Without Being Taught

I am eleven years old. I am lying on my stomach on the living room floor, too close to the television, watching an episode of Beverly Hills: 90210. My father summons me to the dining room table and I can hardly hear what he says as Dylan declares his love to Brenda, or Brandon declares his love to Kelly, while leaning against a motorcycle or sitting in the backseat of a Cadillac convertible, on a cliff's edge, the city of Los Angeles twinkling below them. Somehow the stories of these characters seem so complex, so compelling, even with everyone leading generally pleasant lives and reciprocating love for each other. My father waits until the commercial, as soon as Noxzema promises to dissolve oil without over-drying. "Elizabeth?" he asks again.

"This better not take long."

I join my parents at the head of the table, with my mother and father on either side of me, with my back turned toward the television, but I can still hear what Brenda or Kelly will say next if I stretch my ears to listen. My mother sits with her knees bent close to her chest, her nightgown pulled around her legs, her toes clutching the cushion of the chair. Her eyes are wet. My father, as usual, reveals nothing. His shoulders are relaxed, his hands clasped. He gets directly to the point.

"Your mother met a man who is very nice to her …"

I wake up, just a little, at that moment. And a wakefulness carries through, just a little, beyond that moment. From now on, I start to pay more attention. I start to watch my own life more carefully. But I won't understand most of it, not for a long time.

My mother won't let him finish. "No, stop … Just forget it … I don't want you to say anything else."

My father doesn't say anything else.

My mother wipes her eyes.

I ask, "Can I go watch TV now?"

________

His name was Sonny. And we never spoke of him again, not out in the open like that, with all three of us sitting together at the dining room table. I never saw him at the house again after that conversation. I'd had no idea they were even talking about Sonny until many years later.

I remember his long hair and thin mustache. I remember he wore a black leather jacket, which I thought was cool. I remember he took me to Chuck E. Cheese and Ground Round for dinner, won giant stuffed animals for me, twisted balloons into silly shapes for me, bought Aerosmith and Guns N' Roses cassette tapes for me, because the music he blasted through his car stereo made me smile at the breeze out the open window and think I was cool.

But the most significant detail about him, a detail I hadn't considered as a child, had to be that he spoke Japanese. Sonny and my mother spoke Japanese. They were two of the few people who spoke Japanese in a small suburb of a small city in upstate New York, where people who spoke languages other than English were scattered across miles and surfaced only occasionally. Sonny and my mother found each other at a restaurant, a Japanese restaurant, where he worked as a sushi chef and she worked as a waitress.

My father couldn't speak Japanese. He never learned. Not when he was stationed in Okinawa for a year, in between tours of duty in Vietnam and Korea. Not when he met my mother at a night club, just outside the army base in her hometown of Kadena. Not when he asked her to marry him, and certainly not when he brought her to the United States to live with him. My father never learned, so I didn't either.

Even now, I can't truly appreciate the immediate intimacy she must have felt with Sonny—after spending the majority of her years as wife and mother fumbling for words—to finally be able to converse with someone with ease and grace...