabited by people as rough around the edges as the harsh landscape. There, he is not out of place; there, the physical or emotional eccentricities that would make the people around him misfits elsewhere are almost unseen. What is visible is their basic decency. Quoyle has found a place where his abnormality is invisible. Toshiko had done the same.

For our first dance lesson, my sister and I dressed in silk kimonos my mother had bought. Mine was red with yellow and white chrysanthemums; Nancy's was orange with blue and white cherry blossoms on it. We each wore red butterfly obi belts with pretied
obi bows, and on our feet odori tabis, the white cotton socks with clasps and a hard sole worn by Japanese dancers, and our new vinyl getas. Mother put our hair up in buns so that we could wear these huge hairpins we had bought at a Japanese market. They had a cluster of colored umbrellas from which hung silver-colored spangles. Toshiko came in a blue and white yukata, a cotton kimono, and a simple datejime woven belt as her obi. Even we knew to feel a little foolish. In subsequent lessons, we still wore the silk kimonos and butterfly obi belts, as they were all we had, but the hairpins did not reappear.

If our dress seemed outlandish to a woman who had done household chores in her first days of training in dance, she did not show it. In our living room, she showed little reaction or emotion at all. Perhaps it was her training, perhaps it was her nature, or perhaps it was her acceptance that this was now her life, teaching the children of an American military pilot in 1958 the skills she had learned and, because of another American military pilot in 1945, she could never use.

It was not, however, that she was simply gritting her teeth and doing what she needed to live. I have a letter she wrote to my mother, offering to
take us to the Iwakuni Bon Odori festival so we could join with Japanese children in dance. She offered to teach me to play the samisen and for the first lesson brought her own samisen. And she sat behind me as I tried to play, putting her arms around me more gently than the drape of a robe on your shoulders and showing me where on the instrument my hand should be. In the pauses in the music she would place her hands over mine to still them. There was no written music for the samisen, so the only way to learn was for someone trained in the ancient art to share the music with you. And Toshiko, disfigured by an American bomb, was sharing it with me. It was a gift the value of which I only later understood when Toshiko taught me the notes she had learned in Gion.

Each week, she would share what she had spent a decade learning. She would position our legs so that two awkward American girls could appear, for a moment, graceful. We would fidget, we would fall off the sides of the heeled getas, we would try to make our sister laugh when Toshiko was showing her how to rise from a kneeled position or how to close a dance fan in a single motion. She would pretend she didn't notice when our eyes settled on the
scars in the V of the yukata's neckline. She was in all things a picture of patience and dignity.

In the two years that I knew Toshiko, I remember her smiling slightly, her lips closed and the corners of her mouth turning up, while she nodded her head when we accomplished some skill she had been teaching. Aside from that, I do not remember any signs of joy. I never heard her laugh, but I never saw her frown.

After she left that first lesson, Nancy and I asked about the scars we had seen on her arms revealed by the yukata's wide sleeves and on her chest. Mother told us what they were. We had been to Hiroshima; we had seen the devastation. We were not allowed to go to the museum that showed the injuries and the dead, but we heard about it from our friends. And we saw on the streets of Hiroshima the scars of the living. Great keloid mountains of scarring across the face of a young man, an old woman whose wrinkles and scars formed a dense plaid of lines across her cheeks. The story of what really happened in Hiroshima had been kept quiet for a decade, so many of the injured had not gotten needed medical attention. And many of the children who had been born since that August were born
with deformities. In some ways, the tale of the living on the streets was, I suspect, more moving than the tale of the dead in the museum.