The Electrical Field Read Free

tap water before heading upstairs.
    I hesitated the slightest bit at his door before stepping in; it happened every once in a while. His eyes shifted to me as I stood just inside the doorway.
    “Nani?” I finally said, coming up to the bed. What, what? Knowing what he wanted, making him wait a moment more. He closed his eyes and I moved in, all shameful efficiency: I yanked back the sheet from his shrunken body; Ihitched down his pyjama bottoms without flinching at the sight or the smell, unpinned, wiped, and changed him. He gave a thread-fine shudder at my final movement: tucking the cooled sheet back over him. His mystery, power, gone.
    Downstairs, at my window, a lawn of silvery fine dust had already appeared on the ledge I’d wiped just yesterday. There was still no sign of Yano’s Pontiac. I reminded myself to drain the soybeans I’d been soaking overnight for dinner, and to slice and salt the cucumber for sunomono.
    The beans had bloated up to the surface, along with the moulting husks, tiny corpses. I poured them into a sieve, all clustered against one another like a hive. I shivered at the sight. It was turning into the kind of day, I felt, when nothing looked quite the same. I dropped the beans into the sink, and went back to the front window.
    There she was, my Sachi, crossing the field as I’d seen her on a hundred other days when she’d been skipping school to run off with Tam. Already wise to life, wiser about its possibilities than I’d ever been. I could never fool her, never keep her with my silly folding cranes or my heaven-earth-and-man flower arrangements, my pretend readings of tea leaves. I could never be angry with her for long. No wonder her mother didn’t know what to do with her.
    She was halfway across the field when she turned as if she knew I was looking out, though with the sun casting a glare over the window she couldn’t possibly see me. Her hair was a dark blot, nothing blacker on that field. I came out onto my porch. She raised her hand to her mouth and I saw there was a cigarette clipped between her fingers. She looked foolish and mean, her one shoulder bare where her topslipped down—a summer top, too thin, too skimpy when it was only the middle of May. I fought the feeling welling in me as I saw her tiny hip jut through the cotton of her skirt; I detested that stance with everything in me. She puffed furiously in quick spurts, a little engine revving. All of a sudden she froze, spotting something where the glinting electrical towers marched like giants past the houses and into the distance. Then she ran. She stopped short at the base of a tower, the north one, closest to Mackenzie Hill. So small against the giant, yet I could read everything there in her posture, her turned hip, the way she held her head. Again she glanced back, daring me, knowing I wouldn’t step down from my porch to stop her. She swung herself up the first rung. She was climbing, a slow struggle because the rungs were diagonal and widely spaced even for her gangly legs. Her skirt hitched up to expose the gleaming white of her underpants, white as the clouds.
    I put my hand to my mouth. I was about to utter something. An awkward sound? Her name? “Get down here this instant,” like the concerned mother I could never be? I held my hand there as she struggled higher and higher, higher than I’d seen her climb with Tam, up into the cut of the sun. Then she stopped and leaned her skinny neck and shoulders towards the creek where it curved down behind Mackenzie Hill, holding on with one arm wrapped around a steel beam. I knew she was looking for Tam, and hoping he’d be looking for her. I felt wet at one corner of my lip—my mouth was still open—and I knew the word just as my lips pushed against one another: “Baka!” I cried. Papa’s word. Stupid! Get down! I’d taken another step when shouts from thefar side of the field drowned me out. It was him, Tom, Nakamura-san, her father, on his day off, striding