Chapter Sixteen #3
She touched the skin under her eyes; he looked at her reflection in the mirror.
She watched him fold the towel again and hang it carefully, taking longer than she imagined he usually would.
He turned to her and smiled, and left. He left the door ajar, and she could hear him fall onto his bed, and the deep breath he inhaled and then let out.
When Kit walked back into Amy’s room, she was pulling a dress out of her closet.
“So yeah, I’m meeting this guy tonight—a new guy, a bit older. I met him online on this app. So many cool guys who aren’t in high school, you know? I’ll probably just meet him after hanging with you guys for a bit. Let’s find you something to wear,” Amy said, unaware of Kit’s flushed complexion.
Amy held a dress up against Kit, who was standing against the wall, her thoughts not yet caught up with Amy’s.
Amy explained to Kit that she was an old soul, which was why friends came to her for advice.
Kit wondered whether people asked for it or Amy simply offered it.
There was a lilt to the way she spoke, which sounded like questions were not welcome, and her advice was sacred.
It struck Kit that Amy couldn’t decide whether she wanted to act older or younger.
She flipped between a terrifying maturity and a strange childishness that made Kit want to protect her.
When she explained things about Tokyo or her dad’s job and how “things worked in Japan,” she took on a teacherly expression that looked as though she were saying Kit, I’ll show you the way .
“This will look so good on you. The guys will go crazy. Oh my god, I never even asked you if you had a boyfriend.”
Kit stood and arranged her body behind Amy’s dress.
She looked at herself in the mirror. The neckline was so low she wouldn’t be able to wear a bra with it.
She wondered for a moment what Dave would have said if he had seen her in it.
She changed in the bathroom and peered at the trays of eyes shadows and lipsticks on the shelf.
Kit pulled out her own small makeup bag and applied her eye shadow with her finger.
She looked at the smudge on her eyelids and it looked clumsy to her. She wanted to wipe it away.
“Gorgeous,” Amy said and moved away from the mirror for Kit to see.
In the mirror, Kit saw a girl who might holiday on yachts, travel to Europe, speak another language, maybe French, greet people with air kisses, and order cocktails.
She did not look like Kit Herzog from Chestnut Hill, who had slept in the same bedroom for the last seventeen years of her life. This was someone else.
“Mona says the first time is the worst,” Amy explained to Kit at a booth table in Bar Zero Zero. It was hard to hear what she was saying over the loud music. The dense cigarette smoke dulled her senses.
“My friend Mona has met so many guys online like this.” Amy waved her phone at Kit.
“She’s over there.” Amy gestured with the two fingers that held a cigarette between them and then straightened up, waved to Mona, and suddenly looked like a little girl, waving from the rear window at the car behind.
Amy’s friend Mona, who they met up with at the bar, was accompanied by a short man with blond hair that flopped to the side.
Kit guessed he must have been almost thirty, if not more.
Amy had transformed herself: thick smudgy dark kohl liner over a smoky purple eye shadow that made the green speckles in her irises look like the jade bangle on her wrist. Amy’s skin was pale in the flashing lights of the bar, her veins visible as they ran down her arms like blue ravines.
Kit thought Mona was the more beautiful of all of them.
She stood taller than Amy, her long limbs moving with a languid assurance.
Her almost black eyes and hair, the petite diamond piercing in her nostril, and her feline eyes were striking.
Kit wondered why Mona didn’t draw the same overt looks that Amy did from the men in the bar.
She wondered if it was the visceral naivete of Amy that made her so intriguing.
“I really hated the idea of meeting someone like this, you know—someone I hadn’t even met in the flesh before,” Amy said, her eyes darting around the room.
“But the fact is, it’s how everyone is doing it out in the real world, right?
And it sure beats dating those high school losers.
” She shuddered and then laughed, a loud, mouth-open laugh that sounded hollow.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I got catfished a couple times.
And there were some sleazy-looking guys too, who sent all kinds of weird messages.
But Sean is super nice and respectful. He’s a music teacher.
Not like these guys you see around here, like that guy with Mona, eww. ”
“So how old is he?”
“I don’t know, like in his twenties or whatever. It’s weird, though, like I definitely notice girls like us attract a certain kind of guy. Usually gai-jin , the occasional Japanese guy but not often.”
“Girls like us?”
“ Ha-fu . You know, we are kinda Japanese but a little more exotic. Like we’re kinda Asian but we’re more Western culturally. The crossover is easier maybe? It’s really desirable to be with a mixed girl here. I get asked all the time about modeling but Dad is super against it.”
“It is? It’s desirable?”
“Yeah, I think so. Why, what’s it like back in Philly? I guess it’s different to here?” For the first time since Kit had met Amy, she paused to wait for Kit’s response.
“It’s really different and less international.
People grow up there and live there for their whole lives.
Take my mom, for example, she was born there and she never left.
My dad didn’t either. It’s not like you and Ryo, you have two parents who are from different countries.
I can’t imagine what that is like. I only know growing up in Philly. ”
“Do you wish it wasn’t that way?” Amy asked. The simplicity of her question made Kit hesitate. Did she?
“I don’t know.” Kit paused and looked at Amy, who was no longer waiting for her response. “So does your mom know about this new guy? Like do you talk to her about this stuff,” Kit asked, knowing the answer.
“Oh my god no, can you imagine? The drama? Mom is all about acting respectably. You know, the whole saving face thing, right? That’s a big thing here in Japan.
And you know, Ryo, I love my brother but he is like a golden boy—he can’t do anything wrong.
He’s captain of all the teams, he’s going to Berkeley in the fall, he’s their pride and joy,” she said with sudden energy. Kit didn’t say anything.
···
Kit would later learn that Yuriko’s entire existence hinged on living an elegant, refined, respectable life.
This applied to everything, from how she maintained her weight at the very same fifty kilos for twenty years of her marriage.
Even with the two pregnancies, she managed to rein everything back within two months of giving birth.
She watched her weight, she watched her sun exposure, and she watched her children.
She had always planned to be the wife of a great man, and when she met Rick, a young diplomat in Tokyo, on track to be a future ambassador, she could picture herself with him, hosting cocktail parties at a grand official residence, and that was what mattered, that she could envision it as a place she belonged.
The children were brought up as liberal American kids, which had pushed her far beyond her comfort zone, and nothing had prepared her for the resistance and disobedience she faced in Amy.
But if Yuriko closed her eyes and ears to the little things, she could still talk about them for what they were: smart, good-looking, charming citizens of the world.